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from Fernwood Publishing

Smokii Sumac’s meditative collection, Born Sacred: Poems for Palestine, reflects on the absurdity of everyday life during genocide in a series of journalistic reflections—it is, above all a practice of compassionate witnessing. It is both universal and deeply personal, chronicling his own thoughts, yet extending past the individual self of the writer to interrogate the role of poetry as an expression of humanity. They say: “i write each poem / for Palestine / out of love / for humanity.”

This collection pays homage to the journalists whose work has been an avenue for disruption of a colonial entity that seeks to disempower and render the average person ignorant of the global machinations of genocide and dispossession. Sumac highlights the shared experiences of colonialism by situating the ongoing genocide in Palestine within the history of Canada’s continued colonization of Indigenous land and life. This book is one of the most recent contributions to what is a rich history of cross-cultural Indigenous solidarities, in the vein of works such as Lee Maracle’s Talking to the Diaspora.

In the face of an often-numbing deluge of horrors, Sumac uses the act of writing poetry to rally against the depersonalization of violence. Witnessing, naming and writing become ways to re-humanize and centre the individuals in Palestine who make that witnessing possible— some of whom have been killed in Israeli airstrikes in the time it took for these poems to be edited and published.

While the author often questions the impact of writing poems—imagining each word turning into food or water—the power of language cannot be understated. Writing becomes an act of resistance not only against the erasure of Palestinians but against the soul-death that ignorance would allow: “i write these poems / so they don’t / change / me / so they don’t / take / my / humanity.” ■

EMILIA MORGAN is a Palestinian writer, publisher and copyeditor of several books, including Born Sacred.