Ghazal of روح | Aicha Bint Yusif
December 5, 2024
Jude Abu Zaineh, لو يذكر الزيتون غارسهُ، لصار الزيت دمعاً | If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them. . .Their Oil would become Tears, excerpt of vinyl collage, 2022
Witnessing the genocide, the heart has ossified, becoming
a stone – how can I still love you my روح?*
The pink ribbon collects her hair, the loose strands
held by her grandfather, whispering: where did you go ya روح ال ّروح?
I wake up early these days and kneel twice for the dawn prayer,
asking Him for strength for my tormented روح
The western wind carries tears in its folds.
At sunset, I hear the cries of one thousand and one روح
They say statistics are no longer reliable. Death is ubiquitous,
taking different forms: death is slowly eating our collective روح
Only the faithful survive, they tell me. Have patience.
But what if I carry the stone (my heart) and throw it at the tank: روح!
* روح in Ara*bic means soul or spirit – in colloquial Arabic, it means get out of here.
Aicha عايشَة means “she lives” or “she who is alive” in Arabic. Aicha Bint Yusif grew up in the Palestinian town of Arraba, near Nazareth. She holds a degree in English Literature and Honors interdisciplinary program, and is currently studying Medicine. She mainly writes poems, and her work has appeared in Rusted Radishes (Beirut) and World Literature Today (New York), among other places. She regularly holds creative writing sessions in her community.
Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist-curator working across art, food, science, and technology studies. Her work develops alternative archive practices and investigates themes of culture, displacement, storytelling, diaspora, and belonging, through de-colonial and feminist perspectives. She examines ideals of home and community influenced by her childhood and upbringing in Southwest Asia.
Abu Zaineh is the recipient of several awards including, the 2020 William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Artists, and was one of the first selected artists to participate in a collaborative residency with the Ontario Science Centre and MOCA Toronto (Canada). She has presented her works at Ireland Glass Biennale; Malta Society of Arts, Valletta, Malta; Cultivamos Cultura, São Luis, Portugal; Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia, Lisbon, Portugal; Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City, Mexico; SVA, NYC, USA; Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, USA; Forest City Gallery, London, Canada; Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada; Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, France; Museum London, Canada; Museum of Glass, Washington, USA, and more. Her work has been featured in VICE Arabia, PBS, NPR, across CBC Canada platforms, Canadian Art magazine, NEUES GLAS-NEW GLASS: art & architecture magazines, and on the cover of fuse: the Museum of Glass Magazine.
Abu Zaineh's works can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Glass (USA), Art Windsor-Essex (Canada), The City of Windsor's Public Art Commission (Canada), as well as private collections internationally. She received an MFA from the University of Windsor (Canada) and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (NY, USA), where she was an RPI Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences Fellow and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellow. She maintains an active studio practice between upstate NY, USA and southern Ontario, Canada.
