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BINT
I Grant You Refuge
2024This performance was commissioned and presented by Arab AMP at The Lab. San Francisco, CA. An excerpt of this performance can be viewed below in the first half of Episode #14 of AMP Folktales, an archive of SWANA artists engaging in experimental sound and art forms.
I Grant You Refuge, 2024
Multimedia ritual performance (voice, electronics, cassette tape, processed field recording, samples, original visual projections, live sound and vocal manipulation)
Running time: 42 minutes
Video documentation available
The Lab, San Francisco, CA, USA
Presented by Arab AMP, curated by Leyya Mona Tawil
March 12, 2024
Multimedia ritual performance (voice, electronics, cassette tape, processed field recording, samples, original visual projections, live sound and vocal manipulation)
Running time: 42 minutes
Video documentation available
The Lab, San Francisco, CA, USA
Presented by Arab AMP, curated by Leyya Mona Tawil
March 12, 2024
The poem read during this piece is “I Grant You Refuge” by Gazan poet, novelist, educator Hiba Abu Nada (1991-2023). إِنَّا لِلّهِ وَإِنَّـا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ Hiba Abu Nada wrote this poem ten days before being martyred in her home in south Gaza by an Israeli raid on October 20th, 2023. Translated from original Arabic into English by Huda Fakhreddine.
1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket
from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.
2.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.
They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams.
They know death lurks outside the house.
Their mothers’ tears are now doves
following them, trailing behind
every coffin.
3.
I grant the father refuge,
the little ones’ father who holds the house upright
when it tilts after the bombs.
He implores the moment of death:
“Have mercy. Spare me a little while.
For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life.
Grant them a death
as beautiful as they are.”
4.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and death,
refuge in the glory of our siege,
here in the belly of the whale.
Our streets exalt God with every bomb.
They pray for the mosques and the houses.
And every time the bombing begins in the North,
our supplications rise in the South.
5.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and suffering.
With words of sacred scripture
I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous
and the shades of cloud from the smog.
I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.