For the first time in recent memory, since Naomi Shihab Nye’s nomination for 19 Varieties of Gazelle in 2002, the 2024 National Book Award finalist list was graced with the presence of Palestinian American poetry: the books of Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Unsurprisingly, especially contextualized within a broader literary cultural sphere of Palestinians claiming that mere representational wins within the US can never be enough as the Zionist-American genocide spirals on, both Joudah and Tuffaha used their NBA platforms to call out American complacency and inspire further direct action to end this genocide and work toward a free Palestine. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who was the winner of the National Book Award in Poetry for her collection Something about Living, began her acceptance speech by reorienting us in space-time, translating a good evening in the US into a good morning to “beloved Gaza,” translating an annual ceremony in ordinary time in the US into the 411th day of genocidal escalation for Gaza. 

The night before this historic win, at the finalists reading, Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha were the only authors who used their platforms explicitly to bring Palestine into the space of the National Book Awards. There, Joudah performed a devastating new poem which was written  for the occasion, turning toward the complicit US audience and daring to ask, “Wouldn’t you agree that Palestine today is the empire of the human heart?” Tuffaha read excerpts from Something about Living that connect today’s moment to other events in our ongoing Nakba, such as the great March of Return and the Zionist invasion of Lebanon, during which June Jordan’s “Moving towards Home” was written. 

I sincerely hope that this NBA recognition inspires further critical attention to the lifelong bodies of work by these two brilliant poets. I am a longtime lover of Fady Joudah’s work, not merely for his capacity to expertly translate Palestinians living and dead, but also for his own poetry. The lyric momentum of the NBA-nominated collection […] is not a linear progression through our ongoing Nakba, but is instead a circular arc of returning. Traces and echoes from his earlier The Earth in the Attic and Alight appear recast through the Nakba of now—for it is and always was that same Nakba—in ways which ask the reader, if even implicitly, where have you been in all of this? Similarly, Something about Living, which was drafted and under contract before the Zionist entity’s 2023 genocidal escalations, embodies a line from Tuffaha’s Kaan and Her Sisters, “repetition is a Nakba,” as it creates un/knowable spectral rhymes between the current genocidal assault on journalists in Gaza and repetitions in recent history such as the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh (allah yerhamha) and the broader question of, per Edward Said, Palestinian permission to narrate. The nonmetaphorical nature of our permission to narrate can be seen in the details of the post-National Book Award Nomination trajectory for both poets, with NPR censoring words such as “genocide” in their coverage.

I dream of one day assigning these two books together to future poetry students as they provide different models of lyric form and relationality through Nakba. Whereas Joudah’s […] embodies a generative formlessness, with poems liberated from titles and pronouns, that flow like water, undermining violent Western desires for self-explanation and qualification in such a poetics, Tuffaha’s Something about Living builds on her last book’s project of radicalizing Western poetic forms through sonnet crowns that grow thorns, centos composed entirely of Darwish lines, and poems riffing on intellectuals such as Edward Said alongside poets such as Myung Mi Kim and June Jordan.

Although the Western lyric is, at its essence, understood to be defined as the genre which directs its mimesis toward the performance of the mind in solitary thought (see these useful theses from Wendy Lotterman), the lyric “I” of Joudah’s […] directs its mimesis toward becoming an anti/mirror of sorts, refracting and reflecting the many ways that Western living’s unspoken assumptions are predicated on the annihilation of Palestinians. To be a “you” here, is to be not merely an annihilation of the “I” but to be unable to imagine, let alone build, an otherwise. Never have I seen a book so unapologetically unafraid to love Palestinians on our own terms, however il/legible to this world, from the river to the sea. Similarly, Tuffaha’s book, which ends with the lines, “I have no idea what hope is, but our people have taught me a million ways to love,” lingers in the details of our land, our love, and the space between. Here, “love is paying attention,” and also “the father who plants an olive tree for every newborn,” and also “a story we never tire of telling.” Whereas Joudah’s lyric “I” made generative space of the unexplained and unqualified, Tuffaha’s makes generative space of every act of naming: every poem made me research histories of Palestine I had never known, through names that cut through every settler mythos like a vector I never knew I needed. Here, to read Tuffaha’s work is, itself, to return to Palestine, however im/possibly. 

To commemorate this historic moment for our community and hold its grief alongside anger at the failures of the US publishing industry, we are honored to publish these works, in hopes that they may inspire and embolden our community in this impossible hour. With this, echoing the words of Abdelrahman ElGendy, we offer our heartfelt congratulations to the National Book Foundation for being lucky enough to carry the names of Palestinian poets in a time like this.

—George Abraham, Mizna Executive Editor

Are you in solitude with market or in solidarity 
with spectacle? Which part of you 
isn’t a human shield? Whose body parts
are mine? Do you understand that I am 
a national liberation movement?

—Fady Joudah

What is upon us
will require mercy. Let the plural be
a return of us.

— Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Letter to June Jordan in September

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

I cannot pass the anniversary of that first news event of childhood without returning to your poem. How from my house I watched. And watching, watched my grief-stricken parents unable to speak. How I leaned into the screen, the chords of the cries, searching for what was recognizable of fingers and thighs, of bracelets and moustaches. Macabre arrangement of bodies with names like our own. I cannot pass without your words. Something about witnessing twice removed. About distances magnified by the shift into language. Of dailyness and my own children’s vernacular and the machine. Grinding us all in its jaws. I met a girl from the camp at a reading in Beirut. She asked if we could talk about the life of poetry. Our families are hauled off to the world of the dead, and every day it is on screen. In Gaza, we’re watching Ferguson, and in Atlanta we’re watching Jerusalem watching Minneapolis watching. Their weapons and their training programs indistinguishable. The word almost flickers for a nanosecond. Here I note the shelf-life of self-censorship, legacy of our era. Some days poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living.

On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

At the border, a flock of journalists.
A sacrifice of tires burned behind us.
Beneath the picnic tents, a funeral of families.
What else will we become in Gaza if we gather,
if we carry our voices to the razored edge?
We were met by a gallop of prayers,
clamoring recitatives puncturing the shroud
of humid air. We were met by a delirium

of greetings, peace-be-upon-us surreal
between embraces, the horizon locked
and loaded. What is upon us
will require mercy. Let the plural be
a return of us. A carnage of blessings—
bodies freed from broken promises,
from the incumbrances of waiting.

Inimitable

by Fady Joudah

Is this the banality of evil reconvened?
Are you gen G?
Did you vote to make it great again 
or was genocide never genocide to you?
Is there a light inside you dying 
to go out? Who will you mine 
to keep your night bright? How are you
always unprecedented 
even as echo? Am I, a Palestinian, ever not 
an analogy whose progenitor you are? What  
makes your common decency heroic?
Why are you so often the baby 
and I’m the bathwater? 
Will you judge me if I reply Allahu akbar?
And when you forever hold my peace at your altar
is it with or without Salamu alaikum? 
Or, if I say Free, free, will you fill in the blank 
from the river to the sea? 
What do you remember
of Iraqi memory? What if Palestinians 
love their freedom more
than you love their unfreedom?
Did you know this about the way you love?
Did you convert my ashes to your gold dust?
“Horror beyond the reach of psychology,”
have you heard this expression before? 
Are you in solitude with market or in solidarity 
with spectacle? Which part of you 
isn’t a human shield? Whose body parts
are mine? Do you understand that I am 
a national liberation movement? 
Can we hear it for tiny Lebanon 
fighting off the mother of all crimes 
as the laws that made you king said 
one should? Have you been to Yemen 
or just bombed it? How full of emissions 
are you about your emissions?
When did you first export your wisdom
to those you destroy? 
Do you really think I’ll forgive you 
without you asking for forgiveness?
Why should you wait 
until asking is synonymous with your defeat?
Wasn’t tragedy always there 
before you sequenced it?
Is your methylated double helix 
an individual or a corporation? 
For example, when I say, “Horror 
beyond the reach of genetics,”
will you give me or yourself a standing ovation? 
Does Gaza come to mind? 
Wouldn’t you agree 
that Palestine today
is the empire of the human heart?
Have you thanked me or are you worried 
I’ll charge you interest?
What about Sudan? Congo? 
What have you done to the earth?
When were you in love last?
Was it any good?
What have you done to the remainder of my life?
Has it occurred to you 
that you are a childhood robber?
Do you remember that game? 
Was it ever a game? 

Fady Joudah is the author of […] and six other collections of poems. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award; Kaan and Her Sisters, a finalist for the Firecracker Award; and Something about Living, winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry and the National Book Awards 2024 for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Poets.org, Protean Magazine, and Prairie Schooner, and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye & the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series Poems from Palestine at The Baffler. She is currently curating a series on Palestinian writers for Words Without Borders entitled Against Silence.

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

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

The post Honoring Palestinian Poets in a Time of Genocide: Poems from National Book Award Winner Lena Khalaf Tuffaha + Finalist Fady Joudah appeared first on Mizna.

Executive Editor George Abraham’s introduction to Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe contemplates the work of editing in a time of genocide. Link to order here.

Love takes the form of rain clouds: we accumulate despite our im/possible wounds, gather even in miraculous conditions. We join our kin in the swarm, all of whom gathering, like us, as waters from unknowable sources. And then the flood.

—George Abraham

Toward an Apocalypse of Letters

Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Palestine is not a laboratory. It is not a site of sympathy. It cannot be reduced to a sterile problem. Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present . . . There is no postcolonial, postracial, postZionist. We cannot await a secular salvation or a messianic apocalypse. We are in the apocalypse.

—Sherene Seikaly, “Nakba in the Age
of Catastrophe,” Jadaliyya.com

This does not seek a remedy

this does not need a balm
this needs an ending

—Dionne Brand, Nomenclature for the Time Being

What does it mean to edit in a time of genocide, or moreover, a time when the many ongoing colonial catastrophes that underpin our current world order are hypervisible for the communities we claim to serve? The job of the editor, in one view, boils down to keeping the publication machine going. We check in on writers to keep timelines synced toward a publication deadline. We read pieces closely to move them through content editing and copyediting, layout, and proofing with as minimal potential setbacks as possible. A question I have been grappling with over the course of the past eleven months is, how can the material and ideological implications of this job translate to serving a community that is, intentionally, trying to stop this horrific genocidal death machine; a community making art that, as Mizna beloved Rasha Abdulhadi says, can be thrown like sand into the gears of empire? How does one reconcile these opposing orientations in space-time, making room for the long, deep, slow, relational thinking our movements need, while the world accelerates in its insistence on unmaking us?

One answer, of course, is that communally-focused editors can serve as ambassadors, working to break down imperially-imposed barriers for their authors and build possibility-generating avenues during a time of catastrophe. I cannot introduce this issue of Mizna without naming the ways much of its construction was inspired by listening to poets at explicitly pro-Palestinian gatherings: Aurielle Marie’s pieces which came to us after a Poets for Palestine event organized by Claire Schwartz in October 2023; Olivia Elias and Yahya Ashour who came to us from the immense labor of love that went into organizing Palestine Writes in September 2023 against the wishes of one of the wealthiest institutions in the world; the constellation of conversations that emerged from Mizna+RAWIFest 2023. 

But this is only part of the answer. How do we reach our people, by which I mean continuously go out of our way to find and welcome our people, in a world whose catastrophes are set on tearing us apart, from our land and from each other, isolating us into silos to make us vessels of pure imperial domination? What is a politics of listening (or the dangerous charades masquerading in the name of listening¹) if not backed by an anticolonial politics of rigorously working to break borders as we expand the circle, to accept the infinite unknown implicit to all community-building? In this way, the job of the editor is not merely to be a listener but to be a cultivator of relations: to provide the shelter necessary to keeping each other, let alone each other’s artistry, alive. In this way, I return to the original classical Arabic meaning of the word mizna: a desert cloud that brings needed shelter, perhaps the possibility of rain, in a world insistent on the catastrophe of otherwise.

Having taken on an executive editor position in July 2023, I have, over the past few months, had to learn the beauty and terror of working to build a real-life mizna. At every turn, I have been reminded of just how difficult this position can be. When institutions canceled events with us last-minute because of racist fears of hosting Palestinians in a time like this, I learned and relearned that to be a mizna is to pivot on a moment’s notice, responding to whatever catastrophes the day may bring us. When our insistence on decolonial language and framings were watered down by institutions who cannot see us as more than a “cultural heritage” space, or who cannot tolerate words like “insurgent” or “intifada” or any other gesture toward resistance, I learned that to be a mizna was to embody a kind of collective-oriented sumud: one that knows no other name for future than the collective, the eternal becoming of us as Palestinians and lovers of Palestinians. When, again, board after board of institution after failed settler institution, engaged us in bad faith, gaslit our people, and could not even virtually look us in the eye, I learned that to be a mizna was to be an im/possible wound: to know that many are unwilling to meet us in the depths of our catastrophe, and thus, possibility emerges when confronted by the miracle of finding our people and becoming more radically ourselves together.

This is the ethos I have inherited, from the generations of (predominantly non-male) SWANA artists, editors, laborers, dreamers, and intellectuals who built Mizna. I remember visiting the Mizna office in summer 2023, when our executive director Lana Barkawi filled a box with every single issue the journal has ever published, including our now out-of-print first issue from 1999. As we paged through issue after issue, she recalled the tiniest details: how Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, who graces our pages still today, used the term SWANA in our first issue, decades before it became popularized as a less Eurocentric term for the region; how a flyer from Suheir Hammad’s legendary Poetry for the People reading, presented by Mizna in March 2004 at Open Book in Minneapolis, fell out of a 2003 issue of Mizna, bringing back memories of the packed room that resonate to this day; how the words of contemporary beloveds, from local legends like William Nour to icons such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Joe Kadi, consistently appear in our pages, carrying the many trajectories of our writing community through miniature snapshots in time. At every moment, Mizna held the im/possibility of the time in which it was being published, responding to events we now know as history, such as 9/11 and the Arab Spring, and memorializing deceased giants in our community from Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish to Etel Adnan, in more recent memory. Listening to Lana talk through page after page, I came to understand that this is the nature of our work: love arrives in the attention to even the most minute details. Love takes the form of rain clouds: we accumulate despite our im/possible wounds, gather even in miraculous conditions. We join our kin in the swarm, all of whom gathering, like us, as waters from unknowable sources. And then the flood.

Carrying the entirety of Mizna’s print history, I headed to the airport the next day to board my plane to Chicago, only for the box to set off the TSA scanners. An officer extracted the box of journals from my suitcase before proceeding to inspect every single issue, flipping through every page, testing the surfaces with a chemical swab, and even shaking out some of them to be sure nothing more than the occasional flyer was tucked away in its corners. I didn’t know it, then, but I was, indeed, carrying a weapon that none of us had the capacity of imagining in that moment: I was holding a sheer force that would keep me and many of my loved ones going through the months of genocidal escalation to come, after sustaining itself for such a history for twenty-five years; a force, at once, in/visible to our enemy; a force escaping the margins of imperial terror or colonial anxiety. I was carrying a flood.

* * *

April 2024, seven months of escalating genocide in Gaza. While cowriting EVE with my good friend Fargo Tbakhi at an Arab American National Museum residency, I began venting to him one particularly stressful afternoon. I was juggling our project alongside my editorial work, and more broadly, the work of demanding better from literary institutions in this moment of genocide. Although Gaza deserves our endurance was a running throughline in my head, the burnout was catching up to me. It was the result of months of stalling and bad-faith engagement from the Poetry Foundation, during a boycott that, as I came to see, was popularly supported more out of fear of potential criticism than from a place of actual care for and commitment to Palestinian liberation. At the time, I was also months-deep into conversations with Kundiman’s founders over their (now former) board’s wavering stance on Palestinian liberation—something that, in the months that followed as the Kundiman board proceeded to betray their constituency and fire their ethical staff, I would come to see as a small moment within a broader pattern of bad faith engagement, stalling for self-protection, and downright manipulation of Palestinian generosity. These moments culminated in my venting to Fargo, and eventually my outburst, “Why can’t these people just do their jobs? Why are they so bad at the work they so proudly claim to be doing?” To which Fargo replied something like, “Habibi, you’re having these difficulties and conversations with them precisely because they are doing their jobs.” 

At that point, it all clicked for me. What I was witnessing with these institutions, amid the broader landscape of horror stories from academia and literary nonprofit work, was just a microcosm of that terrible fact: this stalling and antirevolutionary manipulation of politically activated writers was these people’s jobs. They had aligned themselves with empire the second they stepped foot into the executive board or foundation or tenure-track or whatever function they played. They had signed an invisible contract with the ruling class to join their project of producing the right kind of literary citizens: writers who know not to bite the hand that feeds them; literary nonprofits (including the many marginalized identity organizations currently wavering on PACBI) engaging in corporatization, political sterilization, and otherwise joining a united front to insist on silence and apathy in the face of imperial genocide; editors who operate with an assumption of scarcity, neoliberal diversity and inclusion politics, and reform-centered ideologies that are deradicalizing in nature. The types that respond to genocide by reposting Darwish quotes and decidedly not by listening to Palestinian demands of our cultural moment and joining the cause. The types who, on one hand, solicit writing from Palestinians and claim to make space for us, knowing full and well they’ve ignored us for the decades when we had less cultural capital to lend them. The types who, on the other hand, can only stomach Palestinians when we are dead but have no ability to support us while we are still living, to say nothing of insisting on our aliveness.

This is the nature of the neocolonized literary citizen: a term I’m using to name the imperial collaborators who, while often not directly employed by colonial governmental administrations (though PEN America’s former CEO and the Poetry Foundation’s former president are disturbing exceptions) are willing accomplices to empire, upholding values that implicitly morph into, and otherwise fail to challenge, imperial lines of power. These values include but are not limited to implicit anti-Palestinian racism, normalization of Zionism and the occupation, and superficial, corporate DEI policies that hide the underlying elite capture of identity politics writ large. 

The neocolonized literary citizen is a slant rhyme with what Fanon terms the colonized intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth: the kind that seeks to become the exact colonized elite that the colonialist bourgeoisie seek contact with in moments of potential anticolonial insurgence and liberation.² The kind that “learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself” and prioritizes individualistic, representational wins at the expense of collective-oriented structural repair.³ The neocolonized literary citizen is the kind of il/literate that finds value in projects like Poets for Harris or Renga for Obama; the kind of liberal that engages in a daily performance of becoming the ideal representation of themselves, and furthermore, works to service, repair, and otherwise maintain the imperial death machine that produces such a regime of neoliberal representation. In other words, they are (often) not the literal CIA, but they’re comfortable uncritically supporting the new DEI-washed faces of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Paris Review, the Stegner program, and other spaces with such histories of statist infiltration and political sanitization.⁴ They are not literal workers of the political establishment responsible for maintaining the genocides that underpin our current world order but are more than willing to accept material support from, and mold their politics to implicitly service, such regimes. As such, the neocolonized literary citizen ultimately proves to be fundamentally incapable of thinking (or acting) structurally or responsibly. 

The problem is im/material. Material, on one hand, in the sense that all money is blood money, and no one, including us at Mizna, can consider themselves exempt from the horrors of the nonprofit industrial complex. It would take an entire essay, or more, to unpack these material implications.⁵ The problem is also one of imagination—or rather the ways in which these material realities implicitly hinder our imaginative potential. What would it mean for culture workers to orient ourselves not by a politics of scarcity but by one of abundance: to live and embody a praxis that knows the job of the editor, instead of selecting representative literary citizens to uplift, is one of dreaming and building structures capable of holding the sheer mass and magnitude of our people’s brilliance? What if instead of participating in the reproduction of an imperial mentality of hoarding wealth and putting our heads down out of fear of backlash from the ruling class, we engage in the harder work of liberating and redistributing such resources that have been stolen from our communities, in whatever sphere we are able to occupy, however small our impact? In this way, the task of countering an idea of literary citizenship boils down to the question of how capaciously, how im/possibly, we can love our people. Love, understood via Etel Adnan and Franz Fanon, as a kind of violence that destroys world orders and death machines of empire. Love understood in all its impossible hijackings, in all its necessary excess. 

Palestinians have shown us this kind of love: in their political actions from the homeland to the diaspora, and also in the ways their literary works join (but do not replace or impede) resistance. Suppose US-based poets were to shed their egos—their allegiance to imperial Craft⁶ as described by Fargo Tbakhi, their fixations on representational wins. Suppose we were to take inspiration from our kin in Gaza, all of Palestine, and the Palestinian diaspora, instead, who have survived under im/possible conditions beneath the bombs we paid for, at the checkpoints we funded, within institutions whose inclusivity we applaud as they pave over our corpses. What kinds of relations—to each other, to marginalized people in our communities, to the planet we’re actively murdering—might we build toward by taking the lead of the dispossessed as we fight alongside them for liberation? What kind of world is possible if we, as artists and culture workers, model a more responsible listening, a more insurgent response, appropriate to the kinds of catastrophes that underpin our colonial world order? How might we take their lead to build a world where—instead of upholding the normative trend of pitting Sudanese and Palestinian folks against each other in a colonially-mediated audition for empathy, as pointed out by Safia Elhillo⁷—we are able to unpack the structural entanglements of our shared struggles with rigor and integrity; to say, we cannot fight for a free Palestine without fighting against states like the UAE who are complicit in Sudanese, Gazan, and many other genocides that structure this world order?

The question, again, is one of imagination. How might we better encourage structural-oriented thinking, highlighting the interconnectedness of our movements, instead of selling out to a scarcity myth that people cannot hold more than one struggle in their minds at a given time? Isn’t this the exact imaginative il/literacy that the elite need of neocolonized literary citizens? Suppose our response, instead of isolation, was one of the hard, rigorous, ongoing work of relation-building through catastrophe and editorial work therein. Suppose this was the Nakba that made organizers of us all, academics and editors included? Suppose this Nakba inspired the kind of love that comrades like June Jordan, Etel Adnan, and other radical writers of past generations worked so hard to model for us? Suppose we took seriously the words of Black queer Southern organizer and poet Aurielle Marie who, in a heart-stopping poem that meets Palestinians at the depths of our catastrophe, insists, “don’t you run from me. love me back. let us all be together beneath this green sun.” Suppose we were to finally break the cyclic catastrophes induced by the villanelle that has become of western empire that, as River 瑩瑩 Dandelion reminds us in their poem, will end “only in ashes.” Suppose we were to take seriously the stakes Mohammed Zenia articulates when saying, “in a political poem, you write like a suicide bomber or it’s not political.” How might these poems offer us, if not a balm, a brief ending; if not an answer, the questions that will get us there? What relationalities are waiting for us on the other side of empire?

* * *

The works of this issue, brought to us by gatherings in a time of catastrophe, are but a small portrait of the ways our community embodies the kind of decolonial love that resists the closures and boundings of neocolonized literary citizenship. As the US faces a rising fascist right wing, proudly invoking legal canon that deems Black people subhuman, alongside an increasingly fascist democratic party that dismisses catastrophized Palestinians as just another single issue, this edition of Mizna assembles work insisting that we make catastrophe empire’s urgent issue, and furthermore, models the kinds of relationalities possible beyond the current power configurations plaguing our literary landscape. As PEN America responds to principled writers who boycott them for continued silence on Palestine and a long history of entanglement with the Zionist entity with accusations of flattening nuance or inhibiting free exchanges of ideas, the authors in this issue offer, instead, a lexicon of abundance: the kind of abundance that, in a poem by Alan Semerdjian dedicated to Artsakh, ends in the insistence on Armenian aliveness; the kind of abundance that holds more than thirty years of Arab American history, as Summer Farah does in her epistolary poems to Etel Adnan, in a poem written after our Mizna+RAWIFest gathering in October 2023, where Palestinian love for each other looks like “leena’s hand in mine three days straight”; the kind of abundance capable, as Michael Lawrence Payne has done, of translating poetry from eleventh-century Gazan Palestinian poet, Sulaymān al-Ghazzī, with a grief that’s as heavy, relevant, and instructive today as it was then; the kind of abundance that ties together the geopolitical and intimate scales of catastrophe, as Leila Mansouri has done in her short story “Flashbang.”

Although this issue is heavy with many griefs, especially with Sudanese, Armenian, and Palestinian writers at the center, the process of editing it has reminded us of how we are not alone in this struggle. This issue would not have been possible without our comrades from RAWI, who occupy an unique position in the literary landscape as a grassroots organization building community from the ground up and modeling inclusivity and repair beyond what is capable of literary institutions. Long-time Mizna family, such as Leila Abdelrazaq, Ruba El Melik, leena aboutaleb, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, and Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, join with many writers making their first appearances in our pages: elder Nakba survivor and Francophone Palestinian poet Olivia Elias, alongside critically acclaimed writers Noor Hindi, Nadia Shammas, mónica teresa ortiz, Danez Smith, and Arthur Kayzakian, alongside Sudanese writer J Omer and Palestinian American Ghazzawi writer Sarah Aziza. Together, with the staff laboring to make this issue and every beloved contributor across the world, we stand in steadfast solidarity with our kin, and everyone around the world resisting the many colonial catastrophes that underpin this world order.

Together, the mizna of this issue is a rare accumulation in today’s literary landscape. The literature of empire will never have what we have between these pages; they will never, truly, know love. They who only know how to murder each other, in and beyond their words, for the sake of that failed love: the kind that only knows names like hoarding and borders, and never abundance, liberation, unboundedness. They who cave to illiterate executive boards, who allow cops to lead their foundations, who make promises to our community that they are incapable of fulfilling because they are incapable of loving anyone, including and especially their own selves.

We will not mince words: the moment we are witnessing is nothing short of apocalypse. And so, in response, we demand nothing short of an apocalypse of letters.

May we gather.

May we swarm.

Then, the flood.

1. 1. Fargo Tbakhi, “Being Listened to: On Philip Metres’s Shrapnel Maps, Colonialism, and the Violence of Conversation,” The Poetry Project (Fall 2020). Retrieved from https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/newsletter/262-fall-2020/being-listened-to-on-philip-metres-shrapnel-maps-colonialism-and-the-violence-of-conversation ︎
2. 2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 9.  ︎
3. 3. Fanon, 11. ︎
4. 4. For further reading, see Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), which, amusingly, was published by the University of Iowa Press.  ︎
5. 5. For further reading, see INCITE!’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).  ︎
6. 6. See Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” Protean Magazine (December 8, 2023). https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/ ︎
7. 7. Subscribe to safiamafia.substack.com to read Safia Elhillo’s article, “we shouldn’t have to compete for empathy: a war that defies summary, that defies soundbites,” which is also excerpted on her instagram @safiamafia.  ︎

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, performance artist. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the executive editor of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books, 2025). They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence. 

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

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

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