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    As a bookish schoolchild in Galilee, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was invited to compose, and read in public, a poem marking Israel’s national day He wrote from his own experience, reflecting on the plight of Arabs forced to celebrate the independence of their oppressor The following day, he was summoned to the office of the Israeli military governor The guileless young man was shocked to be upbraided: ‘As far as I was concerned, what I wrote and read was what I felt to be the truth I had no idea that speaking out was dangerous’   In these days of televised senate hearings, shock election results and constitutional disarray it can feel difficult, even irresponsible, to reflect on subjects other than politics Yet, as Darwish learned, speaking about the circumstances of everyday life can be a meaningful form of resistance Mounira Al Solh, interviewed in these pages, has adopted the poet’s defence of this ‘right to be frivolous’ as the title for a five- year-long project Her written and sketched portraits of refugees from the crises in Syria and the Middle East celebrate the personal and anecdotal, taking as a starting point the relationship between artist and sitter Rather than treating these men and women as symbols, to be pitied or deplored according to political affiliation, Al Solh documents the experiences – traumatic and mundane – that have shaped them   That tendency to reduce individuals to statistics is apparent in the immigration detention centres that have sprung up around the United Kingdom, the bricks-and- mortar expressions of a xenophobia that we can only hope is on the wane Through the testimony of an ex-inmate, Felix Bazalgette considers state systems of control, dehumanisation, and imprisonment without trial J S Tennant, meanwhile, describes life in Havana as Cuba adjusts to the normalisation of relations with the United States, the death of Fidel Castro and the influx of foreign investment He witnesses the changes brought to the country by consumer goods and Facebook accounts, and buried histories now coming to light The poems of Nisha Ramayya and Heather Phillipson reclaim the body as