Review: Rock Flight by Hasib Hourani

I don’t want to date this review by starting with the thing that is making the news. There is nothing new about the dream of removing Palestinians from Palestinian land. There is nothing new about the dream of removing Palestinians from Gaza. For these things to be news is to ignore history — since 1967, since 1948, or, as Hasib Hourani explains in this poetry, since 1799, when the architects of empire first dreamed of emptying Palestine of Palestinians.

I do want to start with a thing that encapsulates what this poetry is on about. It is most simply a rebuttal of the terra nullius fantasy at the heart of these dreams of ethnic cleansing. The US president’s latest brain fart is just another variation on the theme (nobody does it better than UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese: “utter nonsense“). Hourani quotes Etel Adnan in the epigraph which parodies the coloniser: “stone has no memory”. Rock Flight is a book-length demonstration that to make such an assumption is a terrible miscalculation. It pierces like a rock travelling through blue sky: precisely, elegantly, a thing of beauty and, yes, violence.

“a rock is not a rock until it’s thrown,” is a refrain that recurs through Rock Flight. Throwing rocks is a Palestinian tradition. It came to prominence during the first intifada in 1987, although its use pre-dates and post-dates that uprising. It is a democratic and egalitarian form of protest (with the bonus of being eolithic, of using what is at hand and in reach), and so, of course, is criminalised in occupied Palestinian land. Throwing a rock, Hourani explains, can land a Palestinian person in gaol for 10 years even without intent to harm. There are about 9,440 Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons. About 500-1,000 of these prisoners each year are children; most of them are locked up for throwing rocks.

That work of defining is key to the work of Hourani’s poetry. He begins by offering a definition of his own name, Hourani, an ethnonym referring to a region in the Levant, “a field of 118 basaltic volcanoes”, or, in other words, the site of rock birth. He follows with a definition of “it”, “thing”, “something”, “entity”, synonyms for “Israel” which mean “the reason I am elsewhere”. This is important work when the tyranny wielded by it is often a semantical one. Some of the other words at stake in occupied Palestine: human, child, civilian, person, rights, security.

With laser focus Hourani tests the images of the title. Rocks, a pile can be a garden, a city of gardens, a city, a city turned to rubble, whether through bombs or machines pushing aside Palestinian villages to make way for settlements:

eventually the rubble stops counting for all that much

because green grows thick and over

and you can start lying

we’re rebuilding

A rock is a mountain, or a mountain dismantled. It doesn’t have to be a rock: Hourani invites us to make our own, among “how to” poems through the collection, by scrunching up a piece of paper and throwing it. It could be a seed, the “stone” of a date. “it is about the earth,” Hourani explains. “it has always been about the earth”.

His grandparents fled to Aleppo in 1948; he was “born flying and landing and flying again”: “we now have five nationalities between us”. Flight becomes perpetual motion, an impulse, “wanting to move on to the next thing move on move”. “5. nothing ever really stops existing”, Hourani writes in ironic twists on multiple-choice posed through Rock Flight. “a. this means nothing ever really stops happening”. This is people as verb, transcending borders and events of history. Eventually the image of flight settles on birds, first a cattle egret in a dumpster and Hourani’s vow that “i will lead the bird back to water”, and then later the astonishing image of the pfeilstorch, the storks found in Europe with African spears in their bodies that first revealed that birds migrate.

To these ideas Hourani adds a third, that of breathing and suffocation. “9. what’s a box?” Hourani poses, “c. something that stops you from moving … breathlessness”, through which he explores the prisons used to torture Palestinians. But he also turns it, vowing to “choke israel back”: “8. cutting off its air supply is not murder/a. when the thing is a murderer”. As an afterword and manifesto, Hourani advocates the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement:

i just want to cut off its circulation until it says

give me back my oxygen

and i will say no

Hourani brings these images into conversation, exploring without resolving, through flashes of memoir: a visit to Palestine with family, living in Australia, writing Rock Flight at a writer’s retreat where settler ghosts visit and sit on his chest. These metaphors gather force over this poetry until they strike thunderously:

what a throat

on that waterbird

to eat a rat whole

Through metaphor and image, interactive games and erasure, Hourani’s poetry is lithe and shape-shifting, even as its words are polished and concrete. It takes the tools of Palestinians’ oppressors and turns them back.

Gay rating: not gay.