In times of war and crisis, poetry can become more than just art: it can become testimony. For the people of Palestine living under siege, poetry is not a mere reflection of their suffering, but rather an act of resistance which campaigns for survival and remembrance.
Poetry has adopted these functions throughout history. Most famously in the west, the poetry of the first and second world wars still haunts cultural and sociological imaginations, from Wilfred Owen’s depictions of the trenches to Primo Levi’s poetic recollections of surviving the Holocaust.
But survivors from across history and the wider world have turned to the poetic form in an attempt to distil chaos into meaning, and to offer a language to witnessing where oppressive silence threatens to prevail.
