My lover, returning from the genocide in Gaza during the Western-kissed Israeli bombardments and constant drone surveillance, has the audacity to tell me that I am not ready to love again so soon after the death of my partner, Maria (a former Montréal Serai editor and contributor). I protest, wondering: If I am “not ready” to love someone else after a year and a half of grieving only one death, when will be the proper time for the Palestinians—all of whom are grieving—to love again?
After Israel has assassinated their poets and blown up their schools, when will be the proper time for Palestinians to tell stories, or sing, or study again?
My lover is a romantic, yet she is bitter that although we are finally opposing and resisting the genocide of Palestinians, we are still ignoring the genocide of people in Sudan (where she also took care of the wounded and sick).
I am like you—breathing in this horror unfolding half-way across our world—a horror that is bigger than all of us and at the same time fits in the palms of our hands, even when clenched in a fist.
Resistance, as the Wobblies used to say, should be the polite response to oppression. This issue of Montréal Serai proposes a theme of cultural resistance: Culture shifting: challenging and changing the dominant narratives. I’m not sure what “culture shift” means—it seems very genteel. But don’t judge this issue by its polite title. It should come with a “trigger warning” for some.
The marvelous contributors here have shown me that we resist, we honour and we stay in solidarity by reaching into our souls to share ourselves in our “community” (which, in Canada-speak, is a cultural battlespace for many). They are enheartening.
Zahra Haider writes in “Culture Belongs to No One”: “There is a clear stigma around being South Asian, or Muslim, or both, due to the duality of invisibility and hypervisibility.” Her description of being an immigrant living here but never feeling at home seems to be universal, but having her essential identity perceived as a threat is not something privileged white Yankees like me ever faced.
Palestinian Thaer Husien‘s “Darker than Red” starts off with: “Think of a diasporic kaleidoscope: cypress trees and cardamom breeze; a place where domed turquoise mosaics bleed.” Husien provokes. Then he riffs about his place and pain in this generations-long moment, and I daydream he penned a John Coltrane-inspired poem.
My mind skips back to a Lectures Logos reading in December 2023, where Jason Selman improvised on trumpet while I read the words of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, recounting what his mother told him: “It is both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to yourself. Stories are meant to be told and retold.”
Minutes before our performance, we’d learned that Refaat too had been blown up by a bomb “gifted” to Israel by my country, the U.S. Several months later, the Israelis bombed the remaining members of Refaat’s family still in Gaza. Yet despite all these killings, Israel will not succeed in its goal of destroying Palestinian poets. And more threatening to some, new poets are already replacing those killed.
Love and rage was my late imprisoned anarchist comrade Carl Harp’s signature salutation. But rage is not the driving force in Tahieròn:iohte Dan David’s latest essay, “Degrees of Belonging,” third in a series of four instalments as Montréal Serai’s writer in residence.
Dan paints recollections of struggling against being the Other, of not belonging, and of claiming one’s path. An award-winning writer and journalist, Dan includes stories of his close friend Tony Chan, and his own. “I reached back in my culture to remind myself who and what I was in a Kanienke:haka (Mohawk) word: kariwaroroks. It means ‘truth-gatherer.’” The importance of truth-telling and bearing witness, especially in a time of genocide,
El Arbi Mrabet’s gardening poem Fresh night’s anarchic rhymes deliberately sidesteps the main driving story beat, pitching us into his counter-rhythm:
“My garden was not a splendour
Felt the effect of an icy shower
Melt in my labour sweat
From armpit to elbow “
I don’t know if Mrabet’s poems are influenced by jazz innovator Miles Davis, who asked his musicians to strip down to the essence of their music by NOT playing most of the notes and chords— but “Black holes” and “Fresh night’s” dare us to imagine what pumps their blood. His expansive artwork, in counterpoint, is lush and lyrical.
Alejandra Zamudio’s drawings and paintings feature themes of the mother-daughter bond, menstruation, guardian angels and dogs. Alejandra not only challenges the narrative of human dominance over nature, she reminds us that great art can be whimsical.
Ami Sands Brodoff’s short story “Rescue” was balm to my soul, surfacing the unexpected casual opportunities for everyday joys and brutal tragedies when a grieving widow agrees to be present for herself and the family next door in a time of crisis.
It turns out that I am descended from a line of Jews as cowardly as the Nazis, thinking that if we kill enough Palestinians, we can exterminate their culture and preserve ours. Yet before our watery eyes, our tax-subsidized bombs and forced marches are spreading Palestinian seeds everywhere. Meanwhile, the Western liberal imperial culture, which we Jews have embraced, reeks of decay. You can feel winged scavengers circling overhead. At a pro-Israel counter-demo in front of the McGill Palestinian protest encampment this summer, one Zionist held a sign saying Radical Islamists and Anarchists are Sleeping Together. And the protest campers—many of them Jewish, queer, non-binary, Arab—thought that was “a beautiful thing.”
I recommend that you not read April Ford’s work if you are insecure about your writing prowess, because she casually melds vignettes of a struggling working-class woman’s everyday run-ins, leaving no doubt that April can slay. From “The man who sings out his main street apartment window at you every morning on your walk to hot yoga”:
Toby will sing at you. They will be clever at first
(as in not overtly offensive) and you will feel for
the lame bastard and your empathy will be your
enemy—it will always be your enemy.
In “City of Ideas,” reviewer Louise Carson portrays Peter Taylor‘s poetry collection, Cities Within Us, as “a dense, even rich experience”—ranging in scope from the humour of “Lunchroom Lear” in a senior’s cafeteria to the sobering powerlessness of a child being photographed for porn in “Desire Needs No Image.” She echoes his range when citing Taylor: “the infinite mind in the finite body is escaping / the skin’s excursion // into raw zones, suburbs / of a universal sanctuary.” [Ed. note -Taylor’s quote is italicized here by Serai.]
In “Rapping Resistance: Hip Hop as a Form of Dissent in the Bangladesh Students’ Protests,” Moinak Banerjee guides us through the Bangladeshi student uprising in August 2024, fueled by the “many young singers and songwriters in Bangladesh who deployed their music to participate in a nation-wide student movement that turned into a mass rebellion against the government.” Little did imprisoned artist Hannan Hossain know, his hip-hop Awaaz Uda Bangladesh (“Rise n shout Bangladesh”) would become the anthem of the students overthrowing Bangladesh’s kleptocrat ruling family. We can only dance. Art is sometimes the only response possible in extreme situations.
Atif Siddiqi grew naturally into their trans self as a child in Pakistan before settling in Montréal. In Shahroze Rauf‘s profile of Tranie Tronic, Atif Siddiqi describes what is obvious when you think about it, that public queer and trans folks are braver than me (and maybe you). And Siddiqi’s performance as Tranie Tronic shows why, radiating courage.
Jorge Etcheverry Arcaya has five biting poems that continue the Montréal Serai tradition of—oh, let’s be honest here—normalizing the great replacement of our dominant white empire’s shitty culture. His vibrant digital art resonates off the screen. Jorge ends on a cheery note:
All the people
down there
so far away
in the other hemisphere
materialize like a bit of sunlight
in these circumstances.
Speaking of sunlight, my dreams of my dead Maria leave me unprepared, walking with her through crumbling buildings that are in so much better shape than those in Palestine as of this writing, when 70% of Gaza’s buildings have been shattered. And she walks ahead, intrepid voyager.
I can’t help but think that our dead are sometimes leading us and often inspiring us to continue our resistance. Martyrs, some say.
Culture shift?
Rana Bose, whom many of us had the privilege of engaging, reading and arguing with, understood how dangerous culture could be and should be. Rana left numerous legacies, including a gift from his family to future artists—the Rana Bose Memorial Grant.
Think about how vital Serai’s activities are—we live in the empire whose pitch is: “Would you like fries with your genocide?” A new generation of artists is rising up, and it is our duty to help them (even if they believe they are rising up in spite of us).
I will donate my honorarium to Montréal Serai [Support Serai] and I invite readers to donate as well to support young engaged artists and writers. This centuries-long moment requires the kind of culture that Montréal Serai has featured, to declare itself from the bus seat or the kitchen or the prison, and point fingers. And knock down bullies.
