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Articles

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2026): ILN Journal: Indian Literary Narratives

Blockade, Starvation, and Weaponization of Food: Synthesising Bare Life, State of Exception, and Biopolitics through Select Palestinian Poems

Submitted
27 May 2026
Published
2026-06-30

Abstract

This research article examines the synthesising and contrasting repercussions of blockading and weaponizing food in the theoretical light of through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life, Carl Schmitt’s theory of the sovereign decision, and Michel Foucault’s account of biopolitics, with Palestinian poetry as the primary reference. The article argues that hunger in Palestinian literary discourse is not merely a humanitarian consequence of war but a deliberate political strategy employed to regulate, discipline, and control civilian populations. This article examines how Palestinian poetry represents starvation and blockade as instruments of political control, reading these representations. Drawing on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, and Hind Jouda, the study argues that the withholding of food functions simultaneously as a legal, political, and biological act of control, one that reduces civilian life to bare survival while remaining outside ordinary legal accountability. Particular attention is given to how hunger is shown to stultify language and memory, threatening the very capacity for testimony even as the poems themselves manage to give it voice. Comparative readings of Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve and scholarship on Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Vanni situate the Palestinian case within a broader pattern in which sovereign power suspends legal protection under conditions of exception. The article contends that these poems do more than document suffering: they resist the erasure that blockade seeks to impose, affirming what Judith Butler calls the demand that precarious lives be recognized as grievable.

References

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