Navigating The Stories of the Palestinian People w/Fady Joudah

0:01 Before we begin this episode, I want to talk to you about mental health and the importance of finding a meaningful community. It's been a topic that is often shared on my podcast and an ongoing reminder of the support we need to get through our day-to-day journey in an environment that can feel so overwhelming. If you are a queer person of color living in New York, there is a wonderful resource that I would like to share with you. My friend Sohab Haved, a licensed mental health counselor based in NYC, is launching a virtual adult queer POC group on September 22nd. It's a dedicated communal space designed to help you navigate the challenges of our intersecting identities. Together, the group will explore key topics such as managing identity-related stress, including rejection sensitivity, internalized stigma, and concealment pressures.

0:50 Then there's strengthening relational safety like creating healthy boundaries and repairing harm in relationships and building community through people with similar lived experiences and backgrounds. If you're looking for support and tools with connecting with community, then check out Sohab's Virtual Adult Queer POC Group. You can find more details in the show notes and you can email for more at sohaib at fullyintegratedtherapy.com. Hey, everyone. So welcome to the Banh Mì Chronicles podcast. I am your host, Randy Kim, and I am very honored to have this next guest on. His name is Fadi Jouda.

1:32 He is the author of Bracketed Ellipses. He's a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His other poetic works include The Earth in the Attic, a light text to a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cell phone character count, footnotes in the order of disappearance, and tethered to stars. He translated several collections of poetry from Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Atel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize. The Griffin Poetry Prize, a Penn Award, a Bonnie Paul Times Literary Supplement Prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award.

2:24 He lives in Houston with his wife and kids where he practices internal medicine. So I would love to welcome you to the show and many thanks to Isabella from Page One for getting us connected. I've been very intrigued by your work and appreciate the light that you're bringing to the people of Gaza in what has been one of the most violent events that we've seen in real time. And I also want to give a trigger warning to listeners, viewers, that the conversation will revolve around genocide, trauma, and other forms of state-sanctioned violence. So I do caution you to... Be gentle with yourself when listening to the episode, but I also hope that this will be a way to inform you about the stories from the lens of the Palestinian people and the diaspora around.

3:15 So first of all, Fadi, thank you so much for being on my show. How are you holding up with 2026 so far and also with the anticipation of your upcoming poetry photograph collection called Exhibit G? Yeah. First of all, thank you for the intro and for having me on. I don't know anymore how to articulate how I'm holding up, but I think that I am leaning into making sure that I do not define myself in English Mostly through genocide, which is a very difficult thing to go through because there is nothing more that English would love to do in Imperial English, I mean, than to take that statement to mean, yeah, let's forget about it and talk about other things.

4:18 So having to insist on the life and the aliveness of the Palestinian people It becomes a kind of a paradox because the more you insist on it, the fuller it becomes, the more interiority you bring into it. Then also the more the system that decimates Palestinian life marks you as that and only that. So it's really a difficult sort of estrangement or schism, if you will, to continue going on this way.

5:02 And we know that most... Most people who, even including those who claim solidarity with Palestine or sort of just state the anti-genocide mantra and move on, want to move on or want to subject or submit the Palestinian to the domestic American project, the imperial, the politics of the domestic. So basically people, it's very difficult to kind of answer that question while I know I'm speaking in a language that's asking me to continue to put myself on hold.

5:50 And how do you balance this kind of disappearing act And not actually disappear. So I don't know, you know, forgive me for a very, it seems like. The other thing is, you know, Exhibit G is, as you know, I mean, you work very closely. And openly on a book, on a project, it's an extension, a wider conversation, a wilder conversation with the book that preceded it, the ellipses within two brackets.

6:31 But then, you know, you turn it in, it's produced, and you're waiting, you know, there's a lag time. And the world, or not the world, but an audience awaits it, but you've kind of moved on from it. So it's a bit of a strange, yeah, it's really a strange way to continue to be in limbo, if you will, or anything. On all fronts, yeah. Yeah, and I want to go back to when you were talking about, like, what does solidarity really mean, especially for those who are indirectly and very directly impacted by it, because I think this is something that does need a greater conversation.

7:17 What does feel, I mean... Forgive me if I'm being very simple about it too, but what can it look like or what should it look like perhaps, especially when we live in a digital world that is very fast moving, the news cycle is very short and people just... It looks like people just want to put up like, you know, a free Palestine or ceasefire and then like disappear for several months and not say anything. I'd like to get your own take on that too, because I think that that can feel very frustrating when you're witnessing that in real time through digital media, but also in community spaces and maybe even community spaces that you feel like would be safe, but tends to shy away from The current genocide, I mean, not just in Gaza, but also what's happening in Iran and in Lebanon and also with Congo and Sudan too.

8:25 Yeah, I don't know that I have an answer to what solidarity should look like. And I think if I did, we would be living in a different world. I don't think it's impossible to come up with an idea. But it would mean also that there is something Profound and fundamental about being Western and being under the canopy of the Imperial English world. That would be fundamentally and profoundly different than it is today. That you would actually...

9:07 Maybe at least begin with a sense of radical humility. And I don't know what even that would look like. But as I said earlier, the desire to move on is a complicated one, not just performative. It's also fearful. There is a lot of fear. But it's also, I think, on the other spectrum of it, bullying. I think there are people who, you know, I mean, I just find it absolutely abhorrent that the internal leftist politics in America, so-called leftist politics, address the Palestinians in a way that asks them to say, basically, if you engage the domestic imperial politics toward good, then this will...

10:10 And I think it's just a continuation. I don't think we recognize how committed we are to upholding liberal Western culture, basically. And you could say, well, why is that a surprise? Because after all, this is who we are here. And I'll say, okay, but this is also part of radical humility. If you recognize that about yourself and you're able to speak it out loud instead of, you know, a lot of jargons. That comes from historical language about injustice that applied as you know, 50 years ago, 75 years ago, 100 years ago.

10:50 It applies less today and then you don't know how to make that language more credible, believable, honest, humble in a time of genocide that is committed against the people from within the culture, from within the Imperial English. I don't know that I have a solution, but I would like to point out, and it's something you said earlier, that I bring light to the people of Gaza or Palestine. It's the other way around. I think that we have to recognize that I am sitting here in front of your camera because of what the people of Palestine and Gaza and the Palestinians in Gaza have allowed They sustain me as Palestinian, less so the other way around.

11:43 And I don't think, I think it would be good if Solidarity and the U.S. acknowledged the effort, the, I don't want to say heroic, but I guess it's hard not to use that word, the amount of resistance that is owed, that is owed to the Palestinian people. I mean, think about it, this livestream genocide thing that we talk about. Who brought the images to us? It was the Palestinians who did and who continue to do. This, you know, journalists, regular people, et cetera, this world that sort of forced the world to submit to Confronting their own feelings and their own complicity and to negotiate their own docility, if you will, or numbness was a Palestinian world.

12:45 That was a Palestinian action. And even on campuses in the US, most of the communities on campus, you know, activism was led by Palestinian students. And so there has to be, you know, a recognition if you want to sustain a solidarity and see where it grows and how to grow it, there has to be greater recognition of Palestinian voices. What's taking place now is that the Palestinians, in my opinion, were employed in the service of the voices that claim solidarity or are in solidarity to the best of their knowledge with Palestinians, but for their purposes.

13:29 And I think these things have to be said without saying, oh, you're being negative or so forth. You cannot, you cannot, you know, blackmail a Palestinian with the American version of hope while the American version of life is actually complicit in the genocide committed against the Palestinians. I appreciate that too, because I know being also an American as well, like, The audacity of having to have your own taxpayer money fund the genocide there, and to fund genocide on a global scale and the continuing imperialism is something that I cannot only imagine what that intense frustration could feel like.

14:23 And I wonder about your own feelings, being in America, Watching what's happening in Palestine in real time and what it does to the Palestinian people in America that have to be subjected to the continual violence that America has long been aiding Israel with for the past 70 years. Um, I mean, it's, it's, it wouldn't be right to, you know, give an answer that sort of paints the Palestinians in America in a monolithic way as if it's some sort of a collective, uh, or, you know, uh, homogenous response.

15:08 Uh, but if there is homogeneity in, in the Palestinian response in English, it is towards, um, it is towards, uh, hope in the name of resistance or hope in the, in the, uh, There are obviously Palestinians who are engaged in grassroots work to join the political machine, for example, and begin to change things from within the system. And there are others who do incredible humanitarian work or even cultural and artistic and intellectual work.

15:52 But those who do incredible humanitarian work, you know, this actually brings us to the book in a way, like the Gaza Soup Kitchen people, which is a, you know, it's an American NGO, but it is Palestinian run with members of the family and also many Palestinians on the ground in Gaza. Providing food and water and occasional medical care to Palestinians in Gaza. And so, you know, it's very difficult to, as I said, to just say, the more we talk about how do you feel as a Palestinian in English and so forth, we're basically talking about English.

16:41 We're not talking about Palestine. Mm-hmm. And so one of the things that, you know, inevitable as some aspects of that may be, one of the things that I tried to do, and I was inspired by being close to the Gaza Soup Kitchen when it started in 2024, was really wanting to transform that experience into how Palestinians see each other through the photographs. And how Palestinian even narration of some of the language or stories of the genocide comes across as I, a Palestinian, received them.

17:21 And so I was really just, I would say, indebted to be liberated, if you will, from engaging too much in this language about that always brings us back to To the American sort of grand narcissistic self, whether in its forms of neglect, gaslighting, ghosting, or paternalistic. And patriarchal mode of solidarity. I was liberated to see those photographs from the Gaza soup kitchen were taken by either amateur photographers, Palestinian photographers on the ground, or some of them who were sort of beginning professional photographers.

18:15 And I was just, as I said, I was just transformed by how I could see how Palestinian eyes were seeing Palestinian eyes and presenting all the small and ordinary details in the photographs. And that was my one way of choosing to respond to this while living in English, if you will, for me to juxtapose the images that Palestinians present of themselves while staying alive and with the language of poetry or prose. What was the process of putting together these essays, poems and photos into this book?

18:57 How do you Try to find the cohesion and the way you convey your own experiences, your own connections with the people that you have been connecting with, including Gaza Soup Kitchen. I actually wrote the text Without a conscious, all the texts, without a conscious awareness of what I was doing in relationship to the photographs. It was almost like a parallel existence.

19:38 And I wanted to translate that in the production of the book. So the poems and the lyric essays, they cohere together. Interconnected together in their language and the repetition of certain lexicon, expressions, metaphors. But they do not discuss or caption, if you will, the images. And the same thing with the images. The images speak with each other through very fine details and sometimes imagistic patterns.

20:19 And say things that the text does not say. Because what happened was, as I could not stop writing newer and more expansive texts after the book that I put out immediately in the beginning of the genocide in 2024, the bracketed ellipses. I was receiving, as I joined my friend and Hanil Medhun, who started the Gaza Soup Kitchen, I was on a small group where we were receiving images and photographs daily, and sometimes videos, of the photographers who started in one location initially, then it became two, three, and then now many more.

21:08 Of the Palestinians lining up To get water and food. And I began to notice, I began to be very engrossed in these details of how, for example, it is almost always the children who were sent to stand in line And the people who were serving them were adults. And the photographers were also adults. And instead of analyzing it in my mind with just the simple direct notion of, well, it's safer. If there's, say, 30 adults, 50 adults standing in line for water or for food, it'll be an excuse to bomb them and kill them and say they are Hamas or whatever.

21:54 So if you send children, it's safer. There may be some truth in that, but there was something much more profound in me realizing as a Palestinian that it was actually also the process of preserving the children's childhood. The parents made it into a social event. Kids needed to know that even though it's a hardship, an unspeakable horror, within unspeakable horror, that the kids got, sometimes they dress their best clothes, whatever remains of them. They went out to meet other children and play. They went out to be happy about food and drink. And they also went out to be photographed.

22:38 Such a simple child joy. And I was really overwhelmed by that amazing Palestinian-ness, if you will, that the adults were taking care of the children in a time of genocide in that way. Of course, it's incredibly traumatic and terrifying to think how many Of the children that I encountered. And they're not all children and adults and women and men and women. How many of them are still alive or uninjured or unmaimed?

23:27 And... But I received tens of photographs a day. Then there were hundreds a day. And I was obsessed. And suddenly there was a spontaneous, almost visceral extension of my body with other Palestinians' eyes and bodies that were coming through. And I just let that be what determines the curation process. There is no... They're escaping the curation process, which is problematic in a time of genocide, because you're still putting those people on exhibit.

24:07 And yet, you know, and that's why part of the reason why I call it exhibit G, not only the evidence like exhibit A, you know, in a trial, but it's also this obsession that no matter what you do within English as a Palestinian who's being genocided by English and imperial English, Which extends into Hebrew, German, etc. Whatever you do, you're joining the performativity and the exhibitionism and the musimification of a people and a culture and lives who have greater interiority than just to be painted in this way.

24:55 Yeah, I'm sorry. Oh, no, no, no. Thank you. Really, thank you for bringing so much depth to this work and also bringing the important nuances and context behind these photographs. And how do you and others, especially in the Palestinian diaspora community, try to find hope when so many have been violently killed and when it seems like there's no end in sight? Yeah, it's a good question because One way to answer it is to say, well, it should be a question that begins this way, and it wouldn't have an easy answer anyway, which is to say, what is the Palestinian relationship to hope?

25:39 Because my relationship to hope as a Palestinian didn't begin after the horror of a genocide. My Palestinian relationship to hope has been going on for 100 years, just like that famous book by Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years of War on Palestine. We've been through so many forms of erasure, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, unacknowledged genocide, So we get to the point where now the genocide is acknowledged, even if it's pushed back against.

26:21 And I think that, you know, I don't, it's not that difficult to find in, you know, the word sumud, you know, which loosely and poorly translates into steadfastness for a Palestinian, to know that this is tied to hope, that you're Literally, your extantness depends on formulating less pitiable, less cliched idea of hope. Hmm. And I know this is something that you've been alluding to earlier, but we see the narrative of Palestine has been slowly shifting in the last few years.

27:08 And while it can feel like it's moving at a glacial pace, how does it affect the way you view your relationships with people in general and what you encounter on social media and in other physical spaces? I mean, I feel like I have to... To take care of myself, I have to sort of surrender that answer to a younger generation. I'm not that old, but I'm not in my 20s or 30s. And I think that generation has to answer that for me.

27:49 Because there's something I call the Palestinian carousel. You're born as a Palestinian carousel. You meet Palestine at a certain moment within the Palestinian tragedy or catastrophe. And it forms you and formulates you at that moment. Some people are born with that. They find themselves riding the Palestinian tiger or elephant at age seven or at age 37. And so each Palestinian, you know, goes through a different sort of animal on the carousel.

28:35 But it keeps spinning, keeps rising and falling. And I, you know, I just have to believe in a sort of a private way that I can... Also care for contributing to what it means to be Palestinian in the world in a much more sense than just activism and politics. I think I may have strayed away from your question a little bit. There's a way in which Darwish talks about Ghassan Khannafani and Ghassan Khannafani and says that to be Palestinian is to hold on to your humanity.

29:22 This is sort of the epitome of achieving your Palestinian-ness. And this means that we are people with a rich interiority that is as rich an interiority as anyone else in art, in activism, in science, in families. And, you know, as someone whose parents have gone through the Vietnam War and my dad specifically with the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, you know, I think of how the Vietnam War was the first war televised. And then for the Cambodian genocide and what was happening in London. It was kept a secret from the government for years. And I look at what Gaza is going through and how much of it is captured in real time on social media.

30:07 But then you also have Congo and Sudan, which is quite the opposite. Like, what do you make of how this genocide in Gaza along with what's happening in Sudan and Congo gets played out in social media? And what does that mean? What does that do to you as an artist, as a creative looking through this, observing this contrast? Yeah, I think it reflects on the perpetrators of violence and not obviously on the hierarchy of suffering. You see, it's not that the Palestinians Are suffering a greater genocide than, say, the Congolese have been suffering through various massive wars or the Sudanese or the Rohingya.

31:04 But it is about, you know, it is about the perpetrators of these mass atrocities, which is to say Western culture. And of course, Israel being a direct extension and an actor in this of this and in it. Which is to say that the reason, a reason, that the Vietnam War was the first televised war was because the perpetrator of that arguable genocide as well, you know, in some courts, is because the perpetrator of those crimes was Americans.

31:47 And so the self-aggrandizement of the killer wants to merge a sense of transparency, democracy, freedom of press, etc. could not, to sustain itself, handle a war that's not televised. Of course, they learned a little bit from that lesson because this didn't happen in Iraq. In 1991 or in 2003, except some things eventually slip. And we're supposed to celebrate this as a celebration, as a respect for freedom of the press and transparency and whatnot, when almost always the press is actually an arm in these mass atrocities, but sort of like give you these snippets of And so I think that the, you know, for me, and I know others disagree with me, and some people say, oh, it's the body bags, the Americans returning in body bags in Vietnam that forced more exposition.

32:58 But I think ultimately it's the narcissism of the perpetrator. And... And I think it's the same thing with Gaza. Yes, there are many factors like, okay, we live in a digital world and everybody has a camera and you don't have to be a registered journalist to do this or an embedded journalist, I should say. But the narcissism of the West And of Israel and Zionism feels that this is part of democratic claims and also part of just utter insane belligerence that they can get away with.

33:52 I think that I disagree with people who think that these imagistic live streamed wars are supposed to make us respond in a better way. I don't think that that's the case. I think that that underestimates the way propaganda and manufactured consent and manufactured docility on the Western subjectivity has succeeded so far over the decades. And so... You have to ask yourself the question again, why isn't there interest in standing up and saying, we are also, to a different extent, I don't want to use the word lesser, to a different extent, we're also complicit in the genocide in Sudan and in Congo.

34:45 Why aren't we talking about those things? Why haven't we been talking about those things? In the case of Darfur, for example, because I was there with Doctors Without Borders in 2005, The American initial interest was interested if it could prove or sell the American and Western public that this is the Arab non-black killing the African black when this didn't quite mesh up because it wasn't that way. That narrative was abandoned. So a genocide that was beginning in Darfur, which was very complex, you know, we only wanted to sort of address it if it served a political purpose, a racialized purpose.

35:31 But then we just walked away from it. There are other politics, of course, that engage sort of the equivalence of, you know, they engage the UAE involvement and other Regional players in the region, in the area. But I am with you. I am, and I have addressed this to some prominent American figures in the cultural and media sphere in private. Why hasn't there been an uproar, an uprising about Sudan and Congo, for example?

36:16 You know, it's it's actually terrifying to think that, you know, I mean, even even on the fact that you want to stand up for for black people, for Africans, you know, you know, because it's it's I think there is a lot of reckoning that the American soul has has to do has has to do. And I don't know if it's doable, but, you know, we keep trying, each one of us. Yeah, and also I know with traditional media and how traditional media and then also with social media, with Meta and TikTok and how they have silenced a lot of voices concerning Gaza.

37:01 And it puts the responsibility on not just like amateur journalists, people who are, you know, in the In the line of fire, but also with artists. And there's a responsibility for artists to really start creating and to start documenting where traditional media has failed. And in a way, just basically... A branch from the powers that be, basically, the way we have to see it for what it is. But what does it mean to you, being a creative, having to Feel this responsibility of trying to document and intercept the harmful narratives that have been done through the traditional media outlets and also the way the social media system has been working against those who are trying to speak out.

38:06 I think, you know, to be very frank and, you know, it's a simple contribution. It's just a simple contribution to others who are struggling, similar struggles with making, with hoping for a, you know, a larger change, an effective change. You know, this book ultimately may do well, whatever that means, may not, but as long as Palestinians read it. I will be very happy. It's an intimate conversation with Palestinians. And so this is another way of saying I do have, you know, part of me being Palestinian in the world is to really also not be ashamed to my fealty or loyalty to art.

38:57 And this isn't necessarily a book about Documentation or the documentary. Although we are well trained in the West to view such aesthetic or intellectual engagements as documentary works when it comes from people from the so-called Global South or people who have affiliation with the Global South. Because the reason I say this is because historically in the colonial world, in the classic European colonial world, and even in the decolonial era or the so-called post-colonial, there's been a way in which when the other speaks, they're documenting.

39:55 But when the Members of the oppressor speaks, whether they are directly part of the violence or not. They are creating, they are fiction, right? You are the French, the German, the English, the American are fiction makers. But the Palestinian and the Sudanese, they're documentary makers, if you want to put it in cinematic terms. And I think that on an aesthetic level, Exhibit G is trying to say these kind of subconscious absorptions of these kinds of thinkings, colonial racial thinkings are absurd and not true.

40:42 Can you, I am asking a reader, challenging a reader, can you engage Exhibit G at a level that shows That I am a creator of the imagination, not a reproducer of memory. I don't know if I'm being articulate enough, but I think that, again, you look at this book in the immediate moment where you receive it perhaps as a book that documents genocide.

41:25 But are you able to read it as a book that can be read 30 years from now? And so I do want to read something from exhibit G. And I want to read an excerpt from your poem, Truth is Never Finished, the first part. And I would love to get your own response to it. First they came for the Palestinians and I didn't speak out because I wasn't Palestinian. Then they came for America and we all became Palestinian. Then we were good. They came back for the Palestinians and we didn't speak out. First they came for good and I didn't speak out because I wasn't good.

42:06 They came for natives. This is a land without natives, and the natives shall be removed. They came for Iraqis, Yemenis, Congolese, and I've said nothing because they've been coming for the Congolese for so long and we never spoke out. They came for rubber, then for blood mineral. I was petrol pending electric vehicle. And when they came for the Japanese, I said come after them some more. First they came for Hanoi and Timor and again for Afghans while waving freedom flags for Sudan and Haiti. They came for many others. I was a shadow. I wanted to be praised. Then they shushed the world, praised it, and it wasn't praise.

42:51 I wanna gather your thoughts and processing it because I know it takes from the poem, like first it came for by Martin E. Moeller. So I would love for you to think about what Martin E. Moeller's poem spoke to you about and how this was in your thought process in creating this poem. Yeah. There's obviously something quasi-mythic about that original poem in German, right? We've sort of passed it on already in a way that says we're going to keep continuing.

43:32 We're going to continue to pass it on as some sort of like an eternal red flag, warning sign kind of language. And I wanted to engage it as a mythic language by also taking it down. Because one of the things that was taking place very early on, very clearly, is that the question of Palestine in its genocidal form or genocidal manifestation in the Western world was already being co-opted for the purposes, say, of protecting freedom of speech, for example.

44:17 And what was interesting, for example, is that I was moved initially by how some of these people who spoke this kind of expression and the echoes of it did so only when sort of the hand of oppression came officially too hard on students on campuses. And... But they never spoke a word before that on the genocide that had been going on already for a year. And it was to me then a clear turning point that, yes, this is proof that that language of first they came for so and I wasn't so and I said nothing and then until there was no one left, that that had already become a mythic language.

45:08 What Ghassan Kanafani calls blind language. It's a language that is used without really... And it's a language that is used to protect privilege more than it is actually to stop an injustice. And so I realized as I began that poem, and it's a long poem and that's the first section in it. That I also was speaking, you know, and you can see from, or hopefully people who heard you read it can hear that there is a way in which time is removed from accuracy, from historical accuracy, right?

46:00 There's a whole meshing of events and, you know... The first is no longer a first. You know, the listing of things, they certainly didn't come for the Palestinians first, right? They've been coming for others and others have been come for prior to that. And the whole idea of first and then and second and whatnot is... Is erased or made suspect because of the way we're attached to some kind of logical linearity of events. An obsession with antecedents that, you know, which came first, which is the biggest, which is the big bad wolf.

46:47 These kinds of, you know, expressions that I wanted to begin to concretely begin to kind of shift And our perception of time in the poem, because for those who read the second part of the poem, you clearly begin to see how the fabular language along, you know, the fictional, the magical, even if it's magical horror, and the concrete or... Factual, between the fictional and the factual is a language that takes over the poem in the second section.

47:30 Because ultimately, as I say towards the end of the poem, it's a conversation with time. Those who oppress and think that their oppression will actually last forever are those who have delusionally convinced themselves that they can master time. And that is never going to happen by any human group. I also know that you have an excerpt that you would like to read from Exhibit G, and I was wondering if you're able to share that. Yeah, I'm just going to maybe, you know, as we talked about a little before, just show a few images.

48:12 It's sort of a binder of the book. The book is not yet out, but this is the cover I think some people Are familiar with it and some of the way that the photographs work, you know, next to the poems. Yeah, how would you describe this picture too for those that are like listening to audio? Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, you know, there's something for example about the detail of A boy who's rolling his eyes in the middle of genocide for whatever reason.

48:55 Maybe he's rolling his eyes at the photographer who asked him to smile or give a victory sign or thumbs up. It was one of my favorites of what happens. And there's a, you know, a quiet, it's like a, I don't know. But yeah, so I'll, there's another one I'd like to actually show. And if you could describe that too, yeah.

49:40 There are others that also are from an exhibit called Gaza Habibti. Which precede the genocide for the most part. And that show was sort of a Palestinian life before the genocide. And I love the colors in many of these photographs. Yeah. Anyway, as there's too many photos, I don't want to get sucked into that energy. We won't. We won't be able to leave.

50:23 There's one. So let me read, there are a series of poems titled Exhibit G with a subtitle, and I'll read one of those. Exhibit G, toward it, not away from it. An airstrike disorients you. Am I alive? You shout because you've been told that in the afterworld we speak but don't holler and feel no pain. A phone light tells you you're fine. A little hurt.

51:05 The next day, another bomb in your neighborhood, one or two streets over. You run toward it, not away from it. This signals a distinction in your condition from your killers. For your killers fallen, helicopters lift off. For your bombed out districts, a flood of you to recover the dead for burial and the living for life. You live in lands that can't shoot down fighter jets. You run toward the explosion whose missives are from this alphabet. You're trapped under the debris of this language.

51:46 No manual to help you navigate the extermination of your people. You learn on the fly, a light. You're listening for someone's breath, an oracle, an appendage to your heart. You're listening for names shouted out like roll call over irregular intervals. You're hoping to recognize no name, including yours. The first time your killers disinter you, you hear your kin talk about your clothes, reminiscing. You check your wristwatch for the time of your death. The second time your killers disinter you, you hear your kin holding on to the love that does not set others on fire.

52:35 By the third time, you're next to the seven sleepers and their dog. They lie in their cave like spores or cicada. You wake them. Tyranny has ended yet again and won't come back for a long while. It's good news, you tell them. Now you can die in peace. Thank you so much for sharing this. I much, much appreciate you sharing this beautiful poem. What does a free Palestine look like to you? What can it look like when it's allowed to exist and thrive?

53:17 Yeah, that's a beautiful question because this conversation is quite intense where many Palestinians engage, and I think it's a necessary engagement, the question of futurity, of futurism. You have to imagine that liberation, You know, before it comes, so that post-liberation you can manage good aspects or good, you know, metamorphosis of some things. I, for one, neglect answering this question, which, again, I think is a good question, because I think that why should Palestinians imagine What Palestine would be after liberation.

54:10 I think in it, there is a severe underestimation of the tormented fabric and bodies and dismemberment of the Palestinian people. And I think that we need to just be a people who are free in the first place. You know, place of being killed, of being eradicated, and of being humiliated and racialized. And the rest of it, we join the rest of the world.

54:51 Why should we have a... Let me put it this way. I guess it's not a... What's the word... An inactive position on my part. Actually, I think it's very active when I say, you know, can you imagine, you know, in the West, for example, what you would be like when you actually let Palestinians liberate themselves and let Palestine be free? Because that boot on the neck is a collective boot. And so it's interesting to ask me this question as if I'm responsible for what I would consider in part, in the name of hope, a Western sickness, like I'm blackmailed by the Western sickness.

55:42 I don't want to be a guiding light to anything, not to the post-colonial, not to the decolonial, not to the whatever. I just want to be free and messy and chaotic, but free in it. I don't have to paint an imagination of how beautiful we will be afterwards because I think we are no more and no less beautiful than any beautiful people on this earth. Thank you. What does self-care, personal joy look like to you in your world to take care of yourself? Yeah. I mean, I do enjoy it.

56:29 And I like the expression, you know, going back to the title, I just read that going to Arabic poetry, not escaping, not running away to it, but going to it. I grew up in Arabic and I have access to Arabic and It reminds me when I turn to Arabic literature, you know, which is 1500 years old, but also connected to thousands of years before that with the other cultures from which the language merged and emerged.

57:14 It reminds me that, yeah, I belong to a very diverse, extensive, Beautiful, complicated world that doesn't always have to limit me the way English does. And so it is incredibly soothing for me and liberating and empowering. A lot of people, a lot of Palestinians in the Western diaspora may not have access to that the way I do. So my answer for self-care is sometimes, you know, that's one major aspect. It keeps me sane. Since I am a linguistic animal.

57:54 What other projects and upcoming events plans do you have for the rest of this year and into next year? I hope to be, you know, busy with Exhibit G. I mean, I think the press and the publicist and, you know, we're going to be in... As the book comes out late September, a bunch of podcasts, readings in D.C., Georgetown, George Mason, Busboys, Green Apple Bookstore in San Francisco, Berkeley, Stanford, some art spaces in L.A. and other places, Chicago, Minneapolis.

58:39 It's going to be a little nutty. So, you know, hopefully this, as I said, it creates conversation and also brings us, as you say, brings Palestinians a sense of care, of self-care together. There is something that comes out of this book for us that is very intimate in its power to deliver self-care. And there's times in which we have to persist. And also, I just want to make sure, I don't know if you could really see this, because this is kind of hard to see, but I hope that people get a copy of Exhibit G Poems, Essays and Photographs of Gaza.

59:29 And please take a good look at it. And yeah, it's something that I highly recommend. And I really thank you for gifting us this beautiful, beautiful and Very important work that you're doing in collaboration with the Gaza Soup Kitchen. Where can people find your work? And also, are there other groups or organizations that you would like to shout out? I mean, you know, yeah, the Gaza Soup Kitchen is one.

1:00:09 Honor YUSA is one. You know, I don't have a long list. I think others may have, or maybe I'm just blanking out. And, you know, I think people, it's a sad moment because, you know, people are trying to Lend a hand and you have all this, you know, the GoFundMe phenomenon that is, you know, history has yet to look back at and figure out exactly how to see it more clearly for, you know.

1:00:50 But, yeah, I mean, my books are mostly with Milkweed and I have a handful of books also with Cockper Canyon. Yeah. But yeah, I just, yeah. Yeah, thank you. And I want to say thank you so much for your time and for being able to share so much on this episode. It is an honor to have you on. And I really appreciate the different layers that you share in your own lived experiences and your own observations and It is much appreciated, and I really wish you all the best in this work and being in the spaces, you know, talking about Gaza.

1:01:42 And I hope that people really do pay attention and listen to the people who are most affected. And so thank you so much for your time. It is an absolute pleasure. Thank you. The pleasure and honor are mine, and thank you for your generous invitation.