Deport Me from the U.S. Colony Back to My Country so That I May Live, Fight, and Die with My People
Thaer Husien is a Palestinian educator living as an unwelcome guest on First Peoples’ land. He helped found The Posterity Alliance, is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, a Fulbright scholar, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University. Writing can be found in Rusted Radishes, Black Warrior Review, Litro Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, The Written Resistance, Montreal Serai, Sonora Review, Collateral, Emrys Journal, and Poetry Wales. His recently published novel, Beside the Sickle Moon, is a near-future tale based on Israel’s occupation of Palestine (Daraja Press, 2024).
Diary Entry #1492
So, then. We understand that October 7th was a prison break and that the Palestine Question stems from 1492, not 1948. As it happens, I’ve spent much of my life more than not assimilated into euro-amerikkkan pseudo-reality; a displaced settler materially and largely in mind despite my family’s best efforts to pull me from the confusion. Didn’t quite know soft imperialism back then, so I’ve done Peace Corps and Fulbright and the like thinking it wasn’t the worst way to go. But that deformity didn’t completely take hold and continues to recede, restoring matter thanks to the privilege of family, friends, allies, a lifetime of journeys into Palestine and places of the world, learning, unlearning, X,Y,Z-axis. May it always be so.
Due respect for a journey aside I can’t seem to accept this pervasive idea during a time rivers of blood flood more into Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and the global south wholly – neo-settler-colonial expansion and capitalist extraction haunting every indigenous cousin and diaspora – that I’m supposed to be convinced theory and expression will save us from a bleak future we’re not supposed to look at, in a present we’re supposed to accept for what it is, while not mass organizing under banners or visions because of a great leap assumption that this leads to the same nature of the oppressor.
No. This is annihilation. How many of these settler-organizers in artificial communities called liberation spaces have ever spoken to loved ones in immediate danger of sanctioned slaughter? Can the neocolonial captured hear the sounds of death beyond chanting for indifferent idols? This is annihilation. Then again all I’ve heard from the awakened west is no rulers, horizontal structures; sure, but also “just do you,” while we’re surrounded by this war machine and ecocide slowly encroaching, encompassing, here, now. All while our inspirations come from those like Subcomandante Marcos, Kwame Nkrumah, Leila Khaled, Basel al-Araj, Alaa Mansour, Sakine Canciz, Lumumba, Sankara, the list goes on. But don’t fall for main character syndrome or delusions of grandeur like some Hollywood brainwashed drone thinking that’s your reality. But also-also, maybe grab some friends, read some zines, tag a recruitment center or set fire to a police station. Am I making any sense? Will they ever let me forget we’re demanding the impossible? This is annihilation.
I have basked in the artificial light of this spectacle sun long enough. It is not one of life but the extraction and exploitation of it and we must take responsibility for what that has wrought.
Game recognizes game, ‘we’ have lost ourselves to mutual aid, speculation, and theory for the safe bet of dying in radical vacuums, waiting on particular conditions, throwing our brave few under prisons and tanks. And we children of the diasporas stand for our enemies on podiums as mere relics and representations instead of a living, indigenous community displaced in this confusing place. Exotic objects of study dancing as settlers on unceded lands ourselves. No one really has the answers. Basel did but didn’t. I certainly don’t. Hard to imagine myself as even half of a half of these people who have risen the way I hope to someday do. But.
This is annihilation. Can’t shake the natural whispers that this – whatever “this” is – ain’t it. Belatedly join the First Peoples chant that, “Reconciliation is dead.” To hell with revolution. Free Palestine means death to the U.S. settler-colony. Death to the U.S. settler-colony means First Peoples’ land back and New Afrikan reparations. That’s not a bias, that’s the basis. And I am ashamed at my hand wringing no matter how justified. All any of us have to do is look to our left and right, to these so-called neighbors who think their vague concern makes them good people. Many can’t find their voice. Many more collaborate with Zionist entities cheaply disguised as something more digestible poison-honeyed with our stolen heritage. Hell, we barely ever talk about the Palestinians in the diaspora who write this off as a shoulder shrug inevitability or commercial opportunity. What of the neocolonial captured? Shouldn’t this inspire some self-confidence? Maybe an affirmation of our humanity against their absence of thinking? No. Despite grounding principles in al thawabet, this stalling indicates to me that we are really not all that different. We can be proud of our experiences, battling defeatism and the complex horror of Goliath at every waking day and sleepless night, and in the same breath recognize that the lack of results speak for themselves. Awake I dream of open recruitment. Not as some vague aspiration for a fictitious future, but a total possibility of the conditions in the here and now. This is annihilation. Some may call me a misguided romantic. Or just a fool. Tear me apart with intellect that avoids the same enduring questions, waiting for some mythical inciting moment, swirling around the same distractive, mitigating byproduct loop of organs we’re stuck inside together within this leviathan. Or maybe Occam’s Razor can slice all that shit up. Maybe we can set it aside and really begin. Shed the white mask. Every morning. In every conceivable way. This time, this time, this time, this time, this time, this time, really.
Palestine Plus One Trillion
Haven’t had more words to show, tell, explain our annihilation and what must be done about it for months now. But I recycle through because words are most of what I have while I build in this desolate desecrate place. They are all I have because each time I followed, I was led by cousins to Zionist encampments cheaply disguised as something else, something further away from the point of annihilation muttering something fucking ridiculous about community gardens, scholars, and donations in a vacuum erasing urgency and agency. Every time I tried to lead, I would find myself in ready company then excused to be alone after one, two, maybe three-four steps. It’s their dog’s birthday, after all. Every attempt to be Sent…
So here I die slowly until it’s not. Posturing until it ain’t in front of people who wouldn’t move a muscle if it was me under the rubble. Decaying faster than any martyr. Braver in my wander-search for the glorious who dig than any of your genocidal kin standing silent-still or those who storm-chase crimes against humanity seeking if you ever had your own.
This is annihilation, o’shades of the empire.
Numbers, statistics, and math often do more harm than good but just to break the spell locking frames in time, the martyrs orbit half a million in just fifteen+ months.
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You cannot drown the adhan with your AI powered drones. You cannot deathcamp imprison from zero to ninety-nine. You cannot poison, burn, rape our living ancestors, heritage, land until it’s rubble like white settler soul. Cannot vaporize us under tungsten bombs. Cannot make our children carry parents in plastic bags. Cannot leave those children starved-dead on the side of the road for starving cats and dogs to feast. You cannot push us all into mass graves. Not just them. You.
Wander, search, build
muttering
between hammer strikes
they cannot escape this
they will not escape this
You will not escape.
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