Perfect Victims

Great poets are truth-tellers, and the truth hurts. Mohammed El-Kurds raw eloquence and razor-sharp clarity will make you hurt and curse and cry and sometimes chuckle. A few will think, only to realize he is also talking about 'us,' the allies, the empathizers, even the comrades whose solidarity unwittingly demands the perfect victim. We are not completely free of Zionist lies; we are not decolonized. Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century. And like Aim Csaire, he demands that we confront the truth, wipe away our crocodile tears, and take down Goliath once and for all. Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination Here's a river of fire. Dive in, if you dare. It will clear the fog. Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things In Perfect Victims, Mohammed El-Kurd recenters the Palestinian gaze as compass and metric unit. Noura Erakat, author of Justice for Some Mohammed El-Kurds voice is unequivocal in a hallucinatory media sphere that portrays the colonized and the occupied as either passive victims of an unnamable crime or the very perpetrators of unspeakable crimes they themselves experience. Perfect Victims is essay and memoir at its best. It portrays children forged by occupation and war and a humble people conditioned by the necessity of resistance for survival in the face of a twenty-first century genocide. Humility, irony, and irreverence are the languages of self-defense, and words are El-Kurds weapons. Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future

Mohammed El-Kurd is a writer, poet, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. He is the Nations first-ever Palestine Correspondent and editor-at-large at Mondoweiss, the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and the author of the highly-acclaimed poetry collection Rifqa, which has been translated into several languages.

authors note(s) one: the snipers hands are clean of blood on dehumanization two: the politics of defanging on humanization three: shireens passport on the invention of the civilian four: a life in cross-examination on forbidden sentiments five: tropes and drones on discursive land mines six: mein kampf in the playroom on propaganda seven: miraculous epiphanies on testimony eight: are we indeed all palestinians? on identity nine: do you want to throw israelis into the sea? on irreverence epilogue