George Caffentzis reads Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" Part II, evoking through the figure of Moloch the ravages of capitalism, the military industrial complex and corporate state power.

Recorded by Jesal Kapadia

This poem of hope, solidarity and togetherness was shared by Silvia Federici during the Assembling of January 3, 2021 - a collectively constructed "ceremony" welcoming the new year hosted on zoom by 16 Beaver Group and friends.

TESTING ASSEMBLING
http://centreparrhesia.org/assembling/

“Je suis une voix off” assumes an agency and embodiment of what is absent, playing on various metamorphoses of a voice recorded on a dictaphone. Interrogating different modalities of presentation, enunciation and knowledge transmission, language becomes material trace as the voice is switched "on" while sliding “off” through gaps, mechanical pauses, rewinds, corrections, stammerings, pitchshifts, voluntary and involuntary overdubs, disintegrating and recomposing, exposing fictions of gender, efficacy and neutrality of speech and relocating them in an indeterminate border zone where the body allows us to hear the multiple voices that inhabit and pass through it as it speaks and is spoken, giving voice to echoes of the unimaginable.

Mick Taussig reads "In the Beginning was the Firefly!" from his recent book "Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown"... as a good omen for Firefly Frequencies!

More info about "Mastery of Non-Mastery":
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo46980359.html

* Read by Sara Naili

(To our homes in our absence after war and abandonment)

Sadness is
visiting the ruins of your house in dreams
and coming back without dust on your hands.

Delicacy is
watering the wilted flowers
in your neighbour’s garden
because yours have perished under the bombs.

Distance is
the geography of domination
that separates cities a thousand miles apart.
In one you leave your laundry on the clothesline
in the other you stretch out your hand to the wind
and try to take it in.

To the hand that hovers over the doorbell of the old house
who can say:
“Homes do not belong to those who have had to leave them”.

CROSSING THE WATERS 2
Voice: Sara Naili
Sound and mix: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni

Widad Nabi is a Kurdish-Syrian poet born in Kobani. She lives and works in Berlin.

* Read by Fateh Hamdan

If you go down that road, at the city's edge,
the one that leads to the refugee camp,
if you run into a bunch of kids at the gate of that school that looks like a prison,
if you come across seven who stare at the threshold of silence,
if you see a lithe little boy with eyes that spark with the intelligence of the entire world,
you can be sure you've found my friend Taysir.

His family had a country that was stolen in broad daylight.
In his restless eyes you will glimpse the vibrancy of the birds of the stolen land.
The cement houses,
the memory of zinc,
the scary crackle of the occupying army's radios during the weeks of curfew,
none of it has dimmed the spark in his eyes.

Only once has he seen the sea.
Nothing will convince him not to return.
During the long days of curfew they would say : ”Once curfew is over, we will take you to the sea”.
One night, when the curfew was over, they told him: ”The sea is closed at this hour. Go to sleep!”

He didn't sleep that night, he imagined an old man
closing up the sea with an enormous zinc slab that stretched from star to horizon to sandy beach,
and securing it with a big padlock, bigger than the one his father’s shop had in Omar al-Mukhtar Street.
Then he imagined the old man heading off home.

So if you go down that road, at the city's edge,
the one that leads to the refugee camp,
if you glimpse two eyes that spark with the intelligence of the entire world,
would you please ask if the sea of Gaza has been opened
or if it's still shut.

CROSSING THE WATERS 1
Voice: Fateh Hamdan
Sound: Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni
Music & mix: Graeme Thomson

Najwan Darwish is a Palestinian poet. He lives between Jerusalem and Haifa.