Against Erasure

KARAN

Basman, your poems refuse erasure. They name what others turn away from: the murdered, the missing, the everyday textures of annihilation. “The genocide has never tired of visiting the city,” you write in “The New Dictionary,” “bringing its tongue to consume the language of a child.” It’s a devastating image of language itself under siege. Let’s begin there: what does poetry mean to you in a time when words are being stolen, twisted, or bombed out of existence?

BASMAN

I have been writing poetry since 2014 after the Israeli assault on Gaza, which back then felt like the most horrific war I have ever experienced.  I lost one friend, Haytham, who was killed by Israel. If you ask me now, I still don’t know why it’s poetry but I think it’s the way my body’s systems choose to express my feelings. I think in the time of genocide, poetry becomes an attempt to fight back against the eraser of our existence.

KARAN

Your work is rooted in testimony, yet it’s also profoundly inventive. “The New Dictionary” is both reportage and linguistic elegy (like a child’s vocabulary rewritten by war). How do you approach language when it feels like both your weapon and your wound?

BASMAN

Well, again, you can’t hide from your wounds. Also, you can’t manipulate it. The wound is here, visible, obvious, opened, contaminated, and hurtful. I appreciate very much the ability of poetry to say it out, to let you scream when everything is painful.

There’s no guarantee that this scream will heal you, but when you have a tongue that can be used, why wouldn’t you just scream out loud?

KARAN

“Anti-Ishmaelism” reclaims one of the oldest stories — Ishmael, the outcast son — as a declaration of belonging and divine inheritance. “I am Ishmael… I am also chosen.” In a world that continually dehumanizes Palestinians, what power do you find in retelling sacred stories?

BASMAN

We have been under occupation in the name of God, in the name of history – the descendants of Shem and Abraham, guided by the ideology of being the chosen ones.

But it seems funny enough that our occupier forgets that we are also created by the same God and it wasn’t a mistake that we were all created by the same human form. We have a history in the land as well. The most ironic part is that we have the same grandfather “Abraham,” and the same great-grandfather, “Shem”.

This is the power of retelling the sacred old stories. It’s a wake-up call for the world. I am not sure how unconscious to these stories the world is, but there is no harm in such powerful reminders that every justification might be another accusation.

KARAN

There’s extraordinary wit and self-awareness in “I Was a Superhero.” You’re confronting propaganda and Western fantasy — “that fancier, fitter, whiter Israeli superhero” — through humor, even as you end the poem with obliteration. What role does humor play for you inside the unbearable? Is it survival, irony, or resistance? How do you keep a sense of humor alive, when even laughter is dangerous?

BASMAN

I think I am sarcastic by nature. I write many humorous poems. But still, I wonder sometimes if it is really a gift or maybe because I believe the struggle is very heavy, so it’s just another way to survive. The reaction of the world to the struggle is ridiculous most of the time, which stimulates me to maybe just laugh instead of crying.

I think humor itself is both. It’s survival and resistance at the same time. Also, as a poet I believe laughter stays longer with the reader. It has that magic to it.

KARAN

Your letter poems — to Greta Thunberg, to Rihanna — reach out to the world that is watching but not acting. They’re heartbreaking in their mix of hope and disbelief. “The bombs don’t go easy on the climate,” you tell Greta. How do you decide whom to address, and what does it mean to write to someone who might never answer?

BASMAN

It depends on the moment. Rihanna is one of my favorite singers. When I wrote this letter to her, I actually was watching her Superbowl and the drone was buzzing above my head. I didn’t think at that moment of her answer but it’s really frustrating and confusing that a lot of artists were silent during this genocide.  

Also, for Greta, I wrote this letter at the first attempt of the Flotilla to break the siege on Gaza.  As you know, Greta is a climate activist and honestly, I think also of how the bomb ruins even the climate—not just the people and the land. The Flotilla itself was a symbol of hope. I didn’t believe that Israel would allow them to break the siege, but unlike many artists I carry a lot of respect for Greta and the other activists on the Flotilla.

KARAN

You end “The Body of Santa” with a line I can’t shake: “Maybe he is showing God his stained bag of the remaining presents—flesh, heads and bones.” It’s absurd, tragic, unthinkable. And yet it’s true. How do you carry images like that and still keep faith — in writing, or in people?

BASMAN

I think how hope is surviving now even though the reality pushes you towards the other way. Keeping hope/faith is extremely exhausting but it’s more of a must now than an option. It’s not easy to find a way among these images (I mean poetry images) that even with its horror are nothing compared to reality. I can’t deny that people around the world who protest against the genocide and risk their jobs and positions have been very inspirational.

With the continuity of the genocide, I keep questioning the worthiness of writing. Yet, I think of writing as a duty, a moral responsibility towards my people, my cause. In this genocide, I lost a sister with her family, best friends and colleagues. They deserve for their names and stories to be heard.  

KARAN

In “List,” you repeat “He hates…” turning the oppressor’s hatred into an indictment, a structure of moral exposure. The poem names everything from the burning of books to the killing of poets. How do you balance the personal and the collective voice in your work? When does “I” become “we”?

BASMAN

It depends on the story you’re telling in your poem but at the end of the day, it’s a collective struggle so the “I” always becomes “we.” I mean, I write poems where I feel I need to speak about my own friends or family or sharing a particular personal memory with them or something I write about burning the books, the houses, neighborhood and hospitals. But again, almost every personal thing is collective in such a struggle.

KARAN

Your poem “Dabka” is radiant with life — dance, sweat, rhythm, joy. Amid devastation, it insists on celebration. “You stole my land but not my identity.” How do you understand joy or beauty in the context of resistance? Can joy itself be a form of protest?

BASMAN

Dabka is a folkloric Palestinian dance so, beside the joy of movement, it represents our culture and our history, which is always under the threat of being erased. So, yes, it’s an identity. When your identity is the target, every action—from keeping a folkloric dance to food—becomes a form of resistance against erasure.

KARAN

In your poem, “In the Poem,” you imagine giving the hospital legs, the sea a mouth, the dead a body again. It’s a kind of resurrection through imagination. Some of us carry a grief too great for realism. How do you see the relationship between poetry and healing, or poetry and mourning?

BASMAN

I can’t tell if poetry heals, but for me, it gives me relief. There is something magical about the ability to imagine. In poetry, I can live in a world where I can give a child a life again. I can stretch time with my friends who I lost.  This is not a delusion or running from reality. This is the empowering of poetry that gives you the ability to reflect with a full awareness, to raise your voice up and also to mourn out loud.

KARAN

This is a question we ask all our poets, though the answers are always wildly different: there’s a theory that a poet’s work tends toward one of four major axes — poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, or poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work, if at all? And do you feel it shifting?

BASMAN

I can’t place it at all. I think my poetry comes from all these places and shifts among them. I mean, my heart and soul are almost in every poem. I wrote earlier about depression, the headache from the drone, that mental struggle. I wrote too an ode to my Palestinian bladder, which was one example of writing about my body under the circumstance of being under the occupation. I guess I can say my poetry is a mix of all of these things.

KARAN

What’s something someone once told you — a friend, a teacher, maybe even a stranger — that has helped you keep writing when it feels like everything around you is falling apart?

BASMAN

More than one friend has asked me to write about them. Many friends laughed and admired my sarcastic poems, which motivates me to keep writing. Dr. Refaat Alareer, an academic and poet who was killed by Israel during this genocide admired my writing and always encouraged me to keep doing. My mentors at the We Are Not Numbers project always encourage me. Finally, I have been a member of a Palestinian-Jewish poets group. We have grown to be friends, dealing with difficult times through exchanging and supporting each other through poetry.

KARAN

Would you kindly offer our readers a poetry prompt — something simple, strange, or rigorous — to help them begin a new poem?

BASMAN

I was a student of a project called poetry of the camps/Gaza, which encouraged young students in Gaza to write poetry last year. This year, I am a part of the teaching team. We work under different themes. One theme is called a miracle poem, which is to encourage the people to speak about themselves and define themselves to the world as a miracle. The poem must end with the phrase “I am a miracle.”

KARAN

Please also recommend a piece of art — a film, a painting, a song (anything other than a poem) — that’s sustained you lately or that you wish everyone could experience.

BASMAN

I focus lately on the Palestinian art and literature. The book I am reading now and highly recommended is The Perfect Victims by the Palestinian writer/ Mohammed El Kurd. I am also obsessed with Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken by Pink. Also, there are two Palestinian movies I recommend: 200 Meters and 3000 Nights.