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Contents
editorial
IMRAAN COOVADIA
Living with sorcerers
ZEINAB SHAATH
The Urgent Call of Palestine
ALLAN BOESAK
“HOW LONG FOR PALESTINE?”
MAKHOSINI MGITYWA
The Crux of the Matter
MALAIKA MAHLATSI
On the genocide in Palestine and the death of academic freedom and democracy in Western universities
BRANKO MARCETIC
Israel’s Gaza War Is One of History’s Worst Crimes Ever
CHRIS HEDGES
American Sadism
ARYAN KAGANOF
On Power and Powerlessness: Genocide in Gaza Through the Lens of Afropessimism and Decay Studies
MICHAEL SFARD
We Israelis Are Part of a Mafia Crime Family. It's Our Job to Fight Against It From Within
Theme Gaza
ZEENAT ADAM
Gaza and the Graveyard of Excuses
MAHMOUD AL SHABRAWI
Writing Between Fear and Survival
GOODENOUGH MASHEGO
Why I can’t condemn October 7
GARTH ERASMUS
Lamentations for GAZA
SALIM VALLY and ROSHAN DADOO
Africa’s strong bonds to Palestine
ZUKISWA WANNER
A Common Humanity
MUHAMMAD OMARUDDIN (DON MATTERA)
A Song for Palestine
TSHEPO MADLINGOZI
Ilizwe Lifile/Nakba: Le-fatshe & Crises of Constitution in (Neo)Settler Colonies
SINDRE BANGSTAD
Palestine, Israel and academic freedom in South Africa
GWEN ANSELL
Resistance music – a mirror reflecting truth; a hammer forging solidarity
FMFP (FREE MUSIC FREE PALESTINE)
Listening as an anti-colonial way of engaging
ATIYYAH KHAN
A movement against silencing: What the genocide in Palestine has taught us about journalism
ASHRAF HENDRICKS
Visual Memoirs of Solidarity with Palestine in Cape Town
ATIYYAH KHAN
GAZA: Where wearing a PRESS vest is a death sentence
VISUAL INTIFADA
NARRATIVE REPAIR
SHARI MALULEKE
A Prayer to the Olive Tree
THANDI GAMEDZE
Jesus of Occupied Palestine
NATHI NGUBANE
MALCOLM X IN GAZA
MARIAM JOOMA ÇARIKCI
The dark side of the rainbow: How Apartheid South Africa and Zionism found comfort in post-94 rhetoric
CRAIG MOKHIBER
The ICJ finds that BDS is not merely a right, but an obligation
ROSHAN DADOO
South African coal fuels a genocide: BOYCOTT GLENCORE NOW
IMĀN ZANELE OMAR
From the ground
DEAN HUTTON
Who would you be under Apartheid?
galleri
SÍONA O’CONNELL
Keys to Nowhere
SAMAR HUSSAINI
The Palette of Tradition and other, earlier works
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Chronology of the Now
DEON MAAS
The Resistance
OLU OGUIBE
A Brief Statement on Art and Genocide
CANDICE BREITZ
8 may 2025 Berlin
ADLI YACUBI
A Moment Is On Its Way
TRACEY ROSE
If Hitler Was A Girl Who Went To Art School (2024-2025)
borborygmus
CHARLES LEONARD
Zeinab Shaath : the famous Teta
THE ALDANO COLLECTIVE
Withold
DIMA ORSHO
Excerpts from Half Moon, a film by Frank Scheffer
GARTH ERASMUS
Where is God?
LOWKEY FEATURING MAI KHALIL
Palestine Will Never Die
CHRIS THURMAN
Intertexts for Gaza (or, Thirteen ways of looking past a genocide)
KEENAN AHRENDS
The Wandering Dancer
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
‘D’ is vi destruction
INSURRECTIONS ENSEMBLE
Let Me Lie To You
RODRIGO KARMY BOLTON
Palestine’s Lessons for the Left: Theses for a Poetics of the Earth
MARYAM ABBASI
Drums, Incense, and the Unseen
frictions
HIBA ABU NADA
Not Just Passing
NICHOLAS MIRZOEFF
The Visible and the Unspeakable (For Mahmoud Khalil)
MPHUTLANE WA BOFELO
Before You Kill Them
ABIGAIL GEORGE
4 Struggle Songs for Palestine
MIKE VAN GRAAN
4 Poems for Gaza
EUGENE SKEEF
To The Demise of War Mongers (a suite for the people of GAZA).
ALLAN KOLSKI HORWITZ
Gaza: two poems
MALIKA LUEEN NDLOVU
At the end of a thread, holding my breath, beading
NGOMA HILL
From the River to the Sea
JESÚS SEPÚLVEDA
Gaza 2024
ARYAN KAGANOF
GAZA (body double)
VONANI BILA
Under Rubble
JACKSON MAC LOWE
Social Significance
FRANK MEINTJIES
5 poems from A Place to night in
DIANA FERRUS
Burdened man
claque
FINN DANIELS-YEOMANS
‘If Cannes did not want to go to Gaza, Gaza had to go to Cannes’: Institutional Censorship at Film Festivals post-October 7.
FRANK MEINTJIES
Abigail George’s SONGS FOR PALESTINE - "struggle poems" in an age of livestreamed genocicde
PHILLIPPA YAA DE VILLIERS
ukuphelezela and Nida Younis’ Two Bodies/Zwei Korper
RUTH MARGALIT
Writing the Nakba in Hebrew
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ons is gevangenes van dit wat ons liefhet: Magmoed Darwiesj gedigte in Afrikaans
HEIN WILLEMSE
Frank Meintjies: a mature poet, intellectually astute with a refined social, political and ecological consciousness
M. SOGA MLANDU
'Tell Them I Am Dead’: Sithembele Isaac Xhegwana’s Dark Lines of History
NIKLAS ZIMMER
Détourning the cut
ekaya
LYNTHIA JULIUS
I believe the children for the future
JENNIFER KESTIS FERGUSON
Nikita
CHERYL DAMON
No Ordinary Rage
SKHUMBUZO PHAKATHI
Don’t forget Phila Ndwandwe
INGRID ORIT HURWITZ
SHATTERED
STEVEN ROBINS
The blindspots of Zionist history and the ‘ancient scripts’ of primordial Jewish victimhood
LIESL JOBSON
Sorrowful Mysteries
herri
Towards a Preliminary Archaeology of herri
off the record
STEPHEN CLINGMAN
The Voices in My Head: Reflections on South Africa, Israel, Palestine, Gaza
ANNI KANAFANI
Ghassan Kanafani
FILMS
by Palestinian Women
STEVEN ROBINS
Re-reading Jabotinsky’s The Iron Wall in the time of genocide in Gaza.
JANNIKE BERGH in conversation with HAIDAR EID
Even Ghosts Weep in Gaza
ASHRAF KAGEE
Three friends in Gaza
AMIRA HASS
"Resist the Normalization of Evil": On Palestine and Journalism
GEORGE KING
Fields, Forests and Fakery: ‘Green Colonialism’ in Palestine
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
The Village Under the Forest
MEIR KAHANE
Jewish Terror: A JEWISH STATE VERSUS WESTERN DEMOCRACY
FRANK ARMSTRONG
Ireland and Palestine: A Crucial Vote Awaits
NIKHIL SINGH
The Siege of Gaza 332 BC
feedback
DENIS EKPO
1 April 2025
DEON-SIMPHIWE SKADE
23 March 2025
LIZ SAVAGE
10 January 2025
CEDRIK FERMONT
10 August 2024
AZSACRA ZARATHUSTRA
6 August 2024
FACEBOOK FEEDBACK
Facebook
PhD
COLE MEINTJIES
Power in Relation to Life and Death: Israel's genocide in Gaza
the selektah
CHRISTINA HAZBOUN
Palestinian Women’s Voices in Music and Song – 2025 version
ATIYYAH KHAN
IQRA!
hotlynx
shopping
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contributors
the back page
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Two Weeks In Palestine
GEORGE STEINER
This is called History
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    #11
  • borborygmus

NATHAN TRANTRAAL

‘D’ is vi destruction

“Patrick Wolfe, argues that settler colonial projects were motivated by what he calls “the logic of elimination.” This meant that the settlers developed the necessary moral justifications and practical means to remove the natives. As Wolfe indicates, at times this logic entailed actual genocide, at other times, ethnic cleansing or an oppressive regime that denied the natives any rights. I would add that there was another logic permeating the logic of elimination: the logic of dehumanization.”

Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

Is soese note wat angepass wôd, vanaf die eeste narie laaste ry. Die hele klas is nou involved. Jy voelit soes een van dai monsters in Tremors wat onnerie aarde wurm.

Wattit is, issie desperate, stifled laughter vanne klas van 48 kinnes. Ek vestaan 12D se dilemma, en ek anvaar et met love en mercy:  Hulle besit die soot apathy wat jy nie kan fake ie. Tienie tyd wat jy graad 12 reach inne ghetto het jy al soe baie violence gesien, dat jy dink life isse movie. Oppe staragge Saragmarrag staan jy oppie stoepie en kyk hoe mense innie pad mekaa se koppe oepstiek en oepslaan met messe, bier borrels, bakstiene of whatever innie pad lê. En jy staan en kyk net virre bietjie entertainment, soes WWE.

Jy’s altyd oppie ytkyk vi iets wat gebee of iets om voo te lag. Wannit is iets om te doen dai dag. Daa is bitte min wat jy nie sal of kan voo laggie. Daa’s niks annes eintlik om te doenie. Ghetto physics mean jy kan in ienagge direction move vi ienagge amount van tyd en jy sal altyd trug opeindig waa jy begin et. Die ghetto isse concentration camp wattie overseers abandon et sône ommie mense te lat wiet hulle’s free nou.  

Maa die issie die ghetto nie. Dié isse wit mens plek innie Kaap — die Holocaust Museum. ’n Ou, mooi gebou met donke maa warm lighting soese Caravaggio painting. Waa elke muur ’n duet van terror en resistance sing. Ôs tour guide isse middle-aged wit vrou.

Die geskiedenis menee het byrie skool al gesê ennit wee repeat innie bus oppad narie museum: “Mense los julle kleurling maniere by die huis vandag. Moenie vir die wit mense wys hoe babaars julle is nie.” Soe, graad 12D wiet hulle is supposed om hulle self te gedra. Maa ‘D’ is vi degenerate. Ennie D klas issie een waa allie drypelinge en math illiterate students opeindig. Is elke dag hi-jinks en adventure.

Is swaa vi mense wat nooit ernstag issie om in stilte te sit. En nou sit ôs oppie vloe en oppie groot screen voo ôs is daa Jewish prisoners in concentration camps wat bodies rond move in krywae. It lyk soes skeletons in striped jumpers wat skeletons begrawe inne groot pit. It voel hyper-real en uncanny. Oppie selle tyd beweeg ammel soes actors in silent movies—soes Charlie Chaplin of Buster Keaton.

Daa’s een of twie meisies wat hyl virrie snapshots vanne genocide. Maa meeste vannie boys dinkie selle ding. Die een wattie krywa stoot lyk soes Brynley Jappies, ’n underfed, anemic laitie in ôs klas. Een vannie veterans van 12D, ’n re-offender, wat elke jaa trugkom, sê had onne sy asem, “Brynley daa’s jou pa,” ennie levee briek. Nou lyk graad 12 D asof hulle overjoyed is deerie site van genocide, wan ammel smile bried, lag sône sound (yt respek), lattie trane loep.     

Ek laggie wan ek is advanced vi my oudedom, ek is depressed soese Coloured ma wat haa kinnes allien grootmaak. Instead sit ek daa en hoep die mense vannie museum vattit ie pesoonlik ie — die motherfuckers lag vi als. Hulle lag as hulle eie mense oek soe vemoor wôd.

It sou maklik wies om te sê die laities is antisemitic. Dai label wôd deesdae soe maklik rondgegooi. Maa jy sal kak vekeed wies. Inne Coloured ghetto is antisemitism nie iets ie. Wan jy kan jou hele liewe deegan sône om ooit ’n Jewish pesoon te meet. Dai’s hoe hermetic ghetto life is. Jou hele wêreld is net wat jy innie ghetto kry. Jews,en fok even swat en wit mense is not a thing in Bishop Lavis. Ôs ken net Coloured mense en pinkster kêk, Islam, New Apostolics, die occasional Catholic, Jehovah’s Witness enne klomp random clusters van Chinese, Somalians en Nigerians.Ôs wassie grootgemaak om Jews te haat ie. ’n Jew vi ôs was ieman innie Bybel. Die ytvekorene volk, according die Bybel. Wat ek dai dag gesien et innie Holocaust Museum, was kinnes wie nie suffering objectively kan sien ie, wan hulle liewe binne innit constantly, elke moment vannie dag. It wassie result van systemic oppression.

Ôs accept violence die way jy die vyl sand accept wat op dai winderagge dae innie hys gewai wôd, quietly mettie minste resistance. Ôs liewens is PG-18 wan ôs wôd grootgemaak sône parental guidance.Ôs parents try nog om hulle childhoods te survive tewyl hulle kinnes grootmaak. In ôs parents wassie seeds van Apartheid geplant, ôs issie fruits.

Maa deesdae as ek an Apartheid dink, dink ek meer an Palestine as South Africa. As Apartheid football was, sou Israel Brazil wies en South Africa England. Ôs might die game invent et, maa vandag is Israel die kings van massacres en systemic oppression. Palestine issie unlucky opponent ennie score is 62,000-1000. Ek tel vanaf 7 October, nie 1948 ie. Annes wôtie nommes te groot vi ieman wie op skool innie D klas was.

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Ek hette diep meegevoel mettie mense van Palestine, wat ironically yt my meegevoel kom met die mense vannie Jewish Holocaust. Na dai dag byrie museum het ek beslyt ek wil die hele storie wiet. Ek willie ignorant wies van mense se suffering ie. En dai het my eventually gebring na Palestine. En ve’al Joe Sacco se graphic novel, Palestine. Innie pictures vannie rubble, die poverty ennie violence het ek my eie hys gesien. Maa net worse in elke way. Baie worse, exaggerated soesie film version van Apartheid. Soes fuckin’ Fast and the Furious 20, waa Vin Diesel oo kinnes en ma’s ry met sy kar. Die mense was nog meer desensitized dee hulle suffering. Nog meer accepting vannie worst wat kan gebee. Ennie wêreld was silent. Nieman wou oo Palestine praatie. En ommit te doen was soes om te sê die aarde is plat. Ammel was bang om labeled te wôd as antisemitic. Maa ek gie fokkol om wat mense van my dinkie. Die history is daa as jy wil wiet wattie waarheid is. Lies Palestine, lies Ilan Pappé, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Miko Peled. Is als daa, plain om te sien. Fok, lies Israel se eie historians. Educate jouself, ek issie hie om jou te educate ie. Ek is meer concerned mettie future van Palestine assie past deesdae.

Is nouees dat Palestine gesien wôd. Noudat it te laat voel. En eendag sal daa sieke ’n Palestinian Holocaust Museum wies.

Maa vi nou kry ek my holocaust footage van Gaza op my phone. Ek scroll deerit. Innie begin wassit swaa, maa ek internalize gou ’n massacre. En nou sit ek somme en iet my lunch tewyl ekkie honge laities kyk wat doodgan van starvation. Ek flick deerie pictures van dooie bodies van ma’s en kinnes asofit ’n Tinder account is. Wan ek is dood van binne en ek sallie resurrected wôtie, die kinnes ennie ma’s is dood en hulle sallie resurrected wôtie. My thoughts is nie innie moment ie. Ek gloe sône hope dat Palestine eendag free sal wies. En ek dink annie dae na liberation. Wat gan remain vannie mense van Gaza, van hulle humanity? Gan hulle future generations oek mense wies wie genocide kan witness en instead van trane lat val, wag virrie punchline?

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