Maktaba Recommends: Foraging Fireflies by SuperMelon

Hello from the Burley Fisher Maktaba at Ibraaz!Welcome to the first of our review blogs introducing you to some of the unique books we carry at the Maktaba.

Sweating through this summer’s record-breaking heat, it has felt ever more urgent to consider the infrastructures that govern the spaces we move in. London’s asphalt environment, the industrial and political powerhouse of Empire built on and by global histories, is responsible for the ongoing, ever more loudly beeping red doom of wars and global warming. Against this politics of complicity and the simultaneous crackdown on immigration, we resist at Ibraaz by platforming cultural, archival work of the global majority. In our bookshop, collaboratively curated with the Palestine Festival of Literature, Palestine paves the way.

We’re starting a blog, where, each month, we’ll be recommending something from our shelves that speaks to the collaborative work housed in the مكتبة / Maktaba. And for our very first one, we have a beautiful militant work of art, research, literature, nature and food, made collaboratively in Palestine, Europe and beyond.

زهر القندول / Foraging Fireflies is a first publication by سوبربطيخ / SuperMelon, a Palestinian cultural food sovereignty initiative founded by Hasnae and Besma, two diaspora Moroccan women. In April 2023, they gathered local farmers, artists, activists and researchers in Ramallah to forage wild plants, cook, perform, discuss and workshop the centrality of food to land to sovereignty. With the relentless escalation of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, as the afterlife of this Foraging Fireflies Festival is turned to a death world, this publication is ‘a living archive that refuses to let voices and truths fade, even in the darkest times.’

Indeed, it is a beautifully vibrant book in Arabic and English, printed with four colours on the risograph by Stencilwerck. Set up and run by Bertus Gerssen, this utopian printing studio is in an old industrial building in The Hague, initially squatted, now owned and run collectively by artists ‘and other uncommon minds.’ For those unfamiliar with risograph, it’s a low-cost digital screen-printing machine that prints brilliant, imperfect designs. We have one at the back of our Hackney shop, where Emma prints cards, posters, zines and booklets, and runs a community press.

القندول / Foraging Fireflies collects tales of vernacular Palestinian ecosystems, feeding and healing practices, of curses and cosmological traditions; it gathers intergenerational and diasporic memories, poetry, a كنافة / knafa recipe and tear-out recipe cards as well as a poster of the yellow قندول / aptly called the spiny broom in English. Eucalyptus, goats, clementines and people together resist settler colonialism before, during and beyond the Nakba, but the capitalist military forces occupying and bulldozing the land are overpowering.

Urbanist artist Benji Boyadgian, writing about Wadi El Shami in ‘Some Wild Opinions,’ conveys this dire situation: ‘At the turn of the 21st century, the foundations were poured, and the settlement has not stopped expanding since, a potpourri of real estate, urban sprawl, and occupation … The valley is a paradigm of a habitat whose relationship between humans and extra-humans has steadily been eroding.’ Modern development on settler colonialist terms not only erodes, it destroys to rubble, a land seeped in memories that the book’s contributors tend to and recover for ‘Retrospective Futures,’ as the last section of the book is titled.

‘This publication is an act of militant knowledge production,’ Hesnae and Besma write, its aim ‘to create and preserve knowledge and affirm Palestinian identity.’ Foraging Fireflies continues to be a militant act through its collaborative design, print runs and distribution runs, and it relies on its readers, who I hope to have gathered a few more of!

Bio:

Elena is a French-Swiss-British writer and emerging translator from Arabic and French into English. They work at Burley Fisher Books alongside her MA in Gender Studies at SOAS.