Call for Submissions: Mamilla International Poetry Festival (7 - 9 September, Ramallah & Jerusalem)

Call for Submissions: Mamilla International Poetry Festival (7 - 9 September, Ramallah & Jerusalem)

Call for Submissions: Mamilla International Poetry Festival (7 - 9 September, Ramallah & Jerusalem)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Mamilla International Poetry Festival
7 - 9 September 2013
Ramallah & Jerusalem

Encouraged by renewed hope for the preservation of the ancient Mamilla Cemetery, ARCH joins hands with the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation and Museum and the Campaign to Preserve Mamilla Jerusalem Cemetery in organizing the Mamilla International Poetry Festival.

ARCH (Alliance to Restore Cultural Heritage in the Holy City of Jerusalem), the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation and Museum, and the Campaign to Preserve Mamilla Jerusalem Cemetery announce an Open Call for Submissions for the Mamilla International Poetry Festival, to take place in Ramallah and Jerusalem between September 7 – 9, 2013.

The festival, whose theme is “A Dialogue with Memory,” was conceived to protect the ancient Mamilla Cemetery from complete and final destruction by invoking poetry to promote it as a place of living memory and eternal sanctity.

During a three-day period, poetic vigils, performances, and readings—both live and virtual—will invoke, imagine, invigorate, and illuminate the lives and memories of those buried in the cemetery.

Inspired by Seamus Heaney’s claim that every poet has double citizenship—one of locality and one of conscience—the festival invites poets of all beliefs, faiths, and nationalities to reflect upon and explore universal themes (such as location, citizenship, ancestry, and collective memory) that transcend geographical boundaries.  Poetry that celebrates Mamilla as a resting place for notables, ordinary citizens, and generations of Palestinian families is welcome, as are submissions that engage in a poetic discourse with both the living and the dead.

All submissions must be received by May 31, 2013.  A panel of six distinguished international literary figures will review all content to select twenty final submissions, which will then be performed live (or digitally broadcast) at the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation and Museum in Ramallah.  The festival will be documented and streamed online and an anthology will be published upon its culmination.  Circumstances permitting, the festival will conclude with a candlelight reading of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry in Mamilla Cemetery and/or at other vulnerable cultural sites in the Holy City of Jerusalem.

In addition to soliciting international participation and generating global awareness, the festival will also galvanize local communities: A special prize will be awarded for the best poem submitted by a secondary school student and local youth will be encouraged to participate and attend.

Poetry’s crucial role in the formation of cultural identity is undeniable, especially when it provides agency in the preservation of memory.  As Mahmoud Darwish affirmed, “Poems can’t establish a state.  But they can establish a metaphorical homeland in the minds of the people.  I think my poems have built some houses in this landscape.”

About Mamilla Cemetery:

Resting just west of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, Mamilla Cemetery—ancient necropolis of shrines, of mausoleums, and of modest graves—is facing complete desecration and final destruction.

Mamilla’s venerable history is as rich as it is layered.  Having first been adopted by the Byzantines, whose 4th century church and cemetery marked it a holy ground, Mamilla was then designated an Islamic burial site as early as the 7th century, when the remains of the very first Muslims, the Sahabah—companions of the Prophet Muhammad—were reputedly laid to rest in its sacred soil.  Aside from a brief period as a Christian cemetery during the Crusades, Mamilla served without interruption as a Muslim burial ground over the course of a 1,400 year-period of Islamic rule over Jerusalem.  Growing to become the largest Islamic cemetery in the city, it housed a diverse community of Muslims, from the respected soldiers of ruler Saladin to generations of Jerusalemites spanning a wide socio-economic spectrum.  Tombs of emirs, muftis, Sufi shrines and Mamluk-era mausoleums—amongst other ancient monuments and gravestones—further attest to its hallowed history.  So holy was Mamilla, in fact, that in the 14th century A’lam, interment there was likened to being buried in heaven.

Today, Mamilla stands not only as a symbol and vestige of Palestinian—and Muslim—cultural heritage, but also as a site of exceptional universal value.  In light of its sacred nature and historical significance, the cemetery—and the memories and identities of those buried within it—deserves to be honoured, protected, and preserved.

Click here to download application information and forms may be downloaded here.

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412