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“We’re Holding our Ground”: Body Politics, Verbal/Non-Verbal Performance, and Dissent Aesthetics in Rafeef Ziadah’s Performance Poetry

Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian performance poet and human rights activist who uses the power of the spoken word interfused with stage performance in order to mainstream Palestinians’ experiences of occupation, diaspora, and dispossession as much as the daily struggle for survival, steadfastness, and resistance into American and human pop culture. Performance Poetry, as such, has become a platform for social and political dissent where the poet/performer begins her performance with a Palestinian story at the same time that she instructs her audience to “click, clap, or smile” in order to engage with the Palestinian narrative. The paper weaves together performance studies and body politics in order to examine the interplay between the spoken word and storytelling, on the one hand, as well as facial expressions, voice, movements, and audience engagement as integral to the performed art, on the other. The paper also examines the negotiation between art and politics as well as the aesthetic value of performance poetry and its socio-political implications on the other through different approaches to Aesthetics theory with particular reference to R.G. Collingwood and Marshall McLuhan. Moreover, it explores the social, political, and lived aspects of aesthetics that the performance poet attempts to illuminate by drawing attention to the networks of solidarity within and without the Palestinian community.