The ghosts who watch - "Hijacked Interiors" by leena aboutaleb
BogiReads brings you the daily speculative reading recommendation of editor Bogi Takács.
Today's recommendation -
Author: leena aboutaleb
Title: “Hijacked Interiors”
Venue: Strange Horizons, Jan 2024
Type: Poem – under 50 lines
Themes: Haunting, ghosts, Palestine, imperialism, migration
Where to read: Free text online
I fiddled around so much with scheduling that I didn’t realize that I had two consecutive recommendations from the same issue of Strange Horizons. Sometimes that happens! This one is a poem, by leena aboutaleb, whose poetry I recommended back when this newsletter was still a non-newsletter on Twitter.
“Hijacked Interiors” is about Palestine, addressing the speaker’s grandfather, exploring haunting and being haunted – and the difficulty of dealing with the rage. “Jiddo, it has been so long since I slept in the centre of violence. Jiddo, do you remember the years I begged to go back? The years when I didn’t? What is identity but a card?”
This short poem spans such a wide range of occurrences, scenes, emotions – “What if it’s someone I love next?” I’m assuming it was written after the current Israeli invasion of Gaza had already begun, but I’m not sure and the thing is that these events have been ongoing for many years (please look up the Nakba) even if this is a huge escalation.
There is this driving dynamism to the poem on the word and sentence level that undergirds the meaning; and also I really appreciate that it is not laboriously spelled out. The reader will either understand the references or not. It is not something for the benefit of some kind of stereotyped readership to ~educate~, but something where I feel in my cells that the author is directly addressing her grandfather and I am privileged to hear it.
(I notice that Strange Horizons continues to publish Palestinian writers regularly and matter-of-factly after doing a Palestinian issue, so the generally non-Palestinian people who decried the special issue on the basis of “this will only be a tokenized, one-time thing for social justice cred” were incorrect.)
Until next time,
Bogi.