Author note: Hasib Hourani on rock flight

Hasib Hourani reflects on his debut book rock flight (1 September 2024), an epic poem and a moving testament to the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

rock flight was originally just one poem. It was short, maybe two pages. I had a bad day and wanted to write it down but unknowingly had exposed something cursed and irreversible that demanded transcription. Two pages sprawled to become a chapter, that chapter gained another. And so on.

A book-length poem split into seven chapters, rock flight is about many things: settler violence, hyper-surveillance, birds, boycotts and my family. Parts of it are quite literally haunted. Entire sections couldn’t have been written if I hadn’t gone somewhere else to write them down. I took my computer interstate to start and finish a chapter that remained unread and untouched for a year afterwards. The final edits were done from a high stool at the laundromat. There are words we can’t bring home with us.

It’s perhaps for this reason that the book often uses inference to get the words across. Fixating on a recurring set of images—rocks, birds, water, flight—explicit language is hinted at, omitted or redacted. A gesture towards censorship and a consideration for my own safety, of course, but also a reclamation of language. The book is cheeky and combative. I want the reader to smirk. I want them to scrunch up a piece of paper and throw it across the room.

I made a lot of rock flight’s final changes in September and October 2023. We couldn’t have known then that the zionist entity would double down and massacre over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza between the book’s completion and its release. It took four years to write this book. But the words themselves didn’t change much from one draft to the next, they simply moved around: from one line to the next, from the afterword to the body. Mimicking the relentless motion of Palestinian experience.

All of this to say, the words and stories in rock flight aren’t new. References and accounts date as far back as 1799. I wrote a contemporary poem that contains centuries of history, and fossilised within that graft is something eternal.