I’ve resisted a bit writing about this topic, out of fear of being too clichè—but also because it can be argued that what I’m going to talk about is a given, proven time and again throughout history. And yet, with the realities we—as Palestinians and as human beings within our struggle for liberation—are facing, it becomes all the more important to remind ourselves that our existence can manifest itself through our continuous artworks, in their various forms.
In a world that constantly tries to reduce us to numbers, headlines, and footnotes, poetry insists on our full humanity. It is our artistic and cultural thumbprint: a living archive that can challenge, unsettle, and even debunk the colonial powers’ narrative—especially when those powers have so often been the only ones allowed to dictate what will be written in the future’s history books… when they can.
Whenever I think about resisting or defying injustice when you are completely powerless, probably the grimmest example I know is people at Auschwitz inverting the “B” in the infamous “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”) sign at the entrance of the camp—a subtle last and final act of defiance.
A small act of defiance can be the differentiating factor between being subservient—between giving up and accepting a miserable ending—and not breaking. And sometimes, not breaking is the only way you can actually defeat your oppressor.
The entrance to Auschwitz concentration camp ca. 1945
I find it especially significant, culturally, when it comes to poetry. Poetry has always been that transcendent art form—one that can alleviate our existential dread in this life and this world. It has portrayed the human condition with a spin of beauty, and when things got darker, then maybe even with some irony. It has proven to us that even as we face death, even as we are threatened with extermination, we can still dream. We can still resist—simply by immortalizing our words.
In this short article, I’ll introduce a few translated poems, or excerpts from longer poems, that amplify this idea: resistance under oppression.
Enemy of the Sun by Samih al-Qasim
I may – if you wish – lose my livelihood I may sell my shirt and bed. I may work as a stone cutter, A street sweeper, a porter. I may clean your stores Or rummage your garbage for food. I may lie down hungry, O enemy of the sun, But I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist.
You may take the last strip of my land, Feed my youth to prison cells. You may plunder my heritage. You may burn my books, my poems Or feed my flesh to the dogs. You may spread a web of terror On the roofs of my village, O enemy of the sun, But I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist.
You may put out the light in my eyes. You may deprive me of my mother’s kisses. You may curse my father, my people. You may distort my history, You may deprive my children of a smile And of life’s necessities. You may fool my friends with a borrowed face. You may build walls of hatred around me. You may glue my eyes to humiliations, O enemy of the sun, But I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist.
O enemy of the sun The decorations are raised at the port. The ejaculations fill the air, A glow in the hearts, And in the horizon A sail is seen Challenging the wind And the depths. It is Ulysses Returning home From the sea of loss
It is the return of the sun, Of my exiled ones And for her sake, and his I swear I shall not compromise And to the last pulse in my veins I shall resist, Resist—and resist.
Promises from the Storm by Mahmoud Darwish
Let it be… I might as well refuse death, to burn away the tears of weeping songs, to strip the olive tree of every false and borrowed branch.
And if I sing of joy behind the eyelids of frightened eyes, it is because the storm has promised me wine, and fresh toasts, and rainbows.
Because the storm has swept away the dull voices of the birds, and torn the borrowed branches from the steadfast little trees.
Let it be… I must take pride in you, O wound of the city — you, a streak of lightning painted across our sorrowed nights.
The street may scowl in my face, but you shield me from its shadows and its stares of spite.
And so I will sing of joy behind the eyelids of frightened eyes — for since the storm has risen in my land, it has promised me wine, and rainbows.
Children of the Stones by Nizar Qabbani (an excerpt)
They dazzled the world— with nothing in their hands but stones. They shone like lanterns, came like good tidings. They resisted… exploded… fell as martyrs…
And we remained— polar bears, skins thick against the heat.
They fought for us, until they were slain. And we sat in our cafés— like spit inside a shell.
One of us searches for a trade, one begs for a new billion, a fourth wife, with breasts sculpted by civilization.
One hunts for a mansion in London, one trades in weapons, one drinks away his vengeance in bars, one dreams of throne, army, and emirate.
Ah— O generation of betrayals, generation of waste, generation of prostitution—
You shall be swept away— no matter how slow history may seem— by the children of the stones.
For the sake of remembrance, I would like to end this article with a poem by a martyred poet from Gaza. It is not, strictly speaking, a poem about resistance—but it reminds us why we need hope in our lives, even when everything feels bleak.
Not Just Passing by Hiba Abu Nada (translated by Huda Fakhreddine)
Yesterday, a star said to the little light in my heart, We are not mere passersby. Do not die. Beneath this glow some wanderers go on walking.
You were first created out of love, so carry nothing but love to those who are trembling.
One day, all gardens sprouted from our names, from what remained of the hearts of lovers.
Since the inception, this ancient language has taught us how to heal others with our yearning
how to be a heavenly sent to relax their tightening lungs: a welcome sigh, a gasp of oxygen.
Gently, we pass over wounds, like gauze, a hint of relief, an aspirin.
O little light in me, don’t die, even if all the galaxies of the world grew narrow… say: Enter my heart in peace. All of you, come in!
Interested in our work? Would you like to help us organize, write, or take part in solidarity efforts? We would be glad to have you join us at Tadamun. Resistance requires action.
In Freiburg’s Christmas market, it is easy to forget how violent our “normality” is organized. Lights, music, mulled wine – and at the same time: mobile vehicle barriers at every entrance, officially there to protect against “terror and rampage attacks”. These blocks are not just technical security. They are props for a story: the ever-present threat of “Islamic terror” outside, and a supposedly innocent, peaceful “inside” that must be defended.
This securitized “inside” is heavily staffed. The police are on duty at the market every day; at weekends they are reinforced by police from France and Switzerland. Riot police are planned, alongside private security and the city’s enforcement officers patrolling the stalls. Weapons and knives are formally banned. The message is clear: this is a controlled zone, guarded from “dangerous others”.
And because it is Freiburg, the whole thing is, of course, proudly advertised as running on “100% green energy” – a clean, sustainable Christmas. But that “green” electricity does not fall from the sky. It depends on batteries, cables and infrastructure built from raw materials ripped out of places like Congo: cobalt, copper, lithium. Meanwhile, genocide is being funded with our taxes and our labour. The cosy glow on the Münsterplatz is plugged directly into extractivism, poisoned rivers and exploited labour elsewhere.
Barriers, police, security and green branding together draw a line through the city. Inside the bright, fenced-off area: those who can afford five-euro Glühwein, welcome as customers. At the edges of the same square: people without housing, people in poverty, people racialised as “risky” – treated as security problems, not as neighbours. They literally sit at the periphery of the Christmas market, in the shadow of a celebration that is not meant for them.
Here, Merz’s talk of the Stadtbild becomes concrete. The Christmas market, with its consumer logic and “attractive cityscape”, is what is to be praised and protected. The people at its margins – the homeless, the poor, migrants – are what is to be admonished as a “problem for the cityscape”, something that spoils the image and should be removed.
Christmas sells itself as a time of charity and warmth, but it is organized as an exclusionary space. It separates those who “deserve” comfort from those who are allowed to exist only as a disturbance or threat. Even the supposed “way out” offered within this logic is individual: if you are poor, you are told to work harder, be entrepreneurial, maybe one day open your own stand. Poverty is framed as personal failure, not as the consequence of a system that needs winners and losers.
What is missing is any idea of solidarity that breaks with this logic altogether.
We can see another practice in Sudan.
KHARTOUM STATE, SUDAN – MARCH 17, 2025: A man distributes food at an Emergency Response Room communal kitchen in Bir Hamada, in Khartoum state. As a war between rival generals and their armed forces devastates Sudan, millions have been displaced and left without access to basic services like medical care, water and electricity. While those at the top fight for power, neighbourhood committees and Emergency Response Rooms build kitchens like this one to keep people alive and practice grassroots solidarity from below.
Under war, displacement, hunger and state collapse, neighbourhood resistance committees in Sudan have set up community kitchens to keep people alive. There are no cosy markets there, and no NGOs swooping in to “save” anyone. Human rights organisations and aid agencies are absent, or appear only on terms set by the same imperial states that help fuel the war – often providing just enough assistance to stabilise the situation and discourage migration towards Europe.
The community kitchens are something else entirely. They are not charity from above. They are self-organised survival: neighbours pooling what exists locally – a truck, a yard, a gas bottle, a field, cooking skills, time, labour – and turning it into shared infrastructure.
This is a radical reconceptualisation of resources. Instead of asking “Who has money?”, people ask “What do we have among us?” The return is not profit, but collective survival and strength. This model:
mobilises local, non-financial assets,
distributes food according to need,
and keeps control in the hands of those who use it.
Because decisions are made collectively, it resists hegemony and co-optation. It is explicitly political: a social space where popular power is practised daily, where people defend their ability to survive and shape their future, independent of external agendas. In Sudan, this is a matter of life and death.
In Freiburg, we live in extreme privilege by comparison. People freezing on the street here are not doing so because the city has no food, no space, no money. They are freezing because of political choices: property rights enforced more harshly than the right to housing; a city centre designed for consumption and tourism, not for need; ever-growing budgets for policing and “security” while social services are cut, privatised or buried in bureaucracy.
Exactly because our situation is so privileged, there is no excuse to maintain Christmas as an exclusionary spectacle ringed by barriers, police and guards – and then wash it green with “100% renewable” branding built on extraction elsewhere.
If we take the Sudanese community kitchens as a model, an autonomous, anti-capitalist Advent in Freiburg could mean:
Setting up solidarity kitchens at the edges of the Christmas market, serving hot food and tea to anyone who needs it – housed or unhoused, with or without papers – without pity, tests, or charity branding.
Pooling resources – kitchens, cars, storage spaces, skills, time, some money – to build common infrastructure: food, warm clothes, sleeping bags, power banks, information.
Treating these places not as neutral welfare, but as spaces to meet and organise: to talk about why people are homeless, policed and poor in one of the richest regions in the world – and how to change it.
The goal is not to make Christmas a bit “nicer” within capitalism. It is to practise something that stands outside its logic: a redistribution from those with more to those with less, not as charity from above but as a conscious decision from below.
The person sitting at the periphery of the Christmas market is not a blemish on the festive scenery. They are a mirror held up to the city, showing that this way of celebrating is built on exclusion, securitisation and the criminalisation of poverty – powered, quite literally, by resources extracted from somewhere else.
We cannot copy Sudan’s struggle into Freiburg, and we should not romanticise it. But we can learn from the fact that, under bombardment and hunger, people build daily structures of solidarity without waiting for states, NGOs or donors.
Here, under fairy lights, mobile “anti-terror” barriers, permanent police presence and “100% green” marketing, the question for us is simple and sharp:
If they can build community kitchens under war, why can’t we build them under Christmas?
This speech was delivered by the Freiburg Initiative for Decoloniality (FRID) at a Palestine demonstration on 9 August 2025 in Freiburg. FRID is a collective committed to actively dismantling coloniality in all its forms and challenging the structures that sustain it.
Colonialism, coloniality, and decoloniality might seem like something of the past or academic words, but they can help us understand the roots of the horrors we see in Palestine today – and also how to act on it.
Colonialism
We are all familiar with the term colonialism: when a foreign state or group exercises control over another people’s land — like many European countries have done throughout history, and as they did with Palestine.
During the First World War, imperial powers divided land between them, and Britain claimed control over Palestine.
Not only did Britain impose their rule on the population with military power, they also supported the establishment of the state of Israel and helped lay the foundation for Zionist settler colonialism.
Settler Colonialism
Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism that is not just about exploiting the people and resources of the area, but about settling permanently on the land by evicting, expelling, and eliminating the original inhabitants — and replacing them and their culture with settlers.
We’ve seen examples of this in New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and the US — and this is also what we’ve seen in Palestine since the Nakba of 1948, when Zionist militias massacred and expelled thousands of Palestinians from their homeland.
But that was just the starting point. Since its founding, Israel has employed a range of settler colonial tactics:
Land theft
Destruction of homes
Expelling of the people
Destruction of cultural and natural heritage
Control over water
Apartheid and occupation
And now, genocide
Coloniality
While settler colonialism describes the acts of Israel, coloniality explains why the Western powers allow and enable it.
Coloniality is the power patterns and structures that were designed to support colonialism and that still shape our social, political, and economic systems today. It is like a virus — infecting how we see the world.
It is the differentiation between us and them — between the white and Western and the so-called “others”. It is the notion that some people’s lives are more visible, more valuable, more grievable than others.
Coloniality is:
In our media, where Palestinian voices are sidelined and silenced, and Israeli officials are cited uncritically.
In our language, when a genocide is called a “conflict” and when bombing schools and starving children is called “self-defense”.
When Palestinian resistance is called “terrorism” — although occupied people have the right to resist occupation under international law.
Simply put: coloniality is what dehumanises Palestinians and allows the ongoing genocide in Gaza to be tolerated, justified, and even supported by the so-called “civilized” Western governments.
Why this matters
What is happening in Gaza, as grotesque and unbearable as it is, is unfortunately not unique. It’s the working of settler colonialism and coloniality that we know far too well.
I am not saying this to diminish the seriousness of what we see — I am saying it because identifying commonalities in systems of oppression can help identify common paths forward and types of action.
Decoloniality
This is where decoloniality comes into the picture.
Decoloniality is the antidote to the virus of coloniality. It is a fight to dismantle its structures – not just physically, but in culture, politics, economy, and thought.
It is:
A refusal to accept coloniality as natural or neutral.
A refusal of the narratives we are fed.
We can practice decoloniality by:
Honoring, listening to, and uplifting Palestinian voices.
Speaking the truth — calling things by their names:
Occupation, not “defense”
Genocide, not “conflict”
Learning, unlearning, speaking up, and acting
Because decoloniality is not just a metaphor – for many, it is about survival. And for you and me, it’s a political commitment.
Our commitment
It’s a commitment that we owe the people of Palestine and all other oppressed people around the world.
Because the Palestinian struggle is not just theirs — it is connected to all struggles against oppression and injustice.
So let’s fight together — against colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. We won’t be silenced or stand aside.
tadamun 