Within split seconds of hearing Rafeef Ziadah’s spoken words for the first time, I recognized I was witnessing an explosion, an exquisite exclusively Palestinian star. A spoken word artist of courage, strength, freedom and beauty. And inside of a week, I watched as ‘We teach life, sir’–performed on November 12th at the Tabernacle in London in an evening of political performance poetry with Remi Kanazi and Special Guests–go viral and soar to over 90,000 hits by today. Below Ziadah performs her anthem, ‘Shades of Anger’, on that same evening.
Listen to Rafeef Ziadah radio interview describing the inspiration for “my anthem,” Shades of Anger:
We were at York University doing a creative action …a Zionist came by.. as I was lying on the floor he kicked me right in the gut really hard and said “You deserve to be raped before you have your terrorist children”, and that really stuck with me… The only way I could deal with it was to write back my poem and the poem is… I may be angry but what I’m going to produce is your next rebel and you won’t be able to stop us.
Rafeef Ziadah is a member of the steering committee of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), also a founding member of the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) promoting the BDS campaign in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and an organizer of International Israeli Apartheid Week. Her debut CD Hadeel is dedicated to Palestinian youth.
she so hot she sizzles. i hope her anthem takes off like a rocket the way ‘We teach life, sir’ did because it is equally worthy. a dynamite work of art.
i’m tweeting this.
I hope that Rafeef can inspire some U.S. campus group to push for a Boycott-Israel resolution in their student government.
Don’t let our calls for boycott be censored:
http://annarbor.com/news/aata-rejects-anti-israel-bus-ad/
Thank you.
She is impressive. That was wonderful.
Jurgen Stroop, an SS commander in Warsaw during WWII , said:
“Flags and national colors are a means of combat exactly like a rapid-fire weapon, like thousands of such weapons.”
I’m sure for zionists ,a native, Palestinian language, a poem that touches a soul is also “a means of combat”.
If one knows ,that one is doing some evil, everything/anything that exposes it , is “a means of combat” that needs to be destroyed.
I think her “savage” is even better
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyS8JHxHdQw
Especially
-I have an immune system you can only dream of built on hamrah, hummus and fuul
and
-they tell me you’re Polish and some god promised you my land
-And of all the world decided to promise away my land
-Every rock in Jerusalem knows my last name