The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

I once considered the screaming of a rooster a nuisance. It is not, as many people think, only an occurrence at daybreak, for roosters crow at any time and all the time. But I have realized, especially this year, that in Palestine, the rooster is a hero in a land full of heroes and martyrs. He breaks through the despair, rejects the malaise, and reminds us that our world is more than this cruel settler-colonial genocide. Each of his cries calls across to Palestinian places and sings songs of our ongoing return to our love for each other, to our collectivity, to our present survival as a people, and to our ongoing relationship with the land of Palestine.

In Ramallah al-Tahta, where I live, roosters mark time as well as space. In spite of the urban appearance, the neighborhood is a mix of everything that fills the spectrum from countryside to city and basically nothing in between, for neither the urban nor the rural are apt concepts here. For me, this neighborhood in Ramallah is a temporary replacement for the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood in Jerusalem, that my mother called home, which itself is a temporary replacement for our family village of Lifta, that my grandmother called home, also in Jerusalem.

I grew accustomed to the sounds of the roosters in al-Tahta, as I did before with their symphonies in Wadi al-Joz, even as I wonder how the rooster crows in Lifta. The crows of the roosters eventually helped me find continuity between the locations of my own Palestinian places. Instead of feeling unsettled by the rooster’s disruption or hating the seemingly never-ending temporary, I decided, with the help of the rooster’s crow, to approach myself and the temporaries through love and towards return.

With/through/in love, I began thinking and talking and working with ongoing return as a concept born of Palestine and a practice that will always center Palestinians. Ongoing return is not about re-establishing a “lost” relationship with Palestine. Rather, it is about understanding that our relations with each other and the land, in spite of all the violence inflicted, continue to grow as we continue to find ways and methods to nurture them. Rather than give into the hate and despair that could potentially prevent us from living through this time of genocide, love holds our untenable sadness in the grief of a genocide.

Ongoing return is the story of us and not the story of what has been done unto us. But in the genocidal waves of the relentless brutality of a live-streamed genocide, how can ongoing return even be contemplated? Though perhaps the marking of new historical era in its intensity, this violence is not new in the century-long war against our people and peoplehood, the ongoing Nakba. With all that we know and all that we have endured as a people, every moment of trying to take pen to paper, as we try to scream through our writing, is repetition. I am trapped in the loop of violence and my own limited vocabulary.

How can we break the monotony imposed by all of this violence? Between the winter of 2023 and spring and summer of 2024, our people in Gaza have faced indiscriminate and atmospheric violence, forced to constantly move in the hope of escaping the death machines of the settler state. By the summer of 2024, schools, where people have sought refuge, have become daily sites of settler massacres, as hospitals were before schools, as everything and everyone is a target for the death machines and those who operate them.

It has become difficult, if not impossible, to reckon with life, let alone return, in the face of all of this destruction. Genocide is an all-encompassing kind of violence whereby all roads are intended by the settler forces to lead to death. Forced displacement is an intentional killing just as imprisonment is an intentional killing. Captivity, like massacre and displacement, is yet another concept that our reality is re-defining. This violence should not have a language, for how cruel is the dictionary that can hold words for what is happening?

The rooster’s crow cannot be contained in a metric of language. Our soundscapes, like our landscapes, are riddled with the machinery of a war intent on our elimination. But the rooster still crows. Perhaps the rooster’s crow is a beckoning call to ongoing return in the horror. Is he registering his own refusal of his life being defined by the violence against the very notion of life? When everything feels like it is falling apart, as the skies fall over Gaza and fall from the sea to the river, the roosters’ echoes resonate anew across the land of Palestine. The rooster crows.

In al-Tahta, we hear war planes navigate the skies overhead going north or west to drop bombs. Their bombs seem as endless as they are relentless. And the rooster crows. Do the roosters continue to crow in Gaza? What of the roosters in Jenin and Tulkarm? Can the roosters continue to crow in protest against the cacophony of war? In one of the many nighttime invasions in my neighborhood, I heard the rooster crow. I relied on him, I decided that his cries will be what I will listen to in all that we are forced to hear. In al-Tahta, on this night, the rooster defined time and place. His cries broke the monotony of violence and remind me that ongoing return is the story of us and not what is being done unto our land and bodies. The roosters must continue to crow…

The rooster is a powerful symbol in Islam as well as a well-rehearsed representation in Palestine. The rooster, it is said, is related to the prophet and his accession into heaven on his steed. It is also said that with each crow of the rooster, an angel reaches heaven. How many roosters’ cries do we need to record the number of angels heaven has welcomed over the last twelve months alone?

In Palestine, during this genocide, the crow of the rooster, once a disruption, is now the ever-fleeting thread of possibility and presence in a genocidal present. I wait for his crow as an interruption to the madness. His singing no longer blends into the soundscape for he is a reminder of his ongoing presence and the song of hope—the inexplicable logic of hope that Palestine defines through ongoing return.

As this war is re-defining violence, from massacre to displacement to the very notion of death, Palestinians—and our roosters—are crying out. In these cries, we bear witness to the spirit of our ongoing return. Return is not an event nor an episode, it is a way of being and way of living and ongoing return is who we are. The roosters know this well enough to help mark our presence and our return. And the rooster shall continue to crow.

Postscript

The destruction of this genocide continues in all the geographies the settlers have targetted. Nevertheless, the hope of ongoing return remains, In Ramallah al-Tahta three new editions of the rooster family appeared by the end of October. And now, roosters shall continue to crow.