Reading Hourani and Anjali brings up a feeling that sees melancholy walk alongside resistance – this is not the last of me yet you fool! – as if the affects are mutually exclusive. (Newsflash: they are) This might be one tool with which to resist imperialism, a practiced mode that lies in wait ready to snap into action and the action is right here on the page because with new knowledge comes unlearning comes praxis – that’s the ideal trajectory anyway. Even as Hourani expresses his dissatisfaction with language, he also adds that ‘a rock is not a rock until it’s thrown’ (10). This praxis contains Choi’s ‘mirror words,’ that act of translation that honours the anti-neocolonial mode. Hourani includes an afterword in rock flight, where he briefly outlines the Boycott Divest and Sanctions movement and imagines a free Palestine, where ‘we will fold our flags and place them back in the cupboard. like old scars the borders will flatten. a ferry docks in beirut. a shuttle will park in amman. there’s a minivan company and all the drivers are friendly. my brother-in-law fantasises one hundred years after our liberation, he sees a bullet train’ (82). This speculative mood also appears in the final lines of Naag Mountain: ‘We will meet again in the cassava field. I will be green like a young pawpaw. And you will be old like me’ (101). In the same afterword, Hourani brings up some placards that he and his sister hold at a protest during the 2021 Unity Intifada emblazoned with the words ‘YOU CHOKE PALESTINE. WE CHOKE BACK.’ The meaning makes itself clear: the antidote to colonialism is imagination. And after imagination comes action. A stone arcs across the sky. A naag emerges from the sea. The anti neo-colonial manifesto is written and we are propelled towards something else.