A Promise of Return

Remapping: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme's multi-disciplinary archive of Palestinian subjectivity

- Shiv Kotecha

BECAUSE nothing comes from nothing, I begin with the insistent, final lines of ‘Enemy of the Sun’ (1970) by the Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim:

I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist, Resist ~ and resist.

A year after they were written, these words appeared in the Black Panther Party’s newsletter, misattributed to the revolutionary George L. Jackson, whose handwritten copy of Al-Qasim’s verse was found in his San Quentin Prison cell after he was shot and martyred amid an attempt to escape. The unwitting shuffling of names that marks this poem’s American reception ~ which let Jackson be known by the words of his comrade Al-Qasim, and Al-Qasim by Jackson ~ precisely encapsulates the kind of radical, authorial impropriety at the core of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s collectivizing, meta-archival practice. Nothing comes from nothing.

For nearly two decades, Abbas and Abou-Rahme, based between Ramallah and New York, have compiled, sampled from and sutured found images, audio and text to recompose the world into booming threnodies for dispossession.

‘How do the most intimate parts of your being get captured by the system of colonialization?’ they ask. ‘And, how do people resist?’ I met Abbas and Abou-Rahme early this spring at their home and studio in Bushwick, on the eve of their departure to Ramallah, where they are producing a new multi-channel, audiovisual installation due to premiere this autumn at Nottingham Contemporary.

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