Like a Bag Trying to Empty

Author: Kaleem Hawa

Publisher: Wendy's Subway (2024)

In April 2024, the Palestinian prisoner and political intellectual Walid Daqqa was killed by the Zionist regime after thirty-eight years in prison. In a sprawling essay about Daqqa's life and writings, the Palestinian writer and organizer Kaleem Hawa theorizes elements of the Palestinian captives’ movement, turning to prisoner exchanges and hunger strikes, the psychoanalytic dimensions of imprisonment, and temporal theories of the prison. Considering the ethnically cleansed town of al-Majdal and Asqalan prison, which was established there as its fulcrum, the essay traces the story of the land and struggle, with Daqqa coming in and out of focus at critical moments in Palestine’s history.