As you return home, to your home, think of others
Poems and Reflections from Sagirah Shahid
I first met Sagirah Shahid about eight years ago when I was organizing a reading. I’d seen her read and knew I wanted to ask her, because she is so engaging. Not all writers are great readers or can hold a room, but Sagirah has this skill tenfold. Her work is heartfelt, intense, direct, unrestrained, and she can also be quite funny, even as she is writing of gun violence, environmental justice, or the destruction of Black lives. Often her poetry intimates a fierce understanding of the vagaries of irony. Witness, first and foremost—that’s what Sagirah is after, I think. What do artists do when the world falls apart? As children are bombed, buried, and forgotten as another blip in the infinite scroll, Sagirah writes from the front lines of activism and of the balm that poetry can offer in tumultuous times. I’m glad to add her voice to book(ish). Without further ado, here’s Sagirah.
- Josh
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Against Genocide: Fragments of Protests/Poems, for Palestine
2am, Thursday November 16th 2023; 11,000 Palestinians slaughtered by [ ]
My body is in ruins. My body is a protest on the edge of what living ought to be. Had my eyes only the skill to unsee. In Minneapolis, from my iPhone, I watch premature babies in Gaza flinch and cry out in their exhausted baby cries from their shared bed without incubators, because [ ] has cut off their access to electricity, as it continues to bomb them. I can’t sleep. So instead, I turn to poems, or the poems turn me. I am an altered state of becoming what I read—
You may put out the light in my eyes.
You may deprive me of my mother’s kisses.
You may curse my father, my people.
You may deprive my children of a smile
And of life’s necessities.
You may fool my friends with a borrowed face.
You may build walls of hatred around me.
You may glue my eyes to humiliations,
O enemy of the sun,
but
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins
I shall resist
O enemy of the sun.
— Samih Al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun”
9:54am, Monday October 23rd 2023; 5,087 Palestinians slaughtered by [ ]
Fellowship. Synonyms may include companionship, may include a community of interest, may include camaraderie. I email my fellowship cohort about a global strike for Palestine that I participated in the previous Friday. In the email, I tell them how I skipped my presentation to instead join Jewish Voice for Peace-Twin Cities to protest in front of the DFL office. I do not share how we took to the street, blocking the off ramp of a highway, encircling each other with our chants, with our homemade signs, a comrade to my left holding up the other end of a Palestinian flag with me. I do not share how I cried as the crowd sang, “where you go I will go beloved /where you go I will go/ for your people are my people/ your people are my people,” and how the comrade, the friend, seeing my tears, wove an arm into mine, holding me and the flag closer.
In the email to my fellowship cohort, I fumble through my grief, my rage, I fumble through these fleeting spurts of optimism and I leave a link to www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org instead. I am timid. I ask they follow the actions detailed in the link and to release public statements condemning genocide. And perhaps because we are Black people emerging into leadership, and perhaps because I believe in the profound power of the collective dua of my formerly enslaved African ancestors, I list all the names of historic Black leaders in solidarity with Palestine. They emerge to the forefront of my scattered mind, of my shattered memory: Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Mohamed Ali, James Baldwin, June Jordan—
There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.
—June Jordan, “Poem Number Two on Bell’s Theorem, or The New Physicality of Long Distance Love”
3:47pm, Friday August 8th, 2014; 2,310 Palestinans slaughtered by [ ]
In an email, someone who will become a friend in the years to come, sends the members of a writing collective I joined the previous year an invitation. In the email, the not-yet-friend invites us to participate in a poetry reading, organizing on Sunday August 17th at the “For the Children of Palestine” event at the Parkway Theater from 4-6pm. It is a fundraiser of ANEERA led by Tarik Rasouli.
I don’t know it, because I haven’t met him yet, but in a few months Tarik, the Iraqi-American musician with his long pools of electric guitarist hair, the frequent looper of dissonant sounds through his keyboard and synthesizer machines, this frequent Anti-War protest marshall, holder and gatherer of DIY spaces, he and I will become friends. Comrades. We will share a kind of fellowship. Brief co-conspirators during the early Trump years. Tarik looping poems for Palestine, poems for Muslims, poems for Black & Brown folks into his guitar with a quick kick.
In December of 2018, Tarik died. It was nearly a month after his 28th birthday.
Sometimes, there are protests across Minneapolis’ varied geographies that still remind me of him. Cedar Riverside near the indie bookstore. Downtown Minneapolis in front of the federal building. Lake Street and Chicago. Sometimes I see the all-too-familiar neon yellow vest of a protest marshall and think oh my goodness, and then I remember.
There are a sea of people in my life who are friends now. Who protest and march and chant and loop poems and loop into each other’s arms, and repeat songs and repeat slogans that cling to our bodies. As we share this fellowship, I see the horror in their eyes. I see the details that are never numbers, but beloveds, trapped in it, murdered by [ ]. I see the profound grief haunting/hunting/hurting us, with each name. With each unnamed.
My body does not know how to make sense of this. So instead, I focus on this poem—
As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).
— Mahmoud Darwish, “Think of others”
Sagirah Shahid is a Black Muslim poet from Minneapolis, MN. She enjoys wildflower gardens & daydreams. Her poems and prose are published in Juked, Winter Tangerine, About Place Journal, Parhelion, The Drinking Gourd, and elsewhere. Sagirah is a poetry editor for the online literary journal, Overtly Lit.
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You can find June Jordan’s work here, Mahmoud Darwish’s here, and Samih Al-Qasim’s here. I’m curious: What books or writers are helping you make sense of this time? Thanks, as always, for reading.