Artwork: Emily Jacir, Home, 1998
In 1998 Palestinian artist Emily Jacir did a year-long residency at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and started making work using khubz which is a round leavened flatbread from the Middle Eastern region. Recently she commented, “Can't stop thinking about bread and flour and how famine and starvation are being used as weapons of war…” Food is life, and in Gaza the lack of humanitarian aid, including food, coming in since March is an ongoing crisis. When getting a bag of flour can cost you your life, simply to provide food such as bread for your family and those who depend on you, it’s a horror simply to imagine it, let alone live through.
I wrote the following poem, based on the words of a little boy in Gaza trying to get food for his family:
he was crying
a small boy
not just because
the food he’d got,
the one meal
for his family
that day,
had been stolen
but for the pot
that had been taken
as well, without it
he had no
other means
to carry the food
