Mohammed Moussa

And there were times where the role of the poet changes from being a witness to being an archivist.

You need to archive the names, the places you love and cherish.

And there were many times where I write a poem and I would not read that poem again.

I would not go back

to that poem.

So I found also myself writing about famine again which is a new theme to what the Palestinian poetry is that usually talks about loss, talks about absence, talks about memory and the way we talked about memory in

This book, for example, is really different from what we talked about previously as Palestinian poets regarding memory fetish during the Nakba or after losing Palestine or what Palestine is to us.

We were threatened by the places we cherished.

We were threatened by the memories we built.

So we talk about the erasure of memory.

And also when we become featureless, I mean by featureless, without a memory to stand on, we somehow get lost and we don't know who you are.

And when we don't know

who we are anymore.

We cannot find a place to go back to, a person to go back to.

Not any person, not any place.

The places we grew up in, when these places disappear, parts of who we are disappear.

So there were times where you could find how poetry

has transformed also during the genocide if it is by the new themes you add to poetry or by how language itself is trembling shaking unable to fathom that horror there were times where you could find blood stains on words as you write about the horrors and the crimes happening in gaza

and I'm not sure how I'm not sure if it wasn't for this genocide we would write such poems I've been writing poetry for quite a while over 10 years maybe right now if I remember and maybe from a very young age I mean in English for 10 years but

when i read for example salted wounds and you see how i still talk about war how i still talk about memory and love and other things and you read the first before you writing poetry in genocide you can see how language reshapes itself and covers itself sometimes