Poeticality : In Refusal of Settler Life

"Will you not memorize a little poetry to halt the slaughter?" the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Darwish’s poetic statement points to world-evacuating and genocidal violences – in a triangulation of Palestine, Iraq, and the American settler state – as his language recalls us to a sonority in utterance and acts of refusal in collective form. Through readings of Arabic and Arab poetry, art, translation, and philosophy, Jeffrey Sacks illumines an indetermined, non-accumulative, non-propertied manner of lingual doing – across post-Ottoman topographies and states, and in excess of any single language – where language is a practice in sociality, the social is indistinct from the ontological, and being is a poetic mode – what this book calls "poeticality."

Poeticality studies the Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan, the Iraqi poet and translator Khālid al-Maʿālī, philosophers in the Arabic peripatetic tradition, and writings of Karl Marx, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and others, to demonstrate a sense of form wholly other than what is advanced in self-determined social existence, linguistic self-understanding, and philosophical self-representation – a manner of address and a social pose, which Sacks summarizes under the heading "settler life."

Settler life – a form of life, a practice of reading, and an asymmetric distribution of social destruction – asserts itself as a generalized and regulating attack upon Black and Indigenous life, and upon all forms of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-heteronormative existence. "Everything is in the language we use," the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier has written. This book – learning from Long Soldier’s observation and with Darwish’s sense of the poetic – affirms the demand for Indigenous sovereignty, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, and elsewhere, a demand which, through the collective acts occasioned in it, decomposes and deposes all sovereign forms and all stately legalities, in refusal of settler life.