“A woman tells him a pen is a sword. What’s a pen to a rifle?” (34)
Mohammed El-Kurd’s Rifqa is a collection of poems that exemplify Palestinian diasporic particularities, detailing the author’s lived experiences while refusing to reduce its content to the portrayal of an entire group of people as nothing more than victims. El-Kurd’s words insist on maintaining presence, history, memory, resistance, existence, as necessary forms of survival. With vivid, striking imagery, life under occupation is documented through the lens of steadfast Palestinian-ness: Home becomes “a series of shared memories,” (xi) not just a place, that persists, even in displacement; violence is a fact of life, discussed over breakfast with “tear gas and tea” (11). Understanding the normalization of violence, however, does not mean accepting it. El-Kurd works to portray the realities of Palestinian life, life that does not need to be qualified by humanizing characteristics to give it value.
Rifqa, as an entity, challenges humanitarian narratives that equate suffering and struggle with helplessness: “I was not a victim until the world told me so” (50). Instead, anger, defiance, passion, resilience, become forms of agency. Living with the constant threat of loss means defiance is a method of survival. Living under unjust occupation means rage is necessary, is a refusal to accept subjugation. The collection of work encompassed in Rifqa embodies the legacy of the book’s namesake: a Palestinian woman who spent her life enduring and withstanding the efforts of the zionist entity to eradicate the Palestinian identity. El-Kurd’s writing shows how this goal has failed, and how generation after generation of Palestinian will continue to exist and continue to fight the occupation.
Below are quotes from Rifqa reworked to create stories within thematic contexts meant to replicate each of the book’s four segments:
Part I: Memories & Roots
“Home is a series of shared memories … home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been” (xi)
“She left behind clothes folded and ready to be worn again;
her suitcases
did not declare departure” (18)
“‘We’ll return once things cool down,’
and she believed,
wore her key
until her key her neck her memory
became the same color” (19)
“I cried–not for the house
but for the memories I could have had inside it” (22)
“A chain is corseting
the tree’s waist and hers,
flesh in flesh,
olive skin on olive skin,
fingers branches intersections
rootedness jars their storms,
wraps them
in her unbreakable word
we will not leave” (11)
Part II: Life with Violence
“Outside the hospital room:
protests, burnt rubber,
Kiffiyah’ed faces, and bare bodies,
stones thrown onto tanks,
tanks imprinted with US flags,
lands
smelling of tear gas, skies tiled with
rubber-coated bullets,
a few bodies shot, dead – died” (4-5)
“In Palestine death is sudden,
instant,
constant,
happens in between breaths” (5)
“Here, we know two suns: the earth’s friend and white phosphorus.
Here, we know two things: death and the few breaths before it” (31)
“Blood doesn’t wash away
despite the faucets
despite the color of washing” (36)
“War machines are coin-operated arcade games” (37)
“Gaza – woman
lives where bulldozers rest on clouds.
Her hospital bed is her home’s rubble,
nothing left of her husband but a bloodied beard” (43)
“This Hebrewed land still speaks Arabic” (34)
Part III: Voices of Rage and Refusal
“If hearing about a world other than yours
makes you uncomfortable,
drink the sea,
cut off your ears,
blow another bubble to bubble your bubble and the pretense.
Blow up another town of bodies in the name of fear” (7)
“My father told me: Anger is a luxury we cannot afford” (7)
“This is why we dance:
If I speak, I’m dangerous.
You open your mouth,
raise your eyebrows.
You point your fingers” (7)
“I was not a victim until the world told me so” (50)
“People who give excuses for executions
fear the rifle more than they fear the reason” (30)
“A woman tells him a pen is a sword. What’s a pen to a rifle?” (34)
Part IV: the Past, the Present, the Future, the Reason
“Jerusalem taught me resilience” (46)
“I am but my love for my land, by the way
I have chosen you, my homeland, in love and in obedience
In secret and in public” (67)
“‘How far is Palestine?’ She asks. It’s a fifteen-hour plane ride away, a dozen unresolved
UN resolutions away, a few history lessons
away, a hundred and
some military checkpoints away, too” (54)
“I am but my nostalgia,
my sick homesickness” (68)
“He couldn’t believe I’m from there, called me a flower in cement, earth erupting from a rock. What a miracle” (70)
“take all of my years
but today
let me live” (61)
“Tell them,
‘America is the reason.’ Tell them, ‘Drink the sea.’
let them ride their tallest horses.
Jerusalem is ours” (86)
All quotes sourced directly from Rifqa, with page numbers denoted in parentheses.
Written by a Spring 2026 Intern
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund.
Citation
El-Kurd, M. (2021). Rifqa. Haymarket Books.
