Mohammed El-Kurd is an eighteen-year-old poet and writer from Jerusalem, Palestine. Being born on the 50th anniversary of the Nakba was an appropriate sign for someone who would go on to channel so much of his country’s suffering and complexities into his art form. He was first exposed to the public at the age of 11, as the protagonist of numerous documentaries, including the Peabody-award-winning film, My Neighborhood (2009), which focused on settlements in East Jerusalem and Mohammed’s family’s story of dispossession. He continued to speak out about the injustices he saw around him, telling audiences his story at the European Parliament and at multiple American universities, including New York University.

Mohammed has a large online following and is a permanent writer for Fallujah Magazine. He has been published in The Guardian and Medium. His writing, especially his poetry, has sparked media attention and praise – including numerous features in international outlets such as The Huffington Post and Al Jazeera. The award-winning Lebanese author Joumana Haddad said of his work: “I can assert that during my long years of interaction with the Arab literary and cultural scene, as cultural editor of An-Nahar newspaper and former coordinator of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and as an author myself, I have never encountered a young voice as talented and unique as Mohammed El-Kurd’s.”

Mohammed writes in both Arabic and English. He considers writing in English as extremely important because the narrative of the Palestinian people has been hijacked, shut down, and manipulated by the English-language press. He writes about the intersections of the Palestinian struggle with resistance movements around the world, social norms and gender, Islamophobia, and the complexities of the Palestinian identity.

Mohammed is currently in his first year at Savannah College of Art and Design in the United States. He hopes to publish his first collection of poetry, titled RIFQA, in honor of his grandmother.

 

I’m With Them (excerpt)

This is for women –

child-bearing and child-burying

spines of trees, and concrete feet

walking in tribes of grief and power;

throwing stones in the colonized skies

throbbing whispers of stories

in a bent tent,

in a land un-welcoming.

and Her rockets,

once they hit; a bed

a blanket held on to and bit

as if they are giving birth;

only this

is death.

 

Poetry Doesn’t Turn Water Into Wine (excerpt)

Shy stares accompany my sound

arched back, yet rooted – treed

I stand

god lives folded beneath my tongue;

carpeted the paths I spoke

yet not loud enough for ears to hear

not egotistical or insecure enough for blood to drip

to flood

a kitchen floor, a battleground or

an orphan’s stomach.

 

To My Inner Villain (excerpt)

Don’t let my silence trick you:

there’s a storm unfolding

within the universes of my throat

ready to be written,

ready to be told.

 

Rifqa – A Refugee and a Destination (excerpt)

She worked,

worked,

and worked

until survival was a funny story to tell

on nostalgic evenings, with

what remains of the family.

 

Ears Then Echoes (excerpt)

The streets were renamed

but never re-walked

they don’t know how our feet

take onto the streets

they don’t understand what

land means to us

they don’t see my body

as a root

but my body is treed

and I will fruit their goddamn

colonized roads

with the names they try to deaf and defeat

the truths they tint and neglect

and I’ll brick them a lesson learned

and I’ll brick them a mirror indeed.

 

 

 

 

Flamboyance Takes Spine (excerpt)

Flamboyance comes burdened,

I’ve carried my truth stitched and altered

in settings I have wandered and settings

that wandered me:

staring eyes in barbershops

different staring eyes at airports

and eyes I have made up.

 

I Won’t Tell Atlanta About You (excerpt)

Once I get there,

I’ll replant my will to love,

and I’ll worship another city

that will worship me back

until it serves me checkpoints

of another kind.

 

Warzone Poets (excerpt)

As writers

of backgrounds oppressed, wounded

and stitched with the verb of pain

we cannot choose

for bullets to be metaphors

we cannot use

bruises poetically, blood as a representation

of a non-physical, untouchable red reality

and thirst as another word for drought

we cannot.

 

Personal Definition (excerpt)

Poetry is an attempt

at rooming the unexplainable shivering

the volcano on the tip of one’s tongue

the wound in which a mother disowns a child

grief and its moons

and chaining all of that in the prison

of comas

and dots