Rifqa

“Witnessing Mohammed El-Kurd cut down dragons with the mere shift in his gaze has been a gift to our generation. Reading him is a journey into our collective pit of pain, of unreasonable loss, of screams unheard and unabating, of anger that he tells us - even anger - is a luxury. Mohammed El Kurd’s debut book of poetry is a self-portrait of a Palestinian child who has grown up besieged by nuclear-backed settlers in his own home protected, still, by his beloved grandmama Rifqa’s indomitable belief that her family and her people would prevail. Rifqa is an admixture of the most intimate violence - wounds that are as difficult to reveal as they are to heal- together with song and dance that beseech the sun to sustain this life and these lands that ensure it. Rifqa El-Kurd lives in Mohammed and Mohammed breathes life into us - scented with fire and jasmine flowers - so that we may know her, and the victory she embodied, too.”—Noura Erekat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine“Rooted in Palestine and ranging across the world, these are poems that hurl themselves at the boundaries of what poems can do; lyrics that put a premium on anger, that reflect the serrated edges of living in the world today, that gift new and powerful phrases to the lexicon of liberation.”—Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution“May these poems challenge and awaken you. May they shake you into action. May they help you find the words for what you already know to be true… These words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar. Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been. Mohammed El-Kurd’s poetry is a home returned to us.”—Aja Monet, from the foreword“Rifqa is an absolute marvel and El-Kurd is precisely the kind of poet—Palestinian or otherwise—we need right now: unafraid of the truth. The legacy of his grandmother, the eponymous Rifqa, flits across these poems and with it comes wisdom, hope and, most crucially of all, memory. ‘She left Haifa to go to Haifa/to go to Haifa,’ he writes of his grandmother. This is a collection of remembering, not just the past but the unfolding present, one that is constantly facing erasure; of his own place in this lineage, he writes, ‘What I write is an almost./I write an attempt.’ El-Kurd doesn’t flinch from the violence and death that comes with dispossession. But make no mistake. These are the poems of the defiantly, unapologetically, wholly alive.”—Hala Alyan, author of The Arsonists’ City“Rifqa is the collision of strength and vulnerability. Earnest in its exploration of the grave realities in one corner of the globe, it is a banging on the doors of the world. It illustrates the wit which is necessary to weave together the tragic with the hopeful, and the painful with the joyful. RIFQA, is a testament to overcoming fear in expression. A book that will resonate with you. One which you hold and return to over and over again.”—Mariam Barghouti“Palestinians have long fought with poetry. Napoleon’s army in Palestine was defeated by warrior poets. El-Kurd’s words are part of this long and dazzling lineage. An elegy to our ancestors, maternal, whose resistance we hope to honor, each poem a rock hurled at the occupier and the oppressor. A beautiful and important book.”—Randa Jarrar, Love Is An Ex-Country“At its heart, Rifqa is a call to build a better elsewhere for Palestinians, in & beyond language: an ars poetica beyonded into unity intifada, where Palestinians are loved into present tense. Beyond a failed imagination of poetry that’s more “theatre over thunder,” beyond a poetics where elegy is merely a symptom of border, Mohammed El-Kurd weaves the ancestors and Land into every breath of these poems. “Every grandmother is a Jerusalem,” El-Kurd reminds us, in jasmine-scented memory, in liminal space and punchline, in auto- and anti-biography. Here is poetry the whole of us can turn and return to - even in grief, even in contradiction. Liberating itself from respectability & other colonialist gazes weaponized against Palestinians, here is poetry insistent on truths we’ve carried for generations. JERUSALEM IS OURS. El-Kurd writes this with its whole chest, knowing our lives - the whole & future of us—depend on it.”—George Abraham, author of Birthright

Mohammed El-Kurd is an internationally-touring poet and writer from Jerusalem, Palestine. His work has been featured in The Guardian, This Week In Palestine, Al-Jazeera English, The Nation, and the forthcoming Vacuuming Away Fire anthology, among others. Mohammed graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a B.F.A. in Writing, where he created Radical Blankets, an award-winning multimedia poetry magazine. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Poetry from Brooklyn College. His poetry-oud album, Bellydancing On Wounds, was released in collaboration with Palestinian musical artist Clarissa Bitar. Apart from poetry and writing, el-Kurd is a visual artist, printmaker, and most recently, co-designer of a fashion collection with Serbian designer Tina Gancev. Mohammed has spent his undergraduate weekends performing poetry at campuses and cultural centers across the United States and hopes to continue in the post-COVID-19 era.