Umbilical Discord

Winner, 2024 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize

At its core, Rawand Mustafa’s Umbilical Discord is an impossible attempt. Ambitious in scope, it strives to trace the billion-branched reach of the Palestinian context within a fixed yet flowing form--columnar, helical, intertwining, tense, intense. Incorporating testimonies by elder Palestinian women who survived the Nakba, or Palestinian Catastrophe of 1948, Mustafa re-presents the ongoing shockwaves from this historical upheaval by interlacing witnesses’ stories with related recollections from her own family history. The overlapping accounts from Palestinian women that Mustafa has painstakingly translated or gathered from family members recall moments of supreme perseverance in the face of unimaginable violence, separation, and loss, while weaving together past and present, collective and individual, Arabic and English, memory and imagination, homeland and host country. As Trish Salah observes in the foreword for Umbilical Discord, ＂these are poems of yearning and of being, both in spite of and fractured by an impossible history. [. . .] Mustafa offers resistant traces of the geographies and names dis/re-membered in [. . .] efforts to erase the material architecture and cultural memory of Arab life in Palestine. What must be traversed in order to come to tell a history? As Mustafa writes in ’dis cord, ’ her opening poem, [. . .] ’I attempt / my story / on a lost / foundation.’ ＂

Rawand Mustafa is a Palestinian Syrian writer who grew up in Canada and now lives in the United States. She received her MA in English and creative writing from the University of Windsor. Mustafa draws inspiration from social justice causes and is particularly impassioned by the struggles and resilience of Palestinians living under occupation or in exile.