Suheir Hammad Quotes

One more person ask me if i knew the hijackers.
one more motherfucker ask me what navy my brother is in.
one more person assume no arabs or muslims were killed. one more person
assume they know me, or that i represent a people.
or that a people represent an evil. or that evil is as simple as a
flag and words on a page.

There is life here. Anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting, but breathing for sure. And if there is any light to come, it will shine from the eyes of those who look for peace and justice after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix has risen. Affirm life. Affirm life. We got to carry each other now. You're either with life or against it. Affirm life.

Occupation, curfew, settlements, closed military zone, administrative detention, siege, preventive strike, terrorist infrastructure, transfer. Their WAR destroys language. Speaks genocide with the words of a quiet technician.

Occupation means that you cannot trust the OPEN SKY, or any open street near to the gates of snipers tower. It means that you cannot trust the future or have faith that the past will always be there.

Occupation means you live out your live under military rule, and the constant threat of death, a quick death from a snipers bullet or a rocket attack from an M16.

A crushing, suffocating death, a slow bleeding death in an ambulance stopped for hours at a checkpoint. A dark death, at a torture table in an Israeli prison: just a random arbitrary death.

A cold calculated death: from a curable disease. A thousand small deaths while you watch your family dying around you.

Occupation means that every day you die, and the world watches in silence. As if your death was nothing, as if you were a stone falling in the earth, water falling over water.

And if you face all of this death and indifference and keep your humanity, and your love and your dignity and YOU refuse to surrender to their terror, then you know something of the courage that is Palestine.

I came from a traditional immigrant family where education meant there were only a few valid paths: doctor or lawyer - and I didn't want to be either one.

I cried when i saw those
buildings collapse on themselves like a broken heart.

Writing must always have intention because words have power.

I've read too many books to believe what I am told.

In the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.

I think of feminism as a socially just and imaginative world.

Life is a right, not collateral or casual.

I will dance and resist and dance and persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than death.