Rafeef ziadah biography of barack
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Women's Lives: Rafeef Ziadah – teaching life with the spoken word
Sometimes anger provokes truth: bare, free, not to be stifled or evaded. Sometimes anger, indignation, despair, full blown love of the life of one’s people, one’s own land and planet, can bring fierce flower to the poet’s heart. Then we are blessed with passionate words of resistance that can become the foundation of prophecy. A change for which there is no turning back. Such is the case of this poet." - Alice Walker
Rafeef Ziadah is one of the most powerful, compelling and passionate women performance poets of our time. Her poems 'We Teach Life Sir' and 'Shades of Anger' went viral and became internet sensations within days of being released on YouTube. With wit and precision, her words touch a chord of honesty and beauty that transcends cultural barrier and entrenched beliefs.
Rafeef was born in Lebanon, a Palestinian refugee without official papers or a passport and with a dream of a homeland free of the d
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Pledge under a tree
We Teach Life
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre.
Today, my body was a TV’d massacre that had to fit into
sound-bites and word limits.
Today, my body was a TV’d massaker that had to passform into
sound-bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to
counter measured response.
And inom perfected my English and I learned my UN
resolutions.
But still, he asked me, Ms. Ziadah, don’t you think that
everything would be resolved if you would just stop
teaching so much hatred to your children?
I look inside of me for strength to be patient but patience is
not at the tip of my tongue as the bombs drop over Gaza.
Patience has just escaped me.
We teach life, sir.
Rafeef, remember to smile.
We teach life, sir.
We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last
sky.
We teach life after they have built their settlements and
apartheid walls, after the last skies.
We teach life, sir.
These words from a poem bygd Palestinian-Canadi
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Rafeef Ziadah: 'What is the threshold of Palestinian deaths before a cultural boycott is respected?'
He was killed in an Israeli airstrike, alongside his brother, sister, nieces and a nephew, less than a month later.
For London-based poet Rafeef Ziadah, finding her voice to pay tribute to her lost peer will be a struggle as the death toll continues to mount in Gaza, but she is preparing for a tour of Ireland called ‘Let It Be a Tale’, the final line of Alareer’s poem.
“It’s difficult to even speak about,” Ziadah says, her voice cracking with emotion over the phone. “It’s hard to think about the good friends and amazing colleagues who are no longer with us.
“I am trying to gather all my strength to be on stage, but I must be honest, and tell people that it is really difficult for Palestinians right now, and it´s not easy to speak up and do poetry, but it’s what we have to do.”
For Ziadah, whose own move into performance and poetry came in her mid-twenties after she suffered a