Silently, Witnessing
Silently, Witnessing
2/3/25
I. شقائق النعمان (poppy anemone)
you must be the first, and how else? it is of blood. I will never
confuse you with the Pheasant’s Eye, and won’t you always
blossom, earlier, regardless? before the propellers of spring
can reach your plum-dark seeds. the grasses ceasing to sound
simply of themselves any longer––some watery gray noise soft
and distant––the cautious child peeking faceless from a corner.
II. البري الطرمس (blue lupine)
in the expectancy of the doorway. always these absent voices
in halves, thirds, or glades with shadow. aren’t you the quilt
over the body of the mountains? held in streams of tall violet
like towers––or even growing in the false towers? blue trance
over the Al-Quds, blue trance over the Northern Valley, blue
trance over the silence of the sixteen millimeter. the trespass.
III. بخور مريم (cyclamen)
small and through the bricks. when faced with the crisp fabric
of white edges, not anticipating the uncomplaining roundness
of the tuber beneath the earth. fishermen casting crushed hand-
fuls, powdery maps on the surface of the brook, maps bringing
fish also into the blue trance, becoming hollow before they rise
to the glass of the surface, you too plucked from the wet mirror.
IV. البابونج (chamomile)
a stereograph which unwinds the hill. like two into one. speaking
“recovered” as a term for losing rather than finding, and couldn’t
you tell where those flashes of yellow were, even in the colorless
earth of the negative? picked every eight or nine days, i am told.
what patience to count the suns which fall over thousands, stolen
from parades with the swiftness of eight or nine becoming always.
V. دم المسي (everlasting sun-gold)
somehow the deepest hue is not the illuminated; whipped endless
by wind over the bay. there is nothing romantic about everlasting;
that remembrance of starting and ending with the same color red,
convincing a little blossom that it represents something, while you
lean down and whisper a prayer, so many that everything becomes
language, to the bone-white canopies, a memory hushed by the lens.
After Theo Panagopoulos, “The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing” (2024)
Author’s Note:
I watched The Flowers Stand Silently as one of the selected features in the 2025 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Award Winner Program, finding it to be a powerfully haunting means of reclaiming the environmental archive of a place dispossessed by colonial and militial violence. The film speaks with a convicted awareness about its origin as found footage–– the acknowledgement that the existence of the original video itself is a testament to the entitlement of occupational forces in Palestine. The wildflowers, which act as spectators in the ongoing history of oppression, are romanticized and preserved as a sort of token by the camera, which seemingly aims to isolate a portrait of the land from its stewards and inhabitants. The Flowers Stand Silently is––in a way––an approach at rejoining the two; the repetitions of video clips and use of editing as actions of defiance against the camera’s original priorities. Here, we are able to confront our distance from a history obscured: weighing the idyllic emptiness of the landscape against our contemporary knowledge of cruelty.
I was inspired greatly by Panagopoulos’ ability to communicate about violence in such an indirect capacity: we feel the heaviness of absences and therefore can infer the presences, all marked by ruminations about one’s own connectedness with their heritage. The sound design equally relies on negative space––the ambience unsettling and distant so as to challenge the tonality of the archival footage through juxtaposition. For this piece, I researched Palestinian wildflowers and native plants, selecting one to be the focal point of each stanza. I aimed to the explore cultural, geographic, or biological significance of each species through abstract image and a key relation to the position of the photographer–– a sort of bystander who believes themself to be an archivist.
My intentions are not to replicate, beautify, nor insert myself beside this film whatsoever–– I encourage that you watch, should it become available to stream any time soon. I simply wanted to explore the profound dialogue of erasure presented by this piece of art within a new medium, bringing awareness to the ignorance which has surrounded and continues to surround the history of violence against Palestine even today. My gratitude cannot be expressed enough to everybody involved in the creation of the film.
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