BEING THE NEGATIVE

Being the Negative 
Being in the negative is being excess, excess that is invisible, excess that is disposable ¹ 
excess as hypervisibility ², reduced to pixel and noise 

Being in the negative is being in debt, in the minus, captive to a system of dispossession 
Being in the negative is being in the lack, in the break, in the site of extraction 
the negative is that which is unwanted, undesirable 
Being in the negative, is being short on breath, losing breath 

All those who resist, all those we are indebted to, before and after us, call to us about becoming the negative 
Becoming the negative is to go under, into the earth, becoming the land 
Becoming the negative is becoming the sub terrain, the under terrain, all that is unseen 
Becoming the negative is becoming unseen, invisible to be unbound 
Becoming the negative is becoming unbound resistant, mutating, refusing 
refusing that which has been refused to us ³ 

Being the negative is creating from the lack what is lacking, what is missing, what we need 
We are in the lack and we are what is lacking 
Being the negative is to see in the negative what we otherwise could not perceive, the pores of the land, the fracture at the heart of the colony 
Being the negative is being the spill, being the contamination, being the excess that “fuels return” ⁴ 

Being the negative is to be the debt that is owed to us 
Being the negative is being with what we are indebted to, all those that came before us and call to us now 
call to us from within their graves; “those who chant do not die” ⁵
the call echos, call us again and again to where we must be 
Being the negative is being what seems buried, but continues to sprout 
Being the negative is to see the breaks as openings, to be that break 
breathing and being, being and breathing where you should not be 

PRISONERS OF LOVE:  UNTIL THE SUN OF FREEDOM 

To all those we are indebted to, all those that came before us and all those that will come after us 
“Nothing has been willed, written or composed for the sake of a book … it is both a weapon of liberation and a poem of love.” JG 
“In my twentieth year of captivity… I confess that my heart flutters at the sight of a rose on television, or a nature scene, the sea. I confess that I am still a person holding on to love as if it were embers. I will remain steadfast in this love. I will continue to love you, for love is my humble and only victory over my jailer.” WD 

Walid, your words remain inside of us 
Some years ago, before you were taken from us 
After being imprisoned for over two decades 
You said the longing and yearning was what united us 
A longing for place, a longing for a time not occupied 

We return to M freed after years of captivity 
He walks in his land 
And speaks of plants as though they are his kin 
He speaks of secrets, the secret of our power 
That sometimes we do not dare confess to ourselves 
K.O said this is the land of secrets and magic 

We write this now a letter of love to the people and the land 
And this a forbidden love 
And we, prisoners of this love, prisoners of this loss, prisoners of this longing 

***

And this a forbidden love of the land lost, the land loved, the land loved and lost 
Um al Zinnat, how beautiful you were, how beautiful you are 
On a mountain top looking down to the sea of Haifa 
They came to wipe you out in 1948, 
When they extinguished life in over 500 villages
But who are they to you and us, us and you 
Bound to one another in this wounded kinship 

May 1948, May 2025 
Looking at you all we see is Gaza
Muin, returns now, as though he never left 
Reciting, The Besieged City, for his Gaza in 1952 

“The sea whispers the tale of an imprisoned homeland to the stars, and the night, like a beggar, pounds with its tears and groans.” 

L treads lightly on all that remains of Umm il Zinnat 
Her graveyard and her vegetation 

Muin continues, folding 1952 into 2025, folding us back into the wound 
Gaza besieged again and again 

“The doors of Gaza, locked upon its grieving people, wake the living who sleep upon the ruins of bygone years 
The river, once a traveler rushing through mountain and valley, now casts its stick into the rubble turned to dust.” 

July 2024, Gaza, the old man weeps 
“They don’t want to leave anything for us. 
Not a tree, not a rock, not a school 
No clinic, no hospital, no people. 
The ground is burned. 
The land is burned.” 

A wound that does not heal 
A wound we share in the darkness in the silence 
a wound that should break the world open 

“This is the beautiful Gaza, orbiting in mourning between the hungry in tents, the thirsty in graves, 
Images of indignity, rise up, imprisoned people!” 

Muin’s last word a call to us to answer the call of Gaza
Being the negative is to be the debt that is owed to us 
being with what we are indebted to, all those that came
before us and call to us now 
call to us from within their graves; “those who chant do not die”

• Excerpts from Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

¹For more on this question of excess see: HajYahia, Adam. The Principle of Return. Parapraxis, April 7, 2024.
²Moten, Fred. Music against the Law of Reading the Future and “Rodney King.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 27, no. 1 (1994): 51–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1315058 
³Moten, Fred. The Subprime and the beautiful. African Identities, 11:2, 237-245 (2013). “For, to refuse what has been refused to you, even when what has been refused is a fantasy, is only possible from the perspective of having had something (beyond the constant imposition of a lack or barrier or impossibility). But having had, in this case, is not the description of some previous, violated ownership; it is, instead, a prophecy of having given everything away (in having consented not to be a single being, in having been continually acting out [of] the massive theoretical implications of holding and being held, against ownership, in dispossessive enjoyment of the undercommon underprivilege). Everything I love is an effect of an already given dispossession and of another dispossession to come. Everything I love survives dispossession, is therefore before dispossession.”
⁴ “Slipping out and spilling into the colonial matrix, this excess is what fuels return.” see: HajYahia,
Adam. The Principle of Return. Parapraxis, April 7, 2024.
⁵A chant sung in Palestine, “Raise your hands, raise your voice, those who chant do not die”