from Finished with the Peace by Rasha Abdulhadi
- May 11, 2021
- 2 min read
Updated: May 17, 2021
interrupting Siegfried Sassoon, 1917
—you can tell, can't you, hayk hatha, how the peace is the war they won. Pursuing peace has been the best excuse for making war. That peace of quelling, peace of graveyard, peace of the heaven of the carpet-bombed and altar-bled, peace of the quiet they require. Peace of the weight of chains. Peace of the drowned. Peace of those by their own lives taken. Peace of total surrender. The peace of everything stolen and nothing left to fight for or defend. Peace of evicted homes. Peace of full prisons. Peace of 23 hours in solitary. Peace of checkpoints. Peace of total surveillance. The peace of no dissent or disagreement. Peace of no payment for the workers. Peace of empty farms. Peace of full slaughterhouses. Peace of blood on the slaughterhouse floor. Peace of the empty clip and empty canister. Peace of the tank's tread. Peace of the drone's hum. Peace of the hardshelled fist, of speed and progress, of a more perfect union with the end of the baton. Peace of the long road from the locked city to the village. Peace of the smooth surface of the long wall. Peace of the sniper's perch. Peace of disappearance, peace of kidnapping, peace of trussed and gagged and
no more the din of petition and protest, no more our jokes played, our banners planted on the back of police vans, our murals covering barricades, no more our dances against an audience of riot shields. No noise of the living, noise of the resisting, noise of children chasing each other, no noise of old folks talking story. No noise of groceries delivered, medicines delivered, dinners delivered, of debts loudly cancelled and forgiven. No noise from the painters and poets and musicians, the puppetmakers and sculptors, no more our mics electrified and feasts spread. No more the insurgent sound of us tending each other, making repair, reclaiming houses, derailing train engines to run as generators, so—
RASHA ABDULHADI is a queer Palestinian Southerner who grew up between Damascus, Syria and rural Georgia and cut their teeth organizing on the southsides of Chicago and Atlanta. Their work is anthologized in Unfettered Hexes, Halal if You Hear Me, Super Stoked, and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler. Rasha is a member of Justice for Muslims Collective, the Radius of Arab American Writers, and Alternate ROOTS. Their chapbook who is owed springtime is available from Neon Hemlock press.
I want to close my engagement with this extraordinary poem by reflecting on what it asks of its reader — because I think that question is central to understanding what makes it such a significant work of political literature. The poem does not ask the reader to feel sympathy for a distant suffering; it asks the reader to examine their own relationship to the peace it describes. Are you a beneficiary of the peace of checkpoints? Of the peace of full prisons? Of the peace of total surveillance? The poem's power lies in its refusal to allow the reader a position of comfortable spectatorship — it implicates everyone who has ever accepted the peace of the graveyard as an acceptable…
One of the most formally interesting aspects of this poem is the way it handles time — or rather, the way it refuses the consolations of temporal distance. The poem does not situate its catalogue of oppressions in a safely historical past; it speaks in the present tense of ongoing conditions, of a peace that is being imposed right now, of sounds that are being silenced in real time. This refusal of temporal distance is a political as well as a formal choice: it insists that the reader cannot treat these conditions as historical curiosities or distant tragedies but must confront them as present realities that implicate the reader's own world. The interruption of Sassoon — a poet writing from…
Reading this poem alongside Abdulhadi's biographical note, I am struck by the particular significance of the phrase "queer Palestinian Southerner." Each of these identities carries its own history of surveillance, criminalisation, and enforced silence — and each of them is a site of resistance, community-building, and cultural production that refuses the peace of erasure. The poem's vision of what is silenced — the "noise of children chasing each other," the "noise of old folks talking story," the "insurgent sound of us tending each other" — is a vision of the specific, irreplaceable textures of communal life that are the first targets of any system of control. These are not abstract freedoms; they are the daily practices through which communities reproduce…
The second half of this poem — the catalogue of what is silenced — is where Abdulhadi's political vision becomes most fully and beautifully articulated, and I want to dwell on the specific items in that catalogue because each one is doing significant political and philosophical work. The "debts loudly cancelled and forgiven" is a reference to the practice of mutual aid debt cancellation that has been a feature of solidarity economies from ancient jubilee traditions to contemporary community organising. The "derailing train engines to run as generators" is a reference to the creative repurposing of the infrastructure of capital for the needs of community survival. These are not romantic fantasies — they are descriptions of actual practices of resistance…
I want to focus on the specific political geography of this poem, because it is one of the elements that makes it so unusually precise in its political analysis. The images Abdulhadi deploys — checkpoints, long walls, snipers' perches, drones, the long road from the locked city to the village — are not generic symbols of oppression. They are the specific material infrastructure of a specific occupation, rendered with the kind of concrete particularity that resists the abstraction through which political violence is typically made palatable to distant audiences. This specificity is a deliberate formal and political choice: by naming the actual mechanisms of control rather than gesturing toward them in general terms, Abdulhadi refuses the reader the comfort of…