i am elsewhere

Godelieve de Bree considers Hasib Hourani’s “rock flight.”

By Godelieve de BreeApril 16, 2025

• Poetry

• Politics

HASIB HOURANI’S rock flight, published by New Directions this month—Prototype in the UK and Giramondo in Australia—is a book-length poem in which the poet’s sprawling and erratic form narrativizes the ramifications of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In this striking debut, the significant temporal and spatial repercussions of violence—trauma and the difficulties of expression—are embodied in a form that never manages to find a stability on the space of the page. Through this, Hourani—while rejecting received form—proposes a method of writing about, and understanding, dis/location; an awareness of self as subject to forced displacement from one’s homeland. Edward Said writes in After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986) that “since the main features of our present existence are dispossession, dispersion, and yet also a kind of power incommensurate with our stateless exile, I believe that essentially unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary forms of expression should be used to represent us.” Hourani’s rock flight, written over two decades after Said’s proclamation, speaks to new modes of formal investigation seeking to describe the long history of the violent oppression and genocide of Palestinian people. Fragmentary, restless, and exploratory, the book’s collaged pages contain guidance for the reader, multiple-choice questions, lists, and moments of prolonged silence—all of which Hourani utilizes to write about enclosure, suffocation, and resistance.

Instructions to the reader, one of rock flight’s “unconventional […] forms of expression,” repeatedly interrupt the broader narrative of the text; over the course of the book, there are 10 of these instructive moments—which include directions for making different “boxes,” “rocks,” and “a sling,” even “a throat.” Hourani uses these objects to explore loaded symbols of resistance and containment. The first of these instructions is as follows:

HOW TO MAKE A ROCK
please find a piece of paper

ONE
scrunch it up

TWO
throw it

These instructive instances have significant stakes for the project of the poem: Hourani intends to make the reader reflect on their complicity and response to violence—to call them to action, by indicating that the potential for resistance is everywhere; it could well be in the thing you are holding. You—who are reading this book—have your rock; now throw it. In her short essay “Interruption,” Lydia Davis writes that “any interruption, either of our expectations or of the smooth surface of the work itself—either by breaking it off, confusing it, [or] leaving it actually unfinished—foregrounds the work as artifact, as object.” Indeed, understanding the work as “artifact” and “object” is essential to understanding the intentions of rock flight: that the text is not solely intellectual, but also material, consequential, and embodied. Accompanying the instructions are occasional follow-up directions as the text frequently interrupts itself, and in turn demands us to disrupt our reading of it: “hold your breath, where’s that box you made? put this book inside and close the lid. when you need to come up for air, open the box and keep reading.” The reader is asked to have a somatic, material experience; the book commands our environment and bodies to be momentarily altered through reading it, and it implies the acute question of solidarity—who will act with the book, and who will not?—which further reinforces this sense of the text’s materiality. The poem is aware of itself as an object, a political one with an intention to speak back to subjugation.

In this vein, Hourani is concerned with, and interrogates, language’s inability to contain, or depict, violence. One example is the poem’s preoccupation with suffocation:

        6. what’s the word i’m looking for?
            a. asphyxiate
            b. choke
            c. suppress
            d. snuff

The question is indeterminate; who is being asked, is it reflexive or supplied to the reader?

Multiple-choice questions form a frequent feature of the text, simultaneously mimicking and repurposing the procedural ways in which violence is often executed: bureaucratic hemming in. This interrogation would have its subjects believe that there is no alternative, no other answer, but then pages later, Hourani returns to the line of questioning, still asking the same one, but now answering it differently:

        and i am still trying to find the word:
                                    STRANGLE;  CHOKE; THROTTLE;  PRESSURE;
                                    SUPPRESS;   STRAIN;  CONSTRAIN;  BURDEN;
                                    SQUEEZE;      PRESS;    PUSH;   FORCE;   URGE

The poem has broken out of its enforced bureaucratic “tick-boxing” and into something much more urgent and reactive. While individual words can’t contain the violence Hourani is asking them to, an accumulative itemizing of language—coupled with the words’ sonics, their thrashing sibilance and violent plosives—might gesture toward some essence of what he is attempting to recount. A list of synonyms reaches for this essence of meaning, while also illustrating the struggle of reaching toward. The progression of these two moments, as well as an overlap in certain terms—“choke,” “suppress”—implies a power struggle, a tension between instances of inhibitive suppression and those of expansive resistance. The speaker knows that language can’t bear violence—“the more time i spend with words / the more i realize that they do not mean anything at all”—but he is trying, in the ways available to him, to appeal to his readers; to report the condition of Palestinian lives; and, more than this, to propose a way in which readers might respond. The underside of this preoccupation also becomes apparent in the book’s afterword, in which Hourani writes that “it’s difficult to articulate what we can do from the global north but essentially, it’s to choke back: boycott, stop traffic, turn a ship around, flood the train station.”

Both the content and the formal variation of rock flight indicate a kind of collapse, not only spatially but also temporally; a discontinuous form and tone—manifested in the space of the page—reflect a broader concern with place, as well as with time. Within the space of a handful of lines, Hourani moves from writing about the forced displacement of his grandparents to its consequences on his family: “my grandparents flee the beauty. it’s 1948. they are on foot until they reach the refugee camp in aleppo and then they meet. they have five children and they’re all born stateless. myself and most of my cousins are born stateless too refugees by inheritance.” The immediate temporal collapse of the grandparents’ past actions (of fleeing in the 1940s) into the present tense (“it’s,” “are”) is emblematic of how profound the consequences of being a refugee are, outside of linear time; the reverberations of the 1948 Palestine war are still experienced today.

Doing away with the binary categories of “personal” and “political” in considering “poetry of witness,” Carolyn Forché proposes a third space: “the social,” which is “the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.” The social, with its associations of community and communication, stakes a claim of a self understanding itself within a broader context. The breathless initiation into the poem speaks to this:

        in this text unless the context otherwise requires:

                     “it” means the reason i am elsewhere

                      “thing” means the reason i am elsewhere

                      “israel” means the reason i am elsewhere

                      “something” means the reason i am elsewhere

                      “entity” means the reason i am elsewhere

                      “----------------” [text redacted] means the reason i am elsewhere

                       “the suffocating state” means the reason i am elsewhere

In this instance, “i am” is an assertion of a permanently displaced self, representing how belonging and presence can, or can’t, be claimed when one has been forcibly displaced. The unremitting repetition can be interpreted as both singular and polyvocal, speaking to different instances of the violence of euphemism. The speaker tries, often, to claim himself where he is through frequent assertions; variously, he is “with campfire,” “in a box now,” “in front of a mirror,” “breathless”—all of which is to say he knows where he is, which is also where he knows he is not. Any “i am” statement an author makes of themselves in writing is an assertion that can be both permanent and transitory. By positioning himself in singular, undeniable moments of experience—by the “mirror,” the “campfire”—the speaker emphasizes the differing continuous undercurrents of these experiences, the fact that he has been displaced and understands himself as part of a diaspora.

Just as Forché’s idea of the “social” becomes apparent in the speaker’s exploration of his own self and his past, rock flight’s deep fixations are also temporal experiences, as fixation, occupation, and systemic violence are. The poem revolves around certain objects—boxes, birds, stones—returning to the same things persistently in order to point to the relentless brutality inflicted on Palestinians, as well as the continual demand for resistance:

        eat a date
        keep the stone
        in your pocket: the weight of the afterlife
                                  of ammunition

                        a rock isn’t a rock

                                                                        until it is thrown

                                                               and then it is a weapon

                                                  and then you are put into a box

This repeated “and then” first gives a sense of transformation—the change of the rock from a piece of land to a charged act of resistance—and then to the predetermined consequence of this defiance: imprisonment. The line “a rock isn’t a rock / until it is thrown” echoes the collection’s title: with the correct amount of force and propulsion, anything—even something weighted and typically entirely removed from the realm of the aerial—can experience an instance of flight. “Flight” bears an applied transmutative meaning generated by resistive action, which refuses to be silent in the face of brutality and is undertaken, as Forché puts it, “in the name of justice.”

In rock flight, formal experimentation and linguistic exploration expose the inadequacy of traditional structures of language’s ability to describe the inarticulable consequences of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The poem revolves around certain materials and experiences—a rock, a box, strangulation—in order to point to materiality, rendering the reader responsible in their solidarity with Palestinian resistance. Using a form that is various, consequential, and erratic, Hourani mirrors the violent interruptions that occupying forces have visited upon Palestinian experience, and his text collapses traditional ideas of temporality to depict the aftermath of trauma, both individual and national. The project, one of collage, asserts that something entire, and complex, can be constructed from fragments, and that this piecing together—against a force attempting to silence you—is resistance.