Collective Study in Times of Emergency — L’Internationale (EN)
Join us for an evening of fiction and poetry as part of L'Internationale Online's 'Collective Study in Times of Emergency' publishing series and public programmes. The series was launched in November 2023 in the wake of the onset of the genocide in Palestine and as a means to process its implications for the cultural sphere beyond the singular statement or utterance.
Mosab Abu Toha, 'Where is the rest of me? Shattered in pieces'. Photo: Mosab Abu Toha, February 2024
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).
Rana Issa is a writer, translator and curator. She is the author of The Modern Arabic Bible, Tung Tids tale (Heavy Times Speech), and the forthcoming memoir Ummiyat. She is a cofounder and artistic director of Masahat for Arab Arts and Culture in Exile, an institution that programs and produces cultural expression by Arab and Global South artists and writers in Norway. Rana’s work has appeared in leading journals, platforms and presses, and she has collaborations with international artists from the region in the fields of film, performance arts, visual arts and sculpture.
Shayma Nader is an artist, curator and researcher from Palestine. Her research-led practice is concerned with anti-colonial, anti-disciplinary and land-centred imaginaries and practices. She is currently a PhD candidate in artistic research at ARIA at Sint Lucas Antwerpen (KdG University College) and the University of Antwerp.