“I want my rage to elicit love and more love. I want people to stop asking if I love this country. No. Ask if it loves me.” 

 

Noor Hindi, a Palestinian American poet and reporter, shares her rage and love with us in her debut collection Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. These poems are simultaneously tender and full of rage as they challenge western imperialism and the notion of the American dream. Hindi shares how America has denied her and her family their Palestinian identity and heritage. The poems about her grandmother becoming an American citizen are particularly illuminating as immigration officers refuse to acknowledge Palestine as a country and force her grandmother to remove her headscarf. These microaggressions and violations are acts of violence. And what is America if not a land of violence? 

 

Hindi writes about being a reporter and how reporting is an act of violence, too. This is something we’ve heard over the last five months from Bisan, Motaz, Hind, and Plestia over and over again. Palestinians share their pain with the hope that the world will listen, but when will it be enough? when will leaders draw the line and say enough? Palestinians are dying and most of those in power are doing nothing to stop it. 

 

Hindi also writes about family, Arab womanhood, queerness, and Islamophobia. there is a thread of sadness and sometimes bitterness throughout these poems that tie them to the rest of the collection, and I think this amplifies her overall message of defiance. Not only does Hindi have to justify her Palestinian existence to a racist world that wants to erase her, she also faces the inherent violence of patriarchy and misogyny, too. Her defiance in the face of all this violence is a form of love for herself, her people, and her country. Her defiance is survival and resistance, and her words are a burning flame that cannot be extinguished. She spits in the face of imperialism, as we all should. Free Palestine 🇵🇸🍉