chronology of a genocide
A perfect capsule to feel the emotions that we have all had to shove down to keep going about our lives. Saf performs with so much passion and intensity, and has an excellent way with words.
Being in this room, feeling the weight of the days that Saf has carefully gathered, looking at it all at once and alongside so many people is an experience that I know I needed. Feeling it all in a room full of people who care… that’s how we carry on and keep our hope and action burning bright. Thank you Saf for caring out loud and giving us this moment of togetherness, reflection, mourning, and ignition.
I continued with this theme of gorgeous poetry and not to be missed important Fringe programming with Saf Haq’s Chronology of a Genocide. She stands in the middle of a busy set filled with a large Palestinian flag and many different signs that say, among other things, “Fuck War,” “Ceasefire Forever,” and “Palestine Will Be Free.” On the back wall is written 2023, and we see that she is able to count down the nearly three years of atrocities that have been committed against the Palestinians and their land by a modern war complex in Israel. She has each one of her poems on a different piece of paper, and each one is marked with a date. It feels like the poems are emerging directly from a news headline each day. In the show’s description in the Fringe programme Haq writes that this show is meant to “bear witness to the escalation of the genocide in Gaza,” and that’s exactly what it does. The poems are written from a wide array of perspectives and focuses. Most vividly and brutally, but also poignantly, capture a piece of the horror that has happened in Palestine, and continues to happen there, but some explore the responses here at home- how Dalhousie University deemed protests against the genocide as making the campus unsafe, how people have gone so far as to set themselves on fire to protest what is happening to the Palestinians, how medics and journalists, people who are supposed to receive at least some sort of semblance of protection, even during a World War, have been targeted and murdered along with everybody else. One poem is about our ability here to scroll by people asking us for help, how we can choose to engage or disengage from the comfort of a peaceful place depending on whether we feel like we have the mental or emotional capacity for empathy and compassion on any given day, when Gazans don’t get to choose to turn the horror off when their mental health has reached its limit. Another poem reminds us that even once Palestinians flee they are still targeted by anti-immigration sentiment- ICE in the United States, but the fear of being deported, shamefully, doesn’t stop at our border either. Read more at the link!
This performance will shake you and it is a must see. Saq walks us through the last few years of this genocide with poetry accounts of the stark and horrific “day to day” experiences of the people in Gaza countered with callings-out of the governments and systems that contribute to or mask or deny the genocide. Free Palestine!
Heartbreaking, as you would expect from a show about genocide. But also thoughtfully structured in front of the backdrops of so many protests. The chronology of the poetry gives a timeline, almost like a diary, and also a reflection of how quotidian these atrocities have become. A fitting reminder that this genocide is ongoing. Highly recommend.