prologue for now - Gaza

If you looked at the headlines in Western media on October 7th, you might think history began with Hamas militants storming the fence enclosing Gaza. You wouldn’t be encouraged to consider the fence itself, which Israel constructed in 1994 to restrict the movement of goods and people; or the blockade of the strip that Israel has maintained since 2006, hemming in over two million Palestinians as they are subject to Israel’s massive bombing campaigns, underwritten by US funding; or the Nakba—the ongoing catastrophe of Zionist land theft and mass displacement initiated around 1948, from which most Gazans are refugees. Dionne Brand’s “prologue for now - Gaza” refuses to indulge empire’s relentless present tense, insisting on the now not as a territory cordoned off from what came before, but as an accumulation of persistent pasts that have sedimented into the brutal common sense of our world order. While liberal equivocations are laundering the current genocide through civic procedures of legislation and polite conversation—offering cover for the more explicit articulations of fascist racism—Brand names the complicity between these supposedly opposed schemes. She thus opens space for a grief that holds dear what empire would render disposable, including the more than 7,300 Gazans Israel has killed in the past three weeks. In rejecting the terms of the colonial present, the poem calls out toward a livable future for all that empire would banish outside the realm of care.

– Claire Schwartz