Georgia Arabic Teachers Association - GATA

To go with the translated poem in the previous post, I created a collage of Mahmud Darwish rendered by me in English prose:

When asked by the military judge to state, for the record, who am I and for what crime I have committed that makes me stand before her today, I replied, “Who am I, you ask? I am the one who, when the Word said ’Be!,’ I became a body of its embodiment. And I am the one who said to the words, ‘Be!’ so that I may be that which I say I want to be. For on this earth are things worth living for, and my freedom is to be that which they do not want me to be. And our dead, I mean our fallen, when they go to sleep, I bid them a good night’s rest and pray that they wake up to a homeland, for, on this earth, Mother Earth, are things worth living for, but if the olive trees knew the fate of the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears. Record, the only crime I ever committed that makes me stand before you today is being a Palestinian.”

Your thoughts?

For Indigenous Peoples' Day, the Native American House has invited me to kick off the event by speaking about colonization as it relates to the shared histories of survival between the Palestinian and Native American communities. I am thinking of incorporating the following selection of a poem by Mahmud Darwish, 'The Red Indian’s Final Speech to the White Man.' The translation is my own.

“Did I say, The Dead? There is no death here; there is only a change of worlds.” - Duwamish Chief, Seattle

To where, O White Man, do you take my people and your people?

To what abyss does this robot of fighter jets and aircraft carriers take the earth? To what spacious abyss do you ascend?

You have what you desire: a new Rome, a technological Sparta, and an ideology of madness.

But for us, we will escape from an age for which we haven’t prepared our anxieties and transition to the land of the birds, like flocks of our Indigenous ancestors before us,

And look upon our land through its stones,

And look upon our land through the breaks in the clouds,

And look upon our land through the conversations among the stars,

And look upon our land through the breeze of the lakes,

And look upon our land through the pollen of the corn,

And look upon our land through the wildflowers growing on our tombs,

And look upon our land through the leaves of the poplar trees,

Through everything that besieges you, O White Man, we will look upon our land,

As dead dying, dead living, and dead returning to disclose their secrets.

Let us, then, grant Mother Earth her due time to tell the truth, the whole truth, about you, and about us, and about us, and about you!

My new home!

Meet the Staff | Salaam Middle East & North Africa Cultural Center | UIUC Title Awad Awad, Director Body Meet Awad Awad, a first-generation, low-income, neurodivergent student and proud Palestinian-American intercultural citizen. He embraces numerous multi-layered identities and strives to be the friend, mentor, teacher, and administrator he wished he had. Awad holds a M...

Human - Kind, Be Both!

Palestinian ambassador’s speech moves UN Security Council president to tears “The Palestinian people have not lost their humanity. You wouldn’t find people who long for a normal life, like our people on Gaza.”The president of the UN S...

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