trans.  Huda Fakhreddine

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

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

I panic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Huda Fakhreddine, translator

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

—Nima Hasan (trans. Huda Fakhreddine)

Old Song

by Nima Hasan

(translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

أغنية قديمة

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compiled and edited by Rania Jawad, translated by Malaka Shwaikh

On March 2, 2024 Nima Hasan wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Rania Jawad, Assistant Professor of English, Birzeit University

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

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

March 2024

by Nima Hasan
translated from the Arabic by Malaka Shwaikh

March 1

12:40 p.m.

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

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

5:55 p.m.

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

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

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

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

March 2

7:41 a.m.

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

4:17 p.m. 

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

4:37 p.m. 

I am Nima Hasan from Gaza.

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

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

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

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

I resist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 3

8:01 p.m.

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

8:29 p.m.

Fighter jets accompany aid being airdropped.
Be well.

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

—Nima Hasan, March 2, 2024, 4:17 p.m.

March 4

7:30 a.m.

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

9:20 a.m.

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

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

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

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

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

6:50 p.m.

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

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

11:01 p.m.

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

March 5

8:27 a.m.

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

7:23 p.m.

Everything is negotiable except death.

7:54 p.m.

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

March 7

11:53 a.m.

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

12:52 p.m.

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

5:16 p.m.

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

11:55 p.m.

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

March 8

6:39 a.m.

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

8:01 a.m.

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

4:17 p.m.

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

5:13 p.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Nima Hasan, March 8, 2024, 6:39 a.m.

March 9

8:56 a.m.

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

9:12 a.m.

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

March 10

10:39 a.m.

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

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

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

8:12 p.m.

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

March 12

10:55 a.m.

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

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

March 13

3:46 a.m.

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

3:30 p.m.

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

8:53 p.m.

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

March 14

9:28 p.m.

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

March 16

8:18 a.m.

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

4:12 p.m.

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

March 19

10:35 a.m.

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

11:02 a.m.

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

11:28 a.m.

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

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

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

March 21

9:49 a.m.

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

1:00 p.m.

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

4:59 p.m.

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

March 22

7:08 p.m.

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

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

March 23

5:49 p.m.

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

9:56 p.m.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 24

8:29 a.m.

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

11:57 a.m.

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

2:00 p.m.

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

March 25

11:26 p.m.

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

March 26

9:24 a.m.

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

March 27

6:28 p.m.

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

March 28

10:35 a.m.

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

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

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

March 29

2:25 p.m.

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

March 30

1:42 a.m.

At school

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

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

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

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

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

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

8:22 p.m.

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

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

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

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

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

trans.  Huda Fakhreddine

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

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

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

—Samer Abu Hawwash

A Box of Dates on the Kitchen Table

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

علبة تمر على طاولة المطبخ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

—Fargo Tbakhi

Palestinian Love Poem

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

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

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

for my baba

And we will walk

Into nowhere

You with Your smallness and me with my smallness

The beach where we froze—were frozen—together

When the patrol officer held You he held You

When You held me You held me close

I answer the video call and Your hair has become white

Thin and vanishing—poverty—wraithlike—

Some incontrovertibility inside of us

And our times

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

The two of us and our cigarettes and distance

Stumbling along toward death

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

When the courts disintegrate You will slip with me into anonymity

Where we began and where we looked for love

The indictment text holding You still and frozen

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

And You are named Defendant Last Name First Name

And You are named for me and I for You

The pages typed by somebody’s hands

Who listened around You shapeless in the clear light

I keep telling You about time

And what we need it for

Though I do not believe—

We find ourselves this morning in our capitols

Farther than a ship from safety

On the horizon line

Its vagueness and its cruelty

I have told Your story and You in Your way

You have told mine

You have told it to me

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

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

Its unexpected entrances

To miss each other’s funerals because of our difference

To have lost, finally, our eachness

To be, finally, no discrete things to be legislated

I wander through the ghosts of Your hair

I wander through what remains of You

In the holding

We are not repeated here

We traverse some space outside of narratability

We are somewhere nobody can see us

And here You tell me I am whole and wholly Yours

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

And here we are sweetly entangled and disentangling

Somewhere beyond the electronics store and its robberies

Your hair is becoming its own memory of itself

And Your jacket resides on me like a welcome tick

Drawing from me my life

My somewhereness and my penchants-for-

I, begging some God for illegibility

You, forgotten dream of instability

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

The post TERROR COUNTER—Excerpts appeared first on Mizna.

Eluding illusion and treading warily around “the blank falsity of day,” Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s recently-released third collection of poetry, Wrong Winds, presents us with an enduring suspicion of the apparent and the seeming. Purchase a copy of Wrong Winds HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

I don’t know mainly how
to save myself from my
words: I would want them
all, alive and well, or at
once, all at once, burning.

—Ahmad Almallah

AFTER AL-SHANFARA

ولكنّ نفسًا مُرة لا تقيمُ بي                 على الذأم إلا ريثما أتحولُ

◆

الشّنفرى

◆

• but this proud bitter self
• has no place in it
• for injury;
• it scorns
•        till eyes turn
•         toward an
•                   other
• beyond those places
• in the past I’ll leave—
•              setting out in me.

WOOK

When the world ends
—as in the now—we’ll
have to turn books to
their source, and use
them as burning wood.

For now: I look at my
stack—of scrap books?
Mostly wood on wood
doesn’t burn on its own.
What will I part with
first to keep warm, or

cook my self something?
Because you can’t eat a
book, not for sustenance
anyway! Or could I make
a structure out of all my
books—what would wood

look like in that form?
Would the words stick
out facing the sky, or
would they be dripping
in, on my head, on my
everything. I don’t know

how to save myself, any
how? most of the time?
I don’t know mainly how
to save myself from my
words: I would want them
all, alive and well, or at
once, all at once, burning.

PURE&LOVE

1/2

the object
doesn’t
exist—

thus: no
one is
drawn

to another;
but what
if two

are drawn
together—
will this mean

you’ll be wait-
ing for me in
the after-

life, where
figures
don’t

have to touch?

2/2

benefit-cost-ratio
demands that the
canvas be as wide
as can be drawn

like an expansive
golf field confront-
ed by all the love
cliches: dawn, sun

etc. everywhere
every color is made
invisible by another
color; because the
heart can’t pump love
all day, it takes it away
for matters of living—
isn’t it sad to let go of

chance, for the sake
of the design, the
already given
              structure?

LIFE&DAWN

Both are drawn. This
is the blank falsity
of day. This: I take
as reality. Eyes can
or not. Look in or
out. There. Death
announcing itself
in squares, balanced
on the corner. Boxes,
like boxes that turn
out to be simple fact:
boxes, and more
boxes against
the sun, which I start
to draft, beginning
and brushing its light-
lock. Everywhere, the
mind is a god. Misstep
and you’ll fall prey to
illusions. So: carry on
without starting. Be
the cause to be, because
one has to misstep in
order to defile, because
one has and one has not:
                                                           etc.

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry
collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include
Border Wisdom (Winter Editions 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago 2019). He is currently artist-in-residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn.

The post Wrong Winds—Excerpts appeared first on Mizna.

trans. Sara Elkamel

Translated by Sara Elkamel, Palestinian poet and playwright Dalia Taha builds a refuge for a poetry exhausted after millennia-long encounters with pain and conflict. Special courtesy to The Dial, where the poems “Enter Wrist Pain” and “Enter Poem” were originally published .

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

Protect the head, where the algae grow,
and the sun screams from the summit. 
The head that has stared for centuries 
into the sea as it closed its eyelids,
and never blinked. 

—Dalia Taha, trans. Sara Elkamel

Enter Writing

I would like to thank books. Magazines, articles, 

poems, even the advice column, and the arts and culture section.

Thank you to philosophy books, 

and dictionaries too; massive and silent, as though apologizing 

for the work they’re trying to do.

I would like to thank words. 

When we put them side by side, they become declarations of love

or war, and everything that falls in between: 

poems. 

Thank you to the pamphlets and leaflets, exchanged in secret,

that have shaken kingdoms;

to the newspapers printed clandestinely in dark rooms, before blowing up the world. 

To speeches written in sweltering, overcrowded rooms, to letters smuggled out of prisons, 

and to words scribbled into the margins by faint light.

Thank you to the first word a child draws; broken and distorted, like a puzzle piece.

Thank you to cave paintings—these letters from another world. To the memoirs

of death-row prisoners,

and the words teenagers inscribe inside abandoned houses. 

Thank you to the sheets of worker signatures stitched together into a roll so massive, 

the Parliament’s doorframe had to be excised to let it through. And thank you to graffiti, 

flashing brighter than billboards, in cities that devour their residents.

Thank you to writing under genocide.

Enter Poetry

Like men and women,
poetry must shield its head with its hands in times of war. 

Take the bullet to the foot,
or to the hand. 
And answer “Yes, I can,” just as Akhmatova answered
when in the queue outside the prison in Leningrad,
a woman whispered: “Can you describe this?”

But make sure to protect poetry’s head.

Protect the head, where the algae grow,
and the sun screams from the summit. 
The head that has stared for centuries 
into the sea as it closed its eyelids,
and never blinked. 

Only then can you transmute 
your sorrow into an idea, 
and hand it over like trees 
bequeath their shade to the walls and the sidewalks. 

Poetry must keep eternity 
from slipping through its fingers; 
it should carry its bite mark shamelessly on its neck. 

Poetry should run around with nothing but a head, 
two crazy eyes, 
a love bite,

and Akhmatova’s answer. 

Enter Poem*

The last poem you read 

On your phone 

Its light cast across your face 

Standing up 

On the bus from Jerusalem 

Leaning against the door

Your bag between your feet 

The phone in your hands

The poem you’re thinking about right now 

Crossing Manarah Square

Your hands in your pockets 

Your scarf obscuring half your face

The poem you read first thing in the morning

Before fully waking up

Before the world assaulted you 

The poem you read in bed 

During the second intifada 

While the tanks besieged the Muqataá 

When you knew very little about the world

The poem you read on a hot summer 

In a strange city

Where you spoke to no one

The poem you read while reading another book

The poem you read on your mattress after your cellmates had gone to sleep

The poem that knows something you do not yet know about yourself

The poem you don’t fully remember

But remember walking in Nablus after reading it

How the world seemed then

A mystery 

The poem you read during the war

And though it did not comfort you

It did, for a few moments, distract you

The poem you found wearily flipping through a book 

At your friend’s house 

Because you had nothing to say

The poem your grandfather kept reciting even after he lost his mind 

The poem you read thousands of times 

The poem you wanted to share with everyone you know 

The poem you are thinking of right now

Crossing Manarah Square

Your hands in your pockets 

Your scarf obscuring half your face

Suddenly 

You are captivated by the trees 

And you don’t know where you’re going

Like the frost 

Drifting and alone 

With every step

You swallow the fog

Enter Wrist Pain*

While people were dying in the thousands during the Black Plague, Petrarch, a thirteenth century poet, prowled monastery cellars looking for ancient manuscripts that had stayed silent for hundreds of years. When he came across a manuscript by Cicero, a Roman poet, he copied it for weeks on end until his wrist ached. I will be thinking of this as I cross the Container checkpoint, as the soldiers construct roads and erect fences, littering our hills with bulldozers. I will be thinking of how Petrarch’s trivial wrist pain has traversed centuries, like a bulldozer, only because he turned it into a sentence on a page. And that’s why this image of a scribe, copying a book in full—to give to dwellers of the centuries to come—as a plague races people to the villages they have fled to, will always remain my idea of the road. And that wrist pain will be the bulldozer I scatter over the hills—the hills above which soot continues to rise.  

والآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الكِتابَة

شُكراً للكُتب؛ للمجلّات، المقالات

للقصائدِ، حتى عامودِ النّصائح، وقِسمِ الأخبارِ الفنّيَّة

شُكراً لكُتُب الفلسفة 

للقواميسِ أيضاً، ضخمةً وصامتةً

كأنَّها تعتذِرُ عمّا تُحاوِلُ أن تقومَ به

شُكراً للكلِماتِ، نضعُها جنباً إلى جنبٍ وتصيرُ إعلاناً عن الحُبّ، 

تهديداً بالحرب، وما بينهُما: قصائد

شكراً للكُتيِّباتِ، والمناشيرِ التي تبادَلَها الناسُ بالسِّر 

وهزَّتْ ممالكَ

 للجرائدِ التي طُبِعَت بِصَمتٍ في غُرَفٍ مُعتِمة، قبل أن تُفجِّرَ العالَم

للبياناتِ التي كُتِبَت في غُرفٍ مُكتَظَّةٍ ودَبِقَة، للرسائلِ المُهَرَّبَةِ من السُّجون

لما كُتِبَ في الليلِ على ضَوْءٍ خافِتٍ في هوامشِ الكُتُب

شُكراً للكَلِمةِ الأُولى التي يَخُطّها الأطفالُ، مُكَسَّرةً، ومُتعرِّجةً، كأنَّها أُحْجِية. ولآخِرِ كَلِمةٍ

يَكتُبُها المرءُ، مِثلَ آخر وَرَقَة على الأغصانِ الباردة

شُكراً للنُّقوشِ على الحِجارة، رسائلَ مِن عالَمٍ آخَر

لمُذكِّراتِ المَحكومينَ بالإعدام

لما خَطَّهُ المُراهقونَ في البُيوتِ المَهجورة

للعرائضِ التي حَمَلَت تواقيعَ العُمّال، تلك التي أزالوا إطارَ بابِ البرلمانِ حتّى يُدخلوها

شُكراً للكتاباتِ على الجُدرانِ في مُدُنٍ تفترِسُ سُكّانَها: 

مُتوهِّجةً أكثرَ مِن لَوحاتِ الاعلاناتِ التّجاريَّة

شكراً للكتَابَةِ تَحْتَ الإبَادَةِ.

ولا أعرفُ، لا أعرفُ، كيف يُحاولُ أحدٌ أن يوقِفَ الجريمةَ بأن يُعيدَ الدُّموعَ إلى أصحابِها. العدالةُ لَيسَت أنْ نَرسِمَ الدُّموعَ على صناديقِ الشَّحن. العدالةُ أن تُغرِقَ صناديقُ الشَّحنِ السفينةَ، أن تَكسِرَ رُفوفَ المكتبات.

والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الشِّعرُ

مثلَ البشَرِ

على الشِّعرِ أن يُغَطِّيَ رأسَهُ بِيَدَيْهِ في الحَرب.

خُذ الطَّلقةَ في القدَمِ

أو اليَدِ.

وأجِبْ ”نعَم، أستطيعُ“ كما أجابَتْ أخماتوفا

حينَ وَقَفَت في طَابُورٍ أمامَ سِجْنٍ في ليننغرَاد

وهَمَسَت امرَأةٌ هل ”تَستَطيعينَ أنْ تَصِفي هذا“؟

ولكنِ احْمِ رأسَ الشِّعرِ

احمِ رأسَهُ التي تَنمو عليها الطَّحالِب

وتصرخُ الشَّمسُ على سَطحِها.

رأسَهُ التي منذُ قُرونٍ تُحدِّقُ بالبَحرِ وهو يُغلقُ أجفانَهُ

دونَ أن تَرمِش.

هناكَ تستطيعُ أن تُحَوِّلَ

حُزنَكَ إلى فِكرةٍ

وتمنَحَهُ للآخَرين كما تمنحُ الأشجارُ

ظِلالَها للجُدرانِ والأرصفَة.

على الشِّعرِ ألّا يُفلِتَ الأبَديَّةَ من يَدِهِ

أن يحمِلَ عَضَّتَها على رَقَبَتِهِ بِلا خَجَل.

أصلاً على الشِّعرِ أن يَعدُوَ برأسٍ فقَط

وعَينَيْنِ مَجنونَتَيْنِ

وعَضَّةِ الحُب

وإجابةِ أخماتوفا

والآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها القَصيدة

القصيدةُ الأخيرةُ التي قرأتِها على هاتِفِكِ المَحمولِ

-وضَوْؤُهُ يُنيرُ وجهَكِ-

في الباصِ القادمِ من القُدسِ

واقفةً، تستَنِدينَ على البابِ

حقيبتُكِ بينَ قَدَمَيْكِ،

وهاتِفُكِ في يَدِك

القصيدةُ التي تُفكّرينَ بِها الآنَ

وأنتِ تقطَعينَ دُوّارَ المَنارة

يداكِ في جَيبَتَيكِ

ولَفحتُكِ تُغطّي نِصفَ وَجهِكِ

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها أولَ شَيءٍ في الصباحِ قبلَ أن تستَيقِظي تماماً

قبلَ أن يُهاجِمَكِ العالَم

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها في سَريرِكِ في الانتفاضَةِ الثانِية

 بينَما الدَّبّاباتُ تُحاصِرُ المُقاطَعة

وأنتِ لا تعرفينَ شيئاً عن العالَمِ بَعد

 القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها في صَيْفٍ حارٍّ

في مدينةٍ غريبةٍ لم تتعرَّفي فيها على أحد

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها وأنتِ تقرَئينَ كتاباً آخَر

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها على بُرشِكِ في الليلِ بعد أن نامَ جميعُ الأسرى

 القصيدةُ التي تعرِفُ شيئاً لا تعرفينَهُ بَعدُ عن نفسِك

القصيدةُ التي لا تذكُرينَها تماماً ولكنَّكِ تذكُرينَ كيفَ مَشَيْتِ في نابُلْسَ بَعدَها

وكأنَّ العالَمَ سِرٌّ هائِل

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها في الحَربِ

ولم تُواسِكِ ولكنَّها شتَّتَت انتباهَكِ للَحْظات

القصيدةُ التي وجدتِها وأنتِ تتَصَفَّحينَ بِمَللٍ كتاباً في بيتِ أصدقائِكِ

لأنكِ لا تجِدينَ ما ستقولينَه

القصيدةُ التي ظَلَّ جَدُّكِ يُردِّدُها حتى بعدَ أن فقَدَ عقلَه

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها آلافَ المرّات

 القصيدةُ التي أردتِ أن تُشارِكيها معَ كُلِّ شَخصٍ تعرفينَهُ

 القصيدةُ التي تُفكِّرينَ بها الآنَ

وأنتِ تقطعينَ دُوّارَ المَنارَةِ

يداكِ في جيبتَيْكِ

ولفحتُكِ تُغطّي نِصْفَ وَجْهِكِ

تستَوْقِفُكِ الأشجارُ

ولا تعرفينَ أينَ ستَذْهَبينَ

تُشْبِهينَ الصَّقيعَ

هائِمةً ووحيدةً

تَمشينَ وتَشرَبين الضَّباب.

والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الوجَعُ في الرُّسْغ

بينَما كانت الناسُ تهلَكُ بالآلافِ في الطّاعونِ الأسوَدِ، كانَ هناكَ في القرنِ الثالثَ عشَرَ شاعِرٌ، بترارك، يدورُ مِن قَبْوِ دَيْرٍ إلى قَبْوِ دَيْرٍ، يبحثُ عن المخطوطاتِ القديمةِ التي ظلَّت صامتةً لمِئاتِ السِّنين. حين وجَدَ مخطوطةً لسسيرو، شاعرٍ روماني، ظَلَّ ينسخُها لأسابيعَ حتّى أوجعَهُ رُسْغُه. وسيكونُ ذلك ما أفكِّرُ به وأنا أعبُرُ حاجِزَ الكونتينر بَيْنَ رَامَ الله وَبَيتِ لَحْم بينما يشُقُّ المستعمِرونَ الطُّرُقَ، ويبنونَ الأسوارَ، وينشُرونَ الجرّافاتِ في تِلالِنا. كيفَ ظلَّ ذلكَ الوجَعُ الصغيرُ في الرُّسغِ يعبُرُ مثلَ جرّافةٍ من قَرْنٍ إلى قَرنٍ كما الكتابِ الذي أنقذَهُ فقَط لأنَّهُ صارَ جُملةً على صفحةٍ. ولهذا، ستظلُّ هذهِ الصّورةُ لِمَن ينسَخُ كتاباً كامِلاً -حتّى يُهدِيَهُ لِمَن سيَمشونَ على هذا الكَوكَبِ في القُرونِ القادمة- بينما كانَ الطاعونُ يسبِقُ الناسَ إلى القُرى التي يلجؤونَ إليها هي فِكرَتي عن الطّريق، وسيكونُ ذلكَ الوجَعُ في الرُّسغِ جرّافاتي التي أنشُرُها في التّلال، التلالِ التي يتصاعَدُ مِنها الغُبار.

Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and educator. She was awarded the 2024 Banipal Visiting Author Fellowship, and the 2025 Norwegian Writers Guild solidarity award. Taha has published three poetry books, a novel, two plays, and a children poetry book. Her plays have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Flemish Royal Theatre in Brussels, among others. Her forthcoming poetry collection, Enter World, will be published in 2025 by Almutawassit Publishing House, and in English translation in 2026 by Graywolf Press. Taha taught at Brown University, Ramallah Drama Academy, Birzeit University and Al-Quds Bard University. She lives in Ramallah.

Sara Elkamel holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. A Pushcart Prize winner, she is the author of the poetry chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021). Her translations include Mona Kareem’s chapbook, I Will Not Fold These Maps (Poetry Translation Centre, 2023) and Dalia Taha’s collection of poetry, Enter World (Graywolf Press, 2026). 

The post Four Poems appeared first on Mizna.

Forwarding a praxis of radical antifascist activist-scholarship, activist and University of Minnesota-Twin Cities scholar Sima Shakhsari follows the example set by Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and bell hooks in interrogating the academic detachment pervading their milieu.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

We are flesh measured in kilograms,
my Palestinian colleague says in desperation
But you are a thinker not a doer 
So you do nothing

—Sima Shakhsari

The Thinker

On the other side of this screen 
heads line up in squares
a collage of talking heads

You sit posed
surrounded by books curated on a shelf 
academic rigor de rigueur 
gravitas a self-respecting scholar must display

Your head heavy with thoughts
ponderous air of self-importance
So heavy
its weight 
demands support
hand under chin
eyebrows pulled together 
a pensive gesture
a serious scholar
comrade, compatriot, colleague
Full of contempt
driven by competition 
No chance of a haptic connection here
No chance of commune across this disembodied screen

I am a thinker, not a doer, you say 
I am a theorist, not an activist, you insist
body split from mind 
Theory above praxis
The rational academic
Cold and collected
Never vulnerable
Never weak

Keep your pose, dear colleague
Do not shed a tear
Do not burst in anger, even in the face of genocide
You think therefore you are
The Man with capital M
Or perhaps a derivative 
Mimicry at its worst
The Brown academic’s burden: 
To Think and not to do
To Think and not to feel
To strive to climb the ladder of Man
Alienated
Colonized mind split from Brown body
You are a thinker, not a doer
You have a lot to prove 
You tell yourself that
your brown body on the streets
protesting, shouting, angry
your brown body, a doer
cannot possibly be a thinker
They told you so
so you choose to think. You choose not to do

* * *

On the other side of the screen
a father holds his child’s headless body 
no talking heads here
Literal forced separation of decapitated body and mind
A boy in shock holds his little brother’s corpse in his arms
Bodies without organs 
Dead without shrouds
A little girl tells her cat
I beg you not to eat us when we die
please . . . if you stay alive after we die, 
don’t eat us, our scattered flesh.
Our Ashlaa
What to make of the human/animal split? 
of human/animals
of hungry animals eating human flesh in the rubble
What to make of the Human?
of rights?

A father carries two plastic bags, one in each hand
 أيها الناس
هَذِهِ هِيَ أَوْلَادِي
People! These are my children 
Flesh dumped in bags
Enough to match the weight of a human child
after starvation
Organs without bodies

We are not even numbers
We are flesh measured in kilograms,
my Palestinian colleague says in desperation
But you are a thinker not a doer 
So you do nothing

A 20-year-old man burns alive 
with an IV tube still attached to his body 
Shabaan’s screams fade
in the loud roar of fire collapsing the hospital tent
Ya allah Ya allah Ya rab Ya allah 
Silence
Smell of burned flesh permeates the cold computer screen
Ya allah Ya allah Ya allah
But you are a thinker not a doer

Dear colleague,
Hearts are aching
bodies restless
Mind the body
Maybe you can feel the rage
Maybe you can feel the grief
Embody your theory
Write in flesh
Maybe you can shut down your screen
Maybe 
Just maybe we can shut it down
Step out
Join hurting bodies on the street
soulful, thinking, hurting bodies 
Ya allah Ya rab Ya allah
Yallah, be a doer and a thinker
SHUT. IT. DOWN.

Sima Shakhsari is a professor at the University of Minnesota and a member of the UMN Educators for Justice in Palestine.

The post The Thinker appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Nour Eldin Hussein
Image by Walid Daqqa, produced during his imprisonment

Thinker, freedom fighter, and political prisoner Walid Daqqa describes the systematic colonization of time in Zionist prisons in a letter to a friend. The original Arabic text can be found here. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2: Futurities, link to order HERE.

—Nour Eldin Hussein, assistant editor

We are a part of history, and history—as it is well known—is a condition and an action in the past. Except us: We are a past continuous and neverending. We address you all from it presently, so that it does not become your future. 

—Walid Daqqa, trans. Nour Eldin Hussein

On Parallel Time

My dear brother, Abu Omar,¹ greetings. 

Today is the twenty-fifth of March, the first day of my twentieth year imprisoned. Today is also the twentieth birthday of a young comrade. Such an “occasion”—the anniversary of my imprisonment, the birth of the comrade—reminds me of a question I posed to myself: how old is Lena today, who has become a mother of two? How old is Najla, mother to three? And Hanin, mother to a girl? And Obeida—traveling to America for his studies, bidding farewell to his youth, yet without my bidding him farewell? And my brothers and sisters—either kids when I left them on the day of my arrest or born after the fact—how old are my brothers and sisters, those “children” who have since married and become mothers and fathers to kids themselves? 

I had not asked this before. Time in the broad sense, how much of it passes—that had not concerned me as much as the minutes do when they would fly by during those short family visits. Too brief a time for me to lay out for them all the notes I’ve recorded on the palm of my hand; all the missions Sanaa² will need particular effort for—not just to carry them out, but to simply remember them, as they have barred us from the use of pen or paper during our visits, and so it is only memory that remains as the sole faculty available for recollection. And so I forget to ponder the lines that have begun to dig in the face of my mother for years now, and I forget to ponder her hair that she has begun to dye with henna to hide their gray from me so that I would not inquire after her true age.

Her true age? I do not know my mother’s “true age.” My mother has two ages: her chronological age, which I do not know, and her prisonological age. Let’s say her age in that parallel time is nineteen years. 

I write to you all from Parallel Time. In Parallel Time, where there is fixity of place, we do not use the standard units of your time like minutes and hours, not unless the two lines of our time and your time meet at the visitation window, whereupon we are forced to interact with your chronological formulae. It is, anyway, the only thing that has not changed in your time and that we still remember how to use. 

It has reached me on the tongue of the young delegates of the intifada—indeed, this was told to me personally—that many things have changed in your time. The phone no longer has a rotary dial, no longer works via coin slot but requires credit to activate; and also that the frames of car tires do not have another inner, internal structure, but are tubeless. 

I was quite impressed by such a system! One where the tire is made of a material that closes in on itself, plugging up any holes spontaneously and immediately, stopping any air from leaking out of it. I’m quite impressed, as it seems to resemble the prisoner who resists the tacks laid down by the prison guards by way of that self-contained system—the tubeless system. Generally, there is no escape for the prisoner save for relying on such a self-correcting regime, as our driver or drivers cannot see a tack on the road except that they drive over it or a bump in the road except that they trip on it, supposing that they are taking a short cut—shortening the distance, reducing the effort. It’s not just that our drivers have been reckless, they have simply been relying on that inner tube as if it’s not made of flesh and blood—as if there is no end, no goal. Until we become like cash passed around on the market, the market of political maneuvers: 

“Take this tire and permit us some of the vehicle.” 

Of what value is the tire without the vehicle? 

I do wish for the Palestinian and Arab leadership to improve. I do wish for our people and for their political power to take up such an internal, self-reparatory system without having to resort to those who call themselves “roadside assistance”—the Americans and their ilk who today corrupt all the earth in Lebanon. And if it is unavoidable to speak of politics—despite the fact that I have decided, today especially, not to speak of politics—then we, in Parallel Time, see you, while you all do not see us. We hear you all while you all do not hear us. As if glass, tinted just on your side, stands between us, like the kind for cars carrying important people such that some of us behave arrogantly as if they are, in fact, an important person. They have convinced us that we are important people. 

And why not! The prestige of the situation calls for it. In all the world, there are states and governments who have prisoners except for us: We are prisoners who have a ministry in a government that does not have a state!³

We—for those who do not know—have dwelled here in Parallel Time since before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the First and Second and Third Gulf wars, before Madrid and Oslo and before the eruptions of the First and Second intifadas. In Parallel Time we are as old as that revolution and we precede the genesis of some of its factions; we precede the Arabic satellite channels and the proliferation of the culture of hamburgers in our capitals. Indeed, we are before the invention of mobile phones and the propagation of those new telecommunications systems and the internet. We are a part of history, and history—as it is well known—is a condition and an action in the past. Except us: We are a past continuous and neverending. We address you all from it presently, so that it does not become your future. 

I have said that, here, our time is not your time. Our time does not proceed on the axis of past and present and future; our time that flows in the fixity of place ousts from our language typical concepts of time and place—or say that it confuses them, according to your standards. We do not ask “when?” or “where shall we meet?” for example, rather we have already met and still meet at the same place. We proceed here flexibly to and fro on the axis of past and present, and every moment after this present one is an unknown future that we are no longer capable of interacting with. Of no control to us is our future—a condition quite similar to that of all the Arab peoples, with the fundamental difference that our occupation is foreign and their jailers Arab; here we’re imprisoned for searching for the future, and there the future is buried alive. 

In our Parallel Time, most of us haven’t given an answer to that question posed usually to children: What do you want to be when you grow up? I, even now—even though I am forty-four years old—have no idea what I would like to be when I grow up! 

If it is the case that time as a concept is inherent to matter—if it is its moving aspect—and if place is the fixity of matter, then we in Parallel Time have come to represent the units of that time. We are the time that wrestles with place and in a state of internal contradiction with it. We have become units of time. We have come to define points on the axis of time by the arrest of so-and-so, the arrival to the prison of such-and-such or their release from it. Such things are important chronological events for lives in Parallel Time. We know how to define the hour and the day and history by your units of time, but they are units that go unused; what is used is: X happened on the day so-and-so came, or before or after such-and-such was liberated. And because we do not know when so-and-so will be arrested in the future or when they will be moved from one prison to another, we have nothing by which to define a future event. So, when we talk of the future, we borrow your chronological units.

Your time is the true time. Your time is the time of the future. 

In Parallel Time and in the controversy of the relationship between us and place, we develop relations with objects that are strange; relationships that nobody besides those imprisoned in Parallel Time would understand. How is it possible to understand the emotional relationship between a prisoner and the undershirt that was the thing he was wearing the moment before his arrest? How is it possible to explain the depth of our relationships with predefined objects, the loss of which may lead to sorrow and even weeping. Things like a certain lighter or a specific box of cigarettes acquire deep emotional significance because of their distinction as the last thing we had in the “future,” as if they affirm that we, one day, had been outside of Parallel Time—proof of our membership to your time. Such objects are not simply consumable materials to be thrown in the trash following their use: they are the drowning man’s last life preserver in the ocean of Parallel Time. 

In the year 1996, I heard the honk of a Subaru for the first time in ten years and I wept. In our time, a car horn is used for more than simply alerting passersby; in our time, a car horn is liable to stir the deepest of human emotions. 

Through their relationship with place, the people of Parallel Time develop relationships no stranger than those with objects. There you are suddenly, developing a special relationship with specks on the ceiling of your cell brought about by leaking water and the humidity. Or you might develop a relationship with a hole or crack in the door. Who would understand that dialogue replete with fervor, with emotion, with interruption and description as if it were a conversation on the topic of heaven and its door and not on the cell and its holes?

The first prisoner: “There’s nothing better than department four . . . Oh, to be back in the days of department four . . .” 

The second prisoner: “Sure, but the best thing about department four was cell seven.” 

The first prisoner—expelling all the air from his lungs in heartbreak over those days—interrupts: “I know, I know, but what can you say? From this cell you can hear the precise crack of dawn—the sound of cars on the highway.”

The second prisoner, also interrupting: “But that’s not it—you know the cell door? Between the cell door and the wall, right at the hinges, is an entire two centimeter-crack so wide you can see through it while lying in bed. You can see through to the ends of the earth.”

The first prisoner: “Man, why are you saying this? Department four is the best.” 

How simple the dreams, how great the human, how small the place, how grand the idea. 

I did not plan to write on a day like today—not about time, nor about place, nor about our Parallel Time, nor about anything: not about politics, not about philosophy. I actually had an inclination to write about what worries me—what I love and what I hate—but my unplanned writing resembles my unplanned life. I will even admit that I have never planned for anything: not to be a resistance fighter, nor a member of a political party or faction, nor even to participate in politics—not because all that is a mistake and not because politics is an objectionable, detestable matter as some like to see it—but because, in my view, they are huge and complicated topics. I am not a politician nor a resistance fighter despite previous insistence and observation. I very simply could have continued my life as a house painter or gas station worker as I was up until the moment of my arrest. I could have married one of my cousins early as many do, and she could have borne seven or ten kids; and I would have bought a truck and learned the business of car dealing and the going rates of hard currency. All of that was possible, until I saw what I saw of the atrocities during the Lebanon War and the massacres that followed it—Sabra, Shatila. It inspired in my being shock and astonishment. 

To stop feeling shock and astonishment, to stop feeling the misery of people (any people), the blunting of emotion before scenes of atrocity (any atrocity), was, in my view, a daily anxiety, and the measure of the extent of my steadfastness and solidity. To feel for people and the pain of humanity is the very core of civilization. The intellectual core of the human being is intention; the corporeal core is work; and the spiritual core is feeling—to feel for people and the pain of humanity is the core of human civilization. 

It is this core especially that is targeted in the life of the prisoner every hour of every day of every year. You are not targeted as a political subject in the first degree, neither are you targeted as a religious subject, nor are you targeted as a consumerist subject to be punished by deprivation from the pleasures of material life. You may adopt whatever political conviction suits you, and you may practice whatever religious observance, and you may even be provided with much of your material needs—but it remains that the targeted entity of the first degree is the social, human entity within you. 

What is targeted is any relationship outside of the self, any relationship you value with other people, with nature—even your relationship with the jailer as a human being. Truly, they do it all to push you to hate. What is targeted is love, your sense of beauty, your sense of humanity.

I profess now, in my twentieth year of imprisonment, that I am still no good at the hatred, nor the crudeness, nor the coarseness that life in prison imposes. I profess now that I still rejoice at the barest of things with the glee of small children. I am still filled with delight at a kind word of encouragement or compliment. I profess that my heart skips a beat at the sight of a flower on the television, at a scene of nature, at the sea. I profess that I am joyous despite it all, and I yearn not for any pleasure of the many pleasures of the world save for two: the sight of children, sent off from all corners of the village to their schools; and the sight of workers in the early hours of the morning as they proceed from the alleys of the neighborhoods in a dusty, wintry morning, toward the town square—vital, prepared to travel to their place of work. And I profess now that all these feelings, all this love, would not have remained if not for the sole and solitary love of my mother, the love of Sanaa and my brother Hosny, the support of my people and my dearest friends who surround me on all sides—I to them, and they to me. 

I profess that I am still a human being holding onto his love as if it were a flaming torch. And I will remain steadfast in that love—I will continue to love you all, for it is love and love only that remains my sole victory over my jailers. 

With regards, Milad.

1. 1.  
   Refers to Palestinian political science scholar Azmi Bishara. This letter was sent from Daqqa to Bishara in 2005 and is translated and published here with permission, with special thanks to assistance from Mazher Al-Zoby. Ed .
   ︎
2. 2. Refers to the journalist and activist Sanaa Salameh who was married to Daqqa. Ed .
   ︎
3. 3. Refers to the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. Ed . ︎

Translator’s note: Born in 1961 in the town of Baqa Al-Gharbiyyah in occupied Palestine, Walid Daqqa was a Palestinian philosopher, political theorist, playwright, and armed resistance fighter. Despite evidence to the contrary, Daqqa was accused, charged, and convicted of involvement in a 1984 PFLP operation that captured and killed an Israeli soldier, for which he was sentenced to life by the Zionist entity in 1986 and subsequently languished, imprisoned until his death on April 7, 2024 (al-Shaikh 2021a, 276). The text presented here was penned in 2005 in Gilboa Prison, on the first day of his twentieth year behind bars. 

Despite his captivity, Daqqa remained politically active. As hinted here, he maintained regular contact with the cultural intelligentsia in colonized Palestine, enabling him to conduct a lively political life from within. Notably, Daqqa served as a member of the political party Democratic National Rally and headed the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement. 

Perhaps the most significant of Daqqa’s activities in this respect are his intellectual pursuits, for which his comrades in captivity nicknamed him the Prince of Culture, Amir al-Thaqafah. Pursuing and successfully graduating with an M.A in political science, Daqqa produced a prolific—and largely untranslated—intellectual output that was transdisciplinary in form, taking the shape of screenplays, musicals, novels, nonfiction memoir, children’s books, and works of political and philosophical theory. Situated in the context of a post-Oslo status quo, his body of work proceeds from the urgencies marked by the transmutation of the PLO into the PA, the subsequent official renunciation of armed resistance as a political method, and the “dis-memberment” of the 1948 Palestinians from the national body (ibid., 274). In particular, Daqqa’s intellectual concerns revolve around the peculiar ontology of the post-Oslo Palestinian, a subject who is increasingly forced to exist in a state of a prospectless, futureless infinite present—the parallel time of Palestinian political existence. The text presented here is an early but foundational instantiation of this central intellectual project.

Daqqa leaves behind a legacy that demands dogged belief in a willful, agentic future. Indeed, at every turn Daqqa refused to capitulate to that hallucination of the infinite present induced by the apartheid state. In 1996, an imprisoned Daqqa met and became involved with journalist and translator Sana Salama. Though initially blocked by the Zionist entity, the two married after the intervention of Azmi Bishara—the addressee of the letter translated here and a member of the Knesset at the time—in 1999. Save for exceptional instances like their wedding and a single incident in which Sana managed to steal a hug in 2015 (ibid., 280) the couple conducted the entirety of their marital relationship separated by the steel of prison bars. The couple conceived via liberated seed, nutfah muharrarah, and Milad—birth in Arabic—was born on February 3, 2020 (al-Shaikh 2021b, 84-5). As in other texts, Daqqa concludes his 2005 letter to Azmi Bishara by hailing his future child: Ma’ tahiyyati, Milad.

—Nour Eldin Hussein

References:

1. Al-Shaikh, Abdul-Rahim. 2021a. “Al-Zaman Al-Muwazi Fi Fikr Walid Daqqa [Parallel Time in the Thought of Walid Daqqa].” المجلة العربية للعلوم الإنسانية. 39 (155): 271–308. https://doi.org/10.34120/ajh.v39i155.2889.
2. Al-Shaikh, Abdul-Rahim. 2021b. “The Parallel Human: Walid Daqqah on the 1948 Palestinian Political Prisoners.” Confluences Méditerranée N° 117 (2): 73–87. https://doi.org/10.3917/come.117.0075.

Walid Daqqa (July 18, 1961–April 7, 2024) was a Palestinian philosopher, political theorist, author, and armed resistance fighter who was imprisoned for thirty-eight years, the longest serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails. From prison, he wrote a number of books including, The Tale of the Secrets of Oil, Fusion of Consciousness, and A Parallel Time. Daqqa died in prison, succumbing to a rare form of bone cancer which was exacerbated by medical negligence and torture of the Israeli Prison Service. He has not been given a proper burial as his body continues to be retained by the Security Cabinet of Israel at the time of this publication.

Nour Eldin Hussein is an Egyptian essayist, researcher, translator, editor, and enthusiast of the written and spoken word. He holds an M.A in Arab media and culture studies, and he lives, works, and studies in Minneapolis, MN where he serves as assistant editor for Mizna. He maintains lightedroom, a small blog on Substack where he writes about digital culture, life online, and the Arab world among others.

The post On Parallel Time appeared first on Mizna.

Palestinian poet Summer Farah reviews Mohammed El-Kurd’s newly released Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal in light of the horrifying intransigence of settler-colonial genocide on Gaza, adding to our understanding of the “rhetorical exhaustions” employed to nullify the impact of resistant political action. Order Perfect Victims HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

Subtlety: something I go back and forth worrying about, an oscillation between “not that deep” or “not worth it” to address, but with the knowledge that it is still cutting, cutting, cutting. 

—Summer Farah

Review: Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd

In Toni Morrison’s speech “A Humanist View,” she identifies “distraction” as a function of racism: distraction “keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.” Over the past sixteen months since Israel escalated a genocidal bombardment of Gaza, as well as in Lebanon and the West Bank, “distraction” is a familiar repetition: stopping genocide requires not just attention, but action. It is only natural that those who commit genocide seek to make you as distracted as possible. 

What is claimed as “distraction” varies. In 2024, as a team with a racist mascot secured their second Super Bowl victory in a row, Israel launched an assault on Rafah, killing over 80 Palestinians. My Twitter feed was split between clips of Taylor Swift in the crowd, destroyed buildings, and the scolding of attention on Taylor Swift rather than the destroyed buildings. I do not begrudge the scolding, but I am reluctant to classify the Super Bowl as a distraction specific to Palestine; there are advantages the Zionists take, of course, when the headlines are sure to be elsewhere, but it feels indicative of the general dedication of the average US citizen, instead. We love sports, and spending, and gathering—no matter the context. We are an easy people to distract. 

Instead, the “distractions” I find particularly sinister are the rhetorical exhaustions that Palestinians—and our allies—participate in almost systematically when it comes to matters specifically relevant to the occupation. As if each time a new horror is unveiled, there is a cosmic requirement for it to be buried in layers and layers of linguistic gymnastics before we can get to the real work of stopping the horror. Sometimes, the language distorts so much that you find yourself on a path to stop something else entirely. Of distraction, Toni Morrison says, “there will always be one more thing.” In his debut essay collection, Perfect Victims: The Politics of Appeal, Mohammed El-Kurd identifies and dissects these distractions, accessibly codifying them into an index with which that “one more thing” can be dealt with quickly, sharply—until, I hope, we refine our language enough to no longer, in El-Kurd’s words, “defang” the Palestinian. We can then focus on what is necessary, urgent, and true. 

“I have always wanted to be human,” El-Kurd writes to open the second chapter. The severing of the Palestinian outside of humanity to a Western gaze enables the continued destruction of homes across Palestine, the murder of our families, the dispossession of land. It is not the actions of the Palestinian that disqualifies them from humanity, as “what makes some people heroes is what makes us criminals. It is almost simplistic to say that we are guilty by birth. Our existence is purely mechanistic; we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die.”

I come to Perfect Victims not from El-Kurd’s notoriety as Palestine correspondent at The Nation, but from his work as a poet. Poets working in other forms are often praised for the beauty they imbue into these other mediums—El-Kurd’s line is often beautiful, yes, but what I find most compelling is his brevity and control. The strength of Perfect Victims is its precision, its honesty. There is a trap in writing through the dehumanization of Palestinians via a book produced in English, from a US publisher, to a Western audience; El-Kurd is aware of these traps, of course. He continues, “When I wrote short stories about my grandmother Rifqa as a survivor of the 1948 Nakba, I was told to ‘humanize’ her. I searched in her character for quirks and quips that might pollute her humanity, then I effaced them.” Perfect Victims details this stripping on behalf of Palestinians en masse, utilized by media institutions that seek to nullify support of the liberation struggle and manufacture consent for genocide. 

The “politics of appeal” are what occur in an attempt to endear the Palestinian back to these institutions and audiences. These practices are used by our allies, our covert operatives, and ourselves. They entail: affirming a Palestinian’s proximity to empire by bringing up their US Citizenship (it will not save them from being killed in the West Bank), bringing up their Christian faith (it will not stop the IOF from raiding churches on Easter), their educational background (it will not save them from losing their job), their distance from resistance movements (it will not save them from being imprisoned). But, again, it is not the Palestinian’s actions that determines their “humanity” or lack thereof—it is their Palestinian-ness. The rhetorical gymnastics employed so often move the Palestinian towards whiteness, a US-centric respectability, rather than the identity we are proud of. And so, this rhetorical gymnastics employed, both for us and against us, are distractions to the goal of a liberated Palestine. In his introductory notes, El-Kurd writes “Our people have sacrificed and struggled artfully to work within and around an unworkable system.” The tactics analyzed throughout are not new. El-Kurd’s arguments are not revelatory for Palestinians, nor does he intend for them to be. Instead, he writes: “I want us to invent a new future, to break out of the hamster wheel.”

So, how does Perfect Victims aid us in getting off the hamster wheel? Its structure makes it a compelling recommendation: with short chapters divided into shorter, digestible sections, it is a text easy to imagine assigned in classrooms or cited to back up arguments against The New York Times and other media institutions who have violently failed Palestinians. As I consider El-Kurd’s admission of “effacing” the character of his grandmother, it is the work done in the footnotes of Perfect Victims that I find most interesting. There are many martyrs in this book; El-Kurd makes a note to explain his choices for the shift of the martyrs’ stories from the body of the text to footnotes: “I want to address the reader as if they are a guest in my living room.” The footnotes are where the text feels most like a “living room”—it is a place to expand and explain, of course, but El-Kurd transforms them into something more. 

From Rifqa, El-Kurd’s debut poetry collection, the poem I remember the most is “Laugh”—particularly the line, “My grandmother taught me ‘if we don’t laugh, we cry.’” The importance of humor, laughter, levity, is a major theme in Rifqa that returns in Perfect Victims, in the anecdotes El-Kurd offers of his time with other Palestinians, but also in his prose, and in the footnotes. A well-placed “Feminism!” as a footnote on a point about how Israeli snipers might be any gender is a burst of levity amid the grim reality that Israeli snipers of any gender are murdering Palestinian journalists. There’s a level of trust with the reader in these moments—an off-color joke to some (I would make this joke), it is an attempt to not strip his narrative voice of its specificity. Also in the footnotes is Arabic; this choice, too, brings the reader into the metaphorical living room. It’s an invitation, either way, whether it ultimately registers as intimacy or distance. And that distance is necessary for the narrative voice to maintain its complexity. 

The synthesis of El-Kurd’s processing of his own dehumanization—“The consequences of dehumanization, the staggering and the subtle, reveal themselves not only in how we are perceived but in how we perceive ourselves.”—alongside clear criticisms of these institutions is useful: this fuller picture of the function of dehumanization brings a closeness attached to the urgency. It is not just the passive voice, it is how we internalize it—our own complicity alongside the bombs. Perhaps one of the most important tactics El-Kurd identifies is subtlety:

“Considering that the most brazen declarations are obfuscated from even nut grafs and margins, why bring up the subtle? Because in that subtlety one finds a more dangerous, more insidious logic. Examining the conversation between a liberal television anchor and a liberal author unveils the implicit underpinnings of their discourse: Palestinians must denounce certain affiliations, determined by the West, to be considered worthy of living. Or, I should correct myself, worthy of condolences, as we are doomed regardless.” 

These sinister violences are present in cultural arenas outside of news media as well, such as in literary arts and film. Subtlety: something I go back and forth worrying about, an oscillation between “not that deep” or “not worth it” to address, but with the knowledge that it is still cutting, cutting, cutting. 

Of all of the tropes El-Kurd indexes, the most presciently felt is in film, especially as we approach another “distraction” in the form of an Oscars ceremony. El-Kurd presents the trope that’s resonant in film coverage throughout the 2024 awards season: 

“Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory’s charismatic sidekick. No one—not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review—seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer’s fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.” 

In her review of Palestinian-“Israeli” documentary No Other Land, co-directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, about the expulsion of residents from Masafer Yatta, Mary Turfah writes: 

“The film doesn’t engage with other ways this suffering might end. The only resistance we see is nonviolent demonstration. Adra is an activist, a term whose configurations are vague except vis-à-vis violence. The film matter-of-factly captures plenty of violent Israelis, settlers and soldiers, armed and sustained by the state, their bulldozers and their unmoved expressions, or their twisted smiles as lives are destroyed, but no Palestinian fighters, no direct Palestinian response. Instead, Palestinians and their supporters are ‘armed’ with their cameras, committed to capturing an aftermath to which a sympathetic Western audience might choose to respond on their behalf. At the film’s start, Adra’s father, who has been imprisoned and abused by the Israelis multiple times, describes a desire to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, then apologizes to his Israeli guest, explaining that sometimes he finds himself so angry. The woman’s son was shot at a peaceful protest.” 

Turfah’s description hits several of the points addressed in Perfect Victims, namely the “defanging” and distancing from affiliations that the Western viewer might deem improper. When the New York Times reports on Israeli atrocities, the actor is often missing. Violence hits the Palestinian as gravity forces the apple from the tree. Here, although the actor is filmed, the Palestinian remains a figure only in which things happen to them; in an attempt to restore the humanity to the Palestinian via collaboration of the “slayer and the slain,” the dignity of reaction is withheld—instead, they are still thoroughly dehumanized, made to apologize for even daring to have the thought of resistance. 

I wonder: how does the appeal of No Other Land stand up at an awards ceremony attended by hundreds of notable Zionists? On the night of the Oscars, what would No Other Land spoken into the room do for the residents of Masafer Yatta—should they choose to throw a stone in the face of annihilation? Perfect Victims asks the reader to consider what is the true value of appeal versus what is sacrificed in that attempt. Toward the end, El-Kurd writes that the dehumanization of Palestinians finds us “guilty until proven otherwise and otherwise is often impossible.” Beating the “impossible” cannot happen with the colonizer’s logic; let Perfect Victims be a guide in dismantling these distractions, and moving forward with dignity. 

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. She is the author of I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024) and The Hungering Years (Host Publications, 2026). A member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and the National Book Critics Circle, she is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.

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In the past few decades, as liberal cultural institutions have grown more dastardly effective at co-opting and defanging the political potential of writers and artists from historically marginalized backgrounds, the amorphous imperative to “witness” continuously re-emerges in the face of unceasing tragedy wrought about by the United States, its ruling class, and its ghastly allies across the globe. We are implored to “witness” atrocity after atrocity, but never as more than bystanders, contributing nothing beyond sympathy, and even then, only for the “perfect victim.” I am drawn to Sara Aziza’s stunning blending of form precisely because it refuses this hijacking, asking us instead to unravel the dangerous language with which we understand and articulate the victims of empire from within it.

– Hazem Fahmy, Uncrafted Column Editor

HAZEM FAHMY

Broadly speaking, how do you think about your relationship with craft as a term and a concept? And in what ways have you encountered it, institutionally or pedagogically? 

SARAH AZIZA

HF

I wanted to go back to your point about literature’s capacity for mystery and the undefinable. As vital as it is to center an unambiguously political critique of institutionalized ideas of craft, for me it is also a question of pleasure. For example, there’s been much conversation about the “MFA novel” or the “workshop poem,” these really formulaic ideas of what a sentence should look like, or how a project should be structured—the kinds of characters and concerns that a work can be fixated on. Of course, these are also very political choices, involving what you can and can’t criticize or forefront, but it’s also about narrowing down what is enjoyable. 

SA

HF

You mentioned earlier that initially your relationship to poetry—like that of many people, certainly mine—felt very distant, like something that couldn’t speak to you. When did it, to use Barthes’s term, puncture through for you? 

SA

HF

It seems to me like what you found in poetry during this period was the opposite of what had been pushed on you in journalism school. Journalism in the West in general, but particularly in the U.S., is obsessed with this idea of objectivity, which we’ve seen being put to particularly violent uses since October of last year. For you, to what degree was moving toward poetry moving away from journalism?

SA

HF

I’m assuming they were also asking you to translate very particular narratives that a liberal American audience would find palatable.

SA

Empire is really stupid because of how narrowly it defines legible knowledge. One source of hope for me is the continued refusal of empire to actually exhibit real interest in its own survival, like refusing to take cues from nature, indigenous people, or history itself. When thinking about writing against empire, I think about emergency, about “resistance” in its many forms. But I also think about the desire to preserve who we are in our wholeness and beauty, our desires and interests and curiosities and idiosyncrasies; our uniqueness in the midst of resisting. 

In thinking about my relationship with English and English education, I started taking apart my syntax. I would download declassified documents from the 1950s and redact or appropriate the language and mess with it. It felt like there were lots of ways to be insurgent. I’m thinking about Look by Solmaz Sharif, for example, and how she takes the military dictionary and uses it as a starting point to craft poems against the US military industrial complex. But her next book, Customs, was also very different. So as much as resistance is a really fruitful and important place for me, I never want my craft, art, humanity, or existence to just end there. That would allow for too much of my life to be shaped by oppression.

I want to write against, but I also want to write without. I always ask myself: what art would I create if I’m not even thinking about the oppressor? What can I write that the despots and fascists could never grasp or understand? 

I think a lot as well about Édouard Glissant and opacity when it comes to how stupid and limited imperial knowledge is. I love the moments where art, or even just human friendship, revel in themselves, in what the enemy can never know about us. I think that can be so beautiful, abundant, sustaining, and powerful. And it does work against empire because it begins to build, even if just on the page, or in a space, or for an evening, a different reality. It’s practicing, moving us toward the future that is the reason for our resistance. We resist in order to get to a place where we no longer need to resist. 

HF

Before we get into Mourid Barghouti’s work, as we planned for this conversation, I wanted to ask you about memoir writing more broadly. As the author of one yourself, are there particular considerations of craft for you when it comes to this form?

SA

For starters, I’m very suspicious of conventional notions of narrative, the idea that you have to have rising action and climax, or a beginning, middle, and end. That’s very dangerous to me, especially because I’ve been writing a memoir that has to do with trauma, the Nakba, and recovery. I wanted to be very careful. For instance,I didn’t want it to be a straightforward narrative of “resilience”—I’m very suspicious of this term as it’s packaged and sold in the mainstream, based on simplistic ideas of redemption and clear binaries. On the other hand, when I was talking to agents and editors, most of them fixated on  my female body and its experiences of ancestral and sexual trauma. Many wanted to lean into that in a very lurid sense. They looked for emotional, almost erotic descriptions of my fragility, my shrinking flesh. It’s a conscious choice to resist this  fetishizing appetite for the trauma of certain people; queer trauma and female trauma, but obviously also Palestinian trauma, or that of the colonized subject more broadly. 

When I started writing about my grandmother, I was very sensitive to these considerations. I wanted her suffering and loss to be reclaimed, to be thoughtfully, faithfully presented in language. On a personal level, too, this was so important for me—because her trauma also informs the story of who I became and what my struggles were. Yet, I didn’t want to write about her in a way that implied she, or those like her, are just destined to suffer. 

HF

To just be a perfect victim. 

SA

Yeah, like Mohamed el-Kurd talks about. It was important for me to show her rage, to show my own rage. A quote from el-Kurd that I really like is: “we have a right to contempt.” It’s a little spin on Glissant, who’d said: “we have the right to opacity.” In that same sense, we have a right to contempt, anger, and messy feelings. I didn’t want my book to just be a shallow valley of suffering, one trauma after another, and I didn’t want it to be tied up neatly in a bow of “resilience.” I wanted my grandmother—a brown, disabled woman—and all my people to be granted the complexity, fallibility, and nuance that has been afforded to white, male characters for centuries. And I wanted to begin and end in irresolution—because that is how I experience the world, and because our liberation is incomplete. 

I was also thinking a lot about the responsibility of handling another person’s story. I was writing a personal memoir, but also a family memoir, so I thought a lot about the privacy of my grandmother and father, whose stories I was trying to approach and tell. I wanted to know as much as I possibly could—from other relatives, from photo albums and family records—in order to render their stories faithfully. I learned a lot from Saidiya Hartman’s words about writing into the archive while also respecting the sovereignty of those characters’ stories. There were things that I gave myself license to render on the page, and others that I felt belonged to no one but my grandmother, so I kept them out. I wanted her to be understood, but I didn’t want her to be exposed.

HF

 This actually leads quite smoothly to another question I wanted to ask you, which is that of ethics in the memoir, especially as it’s one of the forms where this concern is most pressing. 

SA

It was central for me. Besides what I’ve just mentioned, I was thinking a lot about how to approach putting less flattering things in the book because some of the people who harmed me were fellow Arabs. My grandfather, as well, was a complicated character. But as we were saying earlier, I didn’t want to write a story in which we were perfect victims. Because of what Palestinians are currently facing, I often felt this pressure that because I have a mic I have to show the best of us. I really struggled with that sometimes because I just don’t want to give anyone any more reason to disparage Palestinians, or more specifically Palestinian or Muslim or Arab men. 

But then I realized that that’s also dehumanizing because that’s not allowing us to be human, i.e. inherently complicated, fallible, and often misguided. It’s also desecrating our love and relationality. Because in reality, love is always fucking up. We make mistakes and harm one another. I was trying to find a way to welcome in some of that messiness because that’s also our birthright. We deserve to be full.

Sara Ahmed talks about the risks of bringing up stories of trauma, specifically sexual trauma, perpetuated from within our own communities because white audiences are so primed to clutch to those things and say: “See? Look at these barbaric men!” But she also talks about the harm of rendering these things secrets—so it’s important to tell them with care. She’s another person I took ethical cues from when deciding to include certain things that ran the risk of being used against us. But in general, I just think it’s more important to write toward our fullness than to preemptively flatten and hollow ourselves out. That’s already done for us so much. 

HF

Agreed, and to that point, I think there’s also a huge difference between someone writing about the experience of patriarchy, misogyny, or gendered violence in the particular context in which they have experienced it versus writing about how a racialized group is exceptionally or inherently violent. Plus, there will simply always be racist who are just waiting for anything to cling to in order to justify their racism against Arabs, Muslims, or whoever else. 

HF

Something that strikes me about his book, which you alluded to earlier in yours, is that he seems uninterested in giving a linear account of his life, but is much more focused on these vignettes that tell a larger story of life in and outside of Palestine.

SA

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity and represents the first in a new interview series Hazem Fahmy is editing with Mizna Online titled Uncrafted, exploring intersections of literary craft and anti-imperial thought. 

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator. Her essays, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Jewish Currents, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, NPR, and the Nation, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Books and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her book, The Hollow Half (April 2025), is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. A PhD student in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, he is the author of three chapbooks: Red//Jild//Prayer (2017) from Diode Editions, Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo (2022) from Half-Mystic Press, and At the Gates (2023) from Akashik Books’ New-Generation African Poets series.  He is a Watering Hole Fellow, and his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming in The Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Mubi Notebook, Reverse Shot, and Mizna.

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