ON INDEGENEITY AND SUMUD: « PERMISSION TO NARRATE » GENOCIDE AND ECOCIDE IN TARIK DOBBS’S POEM WHERE EVERY BIRD IS A DRONE (2021)

Abstract

The settler’s protracted endeavours of erasure and censorship in all its manifestations in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) have been but the ubiquitous nourishment of writers, poets and artists to pen their candid objections and to contrive avenues of ventilating the Palestinians’ ongoing struggle. The paper peruses how the Arab American poet, Tarik Dobbs, subtly conceals multiple layers of meaning in the concrete poem, titled Poem Where Every Bird Is a Drone (2021). It attempts to decode how the poem narrates the interconnectedness of genocide and ecocide through the rich profusion of embedded interpretations within the word, “bird” and the graphic pattern, the tree. The post-sructuralist analysis centres on the linguistic, sonic and visual dimensions of Dobbs’s intriguing poem, which condemns the occupier’s use of combat drones. The latter results in extrajudicial destruction of the Palestinians and their ancestral land and concomitantly implies the Palestinians’ determination to remain on the land. It critically examines the two codes: the « bird » as a hermeneutic code and the « tree » as a cultural one, as theorised by Roland Barthes. It also relies on the notion of historical myth to decrypt the latent meanings and comprehend the semiology and rhetoric of the poem. Despite the apparent void the poem first conveys, the paper concludes that the poem is a plural text and once located in its geographical, historical, cultural and social contexts, becomes a three dimensional graphic space which forms an evocative scenario archiving genocide and ecocide and calling an entire ethnicity being obliterated for sumud in the oPt.