A Palestinian you should know: Zaina Alsous
Writer and organizer in Miami, FL (Seminole and Tequesta land)
Palestine in America (PiA): What balad(s) is your family from?
Zaina Alsous (ZA): Umm al-fahm و I'billin, Palestine
PiA: Was there a moment(s) that drove you to begin your career?
ZA: Watching documentaries about indefinite detention and torture at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as a teenager were deeply politicizing and catalyzing for me. It was where I began to question the function of the state and what it meant to be an American. What I didn’t realize at the time was that it was a crash course introduction to imperialism, a window into the long history of settler economics. In terms of writing and poetry, though reading has probably been my longest lasting friendship, I didn’t take writing seriously until much later in life. In particular, discovering the story of the revolutionary Black Panther George Jackson finding the work of Palestinian poet Samih Al Qasim, and hanging on to a poem that was kept in his cell, from the collection of revolutionary Palestinian poetry, “Enemy of the Sun”, re-ignited something buried in that fathomless place within me around study and the horizon of possibility that art can cultivate in struggle. Shortly after reading about that story I started to work on applications to get a creative writing degree, where I eventually finished a collection of poetry, A Theory of Birds.
PiA: What is your earliest memory of participating in political work?
ZA: I have a funny memory of being a 16 year old in a North Carolina high school inviting people to an after school meeting that no one attended and cutting out neon construction paper circles to create these hideous DIY pins in protest of the Patriot Act. I also remember my friends and I pretending to be each other’s mothers to call out sick so we could skip class to go to the anti Iraq war demo at a nearby college. Teen me made some points.
PiA: How has/does Palestine play a role in your work?
ZA: Palestine is nowhere and everywhere in my work because Palestine is a planet in the universe of class struggle. That Palestinian life can be made less valuable and Palestinian history undermined and erased is merely a symptom of a long, despicable epoch of hundreds of years of colonial plunder. I live in Miami, a city that could not be incorporated without Bahamian workers, many who were forced to migrate from the island because they could not grow and sustain crops on land destroyed by slave plantations. I live in Miami on land once stewarded by the Tequesta peoples whose histories are erased or minimized in public space except for the occasional small plaque, in a city where Black people despite being necessary for the very foundational existence of Miami are being incarcerated and displaced by gentrification on a daily basis. The genocides contain profound variations, but the historic parallels and the benefit of capital at the expense of the land and human life remain a constant. Palestine is a guide for me to pay attention to the land I’m on and the stories I am told to ignore.
PiA: What’s a Palestinian adverb/quote/person/poem/song that you often reflect on in this work?
ZA: The last lines of Mahmoud Darwish’s vast and meditative poem “Mural” often haunt me:
“And as for me – full of all reasons for leaving –
I am not mine
I am not mine
I am not mine”
A contradiction of living as a person indefinitely connected to an irreducible historic violence, in the case of Palestinians—an ongoing attempt to disappear an entire lineage of a people, is that whether you like it or not this violence connects you to your people, most of whom you have never met nor will meet. You can cultivate a self loathing and resentment out of that connection, a connection and a wound you did not choose, or you can see that unconditional we as the most important role of your life, I have found myself more tethered to the latter. I do not have an “I” distinct from us and that has given my life a particular shape and path and the frame for my understanding of solidarity as more than a set of duties but actually an essential relation through which our living (and our ongoing returning) becomes possible. Palestinians still exist because of unbroken and unbreakable solidarity and that is a profound gift and responsibility to carry.
PiA: What’s your advice to folks looking to deepen their political journeys?
ZA: Find an organization. Talk to and listen to a lot of people. Study power. Don’t pretend to have all the answers. None of us have all the answers.
PiA: How would you define solidarity?
ZA: In Camagüey, Cuba, in late 2016 a theatre worker introduced me to her mother, Rebecca, an elderly woman with her hair pulled back into a bun, the widow of a geographer. When I told her I was Palestinian she hugged me, with a level of warmth that I hadn’t ever really experienced outside of my family or close knit community. She walked me through a room in her home to where a fading poster hung on the wall, “Palestine 88” at the top, in the center a child standing still, proud, steadfast with rocks placed in front of him, almost as if preparing to cast a spell. At the bottom of the poster, “They Will Not Pass”. That this mother had held on to this poster for longer than I had been alive, that a people starved and punished by U.S. sanctions for decades for daring to wage a revolution could see themselves in my people, on a land they have not seen and will not see, that a process of understanding, a shared meaning could be forged that cannot be explained in a settler logic or killed or maimed away, whatever that thingliness is, it is the reason for living, and the definition of solidarity to me.
