Soon we will search
in the margins of your history, in distant countries,
for what was once our history. And in the end we will ask ourselves:
Was Andalusia here or there? On the land…or in the poem?

—Mahmoud Darwish [1]

“Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,” an ode written by poet and author Mahmoud Darwish published in 1992, mobilizes the collective memory of Andalusia as a metaphor for a “lost paradise” and the nightmare through which it eroded. [2] It feels odd to say that Andalusia was, because in some ways, Andalusia still is, has been, and can be, in cities, neighborhoods, and homes across various contexts since its material ending on the Iberian Peninsula. [3] In what I call my everyday archive of time stolen back—an in-process collection of images, descriptions, and questions—I attempt to speak with Darwish about potentializing the after-ending of this commons, poetic resistance to its erasure, and the material conditions of its return. [4]

Andalusia, or al-Andalus in Arabic and Sefarad in Hebrew, [5] refers to the society that flourished during a period of Muslim rule over much of the Iberian Peninsula following its capture in 711. Its power and domain dwindled over time, until its fall in January of 1492, when the Reconquista, the centuries-long attempt by Christian Spanish forces to recapture the land, concluded with the fall of Granada. Andalusia thrived during the Islamic Golden Age and is often recalled as a place where Muslims, Christians, and Jews co-created a prosperous commons of cultural, scientific, and cross-linguistic traditions. It was also a society that practiced enslavement, and the cross-border trade of enslaved individuals was entangled with the Reconquista. [6] After capturing Granada, the Spanish began their so-called unification and purification program, which forced the conversion or exile of the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of the land. [7] Not coincidentally, in August of the same year, 1492, Columbus embarked on the journey that led to the colonization, exploitation, ecocide, and genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the lands now often referred to as the “Americas.” His voyage was partially funded by the Spanish using resources looted from the victims of the Reconquista and the lifeworlds it had destroyed. [8] 

To some, particularly those whose histories are intertwined with its reckoning, Andalusia might appear as a cliché, a repeated metaphor for a lost time and place. However, within common historical narratives, I have found that it is often completely unknown. Sefarad, for me, is a mundane kind of absence—a place I return to in my mind from time to time and that simultaneously, I am so wholly dislocated from. [9] I know it—roughly and broadly—as one of several familial origin stories of communal possibility, rupture, and loss. Of course, my attempts at recollection are blurry because they were never mine to begin with. I try to recall the story of Sefarad, only to recover stories from my grandmother’s generational home in Jerusalem, [10] and somehow, also, recent memories of time spent with friends and family over coffee, potluck gatherings at Press Press’s former storefront, [11] or an exchange with a neighbor on the nearby street corner. I try to recall the story of al-Andalus, only to find remnants of its memory intertwined with other al-Andaluses. I try to recall the story, only to find that it has yet to end: My mind wanders backward to the fall of Granada and forward to the Nakba; backward to the Palestine that once was and forward to the one that will be. [12]

From this unfixed place of dislocation, I share my personal threads of inquiry and rehearse a historical context as an insufficient ground to the psychic landscape “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” evokes in my mind. For me, this landscape is an amalgamation of personal and historic events that defy any singular narrative, culture, or geographic connection. Rather, these events make tangible what Sefarad has grown to represent: the shared lifeworlds in the before, the beyond, and the cracks of the imperial and colonial regimes that rose through Andalusia’s destruction and the tenacity of their continued existence. As I gather my archive of potential Andalusias, I borrow scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s framework of potential history, “a commitment to attend to the potentialities that institutional forms of imperial violence—borders, national states, museums, archives, and laws—try to make obsolete or turn into precious ruins.” [13] Emerging through this ground, my archive gathers attempts at potential reconstruction–piecing together the many Andalusias that are born, live, and die in the dailiness of continued interlocking crises and the threads of history we might call to in their wake. 

In “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,” Darwish’s political positioning of both the loss and potential reemergence of al-Andalus resonates with my own demands of the memory of Sefarad. Rather than relinquishing this “meeting-place” to a distant past, Darwish invites a reckoning with what scholar Edward Said later describes as, “not just the place and time of ending (for which the various Palestinian exoduses are an all too persistent reference) but what happens after the ending,” what happens after imperial agents’ recurrent attempts to make an “end” of people, place, and time? [14] In my use of the after-ending, I attempt to draw a throughline between Said’s articulation of an after and Azoulay’s insistence on a before as related language-acts. I read these language-acts through the potent example set by Darwish’s ode—linguistic attempts at resisting and disordering imperial uses of “time” and “history” as vehicles toward the unending destructive aims of so-called progress. 

In the temporal location of the after-ending of al-Andalus/Sefarad, Darwish proclaims, “There is a sky beyond the sky for my return …,” and in another verse:

This land is not my sky, yet this evening is mine.
The keys are mine, the minarets are mine, the lamps are mine,
and I am also mine.
I am Adam of the two Edens, I who lost paradise twice.

As Darwish reflects in a 1996 interview, his ode surfaces the loss of Granada to address Nakba and its recurrent manifestations [15]:

In the Arabic tradition, Andalus is the collective lament for the lost paradise. It is a dramatic attraction to the past. … Andalus was the lost place. Later, Palestine became Andalus. The popular poetry written about Palestine in the 1950s and 1960s formulated the comparison: We lost Palestine just as we lost Andalus. That’s not my view. I have always said: Andalus may return. I wrote “Eleven Planets” [also known as “Eleven Stars over Andalusia”] to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the expulsion from Spain and Columbus’s arrival in America. … My view is not that Andalus is mine and my view is not that Palestine is the lost Andalus. I attempted to create a dialogue among the exiles on earth and I claimed no right to Andalus. But I understand the pain and tears of the Arab who has lived in a place for seven hundred years, who has no other place, who has no other meeting-place, and who is removed from it. … I searched for the otherness of men everywhere. Thus Andalus could be here or there, in any place. For me Andalus was a meeting place of all strangers in the project of constructing human culture. [16] 

As the current live-streamed escalation of Israel’s US-backed genocidal campaign against Palestinian people has made undeniably clear—if it wasn’t already before—the Nakba has persisted through a settler-colonial regime of everyday theft, expulsion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, brutal occupation, partition, torture, sexual violence, starvation, humiliation, and mass systematic extermination. [17] This regime of mass destruction claims to operate in the name of a highly mythologized “Jewish nation,” while its formation is at least partially re/produced through the attempted erasure, dislocation, and weaponization of the diversity of Jewish lifeways that preceded it: historic landscapes of belonging of Jews in Arab lands, [18] like the pre-partition commons shared by Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as of Judeo-Arab traditions more broadly, like those that can be found in al-Andalus/Sefarad. [19]

In recalling Andalusia, an exile of hundreds of years ago, Darwish’s ode almost touches the irreconcilable depths and textures of recurrent dispossession Zionism enacts in the present, and yet, still fails—as any text would—at the impossible task of holding the scope of this violence. Ultimately, Darwish’s ode concludes without a clear resolve, stating:  

Violins weep for a time that does not return
Violins weep for a homeland that might return. 

Darwish leaves the reader in the after-ending thoroughly imbued with the sensation of material demands: No matter the depths of destruction, Palestine, just as Andalusia, will never cease to exist. My emerging archive aims to pick up where Darwish’s ode leaves off—utilizing the after-ending as a vehicle for engaging the tensions embedded in the limitations and possibilities of poetic persistence and the varied material conditions of loss and displacement language may touch, trace, clarify, and yet inevitably, cannot account for alone. [20] This ambivalence is ultimately also embedded in the impossible task of speaking with someone who speaks back to me through the traces of what he left behind. 

As the genocide in Palestine continues, I have found myself looking to Darwish’s life and work as a model of the poetic persistence to resist in the everyday through and with language-work. As many scholars and ongoing projects have shown, consent for regimes of mass bodily violence is partially fabricated in the realm of our everyday speech and/or in the absence of it. [21] And yet, while language-work is essential to cultivating collective visions of possibility, my everyday archive reckons with the ways it also is not enough. Attending to the potentialities Andalusia represents is a project that necessarily transgresses personal and collective acts. The strategic erasure of historic lifeworlds—such as my familial recollections of both Sefarad and Jerusalem—compels those who carry their stories to recall them alongside one another as both differentiated and related neighbors, or, risk their continued weaponization by imperial fields of power. [22] In my ongoing attempts in activating Darwish’s positioning of al-Andalus/Sefarad, I practice asking: How does a present we return through and with the lands that formed the we that was?

In the brief excerpts of my everyday archive dispersed throughout this text, I surface instances of coordinated refusal to the violent impositions of imperial and colonial rule, such as an intercommunal prison hunger strike held by Palestinian political prisoners in 1936, demonstrations organized by members of the Sephardi/Mizrahi Black Panthers and the Palestine Communist Party, and archival materials sourced from related scholarship. These surfaced lineages are distilled alongside my attempts at locating and responding to the imagery embedded in “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” within my everyday life. For me, the acts of scanning and rescanning, printing and reprinting, cutting and collaging, copying and recopying, without arriving at a clear end, is an intimate process of gathering dislocated fragments. Through these ongoing and unstable acts, I do not aim to celebrate nor romanticize the materials gathered, but rather, engage that which they left unresolved as an unstable ground for a shared study of the formation and disintegration of coalitions, the colonial encounters through which they emerged, and the collective actions that we may continue to enact in the present—in the after-ending of al-Andalus/Sefarad. [23]

In the after-ending, we find that many “worlds” have already ended, and yet, here we still are as carriers of their potential: agents of their possible reemergence and/or participants in their continued destruction. The after-ending might begin in language, but it tasks us with material demands: to return that which empire claims as its “ruins.” In the after-ending, Darwish writes, “Soon we will search / in the margins of your history, in distant countries, / for what was once our history.” And I respond: We return with many Andalusias—and all they represent—”on the land” and “in the poem.” [24] This, afterall, is what Darwish exemplifies as the everyday work of a resistance poet—to steal back imperial conceptions of time and wield, in language, the unmaking of the “world order” that they require. 

Image captions and descriptions:

1:
In typed letters on a torn printed page, I ask Mahmoud Darwish a question: “Mahmoud, when you said, / ‘after you, the smell of coffee has no morning,’ / did you mean that we were already / in the ending-after / -ending-after / -ending, / already the ghosts-of-ghosts- / of-disappeared-beloveds, / as if the we of al-andalus were always / also, in the present, always / also, in the simultaneous possible, / of haunting-and / -haunted, / haunting-and / -haunted?” 

My words are gently attached with two strips of blue tape to a printed excerpt of Learsi Links’ Political Prisoners in Palestine: Their Lives and Struggles, published by Palestine Labor Defense in 1936. This text describes an intercommunal prison hunger strike by 55 political prisoners, including members of the Palestine Communist Party, that took place in July 1935. The yellowish typewriter printed page lays diagonally on the scanner bed. The print from the edge of the page fades to gray, leaving the article’s sentences unfinished. The page is framed by a dark gray background on both sides. 

2:
My hand leans against the scanner bed and lifts the corner of a printed image into the palm of my hand. Its corner folds inward and the remaining image lays flat against the glass. Behind, the crooked edges of another pinkish image are placed, surrounded by a black background. The centered image on the page shows a red bouquet that seems as if it emerges from the palm of my hand, my fingers wrapping around the page tightly. It leans to the right toward fragments of a yellowish landscape where silhouetted people gather. This red bouquet of flowers was held up during a gathering of supporters of the Palestinian Communist Party on February, 2, 1990 on the eight anniversary of the re-establishment of the Party. This gathering took place in the village of Silwad. The image I hold is a small fragment of a photograph that is included in the Ziad Yousef Collection of the Palestine Museum Digital Archive and is searchable with the number 0104.01.1236.

The pinkish image behind it is a fragment from a related strike in the city of Nazareth in 1979 organized as part of the activities of the Maki Party—the Communist Party of the occupying power that was established by former members of the first Palestine Communist Party after its disintegration in 1947. This image is also included in the Ziad Yousef Collection of the Palestine Museum Digital Archive and is searchable with the number 0104.01.1236.

To the right of the scan, a typed poem is printed on a hand cut rectangular page. The note reads, “in this brief archive / of daily acts /  I trace attempts at time / (now!) stolen back– / on the land and with a poem / into history / our history.” 

3:
Two images are placed beside each other, with a small gray page with printed text placed in between. The left image shows my hands holding a scan of a bright grayish image against the black of the scanner bed. In the image, an open hand reaches from the left edge of the page toward an arm that reaches from the right. The arm holds a wooden pole in motion. Behind, a grayish brick wall with other wooden poles leaning against it is visible. 

In the right image, my hands push a pile of prints against the glass of a scanner bed. The images are all related, showing details of wooden materials, bolts, a brown ground, and the grayish brick wall. In this image, a bright blue strip of tape covers a portion of a black silhouette of a person in motion. My hands, which appear red in the context of the grayish blue tones near them, peak out from behind the pile in the left and right corners of the scan. 

In between the images, the grayish page reads, “how do we know / the one who writes in and to a world / of everyday theft / is sick–that they’ve been poisoned / by the state / and that the state now (and always) / has a debt that it needs to pay back? / sometimes I try to write a “welcome” letter to the reader / but if you are a state agent / it might end up /  sounding like a threat / hello, hello, welcome! / illness is a weapon and certain debts / can never be unmade.”  

These images are both sourced from Katie Giritlian and my attempts at building a wooden scaffolding structure together last winter. 

4:
My hands hold a collage against the blueish gray of the scanner bed. My left hand crinkles the page slightly into my palm and the right pushes one finger against the back of the page in an attempt to hold it still. This image features a printed and hand-traced photo of Jaffa road in Jerusalem sometime before its destruction in 1948. This image was sourced by Ariella Aisha Azoulay and is included in her book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. Rather than the original photo, this image was created through the author’s tracing of an archival image. My reprinting on a copy machine distorts Azoulay’s marks, in an attempt to cite her act of refusal, rather than the image itself. 

A rectangular portion of the middle of the image has been removed. Within it is an image of a demonstration held by the Mizrahi/Sephardic Black Panthers in Jerusalem sometime in the 70s, included in Ella Shohat’s essay, “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of its Jewish Victims.” At the bottom of the image, over a strip of the white page, an excerpted quote from Azoulay’s text appears, “infiltrators cannot exist anywhere except in the archive and.” To the right of an image, a printed text on a hand cut gray page reads, “searching for proof / and “reliable” stories / accounts (impossibly) sharpened to a point / of transgressions / and meeting places / and rebellions / (horizons to dwell in) / in untouchable histories / in “ruins” / our hands / infringe on and / repel / the archive’s invitation / to act as empires agents.” 

5:
My hands hold an image of a sun setting above a distant body of water against the black of a scanner bed. Beside the scan, a hand cut gray printed page reads as both a poem and description of the image, it says: “I steal back the time of my day / to look for horizons to dwell in / sometimes I can find them from my rooftop, but more often / I look through the glass of a screen / or the glass of a scanner bed / in an attempt to hold the sun /as it sets above a distant body of water. / on the edge of this horizon, as it appears on a pixilated print / shades of purple transition to pink to yellow and grey / and my fingers push against the edges of the page / placing it snug against the glass / as I lift and crinkle it into the crevices of my hands. / here, the horizon leans forward, or do I lean toward it? / manipulating its view / and isolated in between / in the impulse that precedes an end / and a beginning / my arms stretch out ahead of my body / attempting to hold this sun / horizon / still / in protest.” 

Another gray printed page slightly layered beside it continues, “but the sun doesn’t hold / in the sky beyond the sky / it trembles and softens / remaining only with a fragment / of this particular horizon / borrowed from from the corner of a photo / of the sun setting on a Gaza beach in 2019 / when the Great March of Return / was still ongoing and thousands gathered every Friday / even writing signs in english / also facing west / and were met with silence, in perpetuity / as the sun set and rose again / and again / and again.”

This writing includes two text references. In the poem, “On the Pulse of Morning” by Maya Angelou published in 1993, Angelou writes the phrase, “the horizon leans forward.” She recited this poem as the inaugural poet during former president Bill Clinton’s inauguration day. In “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia,” published in 1992 in Al-Quds daily in London, Mahmoud Darwish writes, “There is a sky beyond the sky for me.” This collaged scan borrows and zooms in on a fragment of an original still image titled, “The beach of Gaza,” by Yousef al-Qutob, photographer and journalist at the Palestinian News & Information Agency – WAFA, taken in 2019 and included in the Yousef Qutob Collection of the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive and is searchable with the number 0100.01.0926. 

6:
My fingers are placed over the corner of an image of Katie Giritlian and me attempting to build a wooden scaffolding structure last winter. The page is crooked on the scanner bed and framed by a black background. Our faces are covered with strips of blue tape. I stand on the right side of the image, my left arm holding the upper edge of a wooden pole that extends toward Katie’s right arm, which holds the bottom edge, as her left arm extends toward me. Behind us, scattered wooden poles lay on a brownish gray concrete ground and against a bright grayish brick wall. Shadows of buildings and trees appear. We are wearing coats and a portion of the print drips toward the left. 

kimi malka hanauer is an artist, publisher, and writer based on unceded Lenape Land (Brooklyn, NY). They are a founding collective member of publishing the initiative Press Press, steward of the nomadic education project Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry, and work as an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.