In Rifqa, El-Kurd tightropes between statelessness and
uncertainty, still one thing remains clear: “Jerusalem is ours! /
The biggest punchline of all time.”
Rifqa is
Mohammed El-Kurd’s debut collection of poetry, written in the
tradition of Ghassan Kanafani’s Palestinian Resistance Literature.
The book narrates the author’s own experience of dispossession in
Sheikh Jarrah--an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine,
whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of
homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based
settler organizations. The book, named after the author’s late
grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal
establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers
and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of
1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized,
ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.
