Essayist Farah Abdessamad contemplates the layering of history atop history in a small Tunisian town on the Mediterranean coast, and the poetics of how memory and recollection sediment to become the future of the past—what we call our present. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2, Futurities, link to purchase HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects.

—Farah Abdessamad

Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision

Twelve miles south of Tunis, I inspect the graffiti on the decrepit house. Spray painted in black against a wall the color of young apricots, are the words “Naro” next to “H-Lif”—an abbreviation for the town of Hammam Lif. In capital letters these two words float. Naro, Hammam-Lif’s Carthaginian past; Hammam Lif, Naro’s Tunisian future. In a shadowless street off the polluted beach, they exist simultaneously and become something else: a world-image and a new spatial realm. These two names won’t leave me alone.

Unlike more elaborate mural art, this graffiti contained no signature and no date. The unknown artist strolled, stopped, and appraised the abandoned house’s surface in near collapse under the weight of bygone halcyon days. Everything here is in a state of near-collapse. It must have happened at nighttime, when the beach’s laughter, made of discreet courtship near the wave breakers and hard liquor drunk by the bottle, subsided. Lulled by the rolling waves, the young man—let’s assume a young man—looked around. Silence. Next, he took his can of spray paint and gave it a vigorous shake, muffled by a second-hand sweater he wrapped around it. Without much thought, he tattooed the names of his town. Hammam Lif first, then Naro, a spontaneous but necessary addition as if one couldn’t be inscribed without the other. A quick outburst. Intentionally or not, he mapped a sensory grid: that of the living and the dead. I stare at the evocation, just like he did. As quiet as a cat, he left the scene toward the train station and farther west, joining the towering shadow of Jebel Boukornine. 

Graffiti is a public language; it captures a visual and symbolic mood when not a scream. Yet “[l]anguage is never simply a language, a tool, it is a reservoir of a people’s soul,” wrote Albert Memmi in The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon (1973); this prompts recognition. The young man who spray painted the words Naro and Hammam Lif didn’t do so to show off his drawing skills or compete with others over matters of style or engage in obvious social activism. H-Lif and Naro, by their two-word minimalism—the drawing holding the finality of a signature—conveyed something of a different order. It brought to mind another mural I had noticed two years ago at Hammam Lif’s train station after a decade-long absence. That one shows a teenager with headphones listening to a cassette that reads “please don’t kill yourself” in English. Nurturing and supportive slogans on this anti-suicide campaign include “Stay 4 the strangers that will love you” and “Life is always worth it.” A loving whisper to counter a desperate, silent scream. It hurts to think that for some young people the train linking Tunis to its southern banlieue might be an attractive final destination, a relief to end a painful existence. The mood of inevitable capitulation is challenged in this anti-suicide graffiti by the station that appeared after the Revolution, commissioned by a local youth organization. I wondered why they elected to write these messages in English as opposed to our dialect if the intended audience was local youth. The image carried a distinctive American feel with its textisms and Walkman from the 1980s and 90s, which brought to mind a third graffiti by the beach promenade depicting the American hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur on the sides of a run-down kiosk. English is a social language, an elsewhere, an abstract country, a narrative landscape, much like Naro is to Hammam Lif. A Hammam Lif graffiti resurrects Naro like others vow to avenge the death of Tupac: these alternative spaces exist only in our subjective longing, but their entanglement doesn’t end there. More than a mass of archaeological fragments, Naro is the site of powerful dreamscapes, upon which a graffiti artist extends the affective urge to hold onto the memory of the dead through time. Naro and Hammam Lif etched like the romantic blanket protecting  a lover’s embrace; I got pulled in to examine what kind of longing they conjure.

It’s hard to chart with precision Naro’s timeline. The village and its people were part of Carthage’s expanding empire, which Rome razed to the ground in 146 BCE after three devastating wars. This genocidal campaign brutally erased most traces of Carthaginian culture, literature, and lifestyle, a sprawling civilization that stretched across the central Mediterranean for centuries. Victorious Rome incorporated and administered the territory as a province. The country, to which the Amazigh people are indigenous, changed hands countless times until being ruled by the Ottoman Empire and France before gaining independence in 1956. Hammam Lif, famous for its hot spring reputed to cure nasal ailments, sits where ancient Naro was and has grown from a modest fishermen’s village to a town of more than 40,000 people. At what point did the city cease to be Carthaginian, Arab, Ottoman, Vandals, or French to become something else entirely in our imagination?

Jebel Boukornine, the mountain of “two horns” in Tunisian Arabic, looms over Hammam Lif as it did over Naro. The twin peaks crown the Gulf of Tunis, belonging to the topographical memory of Tunisois today, of Carthaginians yesterday. In the times of Naro, Boukornine’s limestone gave a pink hue to syncretic statues prized by Punic and Roman patrons. On its western peak, where animals were sacrificed and votive stelae placed to honor the gods and commemorate the animal offerings, rested a sanctuary consecrated to the cult of Punic divinity Baal, later assimilated to the Roman god Saturn. There, worshippers overlooked Carthage and the small villages around it. I imagine them, not more than five or six climbing the mountain with their loads to visit the temple’s attendants. Upon reaching Boukornine’s western summit, they rested on small benches made of wood and rocks. The breeze cooled their burning cheeks. The supplicants shared a piece of bread between them before washing their hands to proceed with the rituals. And when nighttime descended, they lit terracotta lamps and stargazed, huddling against the shadows. 

I wandered near Jebel Boukornine one winter day. I went to visit the green and red painted sufi shrine of local saint Sidi Bouriga. A fire destroyed part of the building a few years ago. The zaouia had been renovated since, but it was closed that day. I followed the path leading to the mountain’s slopes that remain green despite the abundance of concrete and dust everywhere around it. The incessant car traffic muted; I paused to admire the expanse of the sea’s changing blue—a blush so warm and tranquil. Amid piles of plastic trash and unpleasant smells, I carried on the forested slopes until confronted with several young men who immediately hid their hands in their pockets when they spotted me. The mountain’s new guardians, I thought. I turned my feet and left visiting the old sanctuary for another day. 

Like the graffiti artist’s infatuation, I too have often thought of Hammam Lif and Naro. I could not roam Hammam Lif without roaming Naro and this spatial collision created an illusion of permanence, the existence of a vague continuum giving way to a love of legends and a mythological resonance. Several months after my walk to Boukornine I encountered ancient Naro when I least expected it in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum opened a show devoted to medieval Africa. Among the exhibition’s stunning objects were Jewish mosaics from Naro excavated in the late 19th century. They testified from a place where multiple faiths coexisted from the 3rd to the 6th century. The floor mosaics represented several potent images including a menorah, a lion framed by floral motifs, and a large-scale date palm tree. I came to know that they had been unearthed in 1883 by Ernest de Prudhomme, a French Army Captain who proverbially dug his backyard and found a treasure: the most complete evidence of ancient synagogues in Roman Africa. Men under his orders unfortunately damaged many pieces due to inadequate excavation techniques and handling. The Brooklyn Museum acquired these historical objects in 1905, around the same year of the Young Tunisians’ founding, a decisive political movement mobilizing indigènes, promoting Tunisian emancipation and equal political consideration under the French protectorate. 

In New York, I admired these vestiges and noted their familiarity despite not sharing the faith for which they were designed. I recognized in the lion the tales of the extinct North African Lion which once populated Tunisia’s forests and mountains up until independence. I visualized the many date palm trees lining the beachfront promenade of today’s Hammam Lif in their various states of desiccation, and in the mosaics the colorful tiles of our family home as well as the ostraca of a surviving past that pokes and gasps through the ripples of time.

That de Prudhomme found the remains of the Naro synagogue in his garden is rather uncanny. It emphasizes that soil is a stratum holding infinite secrets. History’s layers often mingle and argue like the daily pensioners glued to their plastic chairs in smoky, idle cafes amplified by the noise of a TV playing somewhere. These deposits sediment and superimpose, elbowing eras and events out of sight until they stubbornly spring back to view. 

The ancients distinguished between memory and recollection. In the same way, we differentiate History from collective and mythological narratives, and all of these from personal histories. According to Saint Augustine, born in Romanized North Africa, “the time present of things past is memory.” In other words, memory is the present of the past. Recollection, on the other hand, entails the act of piecing together fragments, a determination that leads to a form of realization. Collective and primordial memories may not concern our existence directly but they frame a mental geography. I, as the embodied form of the present, was not present during the birth of oceans and the sky, nor during those cataclysmic events—plagues, wars, natural disasters, famines—that still haunt the collective human consciousness. Yet as a historical being, I live through my personal memories in addition to those I have inherited, what German scholar Reinhart Koselleck referred to in Sediments of Time as a tension between “experiential space” and “expectation horizon”. And crucially, memory cannot be apprehended without forgetfulness and erasure. 

Little has survived Roman wrath to teach us about how Carthaginians philosophized history and human existence. They believed that the soul survived from its physical incarnation. In other societies not too distant from Naro, the dead underwent trials to be accepted into an afterlife; a moment often recounted as a voyage, a crossing of rivers. Forgetfulness grants passage to a new life in exchange for the past: the dead must relinquish the memory of those that attach them to the material world. Historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote in Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting that “the dead are those who have lost their memories”—or, perhaps more accurately, traded. While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects. 

* * * 

After encountering the laconic graffiti signage of H-Lif and Naro, I head back to the beach. The sea is calm and the scent of rotten garbage tickles my throat. Public benches have been smashed into pieces. Sea-facing restaurants and kiosks have shut, except for one with an empty freezer placed like it were part of a garage sale. Wild grass and trash have covered the area where sand used to be. I tiptoe between shards of glass and plastic bottles, baby clothes and broken toys, and dry balls of Posidonia oceanica, a common underwater seagrass, rejected by the sea. Famished flea-infested dogs and litters of emaciated cats haul leftovers of leftovers. Sand was harvested to embellish touristic beaches south, as if this place’s constitutive components were destined to elect one of two imposed choices: to leave or surrender. Following a heavy storm in 1981, ill-advised authorities installed large wave breakers which trapped marine currents, occasionally turning the sea a dangerous tint of green. Stagnating waters have mixed with sewage; it is too toxic to swim there now. When I was little during summer visits, my family rushed to secure a spot on the beach before it got crowded. This was before the sea turned into an irreversible poisonous pond where harassed and beaten-up asylum seekers go to die, trading their own memories for a one-way passage. At night, we would gather on white plastic chairs sinking into the cold sand, drinking sodas drunk on our stupid happiness. 

From the beach on a clear day, I can make out the Byrsa Hill of old Carthage and the elevated village of Sidi Bou Said, the Tunisia of social media influencers and hashtags, a vista that often feels like it belongs to a different country. Located north, both of these spots twinkle at night. Wish you were here, they tout to me, from my there on the other side of the Gulf of Tunis. Large ships anchor in the port of La Goulette—to France, Italy—they pass by until they make a turn and disappear in the far distance. Sometimes I think the ships and their passengers might pity this neglected town and its people who dream of visas they can’t obtain to travel abroad and escape (is visa-fantasizing an early form of memory-trading?). Work, lack of work, life is ghali—expensive. The Tunisia I know, the one of Hammam Lif, is left to old people, kids, and women, to it-was-better-before and look-at-these-young-women-now (always young women). A dirty dot, a stain on the polluted coastline along with Rades’ eyesore of an industrial zone. The old casino is collapsing despite multiple renovation announcements. The empty mansions have stayed behind while patrician families have opted to live elsewhere. The Bey’s winter residence is crumbling, the site reeks of urine. Cinema Oriental closed a while ago and the bakeries are sometimes half empty amid cyclical flour shortages, which have worsened in recent years. And not just flour: lines of caffeine-deprived people in front of the few shops selling ground coffee. But there’s fricasses, pizza, lablebi, and more and we’ve blessed a new dictator to replace the one we had deposed. The town’s characters ignore that they live on borrowed time as each new day starts following the same musical score. The streets bask in nostalgia, a dangerous affliction that infects people sitting, waiting, queuing in between a constitutional coup, an economic crisis, and news of arbitrary arrests. Those working in Europe and Canada front their exchange rate-enabled wealth. They don’t share stories of racism and hardships beneath their hard-won euros and dollars. 

“A remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present,” noted French intellectual Maurice Halbwachs in The Social Frameworks of Memory. I find this helpful to approach Naro’s shape-shifting nature. Naro’s ability to stimulate a reflection on the concept of time—both a physical place and a delineated periodicity—and the poetics of time. Naro has become a salve to soothe daily humiliations, an incantation to fight the static of the present. Naro is not a door for cultural supremacy or racist genetic theories. Rather, it is a revolution in the sense of circling back to a rumination—a poking question mark that gives way to mysterious ellipses. 

In our mind, the graffiti artist’s and mine, Naro is enveloped in a magnetic aroma of fresh fish, baking ovens, and a sticky, generous sea. The village enjoys stillness during napping hours once men have returned to shore with their morning loads of tuna, octopus, and cuttlefish. Children play on the beach and admire the boats going and leaving the port of Carthage. They dream of trading across the Mediterranean Sea one day in these agile ships, of encountering different lands, of worshiping Melqart in the various temples dedicated to him in Gades and Malta. Borders are malleable here. A grandmother scolds a child, who dirtied their cotton robe when drawing fish on the wet sand with his friends. A little girl shrieks and runs away from bees. 

Naro means “fire” in the old and extinct language of the Carthaginians, a connection also found in Arabic today. Fire is light, an emergency signal, a symbol of arrivals and homecomings at sea. It brightens crevices, fear, and human ignorance while projecting diffused shadows against the walls of our caves. Fire is a sun, a raging luminosity, an abundant summer and the warmth of a home during winter. Uncontrolled and unchecked, fire turns aggressive, tempestuous, and incandescent. As such, its cathartic release produces alchemical alterations. Intimate fire nourishes the feeble glow of candles one brings to vigils to remember the dead, to honor their memory, and to stay alive, together, through the night.

Gaston Bachelard had warned about fire’s magnetic allure and dangers in Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938). “In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away.” But fire is an avatar of Tunisian pleasure and pain; we feel it in the burning of our tongue induced by our spicy cuisine and acknowledge its presence in the combustion that killed fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, which has since left us feeling a little lost. Maybe it can guide us out of our maze. 

On the pale apricot wall, the unknown artist—a warm presence by now—drew an invisible bridge between Naro and Hammam Lif, two interconnected worlds that exist within and for each other’s eyes. The gesture might be brushed off as an insignificant spasm, yet the suggestion of this portal is the mark of someone who longs, dissents, and resists. The beach’s sand glimmers under the sun, the trees stretch their opulent palm leaves, parasols dot the vista with wondrous colors. Every able-bodied resident has donated a day annually to clean the city. Giggles rise from the emerald sea. Fresh seafood grills on the promenade and ice cold citronade refreshments. A ferry bound for Carthage, Sidi Bou Said, and La Marsa arrives at the pier. Those who disembark head for the casino, where children and adults listen to a captivating old storyteller. They will spend the rest of the day at the new spa at the bottom of Boukornine. In the city center, cinemas show the latest arthouse and experimental films in the mornings. Art galleries opened in two of the old seaside mansions. One of them, Africa House, specializes in contemporary art from the continent, offering year-long residencies to African artists who play chess and dominoes with residents during lazy afternoon hours. During winter, a fashion show takes place inside the casino with a dedicated prize awarded to the best fripes. Secondhand clothes sellers pick their models long in advance and compete for the best tailors in town. The bells of church Sainte-Marie sound on Sundays. The synagogue that was transformed into a children’s library has reverted to its former status and the children’s library has moved to a large annex. The children gather there, then volunteer on the public farm to take care of the horses, donkeys, and sheep. They tease the plump cats on their way. The trains come on time and service Tunis and other destinations every seven minutes. One season follows another—marked by scents of geranium, jasmine, orange blossom, roses, and verbena. Herbalists have set up kiosks near the spa. The market is buzzing with gossip and well-wishes. Couples cruise the sea in sail boats while others hike Boukornine for a more panoramic view. There’s a concert later tonight. I stand by the pale apricot wall and strike three knocks against the house’s blue door. 

Farah Abdessamad is a French Tunisian essayist and critic writing at the intersection of art, heritage, and identity.

The post Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Nour Jaljuli & Aiya Sakr

It was April of 2024 that Mizna first published Diaa Wadi’s essay “Autobiography of Gaza”. Back then, executive editor George Abraham reflected that “‘ceasefire’—a bare minimum demand back in October—has come to lose all meaning as the horrors of Al-Shifa Hospital and other Zionist massacres unravel before our eyes . . .” Now, in January of 2025, we find ourselves yet again grappling with what it means to cross that threshold marked by whatever it is a term like “ceasefire” could ever hope to signify some 460 days and tens of thousands of casualties of zionist genocide later. We again urge all readers to consider donating to Diaa Wadi’s campaign to evacuate his family to safety.

—Nour Eldin H., Mizna assistant editor

Should I tell you a secret?

I’m afraid of the anguish I hold within me. Do people fear their own anguish?

—Diaa Wadi (trans. Nour Jaljuli & Aiya Sakr)

On the Edge of a Volcano, a Rip through a Gazan’s Heart

This grief is larger than anything I can bear. My eyes shatter from what I witness and my brain withers with the endless thoughts and storms of my own imagination.

I write these words while my heart rings like an alarm with fear and anxiety. I write as the Occupation’s artillery shells and war missiles drop on my family. But now, people see these bombs as raindrops, not tons of explosives and fires eating at Gazan bodies, souls, and buildings.

It is the worst of times. People are being slaughtered—mounds of flesh fill the streets and homes. People in the south of Gaza have turned into the new object of slaughter, while in the north, slaughter joins starvation and thirst.  Monumental exhaustion weighs down my tongue.

I imagine them now, spread across the corners of the tent with burnt edges. An empty tent with only gravel and stone. Each of them holding onto their suitcases, their documents, and their few belongings. They stare at each other. Fear sits with them as they wait for the end with each minute. They remember the moments they shared with their beloved martyrs, every person who left to the sky. They remember the warm family gatherings, loud laughter, daily bickering. They wonder, “Will the day ever come when we argue again, and storm out of our home?” But there’s no home left, no fights, it’s all rubble and ruin—ruin beyond anybody’s description.

I am now reading through reports and searching the faces of survivors and the names of martyrs from al-Shuja‘iyya neighborhood to find out what has become of my uncle, his wife, and their children after connection has been lost. I look for them so I don’t come across their pictures and names by accident as I had before with my martyred aunts and uncle.

Can you understand? You can’t understand and you will never know.

Death came near a few days ago. All of my senses were heightened. Except sight. I didn’t need my ears to hear, the voices were coming from inside of me and from the outside too. I spent my life trying to adjust, to heal from the torments of previous wars. I thought they would face no pain after I left them. Didn’t I do it for their sake? To protect them from harm and need? Did I not suffer distance, rejection, and lonely laboring to provide them with all their wishes?

Now, evil is growing. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide, a policy for organized mass killing. This is terrorism and ethnic cleansing. This is organized state terrorism. And my family is there. They are there with all of my people of Gaza suffering through wounds that can swallow a world whole. Fifty thousand martyrs. Life itself will end before we’re able to adequately mourn each and every one of them. The wounded are in every street, remnants strewn across rocks and trees, dogs are gnawing at the living and the dead, and helplessness is amputating every living part inside of us.

This is the truth that beats at us: that this unlawful attack is a mere tool to erode our very sense of self, to plow out of us every concept, idea, and belief; it is the  complete disregard of all useless laws laid out in ink on paper. What is happening in Gaza singles us out, a dignified people kneaded with death, a people whose fate is folded in with facing tragedy alone. This is nothing new in our cycle of setbacks. We don’t know fear and we don’t surrender to any weakness, even if it was the color of blood.

As for you, living outside the borders of these bombs, know that there is no room for a middle ground. You are either a person of honor defending against our pain with your blood, words, voice, and arms, or you are stuffed with filth, apathy, and so-called neutrality.

The greatest agonies in a person’s life happen during childhood and adolescence—not because of their relative weakness at that age, but because the concepts that may aid them to bear these pains have not yet formed and taken root within. So pain shapes and mutilates their thoughts as it wishes. My life in Gaza was filled with anguish of many forms and shapes. The war of 2008, another one in 2012, 2014, 2021, and now this war—a war a thousand times more violent than anything that has ever preceded even though I am not there.

Helplessness, grief, and loss mold a weapon that stabs at my soul, my heart, and my stamina. This weapon reshapes itself, again and again. It pounds at me until I am debilitated. Every day I grow more certain that what was taken from Gazans cannot be retrieved—this is at the heart of our journey. And the ugly truth is that this sorrow is invisible. No eyes can track it. No one can gauge the size of the blow or how deep the wound runs.

Baraa, my brother, let’s play a game.

I will let you go to bed late, and I won’t worry over you swimming long laps in the sea. I will give you hours to play and I won’t smother you with advice. I will get you the phone you want. I won’t tell mom about some of your grades, and I will hide your shenanigans from the family—keep it all in my heart like a gentle breeze. You can have all you want and more. Under one condition, brother: that you don’t leave on my behalf.

“They cannot expel us unless they transfer our corpses to Sinai. This idea they have of us walking there is a fantasy.” This is what my father tells me before the internet and all communications with them are cut off. We will not leave, we will not have a tent in Sinai, and we will not look back at Gaza longingly from behind a fence. Death smells good in the face of the hell our souls are now subjected to.

An international call comes through.

To be honest, I fear nothing more than an international call with a Palestinian code. He says, “Another Baptist Massacre, Diaa.” He cries and hangs up.

Oh God, give us our old fear back. The one that vanishes when we see family and friends.

Give us our old sorrows and normal life. Give us everything that was and forgive us for complaining.

Give us normal fear just like all people. Oh God, only give us what is mundane.

My mother tells me that some of the women cut off their hair due to the lack of shampoo and cleaning supplies. They’ve been off the shelves for ages. Some have even cropped their children’s hair for fear of lice and parasites. They want to maintain their personal hygiene even if by the bare minimum.

What an unremarkable piece of news. No one will care. It doesn’t have the word “massacre.”

Take this advice from a bereaved soul—pray to God more because you have your children with you; hug your mothers more and sleep at their hands; take photos with your siblings and forgive them for their mistakes; hug your fathers, touch their faces and heads, and ask for their blessings; give your thanks to God that your mothers are nearby and safe and that your family is well. Others have had their hearts eaten by sorrow and the world tested them with what  they hold dearest. I am others.

All of us are like this, with no exceptions. We each got our share of suffering, having to watch our families in tents, friends in hospitals, and their remains gathered in death bags.

Gazans have suffered every kind of torment there is. They’ve tried them all in order and they never stopped paying a dear and outrageous price the rest of the world cannot fathom. We pay with each passing second, literally, a hefty price no one in this time has ever paid. What falls on the heads of Gazans are lava balls of hatred, resentment, and a wish for our extermination. It’s a terrifying state that was never before experienced by anyone other than us in this modern day. Allah is almighty.

“Triers of pain,” that’s what Gazans are. We try pain, pain tries us, Gazan pain—what do you think? Are these titles catchy enough? Are they good enough for your fancy publications? Choose the most emotive descriptions and choose carefully. Take your time. This is not human blood. These are not real scenes. Stay neutral and don’t bother providing a single drop to those drinking filthy sewage water.

May whomever is standing on neutral ground fall. May they fall, those who didn’t give their money, or lend their voice, pen, tears, and prayers. 

We are humans and we know sorrow. But this feeling isn’t sorrow, anguish, nor pain. This thing doesn’t have a name. Today, on the phone with my uncle, he responded with a single sentence, “We’re hungry.” I hung up immediately. I couldn’t bear it.

What does the world want? We will die of anguish!

Should I tell you a secret?

I’m afraid of the anguish I hold within me. Do people fear their own anguish?

They must fear their own anguish and resentment when there’s no way to relieve it, to dispose of it, or deal with it. A sort of anguish that repeats daily in larger and larger doses. An anguish that cuts the strings of my heart and now seeps into my very features and behaviors. An anguish that, if placed on a mountain, would shake it or even force it to collapse.

“Stockpiling crisis,” this is the state in which Gazans are living now. They remain steadfast in their homes despite all that has happened and happens every day.

Gazans are stockpiling their crises and sorrows, so that once this war ends, another can begin. A war no news channel will cover, a war uncapturable without bombardment. A war of trying to eat without ash, now a permanent resident in our mouths. A war of going out to the street without conjuring amputated limbs and heads split open. From the war of tanks and weapons is born another war to build a new life.

“Israel commits a new massacre in al-Nuseirat.”

“Israel targets an UNRWA school sheltering refugees.”

“Israel buries children alive under the school rubble.”

“Israel kills entire displaced families inside the school.”

The world must understand that Palestinians, even when they carry weapons, are always the righteous ones, and that Israelis, even if they are lounging on the beaches of Haifa, are always guilty.

They have barely entered life’s threshold; they don’t have passports. They know the world only through screens. They know nothing outside of the wall. No trains, no civil planes, no mall escalators. They don’t know a boat or the sea without siege. They don’t know.

Baha, Alaa, Bara, and Mohammad, my brothers, don’t know.

After the war on Gaza, mothers will ask about their children’s graves.

If a mother wishes to sit by her son’s grave, “Where’s my son buried?” I don’t know. All I know is that this is a mass grave. Perhaps your son is here or there, or perhaps his parts are bagged together in a different mass grave.

You don’t know the meaning of anguish. You cannot understand what it means for your family to sleep on sand in a tent on the coldest and hottest days of the year. You cannot understand what it means to not find a bathroom to go to when you need it. You don’t understand the meaning of all of this. If we place all of this sorrow in a basket over your head none of you will be able to bear it.

This basket of sorrows is too heavy.

My brother Mohammad tells me that at the beginning of the war he only missed home, but now he misses opening the fridge door, sleeping in his own bed, and turning the lock on our front door.

He tells me about his discoveries in this war, “The thing is, you will long first for the main thing—our home. But then you start thinking about details that never crossed your mind, like opening the fridge.”

Mohammad, let’s play a game.

When we hear the bombs, we run.

Whoever gets tired loses the game.

I never imagined being on the outside of the war; the war that never left us. Loss and helplessness increase with the distance. Keeping up with the war through windows and streets would have been easier than constantly flipping between screens, news channels, images of martyrs, tracking neighborhoods, and endless phone calls, one after the other.

All that I do these days is try to find a way to describe how I feel. At least that way I will be able to hold the keys of knowledge and understand, even just a little, how my mind and heart can settle.

Choice turns into a daily hardship. Especially with the tremendous number of choices we must face in every moment of our lives.

But the choices this time are not only confusing, they’re deadly. Either your flesh is shattered to pieces, or you escape your home with no guarantee that you’ll even survive. You either suffer starvation and fear in the north, or the anguish of living in a tent with its unbearable heat in the south.

But the world did its best to aid us. The world was too generous and offered us a long list of choices: to be killed, or displaced. 

Oh Gazan, what do you think? Should you die by a missile that will turn you into pieces no larger than a finger, or do you want to die with your limbs amputated by a bomb?

No, you still have another choice, a lucky choice: to die whole. What do you say if a bullet should hit you between your shoulders, ripping through your body?

Language has changed, and words mean different things now. Children know school as a place of learning, boring math lessons, and a yard where they can run and play. But now school has become a shelter, a place where you sleep surrounded by carpet bombings and shelling. Mohammad tells me he won’t be able to go to school after the war. The only thing he’ll be able to see are images of him running between bombs to reach shelter in the same school he had once loved and studied in. This is the trauma that children won’t be able to escape.

There are moments when one is forced to question their own sanity. How did I endure all of this harm, my soul as clean as a bird’s? You are shocked by your own ability to endure, and are afraid you will suddenly collapse for no reason after having to bear all of this.

They peeled away all of my loved ones. I remain naked and alone, pretending that “strength” is the only life raft available to me.

After once shivering at the thought of us turning into mere numbers, shame has led us to see the genocide as some sort of victory because the Occupation failed to achieve its goals.

I am as silent as a lamb. I only speak when necessary, or I nod my head. I don’t talk much, and I wait for the night to look for them in my dreams. Last night, I saw them walking to the west, carrying their things. With every kilometer they walked, they would cry all at once to lighten the load. Off they went, no one knows where they are now. Perhaps they were killed or maybe they’re still walking. I don’t know if they have enough tears to see the journey through.

Humans have always been more brutal than animals. Even preying animals only eat because they’re hungry. But what is wrong with humans? Are they even humans, or monsters cast upon us?

I don’t know what to tell you about Gaza now. But the road to heaven is crowded in Gaza.

The great poet Al-Muari once wrote upon losing a dear one, “My sadness over his departure is like the blessings of the people of heaven, it’s born anew every time it runs out.”

The tears that fall by accident are the voices of loved ones preserved in our bodies after they leave us. They fall whenever the heart longs to hear their voice and has no other way to find it.

They disperse between bombs. Some survive and leave elsewhere. Death by scorched earth policies, families exterminated by every kind of weapon and tool, from missiles to vicious dogs, each dies according to their own fate.

Perhaps in heaven when martyrs come together, they will tell each other about how they died.

“How did I pass? By a missile.” Another says, “I was killed by a bomb,” and a child responds “Uncle, a sniper shot me.”

Diaa Wadi is a Palestinian writer and blogger. He studied mechanical engineering and has traveled to many countries speaking for the Palestinian cause at international events. Wadi believes in literature and writing as an effective tool of resistance against the Occupation. He writes about the life of Gazans and the details which are often overlooked by the camera. As Refaat Al-Areer said, “If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story.” Diaa writes on behalf of all those who left us, to honor the martyrs and send them eternal love—for the martyr Refaat Al-Areer, now more than ever. Diaa tweets @diaawadi2.

Nour Jaljuli is a translator and poet traversing between the worlds of Arabic and English. She holds an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia and is the Arabic translator of Rana Dajani’s Five Scarves. Her translations have appeared in ArabLit, Middle East Eye, Jummar, and the 2022 UEA MALT Anthology for which she was also coeditor. You can find out more about her work on nourjaljuli.wordpress.com.

Aiya Sakr (she/they) is a Palestinian-American poet and artist. They are the author of Her Bones Catch the Sun (The Poet’s Haven, 2018). A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Foglifter, Mizna, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is a co-organizer for In Water and Light, a regular community building space and reading series for Palestine. She is also a Winter 2023 Tin House Fellow, and has served as Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University. She collects buttons, and is enthusiastic about birds.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post On the Edge of a Volcano, a Rip through a Gazan’s Heart appeared first on Mizna.

As we celebrate a ceasefire and renew our commitment to fighting alongside our Gazan kin toward a free Palestine, Mizna shares a new poem by Randa Jarrar that insists on a future of Palestinian aliveness. This piece will be published in Mizna’s forthcoming Futurity-themed issue, edited by Barrak Alzaid and Aram Kavoossi.

A Palestinian Tomorrow

after Jotamario Arbeláez

For us, all of us, part of our resistance to the erasure of genocide is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza, to plan for the healing of the wounds of Gaza tomorrow. We will own tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a Palestinian day.

—Ghassan Abu-Sitta

not the day after the war but a day after
the day after the war,
—that day—
the men will sleep for the first time 
without fearing death or its thefts
and for days after that day they will rest
but only a little bit after everyone else 
especially the children 
and the days after the day after the day 
after the war because there is always a war 
the mothers will sleep for two weeks
in shifts
and after that they will start a school
but only after the day that they lie
on the bare earth to say,
I will hold you and only you
in my lungs and heart one day, 
but thankfully not today.

Because today there is still a war and 
maybe after the war there will be a day,
if after the war I have a drum or even a mouth 
to fix to say that we will dance 
and laugh so hard a day 
after the day after the war
and after that we will sleep some more
if after the war there is more 
than a day if after the war
there is a ghost
of a heart or of a lung
if after the war we meet
by each other’s graves 
after we crawl out
on that day, the day
after the day after the
day after the war

Randa Jarrar is a Palestinian artist, author, professor, and actor based in Los Angeles.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post A Palestinian Tomorrow—A New Poem by Randa Jarrar appeared first on Mizna.

Mizna is honored to share an excerpt from Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha’s heartbreaking collection of poetry, Forest of Noise. For readers in the Twin Cities area, see Mosab Abu Toha speak at the Palestine Festival of Literature on Dec. 9, 2024, link to purchase tickets here.

Before I Sleep

Before I sleep,
Death is always
sitting on my windowsill,
whether in Gaza or Cairo.
Even when I lived
in a tent,
it never failed
to create a window
for itself.
It looks me in the eye
and recounts to me
the many times
it let me live.
When I respond, “But you
took my loved ones away!”
it swallows the light in the tent
and hides in the dark to visit next day.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post Before I Sleep—Poem from Forest of Noise appeared first on Mizna.

Leila Mansouri’s brilliant short story, “Flashbang,” inhabits the many scales of catastrophe that inhere in the word. Originally published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe. Link to order here.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

—Leila Mansouri

Flashbang

What you need to understand is this: when the link opened, everything flashed over.

Before I could form a thought, before my eyes could resolve the pixels into dark, taut nipples, hot, bright shock raced through me and spread—out through my nerves, out into the dorm room, out and out into every corner of my world. Understanding was for later. Lungs, fear, air, shame—all for later. My cursor blinked, unmoved, in the reply box as my eyes traced and retraced the subject line.

“You?” the email asked.

I had no answer. I glowed hot, white hot, engulfed.

Behind each nipple, a breast. That much was clear even when everything was still too bright to breathe. There were two of them, the breasts, and skin, and ribs. A torso.

Also sometimes a shoulder. But not always.

The parts, they moved and moved and refused to stay still. Fingers curled. Hands grasped. Now two, now three, now two again. And at the grainy edge, a slack jaw dipped in and out, in and out.

I couldn’t have spoken then, not even if my irradiated brain had had the power to think in words. My fat slug of a tongue sat leaden between my molars, and my parched lips clung fast to my gums. In my silence, the slick, weird image of a mouth parted wide, wider, into a wild, toothy moan, and I understood nothing. Heard nothing. The only noise in me was my own blood. And no matter how hard my eyes strained, no matter how long my fingers hovered ready at the keyboard, adamant that they could save me by shooting Jeff the speedy right answer, the moving parts refused to make a person.

Was I really somewhere in those pixels?

I didn’t know — and also didn’t want to know—or wanted to know only if the answer was one I could live with—one I’d survive. So it was a relief, the beginning of a hot exhale, when, after how long with that video on a loop I don’t know, I admitted—or maybe I decided—that I couldn’t make out anyone except the little stuffed bear—a bear like the one my parents had bought me from the student store the day they’d moved me in, a bear whose neck was ringed with the stethoscope I’d resented nightly as I did my chemistry sets and conjugated Farsi verbs and daydreamed about the other me: the me who had aggressively blue hair and took experimental poetry classes, the me who wanted to jolt you, to make you gasp and say, “this changed my life.”

That me was the real me, I was sure. Or it was going to be.

I would become her just as soon as I finally gathered the courage to tell my parents that I was dropping orgo—that instead of labs and study groups I’d be making mixed media installations, that I’d already made one, in fact, a simorgh lit with kerosene, and that I wasn’t pre-med anymore—I’d never been, actually, not in the way they’d wished for—not really.

The bear, though, was unmistakable.

It was my own Agha Bear, or one just like him. That was obvious even in the bad resolution and dim light. And the desk, too, was familiar. Its dull sheen and thick wooden shelves could have come from any dorm on campus. Which meant the parts in the video could be anyone’s.

Even mine.

So I did the only thing that felt possible from inside my bright hot shock-wave—the only thing I could live with—that felt like it had any hope of being survivable.

I deleted the email, broke up with Bijan, dropped the Farsi class I had with Jeff, and became a doctor.

* * *

“It made sense at the time,” I insisted to my therapist, years later, when we met behind the privacy curtain on the far side of the hospital cafeteria.

The sex tape wasn’t what we were supposed to be talking about. We were supposed to be talking about the victims whose wrists I’d spent half a horrible day tagging yellow or red or green.

The explosion at the refinery had been so massive, all the breaking news segments had ended with ominous questions: Could this be sabotage? Who did the terrorists hate? Were there more explosions to come?

But by afternoon, the story had resolved itself into something more ordinary: a bad safety valve and corporate greed. After that, no one was scared anymore, just filled tight with unleachable anger—the kind that makes your fingers swell and comes out in unfunny jokes about conversion rates between corporate bonus dollars and reattached limbs.

My residency was in oncology, but I’d been paged to the emergency room for triage. I’d gone from body to moaning body checking pupils and asking if anyone felt a sense of impending doom.

No one did, not even the sanitation worker with the metal bolt in his skull. He was the cheeriest of everyone, in fact.

As I rushed him to surgery, he grabbed my hand and said, “Can’t you leave it in, doc? I pick up radio waves now.”

Then he asked where I was from.

And how I liked Michigan.

And if I had kids, or a husband, or a boyfriend, and if I wanted them.

When I said I was moving back to California, his face fell.

“My parents are there,” I apologized. “Plus, I miss the fruit. The nectarines, the apricots.”

Right then, the time Jeff pulled dates from his rucksack flashed back through me. We’d been doing Farsi homework in my dorm room, and I’d looked up from my alif’s and be’s, and there they were, three fat dates. Jeff insisted I try one even though I wasn’t hungry. “Have you ever had a fresh date?” he demanded. “I mean a really fresh one?”

The man with the bolt in his head waved away my apology. Then he said “California,” too slow, his voice bending strangely.

So, I looked again behind his earlobe.

The thread was still buried deep. You could hardly see anything.

That was how I’d almost missed it when I triaged him.

His wound had barely even oozed.

I wanted to say something comforting—to reassure the man that I liked Michigan, too.

But before I could, we were surrounded by the surgical team.

“You should try the sherries,” he told me as my hand slipped from his.

I nodded, not understanding.

“The sherries,” he said. “Promise.”

Then he was gone, and the hallway was bright and not at all quiet, and by the time I realized he was slurring cherries, it was days too late to warn anyone.

The hospital mandated trauma screening for all residents, and I was assigned to Farah. Or, that’s what she told me to call her. I couldn’t, though. Not when her hair was neatly covered, and she sat so prim and straight on her plastic chair.

“Doctor Al Masry,” I tried.

She laughed. She wasn’t even an MD, just a family counselor in training.

I wouldn’t take it back though. “Dr. Al Masry,” I repeated.

“Really? Are we going to pretend we’re our parents?”

I shrugged.

For days, I’d been telling the other residents that these screenings were a waste. My plan was to lie my way through—to run out the clock. I’d even made up a story about a man who’d watched his warehouse collapse. He survived because he had forgotten to turn his headlights off, I was going to say—that’s why he’d been in the parking lot. He’d remembered an hour into his shift and ran back out into the Michigan cold.

Then, boom.

All of a sudden, no building left to speak of.

The clincher was going to be my own story, or really my aunt’s. The one she’d told years ago, in St. Louis, as we circled the Gateway Arch.

One night, my uncle had come home from his pharmacy shift to find their Tehran apartment in rubble. A missile had hit—“a dumb Scud,” my aunt said, as we puttered up I-44 in my parents’ rusty Volvo.

My mother was annoyed. “Look!” she switched loudly to English. “There is arch!”

But my aunt talked over her, sticking to Persian. “Night sounded like this,” my aunt told us, puckering her mouth and spitting out explosions.

That year was endless. Boring, murderous nights, my aunt explained. Again and again, there were blasts and waiting. Then, mostly, nothing. Night after night of it. Loud, distant, terrifying nothings. To the sound of these nothings, my aunt made tea and dreamed of redecorating. She wrote long letters to my mother in America. She set elaborate dinners, and, as my uncle ate, gossiped to him about the neighbor-couples, whose private fights she heard through the walls. My uncle never gossiped back, though, or gave opinions on rugs and pillows. He asked my aunt little about her days. His concerns about her parents’ health were perfunctory. My aunt didn’t understand—not at first. When they’d courted, he’d been chatty and charming. He’d made her believe every word of hers was precious to him. Once he became a husband, though, he turned stubbornly inward. Most evenings all he seemed to want to do was eat and snore. My aunt’s questions about his work at the hospital got only bland, empty answers. Her pleas for a new vase or tea set met with irritable grunts. And when she asked what news the neighbor-husbands had shared when my uncle passed them in the building hallways, he looked at her like she was an irksome child. “Do you think I have time to remember who Mr. Hashemi is angry with today?” he’d shake his head. “Do you not see that I work constantly? Did you forget there is a war?”

For a while, my aunt blamed his stress on bad management at the hospital pharmacy. He’d come to his senses once the shelves were restocked, she told herself. But as the year of booming nothings dragged on, her patience steadily curdled, first into resentment, then into disgust. Soon, every sound my uncle made became repulsive to her. His sighs made her want to scrub his breath from her skin. His snorts made her nauseated. But it was the revolting grooming habits he no longer bothered to hide that became the focus of her fury. The night a missile fell on a busy bread factory, she’d found my uncle’s nose hair clippings in the sink and thrown the soap at him. A month later—the same night a family her cousin’s friend’s brother knew from university was obliterated—she’d lain awake enraged because right next to her in bed my uncle had picked dead skin from his foot calluses.

“Roya-joon, remember this.” She turned to face me in the back seat, her expression so serious I was sure I was in trouble. “If a man cleans his toes in bed, he does not love you.”

“Ani!” my mom screeched, but my aunt waved her off.

“Promise you will remember, Roya-joon.”

I didn’t understand, so I nodded solemnly, and my aunt settled back into the passenger seat.

It was months of this nonsense, she continued, ignoring the arch’s fat, shiny footings. Months of my uncle’s flaking skin in the bed sheets. Months of his soapy hairs in every crevice of the bathroom and his toenail clippings working their way into the living room rug.

Then out of nowhere came the direct hit.

There was no air raid siren—not that night, my aunt insisted. All the neighbors swore it, too—there’d been only the usual nothing right up until the horrible boom.

The building next door was stripped naked, its shattered windows gaping onto disarranged kitchens and bedrooms. My aunt’s building was leveled entirely.

“Pow,” she said, flattening the air between her hands.

By chance, she wasn’t inside. She was visiting a neighbor—but my uncle hadn’t known that. He’d seen the building, or what was left of it, and been certain she was under the rubble—certain her lifeless body would soon be unburied, still sheathed in her white nightgown. He was out of his mind when she spotted him, tearing at the debris with his fingernails. “God forgive me, God forgive me,” he kept saying. “God, God, what have I done?”

As she watched her husband clawing at the wreckage, my aunt’s heart sofened for the first time since the missiles reached Tehran. Maybe she’d judged him too harshly, she considered. Maybe what she’d taken for his disdain was something else. Pride pickled in fear, possibly? At the very least, he seemed genuinely distraught.

She approached where he was kneeling and put a hand on his heaving shoulder. Gently, she raised his dusty face to hers, anticipating he’d collapse with relief.

But, to her shock, the sight of her only seemed to make him wilder.

“Am I possessed?” he cried, stumbling backward. “Have you returned to curse me? Am I so guilty I deserve to be forever tormented?”

That was how his affair came out, my aunt explained.

Or she tried to.

But my mother wouldn’t let her.

“Ani-jan, tell Roya about the beautiful seashore,” my mother jumped in, repeating herself louder and louder, until my stubborn aunt was forced to yield. After that, it was, “Ani-jan, do you remember how we always stop along the road to buy oranges?” We’d driven halfway home by then, but we were still on the freeway, near the Woolworths.

Once my aunt finished discussing roadside fruit, my mother turned to me at a stoplight. “In the mountains, I get always carsick. Do you know that once I throw up on your Khaleh Ani’s favorite shoes?”

“Not only mountains,” my aunt confirmed bitterly. “At home. At school. On my favorite dress. On so many things I can’t list them.” But then she tried to list them, anyway, which bought my mother another five minutes.

And for the rest of the drive home, and that evening, and every remaining day of my aunt’s three-month visit, my mother was relentless. Whenever Khaleh Ani tried to speak about the missiles or my uncle in front of me, my mom would goad her. “I always feel bad for your khaleh, you know, because I am our madarbozorg’s favorite,” she would tell me. Or, “do you know, Roya-joon, that I was best student in school? Top marks. All the teachers say I am genius.”

Khaleh Ani took the bait every time.

“I was the genius,” she’d say. “I was the favorite.”

She spent the summer furious with my mother, the story of my uncle’s affair always cut off just a few words in. That’s why I didn’t find out how she got her revenge until a decade later. By then, we’d moved to California and left the arch far behind us.

Those first years in Gilroy, all my parents did was save and work. They’d bought a gas station out by the produce warehouses. During the day, my mother rang up farmworkers and semi drivers. At night, my father barred the windows, and meth heads skulked at the floodlights’ edge.

This was all for the future, they promised. Only the future mattered, not the farm smell, not the bulletproof glass screening the register. In their future, I would go to medical school. In their future, my aunt would come and stay for good.

By then, we’d been waiting years on my aunt’s visa. My parents had filed the paperwork back in St. Louis, and ever since, every three months, they’d called to remind the lawyer who they were.

Do you have our address?

Can we do anything else?

Will you let us know soon?

But when their application finally made it to the top of the government pile, my aunt balked. She refused to fill out more forms. She declined her Dubai interview. There was no point, she announced, because she’d never move. She had her house, her garden, her tea, and no interest in uprooting herself—especially not to live in her arrogant sister’s half-renovated garage.

My mother told me the news as she was picking me up from my shift at In-N-Out: “Your aunt killed your uncle and now she is killing me!”

I gulped my chocolate shake. The cold turned my tongue thick and numb.

According to my mom, my aunt began this slow murder the night the missile fell on their apartment. My uncle had been having an affair with a pretty nurse. That’s what had sealed his fate. Each Tuesday and Friday, he met this nurse in the hospital supply room, and after, as she basked in their illicit glow, he’d detail his private unhappiness. My aunt henpecked him constantly, he’d complain. Some days all she talked about, it seemed, was their small apartment and noisy neighbors. And even when she was quiet, their hand-me-down furniture silently taunted him. He resented every last scrap of it—every last fussy table and dusty rug. It reminded him of just how much else his in-laws had given him all the other things he could neither repay nor afford to give up. Money for his father’s doctors. Tuition to finish pharmacy school. Proper suits. A respectable watch. Without their generosity, he’d have ended up a poor and friendless orphan. Now, he was trapped by his modest comforts and was determined never to forgive them for it.

“Let’s run away to America,” he begged this nurse every Friday. “We’ll buy a ranch in Montana. We’ll eat nothing but Big Macs. We’ll grow happy and fat.”

Usually, the nurse ignored him. “Saeed, you talk too much,” she’d shush. Or, “Saeed, can you move your elbow? It’s on my chador.”

But the Friday of the Scud missile strike, she’d at last given a tepid, “Do you really mean it? Could we really go? Just the two of us?”

“Yes,” he’d told her. “Yes yes. We can. We will. I promise.”

So, when my uncle came home to the flattened apartment building, he’d concluded that this must be God’s punishment. He had been unfaithful and now he’d lose everything, even the dishes and rugs he’d hated, even the nagging wife whose wealthy parents he’d been ungrateful for.

That’s when, like a hellish miracle, my aunt had appeared before him. And at the sight of her, he admitted it all, weeping in the dust at her feet.

To my aunt, the affair was unsurprising. Weeks before, she’d smelled perfume on his collar and guessed another woman—guessed it was a nurse, even, and felt so little besides disgust for him that she’d washed his shirt and let it go.

But, ever keen, she sensed power in my uncle’s public confession.

God was merciful and she could be too, she told him. But, she added, loud enough to be sure the neighbor gossips heard, she had her honor to think of, and her family’s honor, too. So, her faithless husband would have to make it up to her.

And he could do that with a house.

A nice one. One with a garden and tall walls. A fountain, too, maybe. Not here. North, by the mountains. In a better neighborhood.

My uncle knew this mercy was a death sentence. He could not afford such a house, not even with her parents’ help. His job at the government hospital didn’t pay well, so to get the money he’d need a second job, then a third. He’d have to take midnight house calls. He’d have to work straight through Friday prayers. He’d probably also need to start smuggling. Western eye creams, maybe. Or, more likely, wine and European spirits. Hash, too. “Medicine,” his records would say. “For palsy. And insomnia.” But every client, every supplier, would know the truth. And even if the smugglers didn’t kill him, even if he stayed out of jail and managed to keep his dealings quiet, he’d never get to linger in his own prized garden—he’d hardly ever see its blooms by daylight. No, he’d have to work and work until even his bones were exhausted, his too-brief dreams stalked by men who could ruin him. He’d work until his liver groaned, until his heart gave out. He’d work until he labored himself into an early grave.

Still, how could he say no to my aunt with all the neighbors watching? How would he ever face them, and his in-laws, too, if he refused?

I took a hungry swallow of chocolate shake.

“So? What did he do?”

My mother shook her head.

“What could he do? He said, ‘Yes, my beloved. Yes, of course. Anything. Anything for your forgiveness. I’m at your service.’”

The cruelest part, my mom told me, was that my khaleh Ani, too, had been having an affair—hers was with a dissident poet. For weeks before the missile strike, she’d been sneaking her secret lover into the apartment on nights my uncle worked late. Barely an hour before the missile hit, this poet had left my aunt dozing in her marriage bed. He’d given her two soft kisses, then departed by the back stairs, leaving behind only her pining sighs and a dozen whispered promises to die for her, should she ever want that.

Once my aunt heard the door close after him, she’d risen, like always, to brew some sumac tea. She needed it to settle her stomach—despite the poet’s flattering reassurances, her guilt over the affair was gut-twisting.

But she’d found the tin empty—that afternoon, my uncle, unbeknownst to her, had had a guilty stomachache of his own.

So, she’d gone to beg more sumac from a friend three blocks over. She was returning home, pockets bulging, when she found my uncle digging at the rubble.

My mother’s eyes burned, mean and gleeful, as she spoke.

She took my shake and sucked in a long drag.

“Your uncle is fool,” she went on. “He works until his eyes bleed. He works so much his bones ache. Then he dies, less than one year after he finally gets your aunt this house, and—do you know—she weeps not for him but for her poet.”

I reached for the shake, but my mom didn’t give it back to me, didn’t even seem to see me.

“Now your aunt will die in her garden,” she said. “She will die drinking tea, all alone. And this poet, they put him in Evin prison. He is still in there, you know.”

When I tell my aunt’s story, Americans rarely ask if I saw her again. They don’t wonder much about my uncle, either—not if I liked him or what he died of. Not even whether he ever learned about my aunt’s secret love. If they want to know anything, it’s about how he made his money. Or about the pretty nurse and her chador. Or maybe, if they’re humanitarian types, what the jailed poet is in prison for. That’s why I was going to tell my aunt’s story to the cafeteria therapist. I could tell it and not tell much else, I figured. It would fill our half-hour well enough.

But I never got the chance to.

After Dr. Al Masry explained what she was screening for, she asked what I’d been doing right before the refinery explosion. And I was so thrown I’d told the truth.

I’d been Instagram stalking my ex-boyfriend’s wife. “Instagram stalking?”

“It’s stupid, Dr. Al Masry.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid, Roya.”

“It is. I mean, I’m a doctor.”

“You’re saying doctors can’t be human also?”

That’s how I ended up explaining about the cakes. Cupcakes. Cheesecakes.

Chocolate cakes. Spice cakes. Marbled mirror glazes.

“She just keeps posting them,” I told Dr. Al Masry.

And other things, too. Their redecorated townhome. The themed birthdays she put on for their two love dumplings, now five and eighteen months. But mostly it was the cakes that kept me coming back to the Instagram of the girl that Bijan, my college boyfriend, was married to now, I explained. “Or, woman,” I corrected myself, the bleach smell thick at my nostrils. “The half-Cambodian optometrist from Reseda Bijan started dating three and a half months after I’d called things off and blocked him on Facebook.”

“This man, Bijan—you two were serious? And you broke things off ?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There was a video.”

“A video?”

“A sex thing. I didn’t know what to do.”

When I said those words, I was in four places at once. In the cafeteria chair.

And also at my dorm room desk, with Jeff ’s link. And in the redwood grove, too, as Bijan’s face twisted and soured. And in my Farsi class, with Jeff, the day he sent the video.

But before he sent it. When we were learning food words. Sobhkhaneh. Sabzijat. Gojeh farangi. Miveh. Angur.

Jeff had searched me out that day, as usual. The whole semester he’d been relentless. He asked about my weekends. He asked what sports I followed. He asked whether I’d tried the dates he’d left. He asked if I’d ever dated a Marine. But the day of the video was different. He didn’t ask anything. He just looked. At me. Like I was a pit. Stripped and sucked clean.

And right after class, he sent it.

“The video of you?” Dr. Al Masry asked.

“I don’t know if it was me.”

“What?”

“In the video. I don’t know who it was. It could have been me. But I wasn’t sure, and I deleted it.”

“You didn’t try to find out?”

I blinked, confused that she was confused. “How could I? It would’ve blown everything up.”

I felt sure that would settle it.

But she asked, “What do you mean?”

So, I changed the subject to the refinery explosion.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to the man with the bolt in his head.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to Evin prison. Did she know there were poets jailed there right now? I demanded.

But she changed it back.

So, finally, I said, “You, of all people, should know there would have been no good answer. I mean, let’s say it wasn’t me. Maybe the video was a fake, or someone else’s porn. So, what then? I go to Bijan and try to explain it to him? What could I say? That a guy, an older military guy in my Farsi class, was sending me this stuff? Porn that looked like me? Porn that had my Agha Bear in it? And that I’d done a whole class project with this man, and he’d insisted I eat his dates? How would Bijan see me, then? What if he thought I’d cheated on him? What if he told his parents? Or mine? No matter what, he’d still probably break up with me. And if he didn’t, how would anything be okay? How would we go back to watching movies and playing foosball?”

“I get it. I do,” said Dr. Al Masry. “I mean, I’m from Dearborn. But are you sure it would have been that bad? He doesn’t exactly sound like the traditional type.”

I shook my head. She only half understood. “But what if it was me?”

“What, then?”

“Then, I was with Bijan. There hadn’t been anyone else. So, did that mean Bijan had filmed it without telling me? Probably, right? That’s the only reasonable conclusion. So, then what? I tell the school? I show the video to some sweaty administrator and file a case? And what if Bijan went and told his parents? They knew people who knew mine, you know. I didn’t want to be that person, the one everyone whispered about when they saw my mom in the grocery store. I didn’t want to live with that. I didn’t want my mom to live with that. So, I said nothing.”

Dr. Al Masry took a deep breath and smoothed her long skirt. There was something in her face I couldn’t read. “OK, but what about a friend or a roommate?” she asked, softly, hesitant. She took a breath, then another. “Did you at least tell someone?”

I wanted to lie and tell her I had. I wanted her to believe I had my shit together. I could have told someone back then, if I’d thought to. It’s not as if I had been friendless. Plenty of people would’ve listened. Plenty would have hugged me and let me cry. But I had never tried. I had kept it in. Staying quiet had seemed so natural, I had made the decision without realizing I’d chosen it.

I shook my head slowly. “Everyone assumed it was a normal breakup. I never told them the rest.”

Dr. Al Masry leaned forward. “And if you had? What would you have said?”

That’s how I discovered the thing that had been buried so deep I hadn’t known it was there, the thing that had been lodged in me all these years—the thing that had held everything in place even when I hadn’t known there was anything to hold. What I really believed—believed even though it made no sense, believed even though I was sure it meant I was crazy—was that it was me and Bjian on the tape, and it was somehow Jeff who filmed it.

“But that’s too far-fetched,” I said. “I mean, yes, Jeff could have planted something. A camera. The day he was in my room for our class project. It was absurd but not completely impossible. He was military after all. A Marine. He could have figured out the tech. But how could I look anyone in the eye and say that that was what I suspected? That I was sure of it to my core even though it sounded like a conspiracy? No one would have believed me. They shouldn’t have believed me. The story didn’t hold together. Some guy in my Farsi class films a secret sex tape after I refused to eat his dates? Who would listen? Who could take that seriously? It was easier to say nothing and forget.”

Dr. Al Masry was quiet for a while. Across the cafeteria, someone sneezed. Bleached air burned in my throat.

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me, though,” she said, finally.

“What?”

“Really. I’m not saying it’s true. But I’m saying I could believe it.”

I was sure she was mocking me and couldn’t say so. Not when she’d been so patient. Not when I’d been calling her Dr. Al Masry all this time.

I wrinkled my nose and raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

She looked away, toward the privacy curtain.

“My mother was born in Ein el-Hilweh—that’s a camp in southern Lebanon,” she said. “My mother grew up around guards and soldiers. And what she always told me was to watch out most for the friendly ones—the ones that offer help and candy. They were the most dangerous.”

I reminded her that this wasn’t Lebanon—that I’d been in college, not a refugee camp.

I had missed the point, she told me.

“Listen, when I was a kid, one year my mom took me to the state fair. Me and my brothers. We’d been asking, I guess. Maybe someone at school went. My mom had her hair covered and people were staring, but she didn’t care. She took us to the Ferris wheel. She got us fried ice cream. She even let us pet the goats. She wanted us to enjoy it—to feel like we were normal. And we did. We rode the rides and played those whack-the-whatever games. I won a stuffed shark. My brother won a stuffed donkey. The whole day was great, perfect, really, until we got in line for the spinning teacup ride. That’s when this guy started talking to us. To me, mostly. He had a woman with him, too, but she didn’t say anything, not at first. And he kept asking me things, like what was my favorite subject, and what kind of ice cream did I like, and did I want to be a pop star or a movie actress when I grew up. He hardly spoke to my brothers and wouldn’t even look at my mom. And he kept bringing up that he was a soldier—that he’d met girls like me before, in Iraq. He fought for those girls, he kept saying. Little ones. Some that didn’t go to school. Some that didn’t have toys or electricity or shoes. I didn’t like him and didn’t like his stupid questions and really didn’t like how white curls peeled up all over his sunburned nose. So, I was relieved when the line moved, and my brothers and I got in our teacup, and the man didn’t get on with us. He disappeared while our teacups spun. I thought it was over. I forgot about him. But after the ride, he found us. He had ice cream cones now, for me and my brothers. I didn’t want one, I was sick from the spinning and the heat and the elephant ears. But I thought I had to eat. When someone offers you food, you take it—that’s what my mom had always insisted. So, I reached my hand out and felt the cone in my fingers. And then, all of a sudden, my mother slapped it away. It fell and splattered. The ice cream went everywhere. The ground. My brother’s shoes. My ankles. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I’d done. I started crying. It was my fault, I was sure. I couldn’t see how, but that didn’t matter. And then the girlfriend started ranting about how my mom was a bitch, and we were all ungrateful. We should be sent back, she screamed over and over. We hated America. We hated freedom and God. My mom was walking us away by then, walking us out of the fair, but all I could hear was the girlfriend. ‘That’s right,’ she screamed after us. ‘Go back to where you came from.’ And when I turned to look behind me, the soldier was just standing there, staring at us, like he didn’t know what to say—like he didn’t understand what had happened either. I stared back at the ice cream cones in his fists, at the two he hadn’t given me—the ones he got for my brothers. They were melting already. They were losing their shape in the sun. I remember watching as they dripped, watching as the white ran down his knuckles. My mom waited until we were out of the parking lot to start yelling. ‘You don’t let these people give you things,’ she shouted over and over. ‘Never. You don’t take anything from them. Not money, not ice cream. Nothing.’ Back then I didn’t understand. My mom must be a little crazy, I thought. I mean, it was just ice cream. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Now, though, I think she was right. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. I think she understood more than she knew how to tell us.”

I took a slow breath.

“So, you’re saying I was right to suspect Jeff?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he was dangerous. Maybe Bijan was, too. What I’m saying is, you didn’t know. You still don’t.”

“So?”

Dr. Al Masry looked like she wanted to shake me—like she wanted to grab me by the shoulders and rattle something loose. “So, why didn’t you ask for help? Why did you try to handle it all on your own?”

The question landed in me like a mortar shell. “It would have killed my parents,” I said. “They came all this way for me. I couldn’t let them find out it was dangerous here, also.”

Dr. Al Masry looked at me so kindly that I hated her. “Did you ever think they might already know that?

I never saw Dr. Al Masry again. Twice, she called to set a follow-up, and twice, I ignored her voicemails. The third time she begged me to talk to someone even if it wasn’t her. “You can’t start rebuilding until you clear the rubble,” she said.

But I didn’t answer that voicemail, either. I needed to get on with my life. Or that’s what I told myself.

So, I finished my residency and moved back to California.

I went to work at the hospital, got groceries, had bad dates.

I didn’t tell anyone else about the video. Not boyfriends. Not roommates. Not my mom, either. Not even after she found Agha Bear and tried to give him back. That day, I’d driven to Gilroy with my aunt’s chemo pills. I’d been trading the hospital pharmacist for them. A month of chemo for a legal benzo script. The pharmacist gave her pills to her undocumented brother. I gave mine to my parents. Then my parents packed them into film canisters. They shipped the canisters inside thermoses wrapped with sweatshirts.

The chemo wasn’t working, though. All that effort and still Khaleh Ani’s cancer had grown. And now, she was refusing to travel for more intensive treatment, my mom explained as the tea brewed—refusing, once again, to fill out the visa paperwork.

“She wants to die in her garden,” my mom sighed. “The one my uncle got her?”

“What?”

“At her house? The one he worked himself to death for while she pined for the dissident poet?”

I was just asking—just thinking out loud, really, too tired and hungry to catch myself.

But my mom was furious. “This is how you talk of your khaleh?” she demanded. “Is this how you speak of me when I’m dead also?”

I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to point out I’d only repeated what she’d told me back in high school. Besides, I’d risked my medical license to get Khaleh Ani better cancer drugs. Shouldn’t that count for something? I wanted to say. Couldn’t I get a little slack for once?

I didn’t, though. My mom’s eyes were wet at the corners. I didn’t want to make it worse. I didn’t want her to start crying.

So I mumbled an apology.

Then, I went to the living room.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

Apricots. Cherries. Nectarines. Plums.

She and Baba had stopped on the way back from the gas station, she said. It was an apology, I knew.

I took a nectarine slice, and she took one also.

Then, as more explosions flashed, my mom ran through the usual questions. Was I seeing anyone? Did I know her friend’s son was single? Did I want her to set me up?

No, I sighed. No, no.

But that day she was persistent. She asked about what had happened to that nice boy from college, the engineer whose parents lived in San Jose.

“Bijan,” I said, as the living room fractured in the white light. “He was Bijan. He’s married now. Two kids.”

A blast threw her frown into relief. Still, she didn’t give up. I should find someone like him, she said. Kind. Thoughtful. Like Baba.

She grabbed my hand. “I want you to be happy, Roya-joon.”

I was annoyed. “I thought you wanted me to be a doctor.”

On TV, bullets flew.

I expected a fight. I was ready for one.

But instead my mom got up and left—and when she came back, she had my Agha Bear.

“Look what I find! He hid in your closet! All these years!”

She placed him on the coffee table, next to the dates and nectarine slices. His white coat brushed against the cherry bowl. His stethoscope puffed out proudly.

I blinked.

He was still there.

I touched his fur. It felt different than I remembered.

“You love Agha Bear,” Maman said, looking at me.

I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question.

I could have told her then that Agha Bear was never lost, just hidden away.

I hadn’t been able to look at him after the video, but I couldn’t throw him out either, not when he’d been a gift from Baba. Not when none of this was his fault.

So, I’d put him in my old closet.

He’d been there this whole time, wearing his useless stethoscope.

All these years I’d known exactly where he was.

I didn’t know how to say so, though. Not when my aunt was still dying. Not after I’d said nothing for so long.

So, instead, I told Maman about the man with the bolt in his head.

From the refinery, in Michigan.

I explained how I’d held his hand until his surgery. How he’d told me to try the cherries. How I’d forgotten his name—or maybe never learned it—and never found out what happened to him.

“What is bolt?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to explain it.

“It joins two things,” I tried.

But this confused her.

“It’s metal,” I said. “You twist it.”

But she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I looked up “bolt” on my phone.

But the word the translation app showed didn’t make sense to her either.

Finally, I reached under the coffee table.

I’d guessed right. Bolts held its legs on.

The cold nub of one protruded beyond its nut.

I took my mother’s hand and guided her fingertip to the thread.

“This,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled, saying the Persian back to me.

I smiled, too.

Then, I pointed behind my earlobe.

“No,” she gasped. “In his head? And he is alive?”

I nodded.

“He was,” I said. “Before his surgery. I was talking to him.”

On TV a fighter jet flew by, low and hot.

In a flash, my mom understood.

Her eyes got wet again. She covered my hand with hers. She looked at me, her face very serious.

“You are good doctor, Roya-joon. He is okay now. You help him then. I believe this.”

“I hope so,” I said.

Then she ate more fruit.

And I ate more fruit.

And, together, we watched more of the war, the light of faraway explosions slicing through us.

Leila Mansouri is an Iranian-American fiction writer, essays, and literary critic. Her creative work focuses on the Iranian-American and SWANA-American diasporas and has appeared in the Offing, The Believer, Rowayat, Nowruz, and elsewhere.

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We are honored to publish Aurielle Marie’s “Now, for the Weather,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

here: here: here: here: take what I have in exchange
(but what do I have?) just this:

—Aurielle Marie

Now, for the Weather

Before that she flips the hair over her shoulder
says they are storing the dead in ice cream trucks and 
every violence has been like this, an innocent image gutted 
A thousand pairs of feet, bloody 
beating a path in the dirt in the name
of a freedom they have never known 

For six months this year alone
I march my body in circles
in search of it, trying to create distance between
| the people I love| and |the men who built a killing field
in Weelaunee forest
martyred our sibling for opposing it
then blamed that death on the trees| 

while tortuguita’s body bloomed with 60 places for air
to escape
the State made quick work of mythmaking—first it was
only 14 shots then they wonder if it was just one errant
bullet
volleying between the wood as if an accident
finally, we just fired 57, only 57
The evening pundits speculate that maybe
Manuel Esteban Paez Terán shot all those guns at
themself, by themself

so when a so-called-news woman 
tells me (on behalf of Israel) that Hamas was under
the bridge so they burned the bridge or Hamas was
driving
the car so they must bullet the car
or cry there! Hamas there! underneath
the bed! where seven toddlers are sleeping before
leveling
the last standing hospital, I know I am again meeting a State at its splintering 

my sister, on the phone as we sit vigil, weeps 
when she realizes she has
been speaking to me in Arabic
her mouth beseeching god
in a language it can name its fears by 
I have not prayed since Ferguson. 
Tonight, I tell her, I must try 

every violence is like this, a wail escaping my mouth like a lost tongue
prayers segregated from the dialect that birthed it and each god I meet
allows horrors done in his name 

Maybe if it ever ended, the summers of
death cooling into autumns of disappearance, bodies piling like leaves. . . 

If there was ever any reprieve I wouldn’t be
            so angry,
                            so exhausted
                                                  so willing to become
                                                                       what my enemy says I am
                                                                                           so I might (finally) end him
                                                                                                             if that ending wouldn’t be
                                                                                                                                the start of another so-called war
                                                                                                                                with only one side

                                                                                           But that is a lone prayer unanswered

                                                 this world is what it is
                           And justice is a poem
           that has hung me too often
across where the line breaks

Inaction is
not my birthright,
is  not my job is 
not, even now, my choice 
But what to do with the impenetrable loss?? 
                               what to do about the damned weather, 
                               mundane and always having some little fit 
                               shifting to satisfy the tide or eat away at the land 
The seasons change lalalala 
And from behind the clouds, a fighter jet
Simple and regular, so the state tells me 

No. No. 
No. No. 
No. No. 
No. My god, my heart
                                  no. every violence wants me 
                                  to remove the humanity from my blood 
                                  so politicians and corporations 
                                  can devour me
& like the man driving an ambulance
full of the nearly-but-not-yet-martyred
through his ruined city on my phone’s blue screen,
I refuse to be consumed anymore than I might already have been

I don’t know what kind of human absolves themself to the end
of a world but habibi, I too count children and the seconds
between the dead falling from where they once were
to where they’ll never move from again 
and so how, on a night spilling saffron and sorrow
could I not sit vigil, useless though I may be 
against the mortar and phosphorus and soldiers—God 
what meaning are we to make of a world where the poem is only a container
for the despair that would consume me if I 
didn’t have a line to break or a pitiful lil
image to make meaning of, to give my hands something to fucking—

END IT ALL, GOD! 
end the whole damn twisted mess! but save the sliver of land between the river and the sea! I demand!
bring back the children and mothers and the uncles, the beloved queer librarian, GET TO IT! the doctor
who stayed when they told him to leave SEE TO IT! the people bleeding, waiting, not gone yet beneath
homes older than a fraud State. find the pregnant nail technician GET TO IT! the teenager who was, RIGHT NOW, in flight school AND MAKE IT SO
return them all I REQUIRE IT 
yes give back breath to even 
the men who did a hard thing in a desert 
in the name of possibility ESPECIALLY THEM! ESPECIALLY! 
GLORY TO THE WAY-MAKERS! 

here: here: here: here: take what I have in exchange 
(but what do I have?) just this: 

In 2014, one of us was slaughtered every 28 hours and I could have murdered every white pig with my rage from Gaza, from beneath another nakba, a girl my age shows me how to cool the tear gas from my eyes how pebbles
can disarm goliath, how to run sideways when they weaponize noise with their machines and—I survived.
she must have, too. she is alive, that girl. please?
she must be. if in my mouth. no—our mouth. let it be so. asé o.

Gaza you are not mine, but you are mine 
we, a minefield, beloved and belonging 
I am here I am here I am here I am here I am here I 
I with you I with you I with you I with you, with you 
how dare I feel so alone this little room 
not in pieces my hands clasped together my 
one crooked tooth drawing blood from a chasm it has ushered unto my lip, and I apologize
that I am so whole otherwise, disabled by old wars in mundane ways, considering 

Beyond these empires
Beyond a storm’s swift chest 
there is another world (if only the poem could build it mo’ quicker, beloveds)
lemme use my hands lemme use my guns 
lemme use our body, our useless money 
Our sex our scum our spit, the fires we stoke

beyond these empires there is another world 
And
I am running—finally!—toward one 
in which we only know how cold the night 
is because we gathered in it 
our death absent 
our joy as ordinary, as the changing 
of breeze a young sun 
none of our aliveness coming to an end 
                                  this poem breathing on and 
                                  on and on until 
                                  you meet me 
                                  there 

Aurielle Marie is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and storyteller. The author of Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and winner of the 2021 Furious Flower Prize, the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year, Marie lives in Atlanta, Georgia, on unceded Muskogee land.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post Now, for the Weather appeared first on Mizna.

This poem is published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

A year ago, Gazan poet Yahya Ashour left his home to come to the United States for the literary conference Palestine Writes. Yahya has been exiled in the US ever since, waiting for the genocidal war to come to an end. In the year since then, Yahya wonders what is there left to say but “Gazan Despair”?

Ashour is currently a fellow at Mizna, and we have published his debut book online, A Gaza of Siege & Genocide. Proceeds of book sales as well as the sale of other items go directly to supporting Ashour and his family who are trying to survive genocide in Gaza. Links below:

+ A Gaza of Siege & Genocide
+ Sumud letterpress print
+ From the River to the Sea letterpress print
+ It Matters letterpress print

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

Gazan Despair

Dear sky, 
where were you
when our homes were being
bombed?

Dear sea, where were you
when our bodies were being
charred?

Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and awarded author, born on April 22, 1998, based in the US. He is a Mizna fellow and an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa and the author of the ebook A Gaza of Siege & Genocide (Mizna, 2024). Ashour’s portfolio also includes poetry collections, children’s books in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including MQR and ArabLit. He has received multiple scholarships and fellowships and has read poetry at more than fifty U.S. organizations and universities, including Princeton, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA. His poetry has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali. Ashour studied sociology & psychology and he has worked as a creative writing mentor.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post Gazan Despair appeared first on Mizna.

This poem is in honor of two young martyrs killed by Zionist forces while they fought for Palestinian liberation. Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi and Rachel Corrie both called Washington, lovingly nicknamed “The Evergreen State,” home. As we continue to demand the United States enforce an arms embargo on the Zionist entity, we must recognize Washington generates over $70 billion in business from the aerospace industry. For Washington comrades, state weapons and their resistance are homegrown.

In March 2003, twenty-three-year-old Rachel Corrie from Olympia, WA, was repeatedly run over by an Israeli soldier driving a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. She was wearing a neon traffic vest and peacefully defending a Palestinian home in Gaza from being destroyed, and was crushed to death. Israel investigated itself, found itself inconvenienced but inculpable, and the Bush administration left the issue alone.

Over two decades later, twenty-six-year-old Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was shot in the head by Israeli forces while protesting the occupation in Nablus. Israel has already called her death an accident, despite an autopsy finding the cause of her death was a sniper shot to the forehead. She was volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the same organization Rachel Corrie was part of when she was killed. Eygi was one of the organizers of the Liberated Zone encampment for Palestine on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, and graduated from UW in May 2024. Biden or Harris have yet to speak to Eygi’s family.

In their names & in the name of every martyr: we’ll see an end to state-sanctioned terror within our lifetime, from the river to the sea, from Turtle Island to Palestine.

—Raya Tuffaha

Ayşenur and Rachel

Ayşenur and Rachel lived 
separately. They were executed 

in foreign heat, with tools 
assembled at home. Today we paint 

their names on recycled cardboard,
march the same laps downtown— 

how evergreen.

Header image: Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi at her graduation from the University of Washington in 2024.

Raya Tuffaha is a Palestinian writer, fight director and actor from Seattle. Poetry collections: To All the Yellow Flowers (2020), apocalypse blues (2022). Words with Seattle Opera, Phoebe
Journal, Ms. Magazine, Button Poetry. Her BA is from Swarthmore College, and she has had additional training at the British American Drama
Academy. rayatuffaha.com. “Let it be a tale.”

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

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The post Ayşenur and Rachel appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Jérémy Victor Robert

We are honored to publish Olivia Elias’s “It Always Starts with Words,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

above the ghetto in flames   
frantically dance the goddesses
of vengeance & conquest

Double, double toil and trouble

—Olivia Elias

It Always Starts with Words

the fortieth day is over
& so it’s night
the dove didn’t return
did she lose her way back
engulfed in phosphoric
smog     is she lying 
wings broken     under rubble

fireballs zigzagging in the sky
explode into
monstrous clouds of black smoke
& one after the other the time
to count one two three  
houses collapse like sandcastles 
their inhabitants inside

/

Fire burn and cauldron bubble
sing the fateful witches,

blood will have blood
& death will feed on death

It always starts with words

their mouths   missiles launchpads
spit in a steady stream
death sentences

 terrorist     all of them without any exception

terrorist in the making      even in their mother’s
womb      they say

/

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble
sing the fateful witches,

“Mowing the lawn” 
“Flattening the landscape”
         “Sterilizing”

It always starts with words

sterilizing language     sterilizing life
ravishing it from Latin rapere
taking by force

above the ghetto in flames   
frantically dance the goddesses
of vengeance & conquest

Double, double toil and trouble

/

refugee in my home thousands
& thousands miles far from there  
I sometimes raise my head &
look outside

the light is so beautiful   it seems unreal

does horror have no bottom just like hell?

November 21, 2023

____

*”Blood will have blood” and “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble” come from Shakespeare, Macbeth, Acts III and IV

“Born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias, a poet of the Palestinian diaspora who has been living on three continents, writes in French. Translated into Arabic, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Japanese, her work has been published in numerous reviews. In November 2022, with Chaos, Crossing, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid and shortlisted for the Sarah Maguire 2024 International Poetry Prize, she made her English-language debut. In September 2023, she published Your Name, Palestine, a chapbook translated by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Victor Robert (both books published by
 World Poetry). https://eliasolivia.com 

Jérémy Victor Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes. Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’ Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023).

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

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And the World Borne Between

Mizna is honored to publish Mohammed Zenia’s “Gaza 2 Khartoum,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

Toussaint Nate Turner Leila Khaled John Brown Tubman Joseph Garang 
(2 name but so many few)

— Mohammed Zenia

Gaza 2 Khartoum

Birdsong drifts

Over murder north

(But this is more than murder)

They are trying to unname the dead

Whole litanies of olive bloodlines stuffed teeth Moloch

Cadillac future moves its carrion cannon/

Like famous fathers of death before them

An air raid silence rumbles the pentagon but

No body tinged burns will bear the

Silence of tectonic plates no longer

– Maybe this does mean war,

– But altogether I think we may be on opposite sides of the equation—

Cross over Golgotha has long been buried maimed or homeless and the stench of this

Evil traces its first step  lost colonies  nestled island desert Virginia

Burials at sea 

But the kids of Kumerica still holster their Stones

No surprise who is who, 

Clearly this has always been here—2 many for 2 long have in vain explained 

And some even rode—

Toussaint Nate Turner Leila Khaled John Brown Tubman Joseph Garang 

(2 name but so many few)

Jihadist for the Word 

After kingdom walls fell

Serpent struck Jericho 

— Fucked Babel —

— Today We stand shoulder to shoulder in the trenches of resistance — 

Oct 7th—communique from the Sudanese communist

Party trapped in the bombed out suburbs of Omdurman—

From Shendi 2 Jerusalem echoes the prophecy,

That this world will burn its shell 2 make way anew.

—Ellijah has fled 2 Chad on the back of a Toyota—

And the holy land has fallen into the hands of the Romains once again—

From Al-Aqsa to Mosul we avenge the ruins but inshallah 

There will be birds born free over Gaza once more and no slight

Can unravel this fundamental truth

The earth may never yield its burns

The cosmos maintain its mysterious silence

 Our long march 2 exile repeated 

Over and over to the soundtrack

Of Triumph of the will

And if the deathcamp is the only future

Then

Serenely we will engage the

Endless intifada

To face this

Future of war.

But climate change is I empire is indigenous struggle.

And from Lenape 2 Palestine 2 San Juan 2 the Nile basin

Back 2 Patagonia

In Bay Ridge outside the Hemos you

Could smell the sage.

Diana Di Prima once wrote about

How it feels,

To be up to your eyeballs

Revolution— love spelled backwards

And I couldn’t help but cry

Cuz’ it’s really  that

For a free Palestine A free Sudan land back America 2 Australia 

S/o Wellhanue

The Philippines and Guam will see the sun

Thailand 2 Nepal beam without the yoke

Planet Arab rise LOVE

\The true unification of the Habeshas nation

From Sahrawi 2 the five stars of Somalia

Yemen breath birth! 

 Borderless AFRICA drum spread the healing

(Earth without sadness) 

Our conferred confederacy tribes

Once and will again

HOLD GARDEN PAST PRESENT FUTURE 

Till it’s backward.

Free Palestine.

(From the river to the sea)

Palestine free.

Mohammed Zenia is the author of Tel Aviv, James Baldwin’s Lungs in the 80s, and Black Bedouin. Their work has appeared in e-flux, Changes Review, poetry project AND 240 magazine among other publications. 

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post Gaza 2 Khartoum appeared first on Mizna.