Unsettled Earth: Shrinking Language, Bursting Memory

Drawing on lived experience under siege, this reading by Gazan translator and writer Alaa Alqaisi examines how colonial violence restructures time, speech and thought, forcing communication into fragments shaped by urgency, surveillance and dispossession. Words become tools of survival, alerts for danger and records of loss, revealing how occupation extends beyond territory into grammar, memory and the limits of what can be expressed. At the same time, Alqaisi insists on writing as a space of resistance: a refusal of the compressed, administrative and humanitarian vocabularies through which colonial power renders life manageable and expendable. The reading asserts the right to speak beyond emergency, testimony and spectacle. Alongside her own work, Alqaisi brings in the poetry of martyred Gazan poet, novelist and educator Hiba Abou Nada.

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza. She holds an MA in Translation Studies and is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin, School of English. Her work appears in ArabLit, ArabLit Quarterly, and Encounters in Translation, and focuses on literary translation, resistance, and survival.