[Background image above depicts an Israeli strike on the Islamic University of Gaza on December 2, 2023, killing physics professor physics professor Sufyan Tayeh. Photo retrieved from the Andolu Agency.]

**UPDATE The link to take immediate action has been corrected at the bottom of this caption **

On September 18, 2025, the University of Minnesota’s Office of the Vice Provost and the Senate Faculty Consultative Committee will host PEN America to lead a symposium called A Campus for All: Campus Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and the Current Challenges to Higher Education. The decision to hold such a forum led by PEN America, which has a long track record of suppressing Palestinian voices and critiques of the state of Israel, is hypocritical. It disregards the coalitional pressure campaign led by Writers Against the War on Gaza to hold PEN American accountable for its actions, which include failing to meaningfully address Israel’s genocide on Gaza, normalizing Israel’s colonization of Palestine, suppressing Palestinian voices, promoting Islamophobia, and clamping down on the free speech of its own staff members. Thanks to the campaign, the organization has suffered damage recently, with its major Jean Stein award having to be canceled two years in a row because the nominated authors have withdrawn their books from consideration. The university’s invitation of PEN America while it bypasses the many qualified experts on free speech, academic freedom signals that the university is not actually interested in protecting free speech on campus.

Join the campaign to cancel this event, led by Educators for Justice in Palestine, of which Mizna is a member. The full email text is below. Please revise as you see fit.

** Follow this link to send an email to the Vice Provost, Senate Faculty Consultative Committee, the university’s president, and PEN America. If your browser does not support the Mailto app, send the message to the following addresses: abrah042@umn.edu, trj@umn.edu, phleo@umn.edu, mbodie@umn.edu, borrello@umn.edu, brown013@umn.edu, jenng@morris.umn.edu, hadi0001@umn.edu, rkrebs@umn.edu, kmetzger@r.umn.edu, pahwa007@umn.edu, redish@umn.edu, subree@umn.edu, vpfaa@umn.edu, provost@umn.edu, upres@umn.edu, info@pen.org, umnejp@gmail.com

The full email text is below. Please revise as you see fit.

Dear Office of the Vice Provost and Senate Faculty Consultative Committee (FCC):

Given PEN America’s well-known track record of reluctance to call out the ongoing genocide in Gaza and to fully support Palestinian writers and artists, I am surprised to see the FCC and Vice Provost’s office sponsor PEN to host an event on academic freedom and free expression. 

PEN currently has little to no credibility with many writers, precisely for its woefully insufficient response to the ongoing genocide and scholasticide Israel is committing in Gaza. Following PEN’s violent ejection of Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar from an event in 2024, thousands expressed criticism of PEN and demanded it take steps to stand for Palestinians. Numerous writers, including many affiliated with the University of Minnesota, have participated in what is a widespread and longstanding boycott, still ongoing, of PEN events, awards, and other opportunities. Nor is PEN considered an expert or standards body when it comes to the concept of academic freedom.

PEN America had no qualms condemning Russia’s assault on Ukraine, referring to the ongoing conflict there as “an assault on free expression and human rights, an effort to destroy Ukrainian culture, and poses an imminent threat to the country’s writers, artists, and journalists.” Its reluctance to forthrightly call out these same injustices executed on a genocidal scale in Gaza suggests the organization is tainted with structural racism and Islamophobia.

And yet, UMN welcomes PEN America with open arms, suggesting yet again that the administration echoes PEN’s callous indifference to the University community’s Palestinian, SWANA, and Muslim members and their allies.

It’s especially shocking that this event is organized as a University response to the improper unhiring of Raz Segal, a well-known expert in genocide studies. Violating the normal hiring process and faculty vetting in departments and colleges, the President’s Office barred Segal’s hire as Director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies over political objections to Segal’s recognition that Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza is genocidal. His stance is not a minority or even, at this point, a controversial scholarly position—for example, it is shared by the International Association of Genocide Studies. 

It is concering that members of FCC and the Provost’s office, themselves academics, dismiss concerns raised by multiple scholars and scholarly associations about the politically-motivated unhiring of a genocide studies expert, and attempt to rectify a clear violation of academic freedom and shared governance by organizing an “academic freedom forum” led by an organization criticized by its own membership for silence on genocide.

I ask that you cancel this event and instead allow real conversations about academic freedom and the freedom to speak about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The post Join the Call to Cancel PEN America at University of Minnesota appeared first on Mizna.

trans.  Huda Fakhreddine

In Beirut this July. I wake up, as we all do, to images of starving Palestinians—humiliated, hunted down, spectated, documented, and yet abandoned every minute to the monstrosity and performativity of a complicit world. In Beirut, a city holding its breath, anticipating something to descend upon it—nothing good—Gaza is always on my mind.

A message on my phone jolts me from the all-encompassing horror to a more pointed one.” Fady Joudah writes to me in Arabic: “It’s unbearable that we all know a silence will soon descend on Gaza when hunger takes hold of them—the voices whose words we follow and wait for every hour.”

I panic.

I think of friends in Gaza—but also of many others I don’t know but follow obsessively on social media, checking their pages every few hours as if feeling for the pulse of an ailing loved one. I think of Anas al-Sharif, whose body has grown thinner and frailer before our eyes as he documents two years of genocide. I think of Nima Hasan, whom I only began following a few months ago, awed by her ability to speak from the darkest depths with clarity, force, and, at times, a biting humor that pins me in place. Everything else outside Nima’s voice shrinks into nothing but a guilty distraction from Gaza.

The next day, Joudah writes again. He shares a poem Nima had sent him that morning—a poem she had just written. “I love you is enough,” she says. The complete sentence, housed in a single Arabic word, أحبّك, suffices when the world closes in and there is no room for longer declarations, for the leisure of language and its constructions. “I love you” is enough to resist with, to fight with, to live with for a moment—and perhaps to survive. I read it once, then twice.

أحبّك
العبارات الطويلة تحتاج جدراناً ومخيماً 
وصبية لها جديلة من قمح
تحمل ملعقة سكر بين أناملها
مثل غيمة ملونة
أو موسماً ينمو فيه قصب السكر.

It feels like an impossible poem for Nima to have written in this moment. But then again, a real poem is never only of the moment. A real poem defeats time, every time. And here, Nima writes a poem that time will have to accommodate, will have to make room for—whether there are walls to write on or not.

On August 1st, a young man arrived at Odeh Hospital in Gaza—a martyr. In his pocket, the medical staff found a crumpled napkin with the words “I love you so much” written in English. He must have held onto it for a long time.

Her name was likely Hiba. She signed the message: “from the one who loves you, Habboush.” She had written it first in black ink, then traced it in red. They must have had time—perhaps sitting in a café by the sea, unhurried. There was time. She took her time. In the corner, she drew a heart, colored it in, pierced it with an arrow. She gave the arrow a head and a tail, and at either end she wrote two initials: A and H. A small, ordinary miracle—this love. She had no idea that death, with its blunt hand, would reveal her small secret and turn it into myth. “I love you so much,” she confessed, playfully. She didn’t know he would carry her love all the way to the end—grasping it in his pocket at the edge of time.

Gaza lives and traces for the rest of us paths to survival. When the world collapses and language fails, as it does every minute now, Gaza reminds us that between two lovers, between a mother and her child, a girl and the house she longs for, a boy and the orange grove where he once ran, a man and his beloved, a people and their homeland—against time and its monsters—I love you is enough.

Nima Hasan is a Palestinian poet surviving genocide in Gaza, insisting on poetry that overcomes the most horrific timelines. She is a living Palestinian poet in every sense. Her voice and her language shame and expose the politics of necromancy that pass as solidarity, a necromancy that requires a compromised Palestinian voice or a broken Palestinian body to hold up. Nima’s poetry uncompromisingly resists and exposes that hypocrisy. It is an example of “Palestine in Arabic” that Joudah tells us will liberate itself and us in its course. Her writings lay bare our failures and the many small deaths we die each day before the enormity of life, or what remains of it, in Gaza.

—Huda Fakhreddine, translator

“I love you—
Force the city to hear it out loud.”

—Nima Hasan (trans. Huda Fakhreddine)

Old Song

by Nima Hasan

(translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine)

“I love you” is enough.
A longer phrase requires sprawling walls, refugee camps,
and a girl with braids long as wheat fields,
a candy swirl the color of a rainbow cloud
between her fingers.

A longer phrase requires a season
when sugarcane grows.
“I love you” is enough,
so write it then,
on a large piece of cloth,
to sustain the mosque-goers,
those servants of the Merciful,
and the peddlers of sweetened drinks.
“I love you” will become a litany
for the ruined street.
All will recite it:
the loose tobacco seller,
the flour thief,
and those who own
a loaf of bread,
an empty bullet,
and a donkey with a broken cart.

I will also provide you with another list—
the names of those who were killed,
those who left the city without “I love you,”
those who breathed through stuffed holes,
longed for a trace of perfume
in a smuggled bottle.
See there, the checkpoints are opening their arms.
I love you—
say it again
like a rebel
or a soldier
who misread the map.

Mothers are searching for henna,
for the Zawiya market,
for the t̩asht of dough in the darkness of tents.
I love you—
say it again.
Give an old song
a chance to explain itself.
A white strand of hair
will light your path.
A lantern,
a sprig of basil,
and a country
that walks alone
without losing its way
will then be yours.

I love you—
Force the city to hear it out loud.
Doesn’t the tribal code grant men a minaret?
Then raise your voice to the greater one,
before sin falls and the last leaf drops.
Shadows betray their trees,
their heads bare,
their necks a guide for the hungry.
This fear—burn it.

And squeeze the mothers’ breasts,
mix their milk with the fig’s.
Let the child grow wild and strong.
Let him collect his baby teeth
behind pursed lips
and swallow the tumbling words,
before he speaks them
in a fit of tears.
I love you—
until the child cries himself to sleep.

Throw your instincts wide open.
Summon the notary
before he swears the oath,
and leave all your inheritance
to a man who waged a war
he had nothing to do with,
a man who called out across the land:
“I love you,”
and then set all the gardens ablaze

أغنية قديمة

العبارات الطويلة تحتاج جدراناً ومخيماً 
وصبية لها جديلة من قمح
تحمل ملعقة سكر بين أناملها
مثل غيمة ملونة
أو موسماً ينمو فيه قصب السكر.
ستكتبها إذن
على قطعة قماش كبيرة 
ليكتفي بها رواد المساجد
وعباد الرحمن
وبائع الشراب المحلى.
ستصبح أذكاراً
للشارع المهدوم،
لبائع الدخان العربي
وسارق الطحين.
سيتلوها من يملك
رغيف خبز
ورصاصة فارغة
وحماراً بعربة مكسورة.

سأبلغك بقائمة من قتلوا
وتركوا المدينة دونها
من تنفسوا من ثقوب مطوية
واشتهوا رشة عطر
داخل زجاجة مهربة.
المعابر تفتح ذراعيها،
أحبك.
أعد قولها
كثائر أغنية قديمة
أو جندي أخطأ قراءة الخريطة.

الأمهات يبحثن عن الحناء
وعن سوق الزاوية
وعن (طشت) العجين في عتمة الخيام.
أحبك
أعد قولها
امنح أغنية قديمة فرصة شرح نفسها.
الشعرة البيضاء
ستضيئ لك الطريق.
سيصبح لديك مصباح
وعود من ريحان
وبلاد تمشي وحدها
دون أن تتوه.

 أحبك
أجبر المدينة على سماعها جهراً.
عرف القبيلة جعل للرجال مئذنة.
كَبّر قبل أن يسقطَ الذنب،
قبل أن تسقط الورقة الأخيرة.
الأشجار يخونها الظل،
رؤوسها مكشوفة
وأعناقها دليل للجوعى.
أحرق هذا
الخوف.

اعصر أثداء الأمهات
وامزجه بحليب التين
دع الطفل يكبر بمزاج عال
يجمع أسنانه اللبنية
بزمة شفاه
يبتلع تعثر الكلمات
ينطقها
بوصلة بكاء حارة.
أحبك
حتى يدركه النوم.

افتح غرائزك على مصراعيها.
استدعٍِ ِ كاتب العدل
قبل أن يحلف يمين الولاء.
وسجلْ أرثك كله
لرجل
صنع حرباً
لا ناقة له فيها
ولا جمل،
ونادى في البلاد
أحبك
ثم أحرق الحديقة.

This poem was first published in English with LitHub, and is republished with the original Arabic here with their permission.

Nima Hasan, a mother and single caretaker of seven children, is a writer, poet, and social worker from Rafah. Her published works in Arabic include the novels Where the Flames Danced and It Was Not a Death and the book Letters from a Perpetrator. Her poetry has been published and translated widely in print and online publications. She was awarded the Samira al-Khalil Prize in 2024 and a selection of her writings during the genocide were published bilingually, in Arabic and French translation by Souad Labbize, titled Be Gaza (Les Lisières, January 2025).

Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge). Her translations include Jawdat Fakhreddine’s poetry collection Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA Editions), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry). She is also the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun) and a poetry collection, Wa min thamma al-ālam (And Then the World). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures.

The post Old Song: a New Poem by Nima Hasan appeared first on Mizna.

As we reflect on the fall of the Assad regime, and join our Syrian comrades in deep witness of their years of struggle—the liberation of prisoners from death camps, the reunification of families, the possibility of return for exiled Syrians, and all the complex ranges of emotions being held—Mizna presents an essay by Syrian theatre professor and artist Sami Ismat, reflecting on the future of Syria, its diaspora, and the broader Bilad al-Sham, through mediations on architecture, literature, and the collective-oriented values underpinning these artistic traditions.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

“But the immense neglect and physical destruction of these places along the societal fabric puts doubt in whether the new free Syria, with its new and varied diasporic community, can reclaim a healthy and thriving society with a collectivist living philosophy. It is a challenge that requires utopian imaginings as well as forms of expression and commemoration of the sacrifices and displacement faced by the people.”

—Sami Ismat

The Levantine “Bilad al-Sham” diaspora has been facing waves of forced and often violent displacement that carry much loss and grief. As with many diasporic communities, the “Shami” diaspora is neither monolithic nor static. The vibrancy of this particular diaspora has allowed it to thrive in many diverse regions, extending to both of the Americas. In the search for connection within an increasingly isolated and individualistic society, a pervasive sense of collectivist nostalgia takes hold: a longing for a past that exists only within memorabilia and in past personal experiences, specifically, a profound longing for the architectural splendor of historic Levantine cities.  The new Syrian diaspora is a prime example of this phenomenon, with the romanticization of cities like Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo emerging as a defining feature within the diasporic consciousness. While ample documentation focuses on the destruction aspect of Syria and the crisis under the fallen Assad regime, this essay will examine forms of expression among Syrians about how the architecture of lived spaces reflects the collectivist-oriented nature of the Levantine “Shami” people.  While there are a variety of iconic figures, such as Nizar Qabbani, who historically wrote about Damascus, this piece will instead shed light on those who expressed cultural identity with ties to architecture under the shadow of the recent Syrian crisis during the past 14 years. 

To understand where these forms of expression stem from, we need to examine the type of longing common among the new Syrian diaspora. The type of longing that extends beyond mere aesthetic appreciation or recognition of the historical value of architecture; it reflects a deep-seated connection to our cultural heritage, rituals, and lives. Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni eloquently articulates this sentiment in her book The Battle for Home: “architecture offers a mirror to a community, and in that mirror we can see what is wrong and also find hints as to how to put it right.” ¹ Through this lens, we not only behold the beauty of our architectural legacy but also discern the underlying challenges and injustices that afflict our society. Al-Sabouni is not the only author to reflect upon this idea. Suad Amiry’s memoir My Damascus vividly portrays the significance of a single house in early 1900s Damascus, underscoring the role of architecture—specifically the courtyard house—in shaping the lives of the elite Syrian Baroudi family. This focus on a single house that cannot be revisited encapsulates the deep feelings of  “hiraeth” that permeate the Syrian diaspora. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that lacks a direct English translation. At its root, hiraeth conveys a deep homesickness for a bygone era that can never be fully reclaimed; in Arabic, it would be best described by the phrase “الشوق إلى أماكن ضائعة” which translates to longing to lost places. The word hiraeth is referenced in an interview by Syrian American artist Mohamed Hafez, who expands upon this concept with his work that visually attempts to express what has been lost and stored in the diasporic memory. Since the onset of the protests in Syria in 2011, followed by mass displacement and exile, hiraeth has become a constant feeling in the collective consciousness of Syrians as they hold nostalgia and trauma in their memory.

Photo courtesy of Mohamad Hafez

 Prior to diving deeper, it is important to acknowledge that the described feeling captures a significant aspect of our diasporic experience. However, the feeling of longing for lost places alone cannot fully capture the breadth of our emotions and experiences of diaspora. Syrian-American storyteller, lyricist and poet Omar Offendum, reflecting on his experience at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, articulates the intricate complexities of emotions evoked by encounters with Syrian architectural heritage at the museum. Offendum shares: 

To be honest I was a little bit hesitant at first about digging deeply into the feelings that are evoked when I walk into some of these spaces, I am so far removed from their original context, [at] the same time there is another layer knowing that a lot of these spaces are just not safe anymore in their original context and so you’re kind of happy that they’re this far away from them [the contexts] but that’s a very difficult thing to wrestle with, specifically Syria and the Syrian rooms here. ²

This expression underscores the complex interplay between destruction and beauty, trauma and utopian nostalgic imaginings. Architecture guides our expression and remembrance; we not only honor our past through it but also share our deep longing for lived moments that shaped us within these places. The architecture of the places we left behind helps us preserve our narratives, and it shapes our living philosophy and values, which are collectivist-oriented and based in communal care.  

For many in the Syrian diaspora, the longing for lost places symbolizes a unity they experienced or remember. However, for over 50 years, the (now fallen) Assad dictatorship damaged this unity. The writings of Yassin Al-Haj Saleh expose the contemporary history of the policies of the Syrian regime that led to the loss of a unified Syrian state and people, as the fallen regime created rifts through aggressive nepotism to divide, instill fear, and maintain control through oppressive sectarianism. Al-Haj Saleh in his book The Impossible Revolution states: “sectarianism does not inevitably stem from inherited cultural differences, since those have always existed in every society, but is rather the outcome of social and political privileges. Sectarianism is essentially a tool for governing and a strategy for control.” ³ The regime has systematically developed methods to divide Syrian society through neglecting certain communities and privileging certain individuals, thus creating isolated communities and ruining the ancient social fabric that was based on collectivist morals of sharing and caring for one another regardless of background, ethnicity, or religion. Unfortunately, the Syria remembered by most has been neglected and physically destroyed, and along with that, the civic belonging of Syrians to Syria has been severed among many, including culturally. Those who stayed in Syria have been forced to abandon their basic moral values to get by and survive, or have resorted to becoming informants for the fallen Assad regime for self-gain.

These systemic actions became ingrained and contributed to dismantling the existing networks of social relations and structures, resulting in the degradation of shared cultural values within the average Syrian human, thus guiding individuals toward morally corrupt actions. The harm of these systemic policies and actions moved in tandem with the destruction of the old historic architecture of cities and their intentional urban planning, which was ruined through decades of neglect and indiscriminate bombing. Al-Sabouni provides a detailed account of the regime’s policies and their impact, particularly on the urban and moral fabric, stating that: “The undoing of the urban fabric has advanced hand in hand with the undoing of the moral fabric. And that is written in frightful scars on the face of Old Homs.” ⁴ These frightful scars etched on the face of the city serve as a poignant reminder of the interconnectedness between physical and moral decay under oppressive regimes. Architecture is culture and, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that this idea holds true not only for Syria but for many societies worldwide, as suggested by Clifford Geertz: “Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations.” ⁵

Photo courtesy of Bayt Al Fann

*

While it’s undeniable that Syrian people, like any society, have their share of beautiful traditions, rituals, and values with all sorts of complex variations, including negative implementations, the last decade for Syria in particular has witnessed a notable disconnection from a collectivist-oriented approach that center communal values of sharing and caring for the collective. Such values that have an intertwined connection with our architecture—specifically to the courtyard houses—which make up the core of what a traditional Syrian home is and serve as a space for co-existence and participation in communal rituals based on values of caring and sharing. Renowned Egyptian architect Abdelwahed El-Wakil famously says, “I always say a house without a courtyard is like a man without a soul. The courtyard is the soul of the house. Not only this, it is the protagonist, because the rooms are built around the court.” ⁶ On a wider scale, this concept is even common in underprivileged rural communities in Syria and smaller homes where many members share one common room for everything and spend many hours of the day in it. The latter statement does not intend to romanticize poverty nor to endorse living underprivileged, but rather to describe that these living spaces in all their variations have a commonality that create a sense of critical closeness where one’s actions and values must adhere to the collective in a space as an everyday living situation. Al-Sabouni’s book underscores the intrinsic connection between the lost collectivist morality and the architectural heritage of Syria. Similarly, Amiry’s semi-fictional memoir provides a transparent portrayal of Syrian society, focusing on the rich architectural tapestry of old Damascus from the late 1800s to the present day. In her narrative, Amiry masterfully intertwines the story of Syrian society with the grandeur of the elite Baroudi family home. From the intricately designed living rooms to the serene sleeping quarters, every aspect of the architecture serves a collective purpose, with each room meticulously crafted to accommodate specific rituals or activities at designated times throughout the week in the family’s life. ⁷ The sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence,” which is described as a constant emotional commitment to a group and its moral framework, with rituals serving to uphold and strengthen bonds. ⁸ There is a seamless weaving between architecture, ritual, and communal life in influencing societal values that center on collective identity.

Within these lived spaces, Syrian families confronted a myriad of challenges, be they economic, political, or personal. The courtyard concept of these homes taught generations and served as a vibrant reminder of the shared bonds within Syrian families that translated to the larger society. For in these courtyards, the calls to prayer from mosques mingled harmoniously with the tolling of church bells, underscoring the religious and ethnic diversity of Syria. Amiry’s familial narrative further emphasizes this diversity, with her grandmother being indigenous Palestinian and her grandfather of Turkish descent, with the grandfather’s infidelity within the narrative highlighting the complexity of individual lives against the backdrop of communal coexistence. This collectivist environment inevitably confronts any ill actions sooner or later, as Amiry’s story leads the patriarch of the family to lose his grandeur position within the family. Despite these imperfections, personal struggles, and questionable individual choices, the urban fabric of old Syrian cities genuinely exuded a welcoming generosity, ethno-religious diversity, humbling care, and a confrontational sense of accountability that is nearly inescapable, epitomizing the social cohesion of Syrian society at large for generations. 

But the immense neglect and physical destruction of these places along the societal fabric puts doubt in whether the new free Syria, with its new and varied diasporic community, can reclaim a healthy and thriving society with a collectivist living philosophy. It is a challenge that requires utopian imagings as well as forms of expression and commemoration of the sacrifices and displacement faced by the people. Being trapped solely in past feelings and nostalgic memories poses a danger of getting stuck in an over-glorified past that is removed from the current reality. The work of Mohamed Hafez finds this balance, through his miniature architectural sculptures, which mostly feature homes from Syria. Hafez has showcased his works internationally, using memorabilia, pictures, and audio recordings of people’s lived experiences. Hafez complements the visual intricacy of the sculptures and the stories within them by adding in atmospheric sounds of the places. The artwork is both motivated by the concept of hiraeth or long lost places, and is centered around storytelling that attempts to bridge the beauty of the lost past to the present, but without ignoring or forgetting the scars from modern Syrian history

Hafez’s artistic journey began with his personal experience of loss, which evolved into a profound exploration of the narratives of refugees. The “UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage” project involved the meticulous sculptural recreation of rooms from the communal home environments that refugees (not exclusively Syrian) were forced to flee. Collaborating with Iraqi-born writer and speaker Ahmed Badr, in capturing and editing the real stories of these displaced families, Hafez and Badr approached this project in an ethnographic documentary style, giving a tangible meaning to the visual sculptures. ⁹ Each miniature sculpture in this series is framed by a symbolic suitcase, representing the emotional baggage and memories carried by refugees into their diaspora. Ornate objects are intricately woven into the architectural design of old Syrian homes and serve as visual symbols of cultural heritage and containers of history for entire civilizations.

In Hafez’s artworks, the memories of the recent Syrian diasporic communities (since the protests of 2011) are powerfully brought to life through this audiovisual medium, externalizing nostalgic memory and allowing it to express itself, but without ignoring the painful losses, sacrifices, and destruction in these spaces, which are rendered visible and feel viscerally innate. Each miniature sculpture serves as a snapshot of a forcibly abandoned life, surrounded by the turmoil of army vehicles, cracks, or bullet holes. These evocative representations become reminders and windows into the rich tapestry of heritage, identity, and collectivist-oriented living that centers communal sharing, caring, and confronts us to be accountable for our actions. Across generations, diasporic communities somehow tend to find a shared sense of belonging and understanding, transcending geographical boundaries and trauma to form an imagined community rooted in a complicated past and a cultural nostalgia. 

Photo courtesy of Mohamad Hafez

*

The exploration of the Syrian diasporic memory reveals the rich intertwined nature of architecture’s role in shaping the social/cultural aspects of the Syrian identity. Authors like Marwa Al-Sabouni and Suad Amiry provide invaluable insights into the significance of architecture as a reflection of societal values and communal life. Through their works, we witness how the destruction of physical spaces mirrors the unraveling of moral fabric within Syrian society, exacerbated by the fallen regime’s policies that exploit sectarianism for control, ultimately eroding the social cohesion that once defined Syria. However, underlying this devastation, there are glimpses of a shared consciousness and a resilient preservation of collectivist values that is driven by the utopian and nostalgic imaginings granted by the new Syrian diaspora and the Syrian revolution. The new Syria needs projects like “UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage” that meticulously recreate the environments and narratives of displaced Syrians who sacrificed much and are trying to find the means to reconnect with their roots, bridging the chasm between past and present, exile and belonging, in a Syria liberated from the fallen regime and its corruptions. These artworks become vessels fostering a sense of solidarity and pride in the struggle endured by Syrians dispersed across the globe, attempting to reconnect with their cultural heritage and to work with the local community that remained inside Syria to build a new society inspired by its architectural history and modern struggles. 

Author acknowledgement: While this essay primarily centers on the experiences of the new Syrian diaspora communities, it is imperative to acknowledge the broader historical contexts, including the enduring impacts of colonialism and other catastrophes in Levantine history. Further research could delve into how colonial legacies persistently shape diasporic identities and architectural heritage. Understanding how colonial interventions molded urban landscapes and architectural styles in Syria and the Levant can unveil profound layers of meaning embedded within these spaces. Nevertheless, the subjectivity of collective memory does not diminish the notion that, in the face of complexities, displacement away from our architectural environments brings solace and strength. Hope for a brighter future can be found and expressed in various other forms, such as art and literature, to uphold our sense of belonging to collectivist-oriented moral values. 

Sami Ismat is a Research-Practitioner in Performance & Theatre from Damascus, Syria. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago. His interdisciplinary artistic practice integrates performance art, devised theatre, documentary techniques, ethnographic research, filmmaking, and choreography. Sami has collaborated internationally as writer, director, creator, performer, collaborator, and consultant on diverse projects spanning major theaters and museums to street performances and unconventional spaces. Additionally, Sami is a semi-professional soccer coach, currently serving with Edgewater Castle FC.

His research explores Syrian identity, diaspora, and Arab representations in performance, including investigations of Islamic art and ritual. Through performance, he examines the dynamics of presentation and representation, particularly concerning war-torn landscapes, trauma, loss, grief, memory, and collective cultural consciousness.

Sami’s publications include several theatrical production reviews in Arab Stages journal, “Deconstructing Myths via Performance Strategies” in Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art, anda forthcoming book chapter, “Postcolonial Dramaturgies and Dialogic Practices: Embodied Approaches to Contemporary Theatre Dramaturgy” in Decolonizing Dramaturgy in Global Contexts.

1. Marwa Al-Sabouni, The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017).
   ︎
2.  Omar Offendum, Omar Offendum Shangri La Artist-in-Residence, Video, October 9, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaFRQZs32x0.
   ︎
3.  Yassin Al-Haj, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Pg. 23.
   ︎
4.  Al-Sabouni, The Battle for Home. ︎
5.  Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 2000th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1973). ︎
6. Caravane Earth. 2022. “Documentary: Architect Abdelwahed El-Wakil.” YouTube video, 30:14. Posted November 25, 2022. ︎
7.  Suad Amiry, My Damascus, (Northampton, USA: Olive Branch Press, 2016). Pg. 37. ︎
8.  Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995)
   ︎
9.  Mohamed Hafez, Unpacked: Refugee Baggage, 2017, Mixed Media, 2017. ︎

The post Beyond Ruins: Exploring Architectural Nostalgia in Syrian Diasporic Art and the Resilience of Utopian Imaginings appeared first on Mizna.

In this debut poetry publication by Syrian-American mathematician, musician, and writer M. Hakim, I am reminded of the ways grief acts on language in the most intimate details. In our exchange for editing the poem, Hakim described the ways punctuation is governed not by traditional grammar, but by associations of grief: sentences pairing with each other like ghosts to former inhabitations, spectral residues of once-restricted sites like Qasioun, the gifting of an oud, and the speculative resonances between this poem and Nizar Qabbani. With the fall of Assad opening more space for Syrians and the diaspora to return to their land, to tell the stories held hostage by regimes now past, it is with deep reverence that Mizna thanks Hakim for trusting us to publish this stunning poetry debut.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

walls with ears
looking with eyes that aren’t mine
am i the enemy of the enemies of my father? 

—M. Hakim

the tart air from Damascus 

الهواء الرماني من الشام

i have dreamed of Damascus as long as i have dreamed

the rose
the jasmine and ful
 the stone black and white
memories of those who live only in my own memories

silence
walls with ears
looking with eyes that aren’t mine
am i the enemy of the enemies of my father? 

i have dreamed of Damascus as long as i have dreamed
the distorted dreams of exile and longing

will i hear the voices of an angel in the straight street
                                 was she carried away by the Barada when it flowed?
                                                if i sleepwalk up Qasioun
                                                               will she be there with the oud
                                                                                    she doesn’t remember bringing for me?
                                                                                                   will the storyteller start at last without fear?
                                                                                                                        will the cells of my blood become green?

what will you do to me, Damascus?

M. Hakim (b. 1991) is a Syrian-American mathematician and musician from Texas, now based in the northeast.

Cover photo from Wikimedia (Creative Commons)

The post “the tart air from Damascus”—New Syrian Poetry appeared first on Mizna.

Compiled and edited by Rania Jawad, translated by Malaka Shwaikh

On March 2, 2024 Nima Hasan wrote:

I believe there is some secret in the elements of Gaza that makes us cling to a life that was never a life. I have always tried to keep an eye on death, making plans to distract it, to make it wait, so that it would get bored and leave what remains of me, my remains. We are all remains here. It is only the angle from which the photograph is taken that determines whether we are above the rubble or under it.

Hasan speaks with an intimacy as she documents mass torture by a contemporary world order that sanctions the extermination of a people. It’s an intimacy that invites us to see what she sees and inhabit the spaces she creates through her words. It’s an intimacy that, seemingly, temporarily defies the weight of the genocidal violence and its documentary coverage. It’s an intimacy I believe that we must hold on to so that the slaughter and engineered mass torture does not become the lasting narration of Gaza and contemporary Palestinian experience, so that we continue to bind ourselves not to the camera lens nor to the words that reach us but to the lives that are brutally being erased.

The different modes of Hasan’s writings, while collected here in a chronological timeline, show that the genocide and war experience is not a single, ongoing event but an accumulation of seconds, days, months, and years of lives. And these are lives that Zionist warfare has always meant to disrupt, when seen through the longer trajectory across generations of Palestinians and lands occupied by the Zionist regime in its settler colonial project of ethnic cleansing. Hasan gives us the image of a young woman, waiting long hours in line for bread amid Israeli bombings and manufactured famine, who is trying to recall her femininity. In another moment following months of Israeli targeted destruction, Hasan writes: “we wanted to liberate the homeland, but now O grandmother, we cannot even find a street at its end.” And in another, she likens her body stiffened by lying on the damp concrete floor of a shelter to a utility pole struggling to stand upright in the darkness to “cast a shadow to prove it exists.” Hers is not a timeline of death and torture, but of intimate moments that are narrated with spontaneity and incisiveness, under indescribable circumstances. 

The following is a compilation of writings that Hasan shared publicly via social media over the course of the sixth month of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians that has now entered its twenty-first month. A combination of critique, poetry, captured dialogues, recollections, and real-time testimonial, they were written by Hasan—a mother and single caretaker of seven children, a writer, poet, and social worker from Rafah—from her forced displacement in a shelter and then a tent camp in Mawasi Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip in March 2024. I first began to collect her shared writings as part of a broader initiative to document women’s articulations from Gaza as a way of listening, which has been visceral as it has been about accountability. Although Hasan did not intend for these writings to be compiled and republished, with her permission, we offer them here, for she has given us a lens through which to see (and not forget) a glimpse of the world of March 2024. It is a lens that does not reductively stand in for one woman, or for the literary legacy of a writer, or for a depiction of the genocide. Nor are her words to be taken as evidence to declaim what we already know. Her words are situated simultaneously within the confines of a displacement tent at the ends of the besieged homeland during the sixth month of a genocide and in an intimacy that expands beyond the mechanics of confinement and obliteration.

As I write now in July 2025, today is not the world of March 2024. Not for Rania Abu Anza, whose husband and five-month old twins Wissam and Naeem were murdered in an Israeli airstrike on the home of their extended family in Rafah; the twins who were born at the start of the war on October 13, 2023 and were conceived after ten years of trying should now have been approaching their second birthday. Today is not the world when packages were being airdropped on a starved, besieged, and bombed population—airdrops that killed at least five Palestinians in their execution; deficient packages of declared “aid” that kill and humiliate during the month of Ramadan. Today is not the world when reports of Israeli soldiers using sexual torture as a form of warfare was at the very least being minimally reported. Today is not the world when civilians were used as human shields by an occupying settler army to invade Al-Shifa Hospital. Today is not the world when the US military was preparing to install a floating pier in Gaza’s sea in the name of a “humanitarianism” that was later revealed to enable a military incursion and massacre of Palestinians—a constructed pier emerging from the rubble and blood of bombed homes when the bodies of 8,000 Palestinian martyrs were still buried under the debris. Today is not the world when the Israeli army murders and takes hostage the bodies of Palestinian children. Today is not the world when UNICEF’s spokesperson said, “the depth of the horror surpasses our ability to describe it.” Today is a world that has exceeded that horror surpassing expression, that has exceeded the bruteness and barbarity of March 2024. 

The following English translation was produced by Gazan scholar Malaka Shwaikh. I want to thank Tony Alessandrini for his editorial eye on the translation and Hadeel Abu Arqoub for helping to compile Hasan’s writings over the course of a year. This work has been supported by a Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) grant. To Nima Hasan, she knows this is one of the many letters I am writing to and for her. A book publication of Hasan’s compiled writings over the first year of the genocidal war will be published in Arabic in 2025. An English translation by Malaka Shwaikh of the book is in the works.

—Rania Jawad, Assistant Professor of English, Birzeit University

“When the roads are blocked, draw a new map. Become Rome. Be Gaza.”

—Nima Hasan, March 26, 2024, 8:18 a.m.

March 2024

by Nima Hasan
translated from the Arabic by Malaka Shwaikh

March 1

12:40 p.m.

If you want passionate speeches
to satisfy your desire for heroism, go read novels
or watch the evening news

I write what we’re living through here: not much to entertain you, my heroic reader!

5:55 p.m.

In the line
waiting for the wheat to rest
the smile of the man dusted with flour
the loaf of bread falling freely on the battlefield

In the line
a young woman tries to recall the meaning of her femininity
a man sings to the oven
another tries to understand the screams of the burning street
I stand in the middle of the story
gathering birds in my head
fearing the flight of the trees

In the line
an old woman curses the fields and the ears of grain
as she lists the names of the great cities for you
She sews the rope of hunger
to make a large sack of flour
enough for the guards of the tents

In the line
you and I
a child bites her nails
a man spits on the war
a woman applies lipstick under her veil
No water in this city to wash away our sins
but we’ll defy hell to produce a fresh loaf of bread
a moment before death

March 2

7:41 a.m.

Don’t speak of victory or boast of glory before someone starving to death.

4:17 p.m. 

No streets
No houses
No walls
No trees
In this stricken country
where can we lean our exhausted bodies?

4:37 p.m. 

I am Nima Hasan from Gaza.

I keep putting off writing my will. I believe death is watching all of us here; I wait for my final confession to rush toward me. I have never tried to avoid confronting it out of fear, but that is just my own way of surviving.

It may sound strange amid all this crying and sorrow, but I savor the sweet taste of Gaza in my mouth. It makes me yearn for life with more of its salt, the salt that has become so precious here. As the old woman says: Salt is now sold in bride’s boxes. All of Gaza is now sold in a box buried under the rubble, and the bride has no voice, for they killed her in her white dress.

I believe there is some secret in the elements of Gaza that makes us cling to a life that was never a life. I have always tried to keep an eye on death, making plans to distract it, to make it wait, so that it would get bored and leave what remains of me, my remains. We are all remains here. It is only the angle from which the photograph is taken that determines whether we are above the rubble or under it.

I have learned from wars that in Gaza, everyone waits for everything. I may never reach the front of the line to get my share, but I have learned to stay in line so my children might get theirs. Now that we have to get in line to die, my turn will inevitably come. I have never tried to change my place in line, but I cannot just stand quietly. This damn system: I am a woman who does not believe in standing still to survive, so I am forced to scream, and I am forced to shut up. My children are pulling at my skirts so that I might find a way to live, while death insistently pushes me forward, toward it. 

I resist.

I hate death. I hate the system. I hate the line. I love life, but the dust from the fighter jets obscures my view.

My mother once told me how my grandmother was forced with her children to leave the homeland. She said: my mother dug a hole and put me and my sisters in it and then lay on top of us to protect us from death. The fighter jets have now made many holes in Gaza. But I cannot find a place to hide my children where death cannot reach them.

I forgot what I was going to say about my will.

I just want my children and I to experience life. I want to live like other people without fear of tomorrow. But tomorrow is a prisoner here, and every time it raises its head the war kills it. I do not know when wheat learned how to become a gun. I do not know how the world came to believe that we are all dead here. But I know very well that my children and I know how to live, and I will not leave a final image for the world to cry over and then forget. No: I will follow the spotlight wherever it goes and keep smiling for the camera.

Ever since I was little, I have loved hide-and-seek. I want my children to play hide-and-seek, but when they open their eyes, I want them to be able to find their friends without shrouds. I often sit and stare at my children’s fingers, at how long and elegant and beautiful they are. I never thought to write their names on their hands so that death wouldn’t notice them. Let death leave these limbs whole: I know them by heart.

I have always dreamed of sitting in a café on the other side of our homeland, hidden from the streetlight, smoking a cigarette. In my madness I might be driven to flirt with a strange man here where love is forbidden. So I bequeath a pack of cigarettes, to be distributed as alms for my soul. And I request a handsome man to lead my funeral prayer, and let no insinuations be made by those passing by.

I have never seen anything but warplanes in our skies. How pure the world must look from an airplane window, for a woman with the luxury to travel to satisfy her passion for adventure. I want my daughter to be able to travel so she can enjoy collecting souvenirs and sending them to homes that will not be destroyed in a moment of war. My youngest is learning to design clothes. What if there were a fashion show on al-Rimal Street that did not feature the fabric of shrouds? Or if the World Cup could be held in Gaza, a world event for all the amputated legs, the only ones that know the map of the country?

I hear the chorus in the square now, without the sound of drones. It is the homeland in all its finery preparing for the funeral.

I bequeath life to you.
For we die without life knowing us.
This is how I remain without fearing the gun,
And maybe I will learn to become one.

March 3

8:01 p.m.

The Abu Anza twins Wissam and Naim.
It took their parents eleven years to conceive them.
Rafah’s martyrs.

8:29 p.m.

Fighter jets accompany aid being airdropped.
Be well.

“No streets
No houses
No walls
No trees
In this stricken country
where can we lean our exhausted bodies?”

—Nima Hasan, March 2, 2024, 4:17 p.m.

March 4

7:30 a.m.

5 months
150 days
3,605 hours
216,300 minutes
standing in line for death

9:20 a.m.

There are women making do with some straw
to fool their little ones
as they sew sadness
into bulletproof suits
that no one buys

There are lovers waiting beneath the walls
a forbidden song
a lover who has died
and a street with no name
He was preparing for a rendezvous
I stare at the empty pictures

There are men who drink cheap wine
swallowing ripe anger
One jumps into a bombed-out café
another searches for his lost limbs
No one finds their favorite drink
No use trying to make the dead laugh

There are doors without holes
a nightclub behind them
fields that yield hunger
a railroad track
and a whistle that lost its sound
At departure time
the city won’t leave us here

Fear was created for us all
but it’s the trick of survival
convincing us not to confess
or not to die 

6:50 p.m.

I have always tried to emphasize the social aspect of our lives as Palestinians in my writing. I write about women in my novels, living their lives with all their psychological, material, and social crises—loving, hurting, and getting angry; betraying, cursing, and feeling weak; longing, neglecting, and killing.

I have wanted to say: we are human. We die as you do. We suffer as you do. 
We are impatient.
We are not superheroes who bare our chests to die.
We cannot just be guns, even on the battlefield.
We are not used to death, and we will not get used to it just so you can applaud us for our artificial fortitude.
We are human. Do not forget: heroes also die.

11:01 p.m.

They starved to death in 2024.
Record: I am from Gaza
and strike the world from the record.

March 5

8:27 a.m.

The war did not abate . . . We are the ones abased.

7:23 p.m.

Everything is negotiable except death.

7:54 p.m.

The poor stand in line for food rations
and by the time their turn comes
the distance they’ve traveled devours them.

March 7

11:53 a.m.

We watch prices rise in Egypt in lockstep with what’s happening here.
The blockade and the imports of outrageously priced commercial goods through Rafah will lead to an economic disaster for both Egyptians and Palestinians in Gaza alike.

12:52 p.m.

Not even a thousand wars can change you if you were not human from the start.
Humanity is always a constant within us. All that changes is how we deal with it all.

5:16 p.m.

The rest of the world prepares for Ramadan.
Here we prepare for the invasion of Rafah.
Be well.

11:55 p.m.

Biden announcing the opening of a waterway from Cyprus to Gaza signals the beginning of many years of war and displacement.
The road to war now opened will not soon be closed.

March 8

6:39 a.m.

On International Women’s Day:
O the pain of mothers! Avenge them.

8:01 a.m.

Gantz says: In order to get Khamas out of power, we  need to have periods of chaos in the Gaza Strip. This has already occurred, of course, and it’s escalating, making Gaza a very dangerous place. Gangs have begun to take charge and lawlessness is eating away at what’s left of people’s ability to survive. Cheap weapons are offered for sale on social media and brazenly available in the markets, contributing to the formation of gangs that spread chaos and theft. Drugs are spreading at a frightening rate and are cheaper than cigarettes, so people swap one out for the other. Quarrels between extended families are being escalated, and weapons are being used indiscriminately to kill and cause chaos. The people are being driven to genocide from all sides.

4:17 p.m.

Five martyrs killed by food airdrops dropped upon them from the sky.
May the “humanitarian” waterway not drown what’s left of Gaza!

5:13 p.m.

God seems to have decided to endow the women of Palestine with steadfastness. In this place, it’s not clear if that’s a blessing or a curse. Either we are beings who have the capacity to adapt to any environment—mind you, I do not believe anyone can really coexist with death, although I agree that’s what life here is now—or we are made from a different clay than other women, so that we can be molded according to the condition of our homeland.

As a woman from Gaza, here at the southernmost part of Palestine, I have had to become a seven-headed woman. In fact, I might have to grow more heads as a precaution for whatever in life might yet confront me.

Daily life, with all its ups and downs, is something women throughout the world have in common. Emotions, the sense of yourself as female, mood swings, down to the menstrual cycle and all its symptoms: common to us all. Love, abandonment, depression, rebellion, even suicide: surely these are fully human traits.

Now: let me explain what it means to be a Palestinian woman in Gaza today.

Your daily life consists of knowing how to recognize the sound of fighter jets and drones in our sky. To be a woman is to know whose house is about to be bombed, which direction the missile will come from. Conversations with my temporary neighbor here in our temporary shelter are about the date of the next ceasefire and how to find paper and wood to make a fire. We do not sit together over a cup of coffee; there is no coffee in this stricken country, nor time to sit. Standing is the perpetual state here for women who must be ready at every moment to receive death.

You do not talk about invitations to lunch with family or friends; you ask instead about how long the bread line is, or whether you can find a handful of flour to make a loaf of bread. You cannot speak reassuringly about your family’s whereabouts; you have no news, there’s no telecommunications in this stricken country that will let you hear a beloved voice saying: it is okay, I am fine.

You do not talk about brand names of the clothes and makeup you bought or discuss beauty or elegance or such concerns; you worry instead about how to get your hands on a small bottle of water so you can stand in a line for the bathroom along with two hundred women and children. Standing in the narrow corridor at the shelter, you wonder if there will be anything left to wash your hands with after you urinate.

You sleep fully clothed, and in a prayer garment to cover yourself—this is very important—to be prepared for death. That is, if you can get any sleep amid the sound of falling bombs. You do not brag to your neighbor about the great discount you got on your kids’ clothes and toys; there are no clothes to buy in a country completely burned out from bombing. So instead, you find yourself awash with pain, watching your child shiver right in front of you.

Your children invent a game: writing on their arms and legs. They compete to see who can write their name more beautifully. It is so their limbs won’t get lost when they die.

Have you bought a car recently? Here, I walk three hours a day, back and forth, to get what I need for my children. There is no transportation left in this stricken country. If I am lucky, I can catch a ride in the trunk of a car or on a donkey cart to take me part of the way.

Do you complain about your husband’s neglect? You feel that you are neglected, abandoned, unlucky when he doesn’t get you a bottle of perfume or flowers for your anniversary? Here, the husbands of Gaza don’t return from the war. They are swallowed up in bombed houses or while waiting in a line. Did your lover cheat on you with another woman? Here, the ultimate betrayal is when your loved ones die and you survive without saying goodbye. Another betrayal comes when you stubbornly sleep apart from your loved ones after a quarrel, while the missile comes speeding down upon you, oblivious to all in its path.

You cannot go for a walk to try and lift your spirits, to walk off the despair and abandonment. Why? There are no streets left in my city, no place left to meet loved ones. Your mood swings are a luxury you can’t afford. In fact, the only luxury left here, the only thing that might change a woman’s mood, is the chance to have a warm bath in private every two weeks. Singing in the shower is out of the question, and even warm water and privacy are a fantasy except for those with money and power; I have neither. And singing is a miracle here, not a luxury.

The idea of mood swings when you have your period, that those around you have to tolerate you and your hormones: that’s meaningless here. Women have no sanitary pads when they need them. There aren’t even extra clothes or rags to tear up in their place. My dear, the women here have to make do with torn pieces of tent flaps when the time comes.

Even when you give birth, there’s nothing to absorb your blood, nothing to dress your baby in. Your labor cries make you ashamed: the pain is nothing, after all, when death is all around you. You give birth in the middle of a landscape full of corpses; a new life in the midst of all this death. You feel ashamed to bring more pain to the scene. You look at your newborn for a long time, fearing that this first meeting will be the last.

The feeling of abandonment here is reserved for death, to not finding shelter for you and your children, to the cold that gnaws at your bones, to the sleep that abandons you; there are no blankets to cover your anxiety and fear. And suicide is a luxury. You may laugh, but this is what war’s jurisprudence has taught me. Suicide is a luxury, a sign of overindulgence in life. We never own our lives: death has full power here and there is no room for negotiation.

“On International Women’s Day:
O the pain of mothers! Avenge them.”

—Nima Hasan, March 8, 2024, 6:39 a.m.

March 9

8:56 a.m.

The waterway will be under US-Israeli control; aid will be under Israeli control; all to further humiliate Gaza. Israel spreads lawlessness and chaos and finds fertile ground in the starving and wounded Gaza Strip; it will exploit this chaos to its full measure in order to become the ruling power in Gaza. This makes it look like the Americans are the “humanitarians” working to control lawlessness and chaos in the eyes of the world, the US aiming to improve its image before the upcoming elections. There is an American-Zionist plan: destroy and empty Gaza by any means necessary, and then emerge as both the victim and the hero at once.

9:12 a.m.

We no longer speak about ourselves.
Just stuttering mixed with hunger and death.

March 10

10:39 a.m.

All my life I have envisioned owning a house with a backyard, a garden with a small bed of mint where truffles secretly grew. I would tend to a small olive tree out back, having the luxury of harvesting olives one by one as they ripened and the time to design the garden before planting.

I have known many houses but have never owned one. There was one I thought I owned, near the Egyptian border. But in the days before the Occupation forces withdrew their settlements from Gaza, whenever tanks approached, we would have to flee, leaving the house to face the enemy on its own. We moved around like Bedouins, but without tents. Once the tanks got tired of playing that game, they tore through its walls and parked in the middle of our living room. We were forced to exit barefoot with a white flag that announced our final departure.

That was when I came to understand: houses have to migrate when their owners do. I never had a fixed address again. I moved from one house to the next or to whatever resembles a home. Then the war brought me to this refugee shelter because I couldn’t even find a tent to make it through the rainy season. Longing for a home has become a habit for me. I remember a warm doll from my childhood that I still seem to hold in my arms as I turn over on the shelter’s damp floor, trying to console my bones that are stiff with cold. The cold straightens them, like a utility pole stubbornly struggling to stand upright in the dark street, trying to cast a shadow to prove it exists. 

8:12 p.m.

No mastery of rhetoric or declaiming of verses will feed the hungry or free the homeland.

March 12

10:55 a.m.

Dialysis in a time of war.
There was already a shortage of machines for those who needed them. Now most are no longer working; the kidney patient stands in a long line, one of many lines of death in my city.
He asks me: did you hear that they want to bring in new medical equipment along with the aid? 
O God, the line is long.

And my neighbor, Morsi Khalifa, reached the end, leaving a long line behind him, waiting.
May God have mercy on his soul.

March 13

3:46 a.m.

Did the boy eat the apple?
A sentence whose elements are death, no grammar to parse.
What’s the reward for fasting?
A bale of hay.
Do you love me?
I’m hungry.

3:30 p.m.

I write novels, but I do not believe in the myth of the hero who will save us all in the end.

8:53 p.m.

Sing to me to expand the world
make a path between the waves
and save the city from drowning like a prophet
Don’t grieve alone
Take me as an idea
a witness
or a guide
and open your arms
closing the wound with an embrace
The names of lovers all wiped out:
no walls
no trees
to prove that love exists
just the birds inside your head
retelling the tale

March 14

9:28 p.m.

It’s ironic that the most enduring moments
are those of annihilation or departure.

March 16

8:18 a.m.

When the roads are blocked, draw a new map. Become Rome. Be Gaza.

4:12 p.m.

We wanted to liberate the homeland
but now, O grandmother, we cannot even find a street at its end.

March 19

10:35 a.m.

When you’re surrounded by death, you don’t think about the end. Trying to survive, you drown, watching the brazenness of the cowards floating above you.

11:02 a.m.

Wind, rain, cold air, and tents that do not know the meaning of sumud.
Judge them for their betrayal.

11:28 a.m.

Final nap. 
Fathers alone can lull death with silent pain.

“When you’re surrounded by death, you don’t think about the end. Trying to survive, you drown, watching the brazenness of the cowards floating above you.”

—Nima Hasan, March 19, 2024, 10:35 a.m.

March 21

9:49 a.m.

They say the homeland is lost and we its mawawil
hyenas chasing hyenas
death is coming for you, for him
O mother, if time is cruel to the homeland
we have men to carry it when it is wounded
If you find the free man hungry
he has no one but God to complain to
The martyr sleeps in his grave
with only his mother to pray for him

1:00 p.m.

My mother was a homeland. The homeland does not die.

4:59 p.m.

Hunger is a verse
Displacement is a verse
The world does not bless
a tent made of cans

March 22

7:08 p.m.

At some point in your life, you come to understand that you are alone. Nothing and no one around you will be able to understand who you are. All the accumulations left behind by those who have passed through your life create a wall that grows by the year, cutting you off from making choices. I don’t see this as a psychological barrier that reflects a flaw, a failure in your responses to others. Rather, it’s a sign of maturity born out of your experiences and your ability to transcend them. You will encounter moments that are painful before you overcome them. You will inevitably return to them, but you will always know that you must persevere. It is ok to look back from time to time. We’re human beings who can be overcome by emotions even when we’re able to control them. Even if experience has led you to believe that you can’t build relationships with others, there is nothing wrong with you. Perhaps you simply expected reciprocity for your generosity and cannot just stand by when none is forthcoming.

The other is just an illusion at the beginning of the tale, so you can create yourself for your own story. You are the only truth, and even if you are surrounded by illusions, it is okay to be alone. Loneliness here is uniqueness, not helplessness.

March 23

5:49 p.m.

You have to believe in a god for the idea of rebellion to work inside you. We do not rebel against nothingness. An individual who does not rebel against the chemistry of the universe, even at the level of simple feelings, is a pale and sickly human being.

9:56 p.m.

Day (x) of war.
Waking up early here doesn’t mean you’re an energetic person ready to take in the fresh morning air with your arms outstretched to the coming day; it’s not the luxury of getting an early start that gives you the strength to rise. Tonight, the wind is so strong it seems determined to punish the tents for being in the middle of the street. My cold bed makes me check my children’s temperatures to see if they’re as cold as I am. Their faces are all turned toward me, their bodies curled into a close circle with me at the center, waiting for me to signal a new movement, as though I’m the leading dancer here. Perhaps it is their breath that makes the music. And the sound of a drone is put there by the director to attract the audience’s attention.

Mahmoud, my eldest son, starts a new job today. He’ll make pastries and sell them to those in the tents and the school shelters. Aid has started to come in and flour is a bit cheaper, so now it’s possible to buy some. Just days ago, we were searching for flour like miners, but yesterday, the city was carrying bags of wheat rather than the bodies of martyrs. This is a day that must be written about, but I won’t; I fear the flour seller stumbling, the city returning to where it was, without a loaf of bread to be found. At three in the morning, Mahmoud’s friends tap lightly on the door of the shelter to wake him up for work. They don’t realize that everyone is awake; we just pretend to sleep as a distraction from the darkness all around us. He goes out with his friends, a strange vigor in his step. I hear his jaw shaking from the cold as he walks out the door. I smile, knowing how he likes to exaggerate to make a hero out of himself. But there’s also a twinge of pain inside me that makes me face the darkness with open eyes.

The intermittent naps are over. No more conversations with anxiety: I have to get up. I have no space around me to stretch, to extend my arms, or even to lean on a hand to help me up. I hop up like a rabbit out of its cage. I dread the thought of finding a bathroom to use, so I’ll wait until it’s light enough to go to a relative’s house: I can’t compete with a hundred women and children for one bathroom. And as long as I have the luxury of an outhouse, it’s like having a golden ticket to the opera. I take my three little girls to do what’s natural in an unnatural way, walking through the cold to a far-off stranger’s door, carrying our water bottles like precious treasures, checking our grip upon them at each step. I do not care about the disapproving glances. It is my right to live. Access to a usable restroom: I will not relinquish that right.

Going back to wash our faces requires more water. The boys can handle themselves, although I know they’re more embarrassed than I am; still, they are men in a time of war. I made them each a water bottle for the bathroom and wrote their names on them. They laughed when we first walked down the street with bottles of water inscribed with our names, begging to enter a bathroom that we might find vacant somewhere. I spoil them by squeezing half a lemon into the bottles as a substitute for the soap that can no longer be found. We use one small bottle of water to wash all our faces, catching the water in a wide bowl so that we don’t waste a drop: we have to recycle it to wash our feet. We surround our meager space in the shelter with school desks and some old curtains that we’ve found for a bit of privacy.

To prepare breakfast for the children, I have to collect some small sticks that can light quickly. It’s sheer joy when the wood catches fire, like the joy of a child receiving a bag of chips as UNRWA’s generous gift to displaced children. I’ve been waiting to receive some biscuits. There’s a silent excitement I feel inside at the thought of a small piece of biscuit, a luxury that is not available even to those with money: money no longer has that power here. A lot of blank paper is needed to light a fire under a pot of water to make tea, and money won’t buy you the ingredients for that cup of tea in a city empty of everything except death. 

Water is also a luxury. I no longer remember the flow of water from a tap. The joyful sound of water clinking as it’s poured into a plastic bottle overshadows any image of civilization I have ever experienced. The line for water is a test of your fortitude. You have to stay on your feet without taking a step back or looking up at the sky, even if you are tempted by curiosity at the sound of the death drone, wanting to observe its movement. You have to keep your eyes on the water hose stretched out before you. It’s your connection to life.

Lunchtime
I forget we have lost the meaning of time; our appointments now stand in the line with us
Bread line
water line
fear line
time line
line of death
True steadfastness is returning from all these lines with every part of your body intact
Your soul is of course damaged. That’s okay.

In the line
waiting for the wheat to rest
the smile of the man dusted with flour
the loaf of bread falling freely on the battlefield

In the line
a young woman tries to recall the meaning of her femininity
a man sings to the oven
another tries to understand the screams of the burning street
I stand in the middle of the story
gathering birds in my head
fearing the flight of the trees

In the line
an old woman curses the fields and the ears of grain
as she lists the names of the great cities for you
She sews the rope of hunger
to make a large sack of flour
enough for the guards of the tents

In the line
you and I
a child bites her nails
a man spits on the war
a woman applies lipstick under her veil
No water in this city to wash away our sins
but we’ll defy hell to produce a fresh loaf of bread
a moment before death

Now strip all that away and start to understand the language of darkness, your companion for the hours to come. You have many tales to hear or to tell, depending on the mood of the fighter jets above you, the bombs always threatening to fall.

“You have to believe in a god for the idea of rebellion to work inside you. We do not rebel against nothingness. An individual who does not rebel against the chemistry of the universe, even at the level of simple feelings, is a pale and sickly human being.”

—Nima Hasan, March 23, 2024, 5:49 p.m.

March 24

8:29 a.m.

170 days of our lives gone as we wait for death in Rafah.
In Khan Yunis the shelling has not stopped since suhoor and the Nasser Hospital neighborhood is being burned by fire belts.
The genocide in Al-Shifa Hospital has lasted a week (a genocide on repeat).
Nuseirat is being bombarded by fighter jets and artillery.
The North is being starved to death.
We are fine.
Thanks for asking.
Be well.

11:57 a.m.

The void:
a rendezvous for our disappointments
Laughter:
a defining moment that will not be duplicated
Sleep:
a chance for silence
Reading:
a good excuse for obesity
Crying:
a moment of defeat
Song:
strangers sharing a heart
Love:
a translation of our true selves
Homeland:
a blank phone screen

2:00 p.m.

The thought of home is the warmest thing humankind has ever found.
All of Gaza trembles.

March 25

11:26 p.m.

A poet
paints an ear of wheat on his dead tree each day. The birds believe it.

March 26

9:24 a.m.

My daughter woke up asking:
How long will the war last?
I really miss our home.
I dreamt we returned.
She cried and I cried.

March 27

6:28 p.m.

Tell sorrow that we pardon it—ask it to release us!

March 28

10:35 a.m.

I once had a mute cat that came to me whenever it was hungry or wanted to relieve itself. With a movement of her head, she would move her food dish or scratch on the door to be let out. She did not jab me with a paw or rub herself against me when she wanted me to wake up; instead, she would stand by my head and stare intently at my sleeping face until I felt I was being watched. And I would get up and do what she wanted. Her unique way of expressing herself by just glancing at me made me feel like she was a part of me. I felt free with her, sharing a language that connected us.

The circle has closed around me like a cat forced into silence, scratching to try and reach a false sense of freedom. It has made my view of wars different from the prevailing ones. Some see me as disloyal to the resistance in a country that is forbidden to speak; others question my patriotism. You might be a traitor, a friend told me, while she drank cappuccino in front of her TV screen, watching the news and crying with great “integrity.”

I am trying to tell my story without jabbing you with a paw or clinging to anyone. I am just declaring my needs clearly and firmly, remaining myself, without meowing about it.

March 29

2:25 p.m.

We are not well.
We aren’t strong enough to see death, to wait for it day after day without having breakdown after breakdown. It is okay to reveal our weakness and to cry. Stubbornness in the face of sorrow and oppression is not a form of resistance but a denial of our humanity. That is why we are traumatized and collapse at the slightest glimpse of the future. The pictures and videos and news bulletins we see depict what we are living through, and they send a mixed message: we are all potential martyrs, and at the same time, we have to endure with patience until our turn comes and then welcome it with pride. I do not think our inner strength will be enough to welcome death, even if we can accept it. True steadfastness comes from expressing your feelings exactly as they are. Then you will never reach the point of collapse; you will keep a balance between the reality of your feelings and the reality of what you are facing. Talk to yourself, even to your mirror, and don’t be afraid of the fear you find there.

March 30

1:42 a.m.

At school

I want to hear the school bell ring
draw a line on an empty bread bag
clap loudly for the morning whistle

Put “water” in a sentence
before it runs out:
that’s what the teacher told us

Recite: Mawtini
though chanting can’t be heard in the tent

I have no books
I wanted to make a pot of tea
before winter comes
Words stir the fire’s embers

Where is my mother?
I’m old enough now 
to look for her in the rubble
That’s the first lesson

Stand up. Sit down.
Record: I am from Gaza
and strike the world from the record.

8:22 p.m.

Isaac Mukhaimir, a father and true leader, is dead.
When he came to the signing of my novel, he read it that same day.
He called me that evening to tell me: 
I am so proud: you are a true daughter of the camp. I have never read anyone who captures the realities of the camp, and its secrets, as you have. 

Nima Hasan, a mother and single caretaker of seven children, is a writer, poet, and social worker from Rafah. Her published works in Arabic include the novels Where the Flames Danced and It Was Not a Death and the book Letters from a Perpetrator. Her poetry has been published and translated widely in print and online publications. She was awarded the Samira al-Khalil Prize in 2024 and a selection of her writings during the genocide were published bilingually, in Arabic and French translation by Souad Labbize, titled Be Gaza (Les Lisières, January 2025).

Rania Jawad is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her recent publications and work focus on women’s writings from Gaza during the genocide, and the production and politics of testimonial writing.

Malaka Shwaikh is a scholar from Gaza. She is a lecturer in international relations at the University of St Andrews. She coauthored Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine: A Strategic Perspective (2023) with Rebecca Ruth Gould and has published articles and book chapters on the limitations of resilience and the question of Palestine, narratives of displacement, gendered realities of incarceration, and translation politics in Gaza.

The post “I Bequeath Life to You, for We Die without Life Knowing Us”—Nima Hasan Writing from the Ends of the Homeland appeared first on Mizna.

Mizna is growing our board!

We’re seeking passionate and committed individuals to join our board of directors. Board members enter into a relationship of trusteeship, collectively responsible for supporting Mizna’s mission, vision, strategic directions, fundraising, and overseeing business affairs.

This is an opportunity to make a meaningful impact and help steward Mizna’s future.

What we’re looking for:

• Strategic thinkers with diverse perspectives
• Specific experience with legal and fundraising, more generally, nonprofit experience
• Commitment to Mizna’s mission, vision, and values
• Knowledge about and passion for Arab and SWANA art, film, literature, performance, etc.
• Experience with programming or producing contemporary art, literature, film, performance etc.
• Ability to contribute 3-5 hours towards board duties monthly

Submit your application here

We’ll review all submissions and reach out to candidates who align with our needs for an initial conversation on a rolling basis.

Please contact ellina@mizna.org with any further questions.

The post Open Call: Join Our Board appeared first on Mizna.

trans.  Huda Fakhreddine

In anticipation of Huda Fakhreddine’s forthcoming translation of Samer Abu Hawwash’s Ruins and Other Poems, Mizna presents this stunning new poem on the ways Zionist settler colonialism infiltrates Palestinian life even through mundane, ordinary objects. As with other works like “from the river to the sea,” Abu Hawwash’s poem haunts, and yet returns us impossibly to the land, in all the details.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

“All but those hands,” my beloved says, “that is an obvious truth.”
“But ours is the memory of the hands,” I say,
“the hands that used to care and nurture and love,
the hands that bled their sweat into the sap, the trunk, the frond—
the hands that are that palm leaf
eternally waving to those departed.”

—Samer Abu Hawwash

A Box of Dates on the Kitchen Table

On the kitchen table 
is what’s left of dates in a box.
I don’t know why we keep it still,
there for us to see every morning, 
when we make our coffee,
every noon while we prepare lunch,
every time we go to get a glass of water,
every time we want to see it and every time we don’t,
there it stands among other things, sometimes hidden
and sometimes revealed, gleaming in the dark.

The box was not always here.
A few days ago, it was on another table
in the only Arab shop in this city.
And it was there that we missed everything.
We missed the brand name, “King David,” on the box,
the star and the name of the settlement on the back.
I can hear the pontificators now:
“Don’t you know the ABCs of boycott.
Carefully read the back side.
Look for the symbols and signs, the hidden and the visible.
Decode everything on the product. 
Did you consult the list?”

I look at my beloved and say,
“But aren’t these dates ours at the end of the day?
Each on one of them in this box
and in all the other boxes?
Isn’t all ours to begin with, 
the soil where they grew, ours.
the water that nourishes them, ours.
the shade they make, ours.
Maybe even those hands that grew them, 
those are probably ours too.”

“All but those hands,” my beloved says, “that is an obvious truth.”
“But ours is the memory of the hands,” I say,
“the hands that used to care and nurture and love,
the hands that bled their sweat into the sap, the trunk, the frond—
the hands that are that palm leaf
eternally waving to those departed.”

At home, I stand with my beloved, 
puzzled over the box,
as if it were a dead animal.
I tell her, “It’s just a box, a silly, miserable box,
nothing more than wrapping and a brand,
a made-up name, an advertisement.
Don’t you know, my love, that made-up names and ads
are nothing but lies? You know how deceiving a box can be.”

“But this box has become a country,” she says.
“It’s not really a country,” I say, “It’s just another box, a made-up name, a brand. 
Besides, didn’t you see the expiration date 
on the back of the box?”

Alone in the evening, I stare at the box abandoned on the table,
the box that became a grave, now expanding.
I remind myself: it’s just a box, a silly, miserable box.
O palm trees of Jericho,
palm trees of Khan Younis, of Deir al-Balah,
do you see me as I tear up the box and throw it in the trash bin?
Do you see how the trash bin keeps growing larger and larger,
until it can hold all the boxes from all the stores, in all the cities,
until nothing remains but a single date.
I peel off its pale, lifeless skin,
and reveal the gleaming stone at its heart.

And in the stone, I see all things,
past, present, and future:
the houses, the fields, the clouds, the waves,
all that we call home.
I will strip the stone of all the names
it has falsely claimed along the endless paths of absence.
I will return it to its first name—
and return it to my heart.

علبة تمر على طاولة المطبخ

على طاولة المطبخ، ما بقي من حبّات تمر في العلبة
لا أعرف لماذا ما زلنا نحتفظ بها
هنا حيث نراها كلّ صباح ونحن نعدّ قهوتنا
وكلّ ظهيرة ونحن نعدّ الغداء،
وكلما دخلنا لجلب كوب ماء، أو كلما
أردنا أن نراها ولا نراها
هنا، بين أشياء أخرى تحجبها حيناً
وتبديها حيناً ساطعة في الظلام

لم تكن دوماً هنا؛
قبل بضعة أيام، كانت على طاولة أخرى
في المتجر العربيّ الوحيد في هذه المدينة
حيث فاتتنا رؤية كلّ شيء،
فاتتنا رؤية العلامة—”الملك داود“—أعلى العلبة، 
مع النجمة واسم المستعمرة على ظهرها—
وأسمع الآن أصوات العالمين بالمسائل والأمور:
ألم تتعلّم ألف باء المقاطعة، أن تقرأ جيداً”
ما دوّن على ظهر العلبة،
أن تبحث عن الرموز والإشارات الخفيّة والظاهرة،
أن تفكك شفرة المنتجات،
“ألم تشاور ما جاء في القائمة؟

أنظر إلى حبيبتي، وأقول:
”لكنها، في نهاية الأمر، تبقى لنا، 
كلّ حبة تمر في هذه العلبة
وفي كل العلب،
هي في الأصل لنا،
التربة، حيث نبتت، لنا
والمياه التي روتها، 
والظلال التي صنعتها، 
وربما حتى الأيدي التي رعتها“ 
هي الأخرى لنا
”إلا الأيدي،“ تقول حبيبتي، ”إنها الحقيقة الواضحة،“
”إذن لنا ذاكرة الأيدي،“ أقول،
”الأيدي التي كانت تربّت، وتحنو، وتحبّ
وتحفر عَرَقها في النسغ والجذع والسعفة
الأيدي التي هي السعفة
في تلويحتها الأبدية للراحلين“

في البيت، أقف وحبيبتي حائرَين حول العلبة
كأنما حول جثّة حيوان نافق،
أقول لها: ”إنها علبة، مجرد علبة سخيفة بائسة،
غلاف لا أكثر، علامة تجارية، اسم مصطنع، لوحة إعلانية، 
ألم تري يا حبيبتي كم تكذب الأسماء المصطنعة واللوحات الإعلانية؟
ألم تري كم تخدع العلب؟“
”بيد أن هذه العلبة صارت بلداً،“ تقول 
”لكنه ليس بلداً حقاً،“ أقول، ”إنه مجرد علبة أخرى، اسم مصطنع، علامة تجارية، ثم ألم تري تاريخ الصلاحية 
على ظهر العلبة؟“

وحيداً في المساء أنظر إلى العلبة المهجورة على الطاولة،
العلبة التي صارت قبراً ما زال يتسع
وأذكّر نفسي: إنها مجرد علبة، علبة سخيفة بائسة،
فيا نخلات أريحا
ويا نخلات خان يونس
ويا نخلات دير البلح
أترينني وأنا أمزّق العلبة وأرميها في سلة القمامة
ثم كيف تكبر السلة أكثر فأكثر
حتى تصير تتسع لكلّ العلب في كل المتاجر، في كل المدن،
حتى لا يبقى سوى حبّة تمر واحدة
أنزع عنها قشرتها الشاحبة الميتة
وأكشف عن الحجر اللامع في قلبها

وفي الحجر أرى كلّ شيء:
ماضي الأشياء وحاضرها ومستقبلها،
البيوت والحقول والغيم والموج
وكل ما نسميه البلاد،
ثم أنزع عن الحجر ما انتحل له من أسماء
على دروب الغياب الطويلة،
وأعيده إلى اسمه الأول
وأعيد قلبي إليه.

Samer Abu Hawwash (b. 1972) is a Palestinian poet, novelist, editor, and translator, born in Lebanon. He is the author of 10 poetry collections including his debut collection Life is Printed in New York (1997), I’ll Kill You Death (2012), One Last Selfie with a Dying World (2015), Ruins (2020), and From the River to the Sea (2024). He is also the author of three works of fiction: The Journal of Photographed Niceties (2003), Valentine’s Day (2005), and Happiness or A Series of Explosions that Rocked the Capital (2007). Abu Hawwash is the translator of more than 20 volumes of poetry and prose from English including works by William Faulkner, J.G. Ballard, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, Langston Hughes, and many others. He lives in Barcelona, Spain where he currently works as the director of the Culture & Society section at Almajalla Magazine.

Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge). Her translations include Jawdat Fakhreddine’s poetry collection Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA Editions), The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat (Seagull Books), and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah (World Poetry). She is also the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun) and a poetry collection, Wa min thamma al-ālam (And Then the World). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures.

The post A Box of Dates on the Kitchen Table appeared first on Mizna.

Today, Mizna is honoring the launch of beloved contributor and Palestinian performance artist Fargo Tbakhi’s debut poetry collection TERROR COUNTER. This ambitious, experimental collection is, at once, a battle cry, a love letter, a reminder that we will die and that we are not dead. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes: “Through a variety of invented forms and stirring unravelings, these poems tunnel, excavate, eulogize, exclaim, and most elegantly imagine where we might go once we reject the dehumanizing gaze and obsessions of a crumbling empire and return to ourselves and to each other.” Purchase a copy of TERROR COUNTER here.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

—Fargo Tbakhi

Palestinian Love Poem

Something in me wishes for a dead cell
tower.
I’m a little grime. I’m arterial clogging.
Blister
on the tongue on skin You weren’t aware
could
blister. I puked up a drone today
warm
and stillbreathing. Necrosis of the giver
give
to all the grimes a gift: cleanness.
Up
the throat and toward fresh air. My
goodness
what a pretty taste. The interrogatory lawyer
bends
me over and his briefcase touches my
soul.
I’m a little filth. Blood of a good man
catch
it in my cupped hands. To drink You is to
know
who I will become. I’m a little pest.
Warbling
my little deathsong like a king’s
bane.
I swear I can see through myself tonight,
all
the way through to You, my watcher, my
sweet
interlocutor, silently workshopping
all
of my lines.

Gazan Tunnels (Through Yehuda Amichai’s “Sonnet”)

from “In the Knowledge That You Will Die, and I Will Die”

for my baba

And we will walk

Into nowhere

You with Your smallness and me with my smallness

The beach where we froze—were frozen—together

When the patrol officer held You he held You

When You held me You held me close

I answer the video call and Your hair has become white

Thin and vanishing—poverty—wraithlike—

Some incontrovertibility inside of us

And our times

I answer the video call smoking and You say You smoke now? then light up with me

The two of us and our cigarettes and distance

Stumbling along toward death

When my poems disintegrate You will remain in the documents of the court

When the courts disintegrate You will slip with me into anonymity

Where we began and where we looked for love

The indictment text holding You still and frozen

Where You are defending Yourself against the being-told-of

And You are named Defendant Last Name First Name

And You are named for me and I for You

The pages typed by somebody’s hands

Who listened around You shapeless in the clear light

I keep telling You about time

And what we need it for

Though I do not believe—

We find ourselves this morning in our capitols

Farther than a ship from safety

On the horizon line

Its vagueness and its cruelty

I have told Your story and You in Your way

You have told mine

You have told it to me

We tell each other the temperature and find that the numbers match

And I look for You in the white of my own hair

Its unexpected entrances

To miss each other’s funerals because of our difference

To have lost, finally, our eachness

To be, finally, no discrete things to be legislated

I wander through the ghosts of Your hair

I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

And here You tell me I am whole and wholly Yours

And here I tell You I let You go, again and again, each day

And here we are sweetly entangled and disentangling

Somewhere beyond the electronics store and its robberies

Your hair is becoming its own memory of itself

And Your jacket resides on me like a welcome tick

Drawing from me my life

My somewhereness and my penchants-for-

I, begging some God for illegibility

You, forgotten dream of instability

Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025) and ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT. (Deep Vellum, 2027). 

The post TERROR COUNTER—Excerpts appeared first on Mizna.

This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Ghinwa Jawhari teases apart the multiple layers of queer experience of a summer spent in Lebanon.

Use coupon code SWANAPRIDE25 for a discount on Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices and the special collection I Want Sky honoring martyred Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy, valid through the end of June 2025.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

we find fairuz on the radio. in sleepless tones
newscasters interject with head counts: bodies

—Ghinwa Jawhari

a girlhood summer passes

shouf, lebanon

july war 2006

you curl against me like a burning hair
as airstrikes pock the hillside, bare earth
red as afterbirth. upturned. we knob until
we find fairuz on the radio. in sleepless tones
newscasters interject with head counts: bodies
other bodies have yet to name. the slaughter
a spectacle from your balcony, each missile
a scream of fire & dust. your father’s palestinian
riles in you, wraps your fingers around the rail
like a stone. smoke pillows the heavens black,
gauzes stars away from view. beside me you tear
a weed apart. loves me loves me not loves me loves
until the stem is bare. a girlhood summer passes,
water under the bridge. we are tall & featureless
as the okra crop. we pull cat’s cradles in our hands,
scribble fates in cootie catchers. during the ceasefire
your neighbor begs us to come swim in his pool.
he watches our slim bodies assault the surface
of the water. from his perch he hoots, in english,
bombshell! & we both laugh nervously, thinking
he must be talking about the other. we’ll remember
the brief war this way: dirty water, a man’s eyes
fishing us openly, legs crossed on the wet concrete
as the news drones over fairuz, a list of countries
that have brought warships to collect their citizens.

Ghinwa Jawhari is the author of the chapbook BINT (2021), which was selected by Aria Aber for Radix Media’s inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize.

A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she is the founding editor of Koukash Review. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear in Catapult, Mizna, The Adroit Journal, Rusted Radishes, The Margins, Narrative, and elsewhere.

The post a girlhood summer passes appeared first on Mizna.

This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Mejdulene B. Shomali chronicles a revelatory moment of self-realization and tributes the iconic actor Patrick Swayze.

Use coupon code SWANAPRIDE25 for a discount on Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices and the special collection I Want Sky honoring martyred Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy, valid through the end of June 2025.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

                the bouncer of my road house heart
           my wild Johnny
the first man i thought to love

—Mejdulene B. Shomali

To Patrick Swayze, Thanks for
Everything! Mejdulene Shomali

Patrick Swayze nailed the lift
                baby out of the corner
           into the sky        a rare bird
something beautiful

my VCR rewound & replayed
                to see his smile
           watch her sink down
against his chest        his unbuttoned black shirt

Patrick wore that red dress
                drove queens in the desert
           locks blowing in the convertible breeze
saved Stockard from a bad man

made a whole town believe in something
                in whiteness
           fuchsia sweetheart neckline
lacy black gloves

even as a ghost Patrick moved
                penny up the door i wanted
           to see it again when
he passed too young too gaunt

with what cancer took
                i remember him like this
           tight black jeans no spaghetti arms
twisting hips from tips of feet

Patrick was never a punchline for me
                the bouncer of my road house heart
           my wild Johnny
the first man i thought to love

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and associate professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. She is the author of Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press 2023) and the chapbook agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia (Finishing Line Press 2024).

The post To Patrick Swayze, Thanks for Everything! Mejdulene Shomali appeared first on Mizna.