The Funambulist

22/04/2025

We are excited to announce that our new issue "Black Indigeneities" (May–June 2025) is going to be out in almost two weeks from now!

Until May 05, we offer the possibility to pre-order the print+digital version of our forthcoming issue, which reflects on relationships with the land in Melanesia, the African Continent, the Caribbean, and the diaspora.

This issue is dedicated to Black Indigeneities. The association of these two terms will certainly appear obvious to many, while it might surprise others, depending on readers’ personal and regional imaginaries.

The cover artwork is by Tessa Mars.

Pre-order our 59th issue now to receive your print copy at the earliest.

Reflecting on Relationships with the Land in Melanesia, the African Continent, the Caribbean, and the Diaspora

10/04/2025

"I do not want to forget the day wicked gangs invaded our village, killing me in my mother’s embrace. My dreams, which nearly burst with the first bullet in my body, refused to die, and I had to become something—
to become a tree."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY ZAINAB AL QAISI My name is Ahmad. I was born in 1943 in Jaffa, Palestine. I am five years old! I learned to plow the land and care for olive and orange trees.

08/04/2025

"Home to my paternal great grandparents, Al-Manshiyya was a Palestinian neighborhood that was once situated in the North of Jaffa. It faced paramilitary attacks and mass demolitions under a brutal Zionist colonial occupation, between 1948 and the 1980s. The neighborhood’s obliterated urban fabric was subsequently reinscribed with expansive public beach parks, tranquil hotels, and sporadic parking lots between the 1980s and the present day."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

Home to my paternal great grandparents, Al-Manshiyya was a Palestinian neighborhood that was once situated in the North of Jaffa. It faced paramilitary attacks and mass demolitions under a brutal…

07/04/2025

"These works reimagine those cherished moments, offering a vision of what liberation might look like. They create space for new memories and possibilities of return, transforming the past into a foundation for the future. Through these collages, I envision liberation not as a singular political event but as an ongoing, transformative process—one that seeks to reclaim both the physical and metaphysical spaces that have been erased or altered by the occupation."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

Solomon’s Pools is a series of collages inspired by my childhood memories of the Solomon’s Pools near Bethlehem, Palestine. My connection to the site is rooted in stories of my mother’s involvement in…

05/04/2025

"I grew too old, father,
I now yield that very fear
that begged me to grow older.
How I wish to run with and towards you
to run away, towards the homeland;
but I’m stuck, in death’s gut."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY YASMINE HAJ You dunked your black shirt in blood then ran, in haste, towards genocide you hung it on her nose savouring its scent dripping in her mouth a soul a day.

03/04/2025

"After Palestine was liberated, Buyout opened her eyes and hugged Thakira. There’s a path in your heart which my people walked as they fought, she told her. I want to walk it in real life rather than in mere imagination. I want to include it in the map of this truthful land. We can now take the road out of our memory and examine and embrace it instead, watching it grow bigger in Palestine. We can plant roses for all those heroes, all around, and find that magnificent Sidra tree in every village and town."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

TEXT AND DRAWINGS BY TAGHRID ABDELAL TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY YASMINE HAJ 1- History is a big book, held by a mother called Thakira (Memory). Every day, Thakira reads to the children of Palestine.

02/04/2025

"Over the past few years, I have come across many lime kilns—known locally as latatin (لتاتين, plural of latton لتون) or kababir (كبابير, plural of kabbara كبارة)—often by accident during my walks across Palestine’s hills. I have encountered these structures within Area C of the West Bank and on sites of villages destroyed in the 1948 Nakba, some in Israeli-designated “national parks.” Once the heart of Palestine’s lime industry—dating back at least 3,000 years—these kilns have now been relegated to mere “archaeological” objects. Found in ruins, their most basic forms appear as pits three meters deep and four meters in diameter, dug into the bedrock of Palestine’s hills, surrounded by piles of stone—remnants of their once intricate structures."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

Carved into a stone terrace on the hills of Bethlehem, a lime kiln stands, smoke finding its way between the stones, blackening their surfaces. Moments after being fed a dense pile of thistles…

01/04/2025

"The gangs didn’t cleanse my village, they let us live.
Along the path which seemed safe towards the mountain,
rocks of language crumbled and fell into our mouths.
I was never exiled from land itself, but from the story I never uttered."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY AMINA BELGHITI Sina, my darling, I just boarded the plane carrying me back to you. I’ll see you soon and give you the gift you asked for. I brought, as promised…

31/03/2025

"Here on the brink of silence
bones erode
to sky
beneath our feet

What more do we have to await?
time is an obscenity
when liberation is all we desire."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

Luxury is a decrescendo and we stand at the edge of silence they’ve taken everything— first the roses, then the strawberries now air is an extravagance and water is sold back to us by the pearl drop…

28/03/2025

"Late at night,
I study the objects of my house
As my own cosmology,

The backyard as my solar system,
The lemon tree is my sun
After 400 days,
My sun’s gravity is getting weak

So do my memories,
Slowly slipping from my conscious"

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

There is a little rusty place, Inside my soul Only returning to you can polish it Late at night, I study the objects of my house As my own cosmology, The backyard as my solar system, The lemon tree is…

27/03/2025

"He smiled: “minni ana? You want to know the original name? Aren’t you here with the Hebrew school?”

“I have roots here. I am looking for my mother’s home.”

“Your mother was born here?” his eyes crinkled with deliberate suspicion.

“No, my mother was born a refugee in Lebanon, where she is buried now. She always wished we would one day return to Palestine.”"

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

Last month, I received an email from a Hebrew language school in S***m for a summer immersion course. The email was written in Hebrew, and it was addressed directly to me. I weighed it in my head.

25/03/2025

"The act of Return is the restoration of our relationships: redefining how we relate to the land, to one another, and reclaiming our space and time. It is a reclamation of life in its fullest sense, where we walk freely on our soil, breathe deeply of our air, merge with our sea and rebuild the bonds fractured by violence and occupation. It is the moment when the sea welcomes our fishermen, when the mountains cradle our footsteps, when the skies hum with the freedom of the Palestine Sunbird instead of drones."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

How do we imagine our Return? How do Palestinians, displaced but inseparable from their homeland, dream of going back? Return is not simply reclaiming what was stolen. It is not just the physical act…

24/03/2025

"You think this is a return. But I have never moved, never even changed. I have never been fleeting. Only my faces—what I show to the world, my surfaces and appearances—shift and refract, disguise and conceal themselves. But tonight, as night falls, I reveal myself. You think I am an enigma. And yet, here I am. I am here, entire."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

You were never here, yet you’ve always been here. This paradox, so apparent, unsettles you, troubles you. You’ve just arrived—here, in my place, within me, in this valley you once knew well.

20/03/2025

"I remember how depressed I felt when I saw that first compound on social media. I felt a mix of sorrow and fear, which is normal, considering our own past and the implications that such scenes stir in us. In our Palestinian collective consciousness, tents, tent compounds, and camps immediately summon the memory of the 1948 Nakba—and all its implications of loss and grief. Losing one’s own space, being severed from one’s life course, shifting into a life of refuge, and all the suffering, pain, loss, and decline that come with it—a narrative of pain and harshness. The scene touched on a personal trauma as well, with early memories of living in a tent, when the family house was wrecked for a second time, during the Israeli invasion of the Khan Younis camp in the second Intifada."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

TRANSLATED FROM ARABIC BY YASMINE HAJ I still remember how anxious and stressed I felt at the beginning of the war, when I saw the first tents compound. It had been set up to receive the displaced…

18/03/2025

"Naturally, we have developed subversive ways to endure and navigate the absurdity and violence of the occupation, adapting to the realities of the site, and adopting strategies for survival and growth. Friends of Sakiya, especially those living outside of Palestine, ask how we are able to continue to work in such conditions. How could we contend with this unnatural disruption of life without falling into despair?"

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

I wrote this text while being in Boston for a few months. One morning, I opened my messages to see the news from home. Fridays and Saturdays are especially worrying. Again on December 8, 2024…

17/03/2025

"What does Return to Palestine, our homeland, parceled and occupied and poisoned and where millions of us continue to cultivate and reclaim and restore what we can: what does Return to Palestine in this catastrophe, the ongoing Nakba, entail? How do we truly return to our land? How will we clear the rubble of our homes so we can till the bone and blood and flesh of our kin baked into the soil below?"

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

For some time now, I have taught a doctoral seminar on “Exile and Diaspora,” a course that aims to deconstruct and analyze the confluences, distinctions, and influences across the intellectual…

10/03/2025

"Mona took the logo suggestion to Ghassan Kanafani, the spokesman for the PFLP. Kanafani, the famed Palestinian novelist, was also a gifted amateur artist and he immediately understood the impact of the symbol and had it adopted by the group, after changing the square format to a circle. People in the movement liked the logo and the years and decades passed as it appeared in all sorts of posters, flags, and wall graffiti everywhere in and outside Palestine."

Read more in our current issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025).

August 2016, Tokyo Following the overwhelming Arab defeat and the total occupation of Palestine, including Jerusalem in the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967, the Palestinians countered with a guerrilla…

04/03/2025

We are happy to share with you our new issue "Return/العودة" (March–April 2025)!

Asking people to envision liberation can be rather delicate, in an ongoing situation where Israeli bombs, shells, and bullets were still raining on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and to a lesser extent, the West Bank, to ask from people who have been living with this genocidal threat (on their nation, on their loved ones, on themselves) for the past year and a half—and with the slower, yet just as violent settler colonial processes of dispossession, extraction, and subjugation for the past century. In this issue, it is clearly palpable that many contributors struggle to envision Return in the present moment, even if Return means returning to a house from where people fled this past year to seek refuge from the bombs, the tanks, and the bulldozers. Nevertheless, our contributors present a multiplicity of understandings, visions and forms of what Return (sometimes, deliberately orthographed without a capital R) entails.

The cover artwork is from 'Just in Case #2' by Taysir Batniji.

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