We sit down with Lebanese-Palestinian poet Hasib Hourani to discuss his debut poetry collection, rock flight (2024), which explores Palestinian resistance and Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement in a literary light.
What led Hourani to poetry seems like a case of trial and error. In high school, Hourani initially wanted to pursue a pathway into visual arts. But after exploring art history and the creative writing scenes, he discovered “language was doing something that art wasn’t”. Then devoting his time to experimental non-fiction, they once again reached an impasse trying to pen down his ideas. They began rock flight as a series of essays before realising this form meant “the language wasn’t doing what it needed to”.
Time away from the manuscript revealed to Hourani its intended form: poetry. Hourani cites poetry’s covert language, lack of regulations and tendency to embrace space as reasons why his ideas sing in hungry harmony with this style. rock flight therefore forms part of a burgeoning genre, that of memoir as poetry, bursting into the scene at the same time as Manisha Anjali’s Naag Mountain (2024). Though we typically dismiss poetry as too obscure to communicate testimony, Hourani’s collection testifies to poetry’s sharp quality, suitable for truth-telling.
The poetry of rock flight is richly visual and tactile, delighting and confronting the senses. Hourani points to Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan as an inspiration for how she tinkers with poetic visuality and invents hieroglyphs. Writing as a displaced member of the Lebanese and Palestinian diaspora “there are ways to adapt the English language that feels like building a language of your own”, Hourani explains. One way they do this is to render the reading experience as interactive, such that the book comes alive in our hands. Instructive manuals enable the reader to participate in the book’s teachings, which is particularly clever as the collection delves into forms of praxis such as BDS.
Hourani’s didactic poems such as “How to make a rock” and “How to hold your voice” may empower the reader with instruction, but also importantly empower Hourani as the poet. “I could play with the reader as my subjects”, Hourani explains, “and I felt a desperation in wanting to strip the reader of their autonomy, in turn gaining some for myself”. This is critical given that for decades, Palestinian voices have been silenced and drained of power — Hourani upends this dynamic with this inventive form of storytelling.
Prominent in the collection is the allegory of birds: Hourani tells us that « migration is an inherent part of the body », and is curious as to how birds move through the world compared to humans. Migration of one’s own volition is Hourani’s ideal: he shares how many of his family members’ « first travel » was forced by occupation or destruction of their homeland.
While cities like Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem are constantly “being unwritten and destroyed”, Hourani anticipates an invigoration when Palestinians will be able to shift from a state of exile to one that is rooted in belonging and freedom of movement.
Another shade of his avian metaphor reveals a deconstruction of Zionism: he cites how Zionists use appeals to environmental safety and bird life protection to justify occupation. « Zionists care about the lives of birds more than they do Palestinians », Hourani asserts, a sobering reminder of the occupiers’ cruelty.
Hourani deftly stitches together descriptions of the natural world with family and spirituality when positioning “jannah” (heaven), “jnayneh” (garden), and “Jenin” (city in Palestine) side-by-side. He not only wanted to draw out the relationship between root words but inform how his poems looked on the page whether that be through the formatting of numbered questions, multiple choice answers, and spacing of words.
The stylistic choice of switching to Arabic, another register in his arsenal, arose as a result of him feeling he “exhausted all options in English”. The reader is still able to understand the context of which it is being said in and experience the lyricism, only without the added layer. Hourani explains that he would often omit translations to avoid sacrificing the linguistic intricacies and privileging one meaning over the other.
Upon reconciling with the reality that “no one was listening to Palestinian stories”, Hourani recounts an early reader’s prophetic observation that rock flight will be “relevant two years from now.” He observed that the audience has been primed in a way previously unimaginable, despite the publishing timeline preventing books from being responsive in comparison to political writing.
The chapter titled “TORTURE METHODS EMPLOYED BY THE STATE OF ISRAEL” could not be read in isolation from the context of ongoing and documented abuse of Palestinians in torture camps such as Sde Teiman. Hourani began writing in 2020, was working on his first draft during the 2021 Intifada, and wrapped up the book in early October 2023. The timing of publication was not lost on him, and neither was writing in present tense.
In an earlier draft, Hourani included the disclaimer, “I am not a writer, I am a record player. These stories are not invented, these words are not mine to make up” only to remove it and rework the text to ensure that any language and content is not dated. He also reiterated that he is writing on his own terms, using his perspective to guide recollections of collective trauma and memory.
rock flight functions both as poetry collection and political manifesto, a welcome addition to escalating calls for BDS in political discourses. It touches on the historical BDS movement, which may surprise people new to the campaign for Palestinian liberation — and acts as a reminder that Palestinian resistance has not wavered over time. If people take one thing away from the collection, Hourani hopes it is their interpretation of BDS: not as an act of anti-semitism, but as an act of “choking back” after suffering from suffocation. rock flight is not a guidebook you should consult for step-by-step instructions on how to boycott, but it is a lyrical motivator for readers to find ways to organise.
rock flight (2024) can be found in bookstores now.
