Peace to Benjamin Zephaniah, who died this morning, the 7th of December 2023. Two years ago, during Israel’s last campaign against the Palestinian people in Gaza—one of many steps towards Israel’s current genocidal efforts—I wrote an essay about the people of Gaza and their friends. The title, “A Global People,” came from Zephaniah’s 1995 track, “Palestine.” I’ve excerpted the relevant section from that essay, published in the Arab Studies Journal, below.
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| Benjamin Zephaniah, Rasta Time in Palestine (Liverpool: Shakti Publishing Ltd., 1990). |
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[In 1988] the British-Jamaican dub poet, Benjamin Zephaniah, made a visit [to Palestine]. Rasta Time in Palestine, the account of his trip he published a year later in 1990, is a slim and evocative volume, illustrated by Jez Coulson’s black-and-white photographs of Palestinians. Zephaniah moves effortlessly across subjects. He examines Israeli meddling in African affairs and the politics of Rastafari, including a section on “Rastafari and Zionism.” He writes that everywhere he went in the “Arab world” he fielded questions about Rastafari symbols and tropes. “Zion in Rastafari terminology has always been Ethiopia,” Zephaniah makes clear.
In describing his visit to Gaza, Zephaniah reached for the same analogy many Palestinian writers had come to on their own in years prior, “it reminded me of pictures I have seen of Nazi concentration camps. Some may argue that there are many differences, but again, it was similarities that I notice: the large fences, people being marched off, etc.” The situation today, more than seventy years since Gaza’s initial enclosure, has only worsened. When the United Nations predicted in 2012 that Gaza would be “unlivable” by 2020, it was responding not simply to the deterioration of economic conditions that Sara Roy first described as “de-development” in the middle 1980s, but also to the continuous cruelty of a multi-year siege and blockade that has immiserated and isolated the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. And yet, Gaza only captures headlines when it is bombed in spectacular fashion.
Gaza’s past is little known and rarely studied, but it is a revolutionary past rich in ideas and movement, not simply death, destitution, and isolation. Recalling its political and intellectual history is an ever necessary task. The history of Gaza cannot be buried beneath the present’s rubble. There is no need to “humanize” the people of Gaza, but it would be prudent for the world to consider their aims and desires. “What the people wanted was a poetry reading,” Zephaniah wrote from Gaza, “and I was really excited by the idea. Word spread quickly that I was a poet and I had to prove it, but after making inquiries, I learned that poetry was not allowed because I could draw a crowd.”
“Palestine,” on Zephaniah’s 1995 album Back to Roots, is a moving poetic tribute: “Work your land work your plan / You are a live nation / You are a global people / Suffer much evil / And now you just want get along.” At the end of the track, “Palestine Live!” reverberates as a powerful refrain: “Dancing eyes collect your prize / Palestine Live! / Rise up like the star you are / Palestine Live!”
Esmat Elhalaby, “A Global People,” Arab Studies Journal 29:2 (Fall 2021), 156-162. PDF
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