{"id":28394,"date":"2025-12-09T16:27:48","date_gmt":"2025-12-09T21:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/darajapress.com\/?post_type=product&p=28394"},"modified":"2026-09-22T17:07:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T21:07:01","slug":"lines-of-fire-2nd-edition","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/darajapress.com\/staging\/publication\/lines-of-fire-2nd-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Lines of Fire (2nd Edition)"},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lines of Fire: Recovering the Lost Arsenal of Anti-Colonial Poetry<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Born in Tashkent , forged in clandestine presses, and echoing in today\u2019s streets\u2014this is the recovered front line of a global poetic resistance.<\/p>\n

In 1958, at the Afro-Asian Writers\u2019 Conference in Tashkent, a 90-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois stood before the decolonizing world and declared:\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>\u201cI am an American\u2014I am an African.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em>\u00a0It was a moment of radical, transnational self-definition.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

From that conference emerged a literary movement and its journal,\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>The Call<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em>\u2014a direct line for poets from Algiers to Hanoi, Cairo to Beijing, to speak to one another, bypassing the languages and borders of their colonial masters. Though the movement later fractured under Cold War pressures, its two wings\u2014<\/span><\/span><\/span>The Call<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em>\u00a0and the Soviet-backed\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>Lotus<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/em>\u2014remained united in their stand against Zionism, racism, and empire.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Their poetry, often crafted under threat of torture, exile, and surveillance, became a clandestine weapon. Some of it was passed hand to hand, read aloud in underground meetings, and chanted at mass gatherings from Delhi to Ramallah, Cape Town to Gaza.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Now, for the first time, this vital corpus is restored.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>Lines of Fire<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong>, edited by Tariq Mehmood\u2014former leading defendant in the landmark Bradford 12 case and now professor at the American University of Beirut\u2014gathers these living weapons into a single, incendiary anthology. In an age of resurgent fascism and genocide, these voices speak with renewed, unyielding force: their anguish, rage, love, and hope are as urgent now as the day they were penned.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Why This Book Is Essential:<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n