The imperative to “BE TUNNEL” stays with me, long after putting down Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s debut collection of poems, TERROR COUNTER. I re-read the book again and again. I start to carry it around. The poem, Fargo writes, “is a space to rehearse for the future.” Within these poems are a set of instructions for being human as praxis and for the futures that are made possible by living outside colonial imaginaries. In the unnaming. In the unknowningness. Within these poems is a promise and so, I hold them close.

“I believe in tunneling / underneath words” Tbakhi writes in the poem “Incantation,” and that’s precisely what TERROR COUNTER does: tunnels through language. Throughout the book, Tbakhi engages with imperialist texts—namely laws—not to expose the genocidal logics therein but to forge a pathway in the decomposition of their words. Each of the four sections—IMPERIAL POETICS LTD, GAZAN TUNNELS, PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM, and RITHA’ AL NAFS (all bracketed by poems entitled “Terror Counter”)—decompose settler narratives such that new meaning bursts forth.

I say “decompose” because soil is ever-present, activating these poems much like the dirt and dust which play a central role in Tbakhi’s performances. The Gazan Tunnels, his original visual form, even looks like earth. Soil horizons that remind me of a friend’s Palestinian seed-saving project. Tbakhi’s decolonial poesis shows us that the liberation of Palestine, indeed our collective liberation, necessitates both the end of the world and an after, realized here through tunneling—like seeds, like political prisoners—beyond the wreckage of coloniality. If there’s one thing I want you to take-away from my conversation with Tbakhi about his forthcoming book, it’s this: “BE TUNNEL”. Be tunnel against the world. “Fugitives against the text.”

TK: As I was thinking about what I would want readers to take-away from this interview, “tunneling” kept coming to mind. I feel like you wrote the essay, “Notes on Craft,” and then showed us how to betray craft in TERROR COUNTER and in particular, through what you call “the language of tunnels.” How does the language of tunnels engage with the language of imperial settler states and also with other forms?

FNT: It’s interesting that you situate the book in relation to my essay “Notes on Craft” because all of the poems in this book were written long before I arrived at the language in that essay.

There’s one very specific answer to the first part of your question, which is the visual form in the book: the Gazan Tunnel. I was thinking about inventing a poetic form, which I think for a lot of people is a little more exciting than it generally is for me. I dislike form in the poetic sense. It has never felt like it really gave me much except that sometimes it’s nice to have rules so that you can break them.

I was thinking about some of the ways that form dictates an approach to writing, an approach to text, and I was wondering if that could be a space for creating political commitment in the act of writing. If a form was focused not on things like meter or rhyme or prosody, but on political commitment. There’s something about the dictatorial nature of form that felt exciting to me.

As I made these poems, I created parameters—I would find an imperialist text and create an image of it or a set of shapes with it, and treat it as a material to be tunneled through, a material to be carved through. The idea I wanted to bring was that the Gazan Tunnel, as a form, is an excavation through an imperialist settler text that is structuring our lives. It’s an act of working through that text and creating something else.

The second part of your question touches on the other parameter of the form—the imperialist text offers a background, or material, or obstacle through which modes of relation, modes of indigenous resistance, modes of collective struggle, break through or navigate.. The tension between those two things creates the form. There’s no Gazan Tunnel without the tunnel and without the soil.

My relationship to the literary ecosystem in the United States, and in the Western world at large, is as a space of hostility, brutality, and hierarchy. It’s a space of money. The totality of language—the structures and relationships that create language and are created by language—exists as this wide network in which Palestinian writing, Palestinian interiority, Palestinian thought and expression and struggle are targeted and suppressed.

For me, approaching the text and language that exists as a kind of structuring condition in English is about how I can cut through it, how I sneak through it. Tunnels entail a kind of fugitive relationship. They’re seen and not seen. The tunnel to me is a form of both writing poetry and existing as a poet in a way that feels useful. I would like to be under the surface, to pop up in unexpected places, to get my hands dirty.

TK: I got excited when you said “soil,” because I’ve been thinking about organic forms like dirt, dust, and soil in relation to the Gazan Tunnels—and the Freedom Tunnel. Can you elaborate on these other ecologies vis-a-vis tunneling?

FNT: I really love dirt. Actually, dirt is something I work with a lot in my performance and installation work. There is a kind of collectivity to it.

There’s a performance piece that I made years ago that I’ve performed occasionally since then, which is staged around one ton of dirt. I start that performance buried underneath the dirt and I’m there usually for like half an hour as people trickle in. The experience and physicality of being buried inside of dirt is also a kind of tunneling, a kind of static tunneling.

Dirt compacts when it is close to itself. It’s made ultimately of these tiny, tiny, tiny pieces that cling to one another, that can get compressed, that can get packed and tamped down. In this more metaphorical sense, perhaps I learned the strength of a collective from dirt. Individually, we blow away in the wind. Individually we get wiped off of a nice clean piece of cloth. But when there are larger formations of us, then dirt can suffocate somebody. Dirt can be a dam, can be an embankment. I’m thinking a little bit about—

TK: Dust?

FNT: Dust, yes. Dust and dirt are looked down upon. They’re not clean. I like that about them. I like the way that they spread and can take up space and stick around even when you think that you’ve gotten rid of them. There are lessons in that.

Palestinian resistance fighters and communities have literally made a way out of no way in order to get food, in order to have some semblance of freedom of movement. To do that, to return to the dirt as a place to move, as a place through which to resist, a site of constructing architecturally what resistance can look like, is to me, astonishingly beautiful. It’s the greatest sense of possibility. I think about the prisoners who escaped from Gilboa Prison by tunneling out with a spoon. One of them said, we did this to demonstrate that the occupation is an illusion of dust.

TK: Yaqoub Mahmoud Qadri, one of the escaped prisoners, said, “We do not care what the sentence is. The important thing is that we made the impossible possible…”.

FNT: Yes, to make a way out of no way. This is an infrastructure of how to move, how to survive—an example of what freedom might look like that is intimately connected to spiritual, communal, and ancestral relationships with land. It is also the literal act of getting through the dirt from one place to somewhere else.

I wanted to honor the Gazan Tunnels on the page—to not hedge my bets or say some bullshit about resistance, but to say this is a beautiful and life-affirming act of survival. That is the thing that all of my poems aspire to touch a piece of. 

TK: In Treatise on the Whole-World, Édouard Glissant writes: “I reclaim for all the right to opacity, which is not confinement.” Opacity isn’t defined by an effort to prove one’s humanity to the colonizer; it ditches the state as a paradigm for liberation, redress, rights…I hear you in conversation with Glissant when you write about illegibility. Can we escape closure—on multiple scales, like the sentence, the law—by remaining illegible?

FNT: I wonder if it’s worth beginning with poetry as a space to think about this question. I think a lot about the work that a poetic economy does to enact the kind of closure you’re talking about. The kinds of things that the literary market wants us to be are discrete. They’re bounded. They’re positions which we are meant to stay inside of. We’re meant to be good literary citizens.

Within that structure, there is a way that the “right to opacity” gets complicated. It becomes blurry in that there is a kind of opacity that is demanded by the market. There are things you shouldn’t say in a poem. This kind of opacity or ambiguity, which is specifically nonpolitical or apolitical ambiguity, is rewarded by the market.

Some of what I’m doing in the book is acting against that opacity and asking, “What can I include as a direct statement within the form of a poem that stakes political and ideological claims and is indigestible for the market?” There are things we can talk about because this is a book that is being published, but if I were truly committed to the project of writing things that cannot exist within the literary ecosystem, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.

What’s great about the idea of a right to opacity is that it is not a right you have to exercise all the time. The rest of the equation is: unintelligible, opaque, illegible to whom? In terms of writing and expression, I don’t want to explain anything to someone who doesn’t already know. That gives me permission to not have to demonstrate humanity, make claims to humanity, add context, add history.

That feels a little like a tunnel and it makes me think about Palestinian women utilizing tatreez as a way of sending messages during the Intifadas when communication was curtailed or using traditional songs as a way of literally giving coded messages to resistance fighters hiding in the mountains. There’s this legacy of hiding what we really want to say inside of a more conventional form, inside of a nice poem that’s included in a book that’s for sale…I have said before that the nice thing about poetry is that people don’t really take it seriously. And so, it can be a good place to smuggle things inside of.

TK: What are some things that you’re smuggling through this collection?

FNT: Well, I don’t know if speaking them aloud would destroy the containers. I don’t know if it would disrupt the supply chain of my smuggling.

TK: I re-read Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip while reading TERROR COUNTER. Both you and Philip engage with legal text and break its language apart in a way that makes the “rational” discourse of law totally incomprehensible. I’m curious about how the radical fragmentation of language gives rise to an altered space, like a tunnel, in which something else can happen.

FNT: The answer to this question changes depending on the section of the book, each has a different relationship to fragmentation.

The first section, which is called “IMPERIAL POETICS LTD,” feels very, very constrained. If fragmentation occurs, it’s because the space through which to move is really, really tight. That section is about the imperial economics of the literary ecosystem and what it does to our writing and our ability to think and move. The rest of the book is trying to get out of that space.

I didn’t realize this until you brought me here with this question, but part of the rest of the book’s movement is about taking up space, moving across and through the page in wildly different ways. The work of the tunnel poems is to create extremely different relationships between text, image, and page. This model of tunneling becomes a way of understanding how to write and not be crushed. To go through the tunnels is a way of getting to the openness and the insistence of the futurism section, which is all caps. That section moves wildly. It feels like freedom on the page. In working with a legal text, I cannot wield mechanisms of power in the same way that a court can. What I can do is reintroduce the things that are flattened, erased, or obscured.

 TK: What, then, is the role of futurism?

FNT: Sometimes it’s nice to know what’s on the other side of the tunnel. That’s the work the “PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM!” section is trying to do. It’s asking, can we have a place towards which we’re moving?

TK: I’m reminded of the introduction to the anthology Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, in which the co-editors state: “we are writing from the event horizon of another world.”

FNT: George Abraham and Noor Hindi’s phrase encapsulates why I was drawn to writing in this form. If we are to imagine a truly liberated Palestine, then it necessitates the destruction of the world. The world as we know it—which to me is this set of structures, of nation states, economic circulation, military jets—has been dismantled. Because until that moment, none of us are free. And so, if there’s a world where Palestine has a state with an army and a government, that will not, to me, be a liberated Palestine.

The models of how Palestinians survive under the most brutal conditions imaginable also models what it will look like when we live in a world that is not this world. The levels of care, stubbornness, resilience, and resourcefulness that Palestinians have managed to eke out is a model for the end of the world. Our future imaginings have to be powerful enough to reveal how deeply embedded we all are in this trajectory.

We can’t see what’s on the horizon right now, in this moment, because of the way we’re moving through the dailiness of oppression. We have this vague sense of what we want…but I just have to pay rent this month. I just have to keep someone I love from being targeted by the state. We’re tunneling through this dailiness, and we need to take a moment and imagine collectively: This is why we’re doing that. This is what we’re trying to get to by clawing our way through the shit that we live in each day.

Sometimes I think that this act of imagining a kind of utopian future is just bullshit. But that forces me to ask: How do I get this feeling to pull me into the future? As we’re thinking about imagining a future as a way of bringing us together, we have to also make the thing we’re moving towards worth it. This forces me back into understanding what it actually means when we gather in the street and say “Free Palestine.”

TK: Part of what I’m hearing you say is that world-building necessitates world-upending, which brings me back to the (im)possibilities of language. To tunnel towards an exit from empire—through language, through dirt—requires that we understand how the coloniality of form, craft, grammar, is tied to colonial rule.

FNT: When we think about the ways that language is structured by the colonial world, then our working with language can only do so much to combat the essential nature that is layered onto language. The word “emergency” cannot mean anything else except the ways it has been utilized to institute military rule against marginalized and colonized populations. I cannot recuperate these words until the things that make them what they are, are gone.

The last thing that I want to say is about what we can learn from tunnels: they weaken the foundations of things. Digging through something is to make it shakier. We might do that with language, or through language toward something else. If poetry is anything, it might be a way of acting like a termite and moving through the foundations of this colonial language we live inside of.