Name: Rifqa
Rating: 4.875 (16 reviews)
ISBN: 9781642595864

Mohammed El-Kurd

In Rifqa, El-Kurd tightropes between statelessness and uncertainty, still one thing remains clear: "Jerusalem is ours! / The biggest punchline of all time."

Rifqa

Marion

My homeland tunnels itself in an escape to chosen exile.

Blood doesn't wash away despite the faucets despite the color of washing.

Here, we know two suns: earth's triend and white phosphorus.

Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it. 

Not in Cape Town, the South African tel aviv

"The Psychological Effects of Occupation."

I have never once felt free anywhere: not with the Jordanian passport;

not in Santa Monica, the American Tel Aviv; 

Julia Moran 

I just don’t know how to contain this rage that keeps growing and growing inside of me.

“Please tell me:
Why is anger–even anger–a luxury
to me?”

Sabrina D. 

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.

Rifqa

Reviews

Highlights