“Viva Palestina!”: The new international and poetics of rights from puerto rico to Filastin”

• In Event: Vulnerable Targets: Statelessness and Solidarity from the Americas to Palestine

Abstract

Drawing upon my expertise as a literary scholar, this paper considers in relation verses from two rich and radical poetic traditions, the Caribbean-Puerto Rican and the Palestinian, to bear witness to the cruelty of statelessness. I argue the remembrance of poetry and poets plays a vital role in assertions of new solidarity and internationalism between Puerto Rico and Palestine. Along with the countless dead, the genocide in Gaza has taken the lives of thirteen poets and several professors and journalists. Amidst the continuous airstrikes, a global uprising and diaspora in protest has resurrected the lines written by Refaat Alareer (one of the poets killed by Israel in December of 2023, along with his brother, his brother’s son, his sister and her three children) as a prophetic eulogy. Alareer prophetic lines—" If I must die, you must live/to tell my story” —now circulates across the world and the web. In this way, poetry has emerged as a key medium for registering the affect of genocide and for bearing witness to bodily toll caused by constant deluge of colonial warfare.
This anticipatory grief and the sense of being under the constant threat of an imperial death also informs the foundations of a long Caribbean poetics, beginning with Jose Marti’s foreshadowing of his own death in the poem “Abdala.” At the time Marti was writing, Cuba was not a nation and was at war with United States in 1898 (when the threat of Cuba’s and the Philippine’s annexation by the United States was a realpolitik threat). While Marti is now monumentalized as a national hero, he died a stateless martyr in combat fighting for an independent, anti-imperial land. Like Marti, two contemporary Puerto Rican poets (Roque Raquel Salas Rivera and Urayoán Noel) have both mobilized the poetic form to register the violence prompted by “late stage empire” on quotidian life in Puerto Rico, especially during the year in the aftermath of Hurrican Maria.

I place into conversation the lines of a number of Palestinian and Puerto Rican poets (Alrear, Mahmoud Darwish, Fady Joudah, Rivera, and Noel) to bring forth an analysis of the way poetry on statelessness as well as verses imagining an independent, anti-imperial homeland bring forth an important assertion of solidarity.

One month after Alareer’s death, as conversation recorded on NPR captured an ethics of solidarity and identification between Puerto Rico and Palestine that requires consideration at this conference. As recorded by NPR, “Why Puerto Rico has such deep support for the Palestinian cause?” This paper historicizes and pursues this politics of identification through the words of key poets from each of these extremely colonized sites: sites which are also still stateless but in solidarity.

Author

• Munia Bhaumik, UCLA