Political Collage, Poetic Coexistence: Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure

This chapter discusses how a contemporary Canadian-Jewish poet engages with the politics of Israel-Palestine through a practice of linguistic collage. In writing of the politics of occupation in Neighbour Procedure (2010), Rachel Zolf used ‘the collage method to engender a deliberate distancing effect’ (Zolf, n.d.). The chapter considers how collage is not only an aesthetic strategy, but also a political mode. What might appear to be a strategy of “textualisation”, addressing the Israeli and Palestinian conflict by recombining other people’s words, actually does more than simply string together words into new groupings, but brings about encounters between groups and people. Collage produces a different relationship between “theory” and “poetry”, with continental philosophy existing as one discourse among others that has no necessary priority over the other parts of the text. This strategy also uses the space of the page for other encounters to take place. In particular, beyond Zolf’s engagement with Canadian and Middle Eastern politics, and through the way in which her practice encounters that of Judith Butler, I show how this practice forms connections with a queer Jewish North American community that both sustains and complicates her political critique.