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!