´THE INVADERS´ FEAR OF MEMORIES´: RESISTING MEMORICIDE THROUGH POETRY FROM GAZA

In poetry, artistic and political struggles are intimately tied and voiced as interventions to dominant discourses and ideologies. In Gaza, like in other places where indigenous communities resist settler-colonial erasure and occupation, poetry challenges and resists memoricide, historical amnesia, colonial narratives, knowledge production and policies, speaking truth to the occupying power. This project discusses Gaza´s poetic culture as a mode of resistance against memoricide and historical amnesia, focusing on its outburst since October 2023 in response to the ongoing genocide. The poetic culture, made up of its authors and poets, translators, publishers and other collaborators in Gaza and abroad is explored through the process of production, distribution and reception of poetry. The unwavering courage and determination required to produce poetry during a genocide enables Palestinian poets to resist Israel´s campaigns of dispossession, de-historicization and erasure of memory, identity and history. Their poetry as mode of resistance against memoricide and amnesia takes on the functions of memory, counternarrative, truth, knowledge, history, commemoration, remembrance, witness, protest, dissent, rebellion, memory, memorial, imagination, responsibility and liberation. With writing, reading, publishing and distributing poetry and collaborating with Palestinian poets, the intellectual blockade is lifted, imposed information voids are filled, relational histories are made available, vocabulary produced, and narratives reclaimed.