Refaat Alareer



Poetry as Protest; Protest as Poetry

We’ve had reason, lately, to wonder at the effectiveness of protest. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too (or, earlier: the Occupy Movement) mobilised millions of people around the world, yet it feels – particularly in our current political moment – as though despairingly little has changed. This frustration is felt with acute horror in the face of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has seen protestors gathering in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands every week for two years, demanding an end to the violence only to be ignored or painted as extremists by their governments.

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