Jenan Afaneh (she/her/any) is a Palestinian writer, researcher, and craft-maker.

Artist Statement

My poem is written after much deliberation on June Jordan’s poem “Moving Towards Home,” from her 1985 book, Living room. My poem is an intrapersonal immersion into the question of home, and what constitutes homing practices for me. My poem combobulates material things that I associate with home, with my embodied subjectivity as encapsulating relational, affective, and ecological experiences that have shaped my craft. My aim for this poem is to be sentimental and nostalgic, but also to stand irresolute against rigid and essentialist meanings of home. If home for me is occupied, then how can I subvert my positionality within this occupation, without being mimetic or desolate? I bring up scenic beauty in the imagery of my poem, which is intentional. Beauty is dissonant against the political tides of today, but beauty also helps orient me towards liberation. Home is rhizomatic, but home is still there, waiting for me in the distance.

Reflection and Connection to "Imagination for Liberation"

My piece connects to the theme of using imagination for liberation because home for me as a terrain has been violently dispossessed.  My piece centers situated knowledge, my ancestral history, and lived experience, and thus consolidates my being and world-view against colonial strategies of elimination and fragmentation. While my piece is rooted in real experience in some lines, it is still imaginary, and it precisely aims to interrogate the connections between affect, embedded nature, material reality, and futurity, by longing for an ephemeral thing- home. If liberation for Palestinians is an embodiment of a land, where people and land become one, then a return to that land, to that home, becomes a liberatory practice- a radical imaginary that is in the process of being potentialized.