Pain,
Boundless

Rima Rantisi

Pain has settled everywhere, becoming inescapable, boundless.

Since October 7, the unfathomable images from Gaza and Lebanon have become an inextricable part of us, awakening a pain of day-to-day living. My old notes reveal forgotten horrors found in these images—do I rewrite them here? I think: We should always remember—but I want to respect the living and the dead. The living, for the witnessing they have endured. The dead, because they were whole and left dismembered and they must rest. But our bodies have become anchors for these images, and while art is an inadequate response now, the conviction in their subjective and artistic processing remains. 

Many pieces refer to the sea or water as a space of painful joy, depth, and trauma. We chose the cover art from the “River Print” series of cyanotypes by Jessica El Mal, Chahine Fellahi, Kaïs Aïouch, which manifest the symbolic tension of water as a space of life and loss. In three essays, we see echoes of this tension. In “Constellations of Pain,” Shams Hanieh, landlocked by her West Bank ID, yearns for the sea as the “only thing that ever felt holy.”  In “Izdihar, or: The Flowering,” Rana Issa traces her bladder issues back to her grandmother’s life in the Palestinian camp Burj al-Barajneh. And in “Sea Never Dry,” Nisreen Kaj mourns the version of herself that vanished alongside her mother to whom “life was a sea” where “much could be buried in its depths to be forgotten forever.”

We see the pain of grief, especially over death and disappearance. In “Absent Friend,” Lina Atallah reflects on the pain behind a friend’s disappearance. She posits the pain of an “unknown origin”—buried in the unconscious, where even when projected onto another, can never truly be known. In the elegiac poem “for ryan thoreson carson,” Jess Rizkallah writes “death makes a person mythic. every myth has cracks. / that’s where the grief leaks thru when you remember / the beautiful ordinariness of a person. then you lose them / all over again.” Ordinariness and its vulnerability surface also in Saba Kermati’s “The Gloaming”: “Nicholas is cutting onions in the kitchen / and crying. A football game in the background. / A 24-year-old boy’s leg snaps in half / And then he is carted off the field. Gaza is home / to the largest number of amputee children / in modern history.”  

We have published eight new poets in this issue including Sahara Sidi, Saba Keramati, Lara Atallah, Doaa Atamna, Lauren Camp, Dania El Abyad, Glenn Shaheen, and Kaleem Hawa. Their poetry is alongside three poets who Rusted Radishes has been publishing since their early days, including Mai Serhan, Laura Braverman, and Jess Rizkallah, and who have recently published collections. The work of this exciting group of poets is marked by colloquial language, forms that stutter and halt in ghazal, typography, and narration. They tell stories, some clipped by images of genocide, others swimming in pains of incarcerated brothers or lamentations on illness or geography, and other pains.

Many of the artworks in this issue speak to corporeal pain. Christine Safatly’s “Lost” series derives from a project that focuses on “body suffering and daily experiences with oppressive structures” with meticulous attention to body detail (look closely for the bones) while also evoking an abstract heavy emotional response. The dark heavy lines of Safatly’s work echo in Shawki Youssef’s where he poses an unflinching, raw, and abject view of the body, seemingly as a vessel of trauma – torn, leaking, broken. Ahmad Ghaddar’s (Renoz) “Coping Mechanism” mimics the pharmaceutical industry’s packaged promises of relief. Nourhan Maayouf’s photography series “Don’t don’t don’t you forget about me” of engraved aloe plants invites us into tender spaces between remembering and forgetting. . In “Floating Limbs,” Mohammad Abdel Karim renders the human body as dislocated, severed, and suspended, capturing the existential weight of estrangement. Aya Nadera Zantout’s handwritten “Akh” echoes the incessant pain we have faced in witness to the fall of thousands of bodies.

War and violence emerge as subthemes of pain—unsurprisingly, but what follows this pain? Two translations span a millennium of suffering. Michael Payne renders al-Ma’arri’s “Epistle of the Neigher and the Brayer,” written in 1021 CE in northern Syria just before the Byzantine invasion, which features a horse rebuking a mule’s complaints on suffering: “Every sperm has darkness.” Payne notes, “the mule’s misery is a necessary fact of nature.” Sara Mourad translates a 2024 Beirut conversation between Arabic editor Zeina G. Halabi and Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. Halabi highlights Shibli’s “method of excavating fragmented and ambivalent details that are unmatched in their power to enunciate, minor details whose fragmentation and stuttering point to the literary as a Palestinian experience.” Shibli claims that the fragmentation and “stuttering” of Palestinian narratives, brought on by its painful history, oppose those of the violent oppressor, the Israeli government’s clear “complete story.” Distrust in the latter’s narrative structure leads Shibli to claim “stuttering” as a literary mode, asserting that she does not write Palestine but rather Palestine is her “teacher.” Nour Debian’s artwork was especially created for this interview and Shibli’s story in the Arabic section. Halabi and Shibli also discuss Majd Abdel Hamid’s tatriz art, “Screenshots,” featured in this issue, which display war scenes from Syria, not only memorializing the pain of war but also inviting us into the slow painstaking work in the imagery he confronts. Meanwhile, graphic narrative, “War Crimes,” by Sarah Saroufim alludes to the ultimate demise of Gaza’s hospitals, schools, journalists, mosques, churches, and children, transformed into plumes of smoke. Finally, in Petra Serhan’s performance “No Blood Included,” she draws attention to the pains of the last century to the present day. With her call for long silences, she asks us to be present in pain.

Thank you to all of the writers and artists in this issue who accepted to dwell in theirs.