Preface

I began writing From Turtle Island to Gaza in 2016, but the idea came to me several years earlier at a poetry reading in Toronto's Harbourfront, where I was reading from A Difficult Beauty. In the poem “Widening the Highway on the Rez” are the lines, “now this land becomes our Palestine / broken off from torso and limb / this long execution.” After the reading, an older Palestinian man joined me for a smoke outside, and he told me how much he loved these lines. We spoke very little, as we both knew we shared that long execution—that distance, religion, education could not break what we shared. Colonialism is a shared experience. I've always known that, and I've always known that the Indigenous peoples here on Turtle Island were not the first or the only peoples to endure this long execution. I wanted to make what we have experienced here available to the world, believing that sharing stories is a power more powerful than bombs, bullets, or religion.

Some of the pieces address Palestinian poets—Mourid Barghouti, Mahmoud Darwish, Suheir Hammad, Rashid Hussein, Salma Jayyusi, Samih al-Qasim, Anton Shammas, Fadwa Tuqan, and Ibrahim Tuqan—I list their names here so you may hear them too.

In these poems I hope we find that we, colonized peoples, are not alone.