The Avery Review tends to publish critical essays on architecture—essays that, through the method of the review, account for, challenge, and expand the past-present-future commitments (intellectual, political, spatial) of those working on the built environment. But there are times when our attempts to make sense of what is happening in the world, as people who think about cities and spaces, demands a break in our format; when the essay as a form feels futile against the urgencies of the present. The ongoing genocide—and urbicide and domicide—in Gaza is such a moment.
In reviewing our own commitment to the essay, we have been asking what other forms (formats and traditions) of writing are required amidst genocide. What other ways might we (re)act, evaluate, or narrate the extent to and rate at which Palestinian life is being eliminated by the Israeli settler state? This issue introduces Gaza Pages, an ongoing editorial project that makes a persistent and insistent space within, and alongside, our essays for work by Gazan writers about Gaza, about Palestine, and about living through genocide.
The project begins with two new pages, sharing poems from Gazan writers Mariam Al Khateeb and Haidar al-Ghazali, in both their original Arabic and in English. Where prose becomes too static, poetry, on the other hand, breathes agency, clarity, and defiance. Poetry here acts as a review of events that increasingly cannot be fully narrated with prose because they are unspeakably cruel and violent. Poems behave like testimony, like breaths that proclaim that Gaza, the city and its people, cannot and will not be erased from the face of the planet.
In gathering these poems and commissioning their translation, we choose to accompany, to hold closely each word, and one another, to extend the reach of these breaths.
Arabic poetry holds long standing relationships with local tradition, land, and language that move far beyond colonial partitions and border mongering. Most of us are not Arabic speakers and many of us humbly come to this genre from a space of non-expertise. Gaza Pages is thus an opening, a spatial project that requires engaging with others, where the terms of proximity (to violence), scale (of devastation), materiality (of language), and relationality (of translation) coalesce. And, so perhaps, especially when read together, these pages are not so much a divergence from what the Avery Review has always done but an amplification of our openness to be moved.
We invite you to read these poems as we the editors have done—that is to break from traditional form and find, in these breaks instead, a full-throated affirmation of life, persistence, and resistance in the face of overwhelming injustice.
Read them. Share them out loud. Let these voices move you to action.