Air Supply

Hasib Hourani’s debut poetry collection, rock flight, is a slight book, but heavy. Centring on Palestinian liberation, the collection was written during the violent years preceding Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and published nearly a year after it began. It is inextricable from this context, which has its own heaviness. The day I open my copy, for example, Israel kills twins, four days old, while their father is out getting their birth certificates. Israel kills their mother and grandmother too and the man’s cracked face haunts the algorithm.

In the face of such daily atrocities, rock flight is a counterweight to hopelessness in the form of a defiant call to action. Slight but heavy, it is peridotite: it is stone. I mean this rhetorically and materially, the two being two sides – or rather two forms, as Hourani would have it – of the same page. After all, to make a rock, he tells readers, one need only find a piece of paper, scrunch it up, and throw. A Lebanese-Palestinian writer, Hourani is used to casting his words as stones, since to speak at all is an act of resistance if you are speaking as a Palestinian.

Being a counterweight to hopelessness is not the same thing as being hopeful, and the prevailing spirit of the book is something else altogether: something grim-mouthed and resolute. This is an affective posture not unfamiliar in the context of Palestinian liberation and has gone by many names, among them: sumud; John Berger’s ‘stance of undefeated despair’; and pessoptimism – each term suggesting a similarly defiant refusal yet carrying a slightly different texture, each gesturing at a particular orientation towards the future.

Pessoptimism, for example, was described by Isabella Hamad in her September 2023 speech at Columbia University, ‘Recognising the Stranger’, as an ‘acutely Palestinian frame of mind’ – not unlike Antonio Gramsci’s ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Berger, on the other hand, offered the ‘stance of undefeated despair’ in 2006 to describe an attitude he noticed in Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Rather than define it, Berger gave examples of how the stance ‘works’: young men joining Hamas; unemployed Palestinians building Israeli settlements in order to feed their families; prisoners going on hunger strike to reduce the number of daily body searches Israel conducts on each of them.

Sumud, of course, predates both, and has long been associated with Palestinian resistance and conditions of life. Translating as steadfastness, perseverance, or everyday resistance, sumud is a political strategy and a way of being: non-violent resistance against occupation through determined refusal and endurance. It is sumud when a Palestinian refuses to leave their house, even as settlers have moved into part of it. It is sumud when Palestinian shepherds graze their flocks under attack from settlers, and when Palestinian farmers return to tend their olive groves, half destroyed by Israeli chainsaws. It is sumud to write a book and make it a rock.

In her author note to The Sunbird (2025), Sara Haddad notes that the language of liberation is inherently simple: honest, transparent, direct. Hourani writes in this manner, interweaving unadorned fact with a poetic clarity that defies the ‘it’s complicated’ rhetoric permeating conversations about Palestinian liberation. Many of his sentences land like declarations; some of them are declarations:

There is a density and concreteness to his matter-of-fact lines, which are often so short, so terse, and so direct as to cut right through to the bones of things, dispelling any doubt. This plainspokenness seems to obviate the possibility of misunderstanding, even as each line comes loaded with implications that unfold across each reading.

One example: as the book opens, Hourani offers a partial unveiling with a key: it, thing, israel, something, entity, the suffocating state are words with direction. ‘unless the context otherwise requires’, each key word points to ‘the reason [Hourani] is elsewhere’. This means the book can be un/folded in many ways, enlivening readers to its various interpretive contexts and the valences each brings. Poetic shifters, it, thing, and something recur frequently, and it is for the reader to decide what Hourani means by ‘something’ when he writes ‘sometimes i kick the pavement like it owes me something’.

There is another example of constructive ambiguity nested within the phrase suffocating state, where suffocating could mean depriving someone/something of oxygen as well as being deprived of oxygen. It is clear from the context that the state referred to is always Israel, but Hourani’s deliberate adjectival equivocation results in a magic eye trick: the state being suffocated is right there, contained within the state doing the suffocating. You cannot see one without seeing the other.

For all its apparent straightforwardness, rock flight is many things at once and doesn’t stay still long enough for the reader to get comfortable. It shifts and swings, restless like the migratory birds that appear throughout, moving back and forth between conceits, refusing to land anywhere for too long, coming back, but always with a difference.

I said that rock flight is heavy, and this is partly due to the density of metaphors that accrue like sediment. References to birds, rocks, boxes, and suffocation arise repeatedly, compact and lithify into meaning.

The book’s first lines offer a case study: ‘five months old and in flight. five months old by a window that doesn’t open because it’s been engineered not to.’ Hourani opens with one of his primary metaphors – Palestinians as (migratory) birds – before quickly shifting to another, one that will be explicated more slowly. On first reading, the ‘it’ that does not open is an aeroplane window, but as the book unfolds, every iteration of ‘it’ bears the signification of Israel, the suffocating state engineered to push people out or pen them in, to keep them trapped on one side of a border. ‘It’ is also the box that is a cage, and through this, the structuring paradigms that curtail Palestinian flourishing (later, as ‘it’ slips into the ‘something’ that is keeping Hourani trapped – that is ‘closing in’ and leaving him ‘shellpacked again’ – it becomes apparent that discourse, too, is a cage: Hourani is trapped equally by ‘politics and echo chambers’).

Importantly, the opening paragraph also includes descriptions of trouble Hourani’s having with his throat, the locus of both breath and speech, thus introducing suffocation as the text’s primary somatic metaphor. Entrapment is embodied: ‘high altitude makes my throat blister and then crunch, swallow, crunch.’ Hourani develops tonsillitis. He cannot breathe; he cannot swallow. His throat is ‘boarded shut and popping’. His throat works to ‘hold on to the breath’ inside him. This is how he writes: through gritted teeth, in language that grinds against its constraints, that fights for breath.

Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah said that in the English language, Palestinians are constantly encountered through ‘necropolitics’, a term coined by Achilles Mbembe: they are only alive when they’re dying. rock flight refuses such necropolitics even as it embraces a metaphor seemingly contingent on it, or more precisely: rock flight mobilises suffocation to make explicit the logic of necropolitics. It does this in three ways. The first is simply that, despite the repetition of choking imagery, in refusing to depict Palestinian death, it undermines the Global North’s voyeuristic gaze.

Secondly, it mobilises the throat as a site not only of suffocation, but also of resistance. To make a throat, Hourani instructs readers to find a piece of paper and scrunch it up. To make a rock, he asks that we do the same and then throw it. ‘a rock,’ he reminds us, ‘is not a rock until it’s thrown’. The throat – like the page, like the rock – is a weapon too. Later Hourani will marvel, ‘what a throat / on that waterbird / to eat a rat whole’, and later still, inform readers about the first pfeilstorch, a stork that migrated back to Europe with a wooden spear through its throat, proving that, like Palestinians, the birds are only ‘gone because they are elsewhere’. The throat, then, is a weapon and a proof of life; and by implication: drawing breath as a Palestinian is an act of testimony and of resistance, bird and stone.

The third is more controversial in that Hourani once again makes the metaphor go both ways, passive and active: ‘you choke palestine, we choke back’.

I think some readers will be shocked by Hourani’s calls to ‘suffocate settler annette’, ‘suffocate the suffocating state’, and ‘choke israel back’, demands that in their literal and metaphorical force are less straightforward than they seem. rock flight is polemic rather than dialectic, and polemicism is a rhetorical strategy, just as violence is a revolutionary one. Hourani’s language means, I think, to question the assumptions behind our attitudes towards violence, whether in word or action, and the limits of what we’re capable of tolerating as ‘defence’ or ‘resistance’. In the face of hundreds of documented incitements to genocide in Gaza (to say nothing of its enactment), ‘choke back’ is a pointed attack on the West’s simultaneous hypersensitivity to rhetorical ‘violence’ in support of Palestine (take, for example, the controversy around the statement ‘from the river to the sea’), and acquiescence to Israel’s linguistic and physical violence.

Open your phone, there’s a genocide being livestreamed as we speak. Hourani’s demand is that we work to stop it. He has made this demand before, writing in an accompaniment to his poem ‘i am writing in vignettes because all we have are fragments’ that he wants people to ‘boycott with us, rally with us, shout with us […] learn how to argue with zionists’. In his afterword to rock flight, he offers another articulation of what we in the Global North can do: ‘choke back: boycott, stop traffic, turn a ship around, flood the train station. cut off the air supply of imperialism.’ That this list of non-violent strategies is framed by images of suffocation-as-resistance is not accidental: through it, Hourani underscores the way that violence is interpolated into any acts of resistance taken by Palestinians, what Bassem Saad describes as the ‘demonisation of all Palestinian resistance’.

Such control of the language of resistance must be understood as part of the Nakba, which Rabea Eghbariah has characterised as a structure serving to ‘incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political will as a group’ and as the ‘continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestinians from materialising their right to self-determination’. Controversial as it may be, when Hourani expresses a desire to become the suffocator, to ‘cut off its air supply’, he is doing more than merely fantasising about revenge. He is staking a claim to profound political change: the right of the Palestinian people to decide the methods and means of their liberation.

States are arbitrary and Hourani does not believe in borders or the division of land and people. Back in 2021, he wrote in his essay ‘when we blink’ that he was ‘one thing: palestinian’. He wrote this while Israel was bombing Gaza, his mother having asked ‘what about lebanon? what about me?’ Identity, for Hourani, is not fixed but contingent, circumstantial. Now, four years later, Israel is bombing Gaza (and the West Bank, and Lebanon, and Syria, and Yemen, and Iran). Now, Hourani is two things. He is Palestinian, he is Lebanese.

His belief in the contingency of these ethno-national divisions is clear throughout rock flight. He opens with an epigraph by Etel Adnan, an eminent Arab poet whose multiply inflected identity is typical of descendants of the Ottoman Empire: a Lebanese writer whose mother was Greek Orthodox and whose father was a half Albanian, half Turkish Sunni Muslim. Next, he specifies ‘Hourani’ as a regional ethnonym referring to: ‘syria’s south to jordan’s north directly east of palestine’. Swiftly, before the first chapter, Hourani dispenses with the myth of easy categorisation and the borders imposed by Europe onto the ‘Middle East’.

He returns to this in his closing pages, writing that from ‘lebanon to syria / syria to jordan / jordan to palestine / palestine to egypt’, the land and people have been ‘splintered’. Here, Hourani both enacts the splintering he is describing and denies it: the lines are broken into indented fragments yet each one insists on continuity – they do not break where a border would interrupt them (for example ‘lebanon / to syria’) and each repetition of a country name on the next line is like a needle rising again through the cloth to stitch the land back together.

This repair is what Hourani dreams of. He wants to ‘wake up and drive from beirut to the galilee / […] the region back unfractured / like it was before’. He wants a bullet train, a ferry. These futures are possible, he seems to say. And the only way to achieve them is through Palestinian liberation. The borders Hourani writes about depend on the oppression of Palestine and the oppression of Palestine depends on these borders. Once Palestine is free, he says, ‘we will fold our flags and place them back in the cupboard. like old scars, the borders will flatten.’

To be Arab, to be Palestinian is not a static fact. These are political identities, and, hostage to the vicissitudes of geopolitics and empire as such identities are, they do not fit neatly inside lines drawn on maps. They are fluid, they pour over and seep out. They scatter. Families move from one end of the Ottoman Empire to the other; nomadic groups get stuck on different sides of the same border; displaced people make lives where they can.

Because borders are human constructs, Hourani turns Palestinians into birds, their movements into metaphors of migration and disturbed flight. Through pronominal slippage, his family become ‘pelicans after an oil spill’: ‘travelling when you’re coated in thick diesel slip / cannot last forever. we get tired. we all have to land eventually.’ Elsewhere, Hourani describes himself as a bird picking through ‘black dirt but it is actually wet cement / and it sticks / and it dries… and [he is] weighed down’. This is the same language he uses to describe the region encompassing Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt: ‘splintered black / dirt and wet / cement blocked / up weighed down’. The constricting force is external, acting upon the birds’ wings, but it is also internalised – literally, eaten. Borders are not real, but they act on and within human bodies.

Macaws, Hourani explains, are weighed down because their food source is toxic, and to prevent poisoning, the birds lick clay, which ‘absorbs what would have otherwise killed them. and the clay sits in their belly like it’s rite.’ Playing on the homonym ‘rite’/‘right’, Hourani points to both the wrongness, legal and moral, and ritualised nature of Israeli rule. But even if the checkpoint is wrong, participation is internalised as a protective mechanism: it is safer to take part in the ritual of stopping, showing one’s papers, being questioned, waiting. To follow these rules is a reinforcement and normalisation, a weight, restricting and constraining life, making it harder, and, more dangerous. There are reasons to feed clay to pigeons, Hourani notes. One is that it slows them down, makes them easier to catch. But of course, to follow the rules is to survive and to survive is to resist. This is part of sumud: existence is resistance.  

We are told what is happening is self-defence and so when Hourani says ‘the more time i spend with words the more i realise that they do not mean anything at all’, it is hard not to agree. Perhaps this is why Hourani leaves so much blank space – a refusal, of sorts, to continue playing semantics. Then again, like all things in rock flight, meaning nests within meaning.

Diné poet Orlando White describes white space as a ‘poetic field’ through which one may ‘express a silence’ (original italics). The silences Hourani is concerned with are not only those of poetic rhythm or structure, but, more pressingly, those that undergird the Global North’s relation to Palestine: silence in the face of apartheid, silence in the face of the ongoing Nakba, and silence in the face of the ongoing genocide.

The longest stretch of silence comes after Hourani asks us to turn our attention to the twenty-five taxidermied pfeilstorch specimens kept on display around the world. ‘close your eyes and think of the great pfeilstorch diaspora,’ he tells us, fixing our attention on the dead birds and speaking directly and critically to the necropoliticisation of Palestinian identity. Think of birds. After this, he is quiet: the four blank pages that follow signal a silence, but not a pause. The numbers in the corners keep rising, shifting our attention to what is happening even as we are not looking at it. We lost count of the dead in Gaza months ago, and months before rock flight’s release. But the numbers keep rising.

Hourani often makes such affective use of the book’s form and structure to enact the conditions of Palestinian life. He has long favoured the vignette as a testament to the ‘fragments’ Palestinians are left with (and indeed, the fragments their country has been turned into). Even his variable line lengths – at times, painfully short – force readers to slow, to focus their attention on each unit of meaning (the way, for example, we are forced to sit with each image in ‘smoke in the golan heights / smoke in lebanon / smoke in the sinai’). At other times, the lines stretch to meet the other margin or rush into paragraphs, racing the reader along and through the scenes they describe. Always, Hourani changes tack just as the reader grows accustomed to the situation, almost as though textually replicating the uncertainty of life under, at the whims of, occupation.

He scaffolds his text through pragmatic, traditionally non-poetic forms reminiscent of bureaucratic and legalistic writing: instructions, diagrams, lists, nested bullet-points appear throughout, alongside cryptic multiple-choice questions (‘what is dawn good for?’), perhaps not unlike those asked of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints. There are also whole swathes of rock flight in which Hourani refuses poetic dissimulation, instead writing in the cold, dispassionate language of the law and of human rights bureaucracy to expose the structures maintaining Palestinian oppression in all its cruelty.

When, for example, he writes about HP’s involvement in the oppression of Palestinians, he footnotes his claims precisely and uses asterisks to give further detail. He is methodical and exact. His choice of Arabic numbering is another formal indictment: numerals spread to the West from the Arab world, and with this list Hourani foreshadows the spread of Israeli surveillance technologies. It’s happening already: for example, so-called Australia used Israeli spyware to investigate alleged welfare fraud. A colony is a colony is a colony, and it will suffocate you.

Hourani mobilises the same citational technique in listing the torture methods used by Israel, placing the methods under headings taken from a Human Rights Watch report: ‘sensory deprivation’, ‘psychological pressures’, ‘beating and physical force’, and ‘position abuse’. Each heading stands starkly on the page and each item listed beneath is rendered in language that closely follows the HRW report, unadorned and brutal: ‘placing detainees in strict isolation / placing detainees in extreme cold / placing detainees in suffocating heat / placing foul-smelling hoods over detainees’ faces / to induce feelings of suffocation’.

Reading this, one cannot help but be reminded of the recent headlines about the torture of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers. But when Hourani writes about torture in Israeli prisons, he is not writing about Sde Teiman where prisoners are raped with electrified batons and zip-tied so tightly to their beds that amputations are ‘routine’. He is not writing about the leaked footage depicting sexual assault, or the Israelis who thereafter argued that they have a right to rape Palestinian detainees.

He is writing about what was normalised so that these things would be too.

rock flight is poetry caught in the moment of becoming something else: a weapon. Hourani seems to invite his readers to render his work just so, teaching them to make a rock, a throat, a box out of what’s immediately at hand. Often, he begins ‘please find a piece of paper’, and readers cannot help but notice: they are holding a piece of paper. Hourani is acutely aware of the materiality of the collection (‘where’s that box you made? put this book inside and close the lid’; ‘this book that you are reading’), and of the limits of language (‘the more time I spend with words / the more I realise that they just won’t do’). He is interested in the transformation of one into the other, language into action.

This is perhaps most evident when he instructs readers on how to make a box. It is more complicated than making a rock, so Hourani includes a diagram with his instructions. I follow until I get to number 6 which confuses me. I do not know how to ‘fold the shaded sections into the coloured-in sections’. I watch a tutorial on YouTube and complete my box, realising that Hourani’s instructions end a step too early: his box has two lids and is unable to close. It is not even able to maintain its shape. He has shown us how to make an impossible box. Or: he has led us part way and demands that we take ourselves the rest. Words can only go so far.

Later, Hourani will instruct readers on how to turn their body into a box:

These are the same instructions he gives in ‘HOW TO HOLD YOUR BREATH’. A body, unbreathing, is a box. This is a lesson in suffocation, but it is also a lesson in the uses of a body.

A box is a body, but it is also other embodied experiences of entrapment: ‘oil-slick in your wings’ and ‘clay in your belly’. A box is ‘a cage for things that aren’t living’, ‘something that stops you from moving’, something ‘you are put into’ after you have thrown stones, and later still, ‘something you have no power over once you are in it’. A box is a prison, and we have made one with our hands, we have made one with our bodies. Imprisoned and imprisoning: our bodies are implicated.

All over the world, pro-Palestine protests are being held every week. Staging these is an act of sumud. In Berlin, these protests are frequently banned hours before they’re due to begin and organisers must act quickly to procure the necessary court orders to allow them to go ahead. Often, routes are changed unexpectedly or, once gathered, protesters are not permitted to move. Without exception, the start of a Laufdemo (walking protest) is delayed under whatever pretext the police can find, and people are forced to stand in the blistering cold or under a blazing sun for hours. Palestinian organisers are frequently arrested.

There is some warning before the protests quickly become brutal. Police officers close the entrance to the nearest U-Bahn station, then the side streets. They position themselves so that there is no way through, turning their bodies into walls and squeezing protestors into a confined space. They make themselves a box to pen in the crowd.

Kettling, as it’s called, is a word that may come from the German Kessel, a military term referring to an army encircled by a larger force. For those trapped in the kettle, the situation becomes unbearable; it heats up as they struggle to free themselves. For the manoeuvre to be successful, the surrounding force need not engage, only maintain the box. Or: some engage, but there are enough of them that the box holds shape. (Gaza is a Kessel; the West Bank too.) When an officer is assaulting someone, the others form an enclosure around them – to prevent escape, and to prevent those on the other side from interfering. A body can be a suffocating box, but, as we know, this goes both ways.

Before large protests, it is common for friends and comrades to exchange names and dates of birth. They write the number of a lawyer on their forearms and divide themselves into two groups: those who need protection and those who will protect. When the violence starts, the latter link arms and place their bodies between the police and their targeted comrades, using their bodies to make a box. To keep people in. To keep people out.

When Hourani returns to Palestine, he writes: ‘i am walking down the street and there is a rock on the pavement and look another one. the first city i see when i see palestine is jericho […] it has always been about the earth’. Jericho returns us to scripture: the battle of Jericho, the first battle fought by the Israelites as they began the conquest of Canaan. It is currently part of Area A of the West Bank, an enclave surrounded by land designated as Area C, which is under full Israeli military control. We might say that Jericho is a Kessel too.

Hourani returns to Jericho in a hail of stones, translating from the Quran’s Surah al-Fil, ‘the Elephant’, a story which describes how a plan to destroy the Kaaba was thwarted: ‘and he delivers unto them birds in flocks’, ‘throwing at them stones of clay’. Synonyms for the key words rain down the page like stones dropped by birds from the sky.

I think of Etel Adnan’s line in XXXVI, ‘In the deluge on our plains there are no rains but stones’. I think of Berger’s 1998 ‘Open Letter to Subcommandante Marcos in the Mountains of Southeast Mexico’ about Sardinia and its invasions, about Gramsci and how the environment shapes and informs political practices. His letter was addressed to the spokesman and military leader of the Zapatista, the far-left militant group fighting the Mexican state for indigenous control of Chiapas. In it, Berger noted that ‘stones propose another sense of time, whereby the past, the deep past of the planet, proffers a meagre yet massive support to acts of human resistance, as if the veins of metal in rock led to our veins of blood’.

Most of all, I think of Palestinian resistance. Hourani has rendered birds and Palestinians interchangeable throughout rock flight, so when he gives throwing the most synonyms (‘casting’, ‘launching’, ‘shooting’, ‘flinging’, ‘slinging’), an image of Palestinian resistances flashes alongside each analogue. Youths with keffiyehs and t-shirts around their heads throwing rocks at an enemy out of the frame. A little girl in pink slippers throwing a stone at a helmeted sniper who points his gun at her. A woman in a black dress and green hijab pulled up over her nose, her right arm raised to throw a rock, another stone in her left. Faris Odeh, fifteen years old and alone, arm crooked back to hurl a stone at an Israeli tank during the Second Intifada. Abu Amro, shirtless, Palestinian flag in one hand, a recently-fired slingshot at full extension in the other.

Birds disappear, then loop back. Metaphors accrue, shifting meaning with each repetition. rock flight is hard to grasp; it flutters out of reach. It resists and indexes resistance: ‘too many macaws on a clay lick will collapse it.’ This is why the right of return is such a dangerous idea. Palestinians are pfeilstorch, and as resilient – not gone but ‘elsewhere’. 7.2 million of them waiting to come home.

‘did you have a rock in your pocket?’ will be answered by a sharp arc, a slingshot being pulled back, a rock being thrown.

It is now almost two years into the Gaza genocide, and almost a year since the publication of rock flight. In that time, protestors and activists have made the profits of companies on the BDS list plummet. They have vandalised weapons factories and stopped ships, quit their jobs in protest, set up donation drives, moved into encampments. They have turned their voices into rocks and their bodies into protective walls. They have come out, week upon week, to denounce the violence that their governments are supporting. Yet the violence goes on, and amid calls to ‘globalise the intifada’, Hourani understands that it is also necessary to globalise sumud, to remain steadfast, to persevere, to say no when we are told stop.

This refusal is perhaps the movement’s strongest weapon. Refusal often is. Bilal, the first mu’azzin, refused to renounce Islam under the torture of a hot boulder placed on his chest. Similarly suffocated, ‘boulder on chest’, Hourani, refuses to renounce BDS. He refuses to stop protesting, refuses to stop speaking out, refuses to accept Israeli domination and Palestinian subjugation. Under pressure, we must do the same.

Hourani’s teacher told him: ‘if you are on your deathbed lying on the sand, plant a date before your last breath and you will go straight to heaven.’ This is a reference to a hadith, but Hourani makes a more revolutionary demand that you ‘keep the stone / in your pocket: the weight of the afterlife / of ammunition’. This refusal is not a disobedience, but a call to arms: another way to make a rock is to ‘eat a date’; another thing you can make from your body is a sling: ‘rest the pit of the date / gently on your tongue’ and ‘blow whip-sharp and fast / like storm / like current’. A stone, thrown or spat, becomes a tree whose roots will grow between the bricks of empire and, from within its crevices, destroy it. This is a way to ‘eat the window open’, to ‘choke back’.