Collective Study in Times of Emergency, Brussels. Rana Issa and Shayma Nader

At WIELS, writer and translator Rana Issa will turn to the long history of Palestinian poetry as both diwan and protest. Including readings of a number of poems dating from the Nakba to today, by Najwan Darwish, Dareen Tatour, and Kamal Nasser amongst others, Issa identifies poetry’s refusal of the banalisation of language. Instead, she outlines, they serve as testimonies against injustice. Alongside this, writer and artist Shayma Nader will read her recent short story ‘Five Rocks: A Collection of Tales’ set inside the Wall of the occupied West Bank. Here, drones, sent by Israeli settlers to survey the land, buzz overhead. Hawks capture the flying machines and hold them ransom, whilst jumping gazelles defiantly fall in love beyond the shadow of the Wall. The text was recently commissioned jointly by L’Internationale Online and WIELS and appears in the publication Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order (2025).

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