ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Suheir Hammad's First Writing Since, a searing poem that arguably provides one of the first Arab American women's literary responses to the 9/11 events. It aims to show how its author enacts and performs a vision of solidarity that neither negates nor reifies differences. It also examines how Hammad, as a Palestinian American from a Muslim family, a poet, performer, and writer-activist, presents a transformative politics of solidarity that transcends national borders, enacts transnational connections, and resists racism in a highly stratified post-9/11 world. But it is here that she shapes her deeply transnational method of feminist solidarity. In her critique of Butler's work on mourning and violence after 9/11, Sunera Thobani argues that Butler universalizes white pain and suffering by decontextualizing differences between those who inflict violence and those who experience it. Beyond this, it reminds us of the work that is involved in being in solidarity with those we imagine as Others.
