Review by Pip Murphy-Hoyle

Hasib Hourani’s debut book is a long-form poem that narrativises experiences of occupation, dispossession and resistance. After its release in 2024, the book won the Mary Gilmore Award and was shortlisted for both the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and the NSW Literary Awards. Split into seven chapters, rock flight dismantles the language of genocide while advocating for Palestinian liberation.

Using blank space, fragments and blacked-out text, rock flight captures how words can have an abundance of meanings. We are invited into Hourani’s struggle to define and articulate. We witness the words he can sketch and trace but never fully hold. For example, the reason he is physically elsewhere is a ‘thing’, while Israel is an ‘entity’, a ‘ ‘[Blacked-out]’ ’and an ‘it’. Additionally, a box is a ‘cage’, a ‘coffin’, and a ‘closed window’. A box is also ‘origami’, ‘fractured bones’, ‘suffocation’ and ‘breathlessness’.

The attention Hourani places on the plurality of words and objects is an explicit reference to the way Israel’s government has weaponised language to justify acts of genocide. The items banned from entering Gaza are defined as ‘dual-use goods’, which means any items that could hypothetically be turned into weapons are not allowed to enter. This is evident in the way dualities and multiplicities prevail in Hourani’s debut; a rock can be a scrunched-up piece of paper, a date pit, a weapon and a ten-year sentence all at once.

As readers, we watch as language is dug out of obscurity, as words are polished, tumbled, cemented and fortified until a crack in the foundation causes them to crumble. Hourani wrestles with a language that is diasporic; its roots are scattered, buried beneath rubble, waiting to be reclaimed anew. The result is a poetry that is malleable and generative. Despite recurring themes of constriction and suffocation, this book is dynamic—playful even—in its innovation.

The book is ideally read in one sitting, because each fragment builds upon its predecessor. As a book-length poem, rock flight is discursive. It’s propelled by a developing sense of clarity and momentum. Dispersed across this historical narrative is an imperative voice and a ‘HOW TO’ refrain that actively engages readers with the Palestinian struggle. We are instructed to ‘hold our breath’, to ‘make a rock’, ‘a throat’, and ‘our own explosion’.

Hourani refuses to isolate rock flight’s artistry from politics, its speaker from an occupied embodiment, its readers from the violent reality of colonisation. In an interview with Ash Davida Jane, Hourani says:

I write in fragments because that’s how our archives exist right now. I play with space because I come from 75 years of motion and statelessness on one side and on the other: civil war.

There is a restlessness in Hourani’s poetry; it refuses to fit into any of the forms it imposes. The effect is simultaneously startling and uncomfortable, lively and hopeful. As readers, we traverse through occupied and unoccupied space, trapped within the confines of the page. Sometimes this space is left empty, sometimes it is constrained:

i     am     in     a     box    now and the

box is a yellow dumpster on    jamal abdel

nasser   street i      am     a       cattle

egret in      a       yellow       dumpster on

jamal abdel nasser   street i     am       a

water       bird and  jenin   is  forty

kilometres from

water in         either                 direction.

Hourani uses juxtaposition between form and language from the very start of rock flight. Proper nouns are left uncapitalised, punctuation is used sparingly and blocks of prose bleed into Hourani’s free verse form. His informal style feels intimate and free flowing, but also modest and unimposing. He strips back the vigour of language and syntax so his personal and historical narratives are laid bare. The lack of restrictive punctuation conventions makes Hourani’s writing seem more conversational and consequently more intimate. It was easy to read and I didn’t feel like he was hiding behind any inaccessible prose.

In one section of the book headed ‘TORTURE METHODS EMPLOYED BY THE STATE OF ISRAEL’, Hourani borrows the language of a Human Rights Watch document. Fragments of the poem are collaged entirely from the source document, resulting in a language that is objective, fact-based and restrained. His words are uncoloured by emotion because it isn’t needed. By building and accumulating words to a point of overwhelm, Hourani transforms a sanitised language into a living and breathing entity that readers have no choice but to respond to.

sensory deprivation placing detainees in strict isolation placing detainees in extreme cold placing detainees in suffocating heat placing foul-smelling hoods over detainees’ faces to induce feeling of suffocation.

The intention behind rock flight is overt; the book is a call to action. Hourani’s use of instructions and external references capture the emotional reality of Palestine’s occupation, and ensures that settler readers like myself are left with no uncertainty, no hesitation—only a devoted commitment towards a Free Palestine.

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Pip Murphy-Hoyle (she/they) is a writer and editor living on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are currently studying a Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. They are a Creative Manager at Farrago and an editor for Florien magazine. At the moment, they spend most of their time reading queer-horror fiction.

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rock flight was first published by Giramondo Publishing in 2024 and has a RRP of $27.