Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

"The only trees in my neighborhood were the ones in the cemetary down the street" (Suheir Hammad 10/31/07)

After which she read a poem about the trees of Palestine, the trees of earth and memory which are destroyed by the wall being built by the IDF and and carefully constructed (and blockaded) roads through many of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Thousands of pines in the northern hills, date palms and olive trees further south, burned or cut to make way for Israeli fortress-communities - much like the oaks and beeches that once covered what is Brooklyn, Suheir Hammad's adopted home. Is the removal of trees always a spatial form of colonization?