No, empire

A few days ago, I joined a writing group to co-write and raise funds for aid to Palestinians. Two prompts, one after the other, were offered by two different writers who drew from works by Mahmoud Darwish, Sarah Aziza, June Jordan, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. We did 15-20 minutes of writing after each prompt.

Prompt one, based on quotations from Mahmoud Darwish’s “Silence for Gaza," and Sarah Aziza’s work
​Prompt: Writing with no: wild, impractical, and uncompromising rejection
“What if the first word hope utters is no? … … What if this word is not just negation but an opening?” — Sarah Aziza (I did not note down the source work so cannot cite it or, indeed, check my note-taking accuracy)

Prompt two, based on quotations from June Jordan’s and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s work
Prompt: Repetition, and empire (repetition is a feature of the Palestinian experience)
“I do not wish to speak about … … I need to speak about” — from June Jordan’s poem “Moving towards Home.” 
In her poem “To be Self-Evident,” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha repeats the phrase, “every empire.”

The prompts are connected in many ways. I wrote the piece below in response to one prompt and then the other. Some supplementary information and thoughts follow.

No, empire 

No

The first thing that comes is no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no …
Like dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, the last syllable of the sword that slices away delusion

No.
I will hide myself, I won’t read this
No, you will not know this person
No, of course you know this person
Who are you to say no?! To refuse this

I cannot talk to you.
There is no further story.

And yet I am still alive. What do I do with this body? Touch me. Please hold me. If you see me, just don’t kill me, for real, or in your mind.

No! You don’t see me. I’m just dots on your screen. I fooled you. That wasn’t me.

No! I didn’t die. And I didn’t die again.

No, I don’t want to know you. You’ve lost me. I didn’t even have a chance to lose you. You were never tender, never mine, falsely tender, falsely mine, lying not-tender, lying not-mine. Who are you, you?

Negating me as Beloved, are you the negative of Beloved?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, …. 

empire

I.

I do not want to speak about
death and life
death and joy
death and achievement
death and cruelty
complexity, on and on
grief

I need to speak about 
death and life                        love
death and joy                        myself
death and achievement    what I love, who I love, wanting love
death and cruelty                 life
complexity, on and on        life beyond my skin
grief                                             what lives

beauty
cruelty AND squash it! No!
complexity, on and on
so much. I cannot.

II.

As Tuffaha writes, “every empire sings itself a lullaby.”

I cannot do this. My empire, small, sorry flesh, is my body. My empire, small, sorry time, is my life.

Little one, you can’t say that. Empire, sorry greedy frightened empire took empire away from you. They weren’t able to though, were they? You are whole. You are whole every babbling shitting crying moment.  

Breathe with me beloved. I will kiss each eye to sleep. Let me wrap this shawl around you.

This pot. I still have this pot. 

this pot is so empty
full of the dust of memory
spilling to be filled

No. 

No, I cannot write about that empire. These moments are ours. Dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi, dhi …

What is empire?
You, what is empire?

_______________________________________________________
Supplementary information and thoughts

The situation in Palestine and Israel is about numbers and is not about numbers. Here are somewhat current numbers reported in the recent (August 13, 2025) Ezra Klein and Philippe Sands discussion on “When is it genocide?” in the New York Times. Klein opens the discussion with:

“In the days after Oct. 7, President Joe Biden tried to help Americans touch the size of Israel’s horror and grief by translating it into the terms of our own tragedies.

Archived clip of Joe Biden: Since this terrorist attack took place, we’ve seen it described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like fifteen 9/11s.

Imagine what that level of trauma would do to us. Imagine what that level of loss would do to us.

We are almost two years on. The death toll in Gaza is now estimated to be more than 61,000 people. There are a little over 2 million Gazans. The leaders in the U.S. government are not spending much time trying to help Americans grapple with that scale of grief and loss. But that would be, for our population, like 2500 Sept. 11s.

I know people want to cast doubt on the death toll. We’re told it’s from the Hamas-run ministry of health. And that’s true. But when The Lancet, the medical journal, tried to fill in gaps in the data by adding in new sources, they concluded that the true number, the real death toll, was far higher.

Gaza is a strip of territory about the size of Detroit. Since Oct. 7, Israel has dropped more than 100,000 tons of explosives on this tiny sliver of land. That is more tonnage than was dropped on Dresden and Hamburg, Germany, and London combined during World War II.

Aerial photography of Gaza shows absolute devastation. It’s estimated that 70 percent of all structures in Gaza — homes, hospitals, schools — are severely damaged or destroyed. You cannot drop that many bombs on such a densely populated strip of land without mass casualties.

But it is not just the casualties. Israel has also been restricting the flow of food into Gaza. Aid organizations have been warning all along of growing hunger, of the possibility of famine. In March, Israel blockaded aid into Gaza for 11 weeks. Then it largely ended the existing aid infrastructure the U.N. had built and replaced the hundreds of sites of aid distribution with four sites run by inexperienced American contractors.

Famine is spreading across Gaza. People are dying of hunger. The images, the videos, the stories here — not only of the starving but of the people, the children, bowls out, begging for help, lining up to get food, hundreds having been killed at these aid distribution sites — is beyond what I can imagine. What would it be like to not be able to find food for my children, to not be able to feed them, to lose their mother or their uncle or me because we went to get food for them?

The idea that this is made up, a concoction of Hamas or anyone else — just listen to the aid workers who have been there:

Archived clip: People have been hungry for months.
Archived clip: We are seeing this starvation is widespread nowadays.
Archived clip: Famine is unfolding. It’s not pending anymore. It’s happening. People are starving to death as we speak. Children are starving to death as we speak. And I want to be really, really clear: This is not a drought situation. This is an entirely preventable famine that we are witnessing in front of us.
Archived clip: The parents are writing on the social media, and they are thanking God for the loss of their children who have been killed in a certain time of the world because of the bombardment or the invasion. They are thanking God that they have lost their children to not reach to this stage while their children are asking them to feed them, and they didn’t have any capacity or any ways to just fulfill the needs of their children. So this is beyond description and even unimaginable, to be honest.

If it really isn’t that bad, if this is all propaganda, Israel could prove that easily: Let reporters in. Let independent inspectors in. But they won’t do that because this is not a trick. This is hunger as policy. Hunger as a weapon of war. This is a siege.”
From the transcript of Ezra Klein’s opening to “When is it genocide?”

….........
Stopping massive death and devastation in Gaza is the urgent need of the present, but stopping the war in a way that only allows some people to live on with their devastation is not enough. Please hold on to the equally important long term questions relating to land, peoples, reparation, reconciliation (such a hard word), and future. It's complicated and it isn’t complicated. This is not a 2000-year-old religious war that we can’t get our heads around. There are religious differences and drivers, but they are not the core.

Poets and writers engage differently from lawyers, journalists, politicians, and bureaucrats. They engage with the desires and palpability of bodies; the rhythms and sensations of feeling; the dissonances of life, pain, love, death, and joy; the harmonies and (dis)integrations of matter; and so on.

If you want to know more about Palestine and Israel from the perspectives of poets and writers, one place to start might be my blog post Conversation among poets and writers (December 2023). There are many more poets and writers than those quoted in that blog post but my blog post, though dated, could be a start. Two other blog posts I’ve written on Palestine and Israel are It’s about the children (December 2023), and Two Flags (April 2025).