Suhair Hammad: "I was born a Black woman"

Brooklynite Hammad may be the first Palestinian-American to make it big in the spoken-word or performance poetry scene!

She writes, Home is within me. I carry everyone and everything I am with me wherever I go. Use my history as the road in front of me, the land beneath me. Paths are many, but essence is one and eternal.

But what does Suheir Hammad mean when she says she is "born Black?" According to Kazim Ali, Black, in her case, not being mere ethnic marker but a political position in relation to a dominant power structure.

As Hammad herself explains in her book, the word has numerous historical and political meanings that she embraces.

In "Jabaliya" Suheir Hammad writes,

a woman wears a bell carries a light calls searches

through madness of deir yessin calls for  afah for bread 

orange peel under nails blue glass under feet gathers 

children in zeitoun sitting  ith dead mothers she unearths 

tunnels and buries sun onto trauma a score and a day rings 

a bell she is dizzy more than yesterday less than 

tomorrow a zig zag back dawaiyma back humming suba

back shatilla back ramleh back jenin back il khalil back il quds 

all of it all underground in ancestral chests she rings 

a bell promising something she can’t see faith is that 

faith is this all over the land under the belly 

of wind she perfumed the love of a burning sea 

concentrating refugee camp 

crescent targeted red

a girl’s charred cold face dog eaten body 

angels rounded into lock down shelled injured shock 

weapons for advancing armie   is clearing forests sprayed onto a city

o sage tree human skin contact explosion these are our children

she chimes through nablus back yaffa backs shot under 

spotlight phosphorous murdered libeled public relations

public

relation

a bell fired in jericho rings through blasted windows a woman 

carries bones in bags under eyes disbelieving becoming 

numb dumbed by numbers front and back gaza onto gaza 

for gaza am sorry gaza am sorry she sings for the whole 

powerless world her notes pitch perfect the bell a death toll