POETRY AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY IN PALESTINE

Through poetry and through the care of olive, fig and orange orchards, Palestinian people assert their indigenous identity and relationship with the living ecologies of the landscape

- CHHAVI MATHUR

In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds the warplanes must be silent. - Marwan Makhoul

Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don't see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It’s so beautiful, the moon. They're so beautiful, the flowers. I pick flowers for my dead father when I'm sad.. - Noor Hindi

Where is the place for “nature poetry” in times of war, massacre and genocide? Can one still write of birdsongs, flowers or the beauty of the moon while facing tanks and warplanes? The words of Palestinian poets Marwan Makhoul and Noor Hindi drive home these impossibilities, even as they express a longing for a time that would allow them such freedom to escape politics.

Yet, contested land, nature and ecology have always been at the heart of the politics around Israel-Palestine. From very early on (early 1900s), Israeli-Zionist claims to land have been closely tied to the “green colonial” narrative of “making the desert bloom” and restoring the Palestinian landscape to a mythic “original state of biblical splendour”. An afforestation programme to plant varieties of primarily non-native coniferous trees—often in areas previ-ously used by Palestinian pastoralists and farmers—was, in fact, a key function of the Jewish National Fund set up in 1901 to lay the foundations of Israel. In his book Landscape and Memory, British-Zionist historian Simon Schama describes the pine trees planted to transform indigenous vegetation of Palestine as “proxy immigrants” for Jewish people in the nation-building project of Israel.