This Black History Month, I wanted to take the opportunity to highlight the book Born Palestinian Born Black – a powerful poetry volume from Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad in the NGL’s collection.

Hammad’s poetry is deeply inspired by and speaks up for the Black Brooklyn communities within which she grew up. For example, as Kenza Oumlil states in his essay “Talking Back”: The poetry of Suheir Hammad, Hammad ‘[inscribes] Brooklyn and hip-hop language on the page in an effort to revalue its aesthetic merit as a form of orality’.[1]

Hammad also writes in the introductions to Born Palestinian Born Black explicitly of the inspiration she owes to African American poet and activist June Jordan – how, ‘The last stanza in June Jordan’s “Moving Toward Home” changed her life’[2]. One of her descriptions of her own writing process is also as ‘a new embroidery, stitched in june jordan’s dark’[3]. As Sirène Harb argues in her essay, Naming Oppressions, Representing Empowerment: June Jordan’s and Suheir Hammad’s Poetic Projects, ‘these resonances and echoes [between the two poets] originate from a shared commitment to coalition-building, solidarity, and the fight against various oppressions and injustices, which reflects the spirit and analytical project of women of color feminism.’[4]

This focus on coalition-building is apparent through Hammad’s poetry in different ways – including not only the communities she writes about, but also community-building between speaker and audience. And nowhere in the collection is this made more explicit than in we spent the fourth of July in bed, as Hammad declares ‘my sincere love         for real / is for my peeps         my family        humanity’.[5]

It is also in this poem that Hammad rhetorically weaves together a community of victims of US violence, in Iraq, Malaysia, the Philippines, Puerto Rica, Yemen, Japan, and Palestine. This is a device that she uses throughout the book, as again and again, she connects sites of injustice. She also finds kinship in marginalisation with her African American neighbours, as in open poem to those who rather we not read… or breathe, she constructs a ‘we’ that connects ‘taino and arawak bodies’, ‘children of children exiled from homelands’, ‘descendents of immigrants’, and ‘survivors of the middle passage’ – all linked in opposition to fascism and imperialism.[6]However, Hammad does not draw one-to-one comparisons between African American and Palestinian experiences, instead presenting each side-by side, connecting them often to illustrate how the trials faced in both are the product of many of the same structural forces.

She also makes clear that these kinships are not only born of suffering. For example, manifest destiny details how Hammad and three of her friends defied the expectations of society and family to forge their own paths and find one another, ‘creating a family’.[7]

A frustrated attempt to establish this sort of connection is furthermore present in fly away. This poem tells of a ‘young brother man’ who decides to escape ‘bein high / and forced / into the back of a police car’ by joining the US Air Force, as Hammad confronts him with the ways that that organisation has inflicted trauma on ‘saigon beirut   greneda’ and asking ‘what if you have to kill people’. He in turn argues that ‘he’s gotta support his moms / give up donations / for the next funeral’ and that he cannot consider these issues ‘cause he’s dealin with / a different kinda fear’. In doing so, she makes a powerful argument about how oppressive systems force the marginalised into competition with one another and for the importance of ‘revolution and peace’ and solidarity as a corrective.[8]

Indeed, I hope that this message of solidarity, enhanced rather than diminished by the acknowledgment of intense suffering worldwide, and this homage to African American communities is one that we can all take from Suheir Hammad’s work this October. I could never do full justice to all of the textures of this poetry collection, so, if anything at all that I have said here has interested you, I can only recommend that you have a look for yourself.

Bibliography

K. Andrews, K. Crenshaw, and A. Wilson, Blackness at the Intersection, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

S. Hammad, Born Palestinian Born Black, Brooklyn NY, UpSet Press Inc., 2010.

S. Harb, ‘Naming Oppressions, Representing Empowerment: June Jordan’s and Suheir Hammad’s Poetic Projects’, Feminist Formations, vol. 26, no. 3, 2014, pp.71-99.

J. Jordan, Moving Towards Home: Political Essays, London, Virago, 1989.

J. Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, Port Townsend, 2007.

D. Moore, ‘“Breaking language”: Performance and community in Suheir Hammad’s poetry’. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 56, no. 1, 2020, pp.110-125.

K. Oumlil, ‘“Talking Back”: The poetry of Suheir Hammad’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 13, no. 5, pp.850-859.

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[1] K. Oumlil, ‘“Talking Back”: The poetry of Suheir Hammad’, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 13, no. 5, p.855

[2] S. Hammad, Born Palestinian Born Black, Brooklyn NY, UpSet Press Inc., 2010, p.12: The stanza itself is also quoted on that page:

 I was born a Black woman

and now

I am become a Palestinian

against the relentless laughter of evil

there is less and less living room

and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home

[3] Ibid., p. 9

[4] S. Harb, ‘Naming Oppressions, Representing Empowerment: June Jordan’s and Suheir Hammad’s Poetic Projects’, Feminist Formations, vol. 26, no. 3, 2014, pp.72.

[5] S. Hammad, idem., p.72

[6] Ibid., p.73-75

[7] Ibid., p.72

[8] Ibid., 46-47