Witnessing From the Empire with Fady Joudah & Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

[00:00:01] What's good? I'm Nikesha Elise Williams and this is Black & Published on the Mahogany Books Podcast Network, bringing you the journeys of writers, poets, playwrights, and storytellers of all kinds. And I know, I'm a day early kicking off Season 5. It's a Monday. But not just any Monday. If you're in the United States, we're commemorating the full and complex life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., which happens to coincide with the

[00:00:31] inauguration of the 47th president. If you're anything like me, you may need an escape from the political theater and I am happy to oblige with two premiere episodes. First up are the Palestinian American poets Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Fady is a physician, in addition to being a poet. His latest collection, entitled with the bracketed symbol of ellipsis, chronicles the beginning of the genocide in Palestine

[00:01:01] in late 2023, and was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in Poetry. It's really hard to experience what it's like for two Palestinian American authors to receive recognition in a time of genocide. As if we couldn't be seen unless we are near annihilation.

[00:01:24] Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She's also the co-founder of the Institute for Middle East Understanding. Her latest poetry collection, Something About Living, won the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry.

[00:01:40] I'm not unlike many writers who are Palestinian American, Arab American, and to some degree broadly writers of color in that every single thing is hard won in a way it shouldn't have to be where it comes to publication. The invisibility is glaring. In our conversation, we discuss what the protest slogan from the river to the sea truly means.

[00:02:04] What they would write if they weren't living through and didn't feel compelled to be a witness to constant war and genocide. And how they're helping their children survive and thrive as full Palestinian people who happen to be living in the empire. That and more is next when Black and Published continues.

[00:02:32] When did you know that you were a writer? And I will start with Fatty. When I was 12 years old, I was living in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia at the time. And on the back page of a newspaper, there was this obituary of a well-known Egyptian poet, Amal Donkul. And in it, he died young. He was about 42 or so when he passed away from cancer.

[00:02:59] And they included one of the poems that he wrote in the cancer wing in the hospital. And it was published posthumously. And it was such a miraculous experience for me that I knew at the time that this is who I would live my life to be as a poet. Because it had such a great, encompassing reach of both the elegiac and the eulogy as well.

[00:03:29] Okay. Now, Lena. I mean, it's interesting how death is coming up. But I don't know that I knew I was a writer. I aspired. I always wanted to be a writer. I think I had less confidence about it. Some of it having to do with, you know, moving back and forth between places and languages. So hoping that my mastery of a language was strong enough. You know, self-doubt is definitely a thread in this story. But my grandfather was a renowned poet in Jordan.

[00:03:58] And I grew up spending summers in his home and surrounded by his books and his writing process and his writing life. And I was fascinated by it. He was like a superhero to me. And when he passed in 1990, like a few days before he passed, he used to write a weekly column in the Jordanian Daily Newspaper. For like 19 years, he had a weekly column.

[00:04:25] And a few days before he passed, he said to my mother, when she came to see him in the hospital, bring me a paper and pen. I would want to write. And that has stayed with me my whole life. The idea that one of his last desires, literally a few days before he died, was still to write. And I just thought that that was such an incredible life force. So the wanting to write and wanting to be a writer is a very old desire in me. So once in a while, I think, okay, maybe I'm a writer now.

[00:04:57] But just following- You just won the National Book Award. So are you a writer now? There's a solid chance I'm a writer now. We'll see. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. So Fadi kind of explained this already. So I'm going to go back to you, Lena. In always aspiring to be a writer, why poetry? To me, it feels like the most Arab or Arabic form. The most authentically Arabic form.

[00:05:21] The music is so important, even though I'm writing in English, but it's a kind of belonging that's important to me. So then for the both of you, you all have other career pursuits, jobs, but writing is what you stick with. So then what is it about poetry and the rhythm and the lyricism that keeps you coming back to the page when you don't absolutely have to?

[00:05:51] And poetry is notoriously hard. For me, I would say it's a compulsion that you recognize in yourself since you're a child. I refer to it as my love for the music the alphabet makes in the mind.

[00:06:06] I noticed when I was a kid being drawn to it as some kind of a magical thing that my senses or my own internal wiring had exhibited something to me that made me pursue it more like a fix. It's always connecting to the child in me. It feels like I'm always a child, no matter how serious the content or the occasion may be for writing.

[00:06:32] And you practice it enough times or you engage it enough times, you pursue it over such a length of time that for me at this point, it becomes a way of being. I tend to think of my experiences and feelings as a conversation with poetry all the time.

[00:06:52] So often things people say to me in a regular encounter as a physician in the hospital or just with friends, I'm always seeing the world through the language of poetry. I think also one can argue that when humans began to encounter speech, we found everything having the force of the poem. You know, when you name things and you construct things and you give them these kinds of abstractions.

[00:07:21] And this is a mountain and this is a bird and this is love and this is grief. So you connect to that as a child and you nurture it. And I'm in my 50s and just won't leave me anymore. It's a half madness, I think. Lina? I have a friend who says I would quit poetry if I could. So, you know, it is a half madness or a condition sometimes.

[00:07:48] But yeah, I think definitely there's a through line from childhood. My early years were in Saudi Arabia and I went to a girls school that followed the state curriculum. And so there was a beautiful immersion in classical Arabic and in Quran. And the Quran is often verse with end rhymes. And so there's just a way in which that kind of language can hold you.

[00:08:16] I think that's part of what keeps you coming back. The way that the language of a poem can hold you differently than any other literary work. And so I think I come to poetry to try to make sense of the world around me. To work in language in a compressed way and in a way that distills experience. And maybe also by kind of eliminating the extraneous, it can reveal in ways that maybe other genres don't.

[00:08:44] I think that's very evident in the collection. You have a line that I actually took a note of where you talk about you were tired of writing about the war. So you wrote about the war again and again and again. Your words are its wounds. Fatty, you mentioned that there's still this childlike wonder attached to writing poetry, even when writing about hard subjects. Both of your collections center around the genocide that is happening in Palestine.

[00:09:12] And yet both of your collections have love poems in them. Why was it important to balance in these collections the telling the truth of what is really happening in Palestine with the love that you all feel as people, that all people can feel and identify with? How can love not be in the picture?

[00:09:41] When, for example, for those of us who are aware of the details of the genocide on a daily basis, what keeps people alive is that love. I would like to mention a dear friend's brother, Haniel Madhun's brother, Chef Mahmoud, who Israel assassinated precisely because he insisted for six or seven months to open up a soup kitchen to feed people.

[00:10:06] And it created such a culture around the soup kitchen. He employed photographers so that they would photograph the kids coming to eat. The kids come to eat hungry and they fight over their turn to get the food. But when the photographer asks them to pose, they pose like children with smiles and happiness and goofiness. And their mothers sometimes dress them up to go pick up the food in a time of genocide.

[00:10:35] Because the mothers are aware that these are moments that are important for children to imprint in their minds that love will get you out of trouble. If you know that it existed in your life at such a young age, you will believe in it if the hardness continues. And that's also something I experienced from my parents and the hardship they went through in previous, you know, Palestinian decades.

[00:11:05] And so I think that we write about love because it's just there. It is not a discovery. The other way to answer this is it's really hard to experience what it's like for two Palestinian American authors to receive recognition in a time of genocide. As if we couldn't be seen unless we are near annihilation.

[00:11:32] And I would like to say there's a vulgarity to it. And one day people will reread our books with a deeper understanding that it was not about documenting the world historical event of the genocide. But it was about a lot more. Yeah, there's a... Sorry. It's okay. It's been a long few months with this process.

[00:11:59] Fadi and I have just had a lot of conversations trying to show up for ourselves and for each other and for the people we care about and whose work or for whom our work matters or we imagine it matters. And trying to do that with dignity. And also just trying to preserve our sense of who we are. You know, every day I have a different assessment of whether I'm succeeding in doing that or not. But I don't know what there is to write about other than love.

[00:12:26] I think that Palestinian life is a kind of love incarnate. It's incredible. It's incredible to consider how capable of humor and goodwill and faith Palestinians continue to be given the hand the world has dealt us. It makes no sense. And yet it's true. It's my truest experience of who we are as a people. And interestingly, like my book was written a few years before.

[00:12:55] It was published in 2024. But technically speaking, it precedes this iteration. But the genocide is an ongoing, you know, the annihilatory violence that's built into Israel's colonial project is ongoing. It's just reached a kind of horrific peak this year. So there are these ghosts in every poem, right? We live in something I call the past continuous. The time frame never really changes.

[00:13:23] And so the only way to survive and to retain your humanity is to be tethered to love. And that's my deepest experience of being a Palestinian. And so I'm grateful that that comes through in the poems because a lot of times the grief and the devastation can be overwhelming. But I'm always reminded by the Palestinians in my life, my family, my friends, that, you know, that's not who we are. It's not just grief. And so that the love survives in any of the poems to me means a kind of success that's important.

[00:13:53] When I was in my freshman year of high school, when this U.S. history class and the teacher, he would make us listen to the radio once a week on a Tuesday. I believe it was NPR and take notes on the news. I don't remember which conflict it was, but I always heard the name Yasser Arafat. And we were always talking about the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine. But it's at 13, 14, you don't know what you're listening to. You know, being a good student, I would always take the notes.

[00:14:22] And so you talking about writing this book, something about living before this present iteration of conflict and war. And it's still being so relevant and poignant. And then you, Fadi, mentioning the vulgarity of which you all have to basically like prostrate yourselves to the media and do the dance of authors to draw attention to greater suffering.

[00:14:49] Was it difficult getting these collections published? Or do you have feelings about the fact that they are published and you are having to do events and humanize and dignify your people and your country and your land when they should already have that? And Fadi, I'll let you start.

[00:15:11] The more relevant part of your question is about the work that each one of us has to do to make sure that the book is visible. For the amount of visibility that my book had, which I wrote very quickly in the second month of the genocide, November 2023. And my publisher was gracious enough to speedily publish it in a matter of three months, actually, and put it out there.

[00:15:38] But I had to do a beastly amount of work to insist on Palestinian speak so that if the book doesn't get ignored, that it also doesn't get sensationalized as a form of like, oh, here's a book about Palestinian suffering. Because my book wasn't necessarily about that. And I think that it insisted on a different form of address, a different form of using pronouns.

[00:16:05] How do you as an American or Western recipient of those poems identify yourself or actually struggle to identify yourself? Because as a Palestinian, I know more about you vis-à-vis the Palestinian question than you think you know about me or the Palestinian question.

[00:16:23] And I think that this poses discomfort, even if it engenders awe or respect, because we in American culture don't realize sometimes our tendency to know everything. There is nothing anyone else can teach us that we don't know. We're exceptionally anti-exceptional.

[00:16:45] And I think that it takes a lot of one's soul to engage in standing in front of the mirror in order to crack it. Because it is already cracked. You mentioned Yasser Arafat. So it must have been during the second Intifada or something like that. It was 2000. That was the year that I was listening. And so like the participation and the dehumanization of the Palestinian in English begins with the figure of Yasser Arafat.

[00:17:14] It doesn't begin when it definitely takes on a major form, right? The Clinton administration was a major participant in spreading of the racism against the Palestinians in the late 90s and onward. And then to find out full circle that Bill Clinton comes and wags a finger at us during the election campaign, you realize that the Palestinian mirror shows him for the racism that he upheld.

[00:17:43] And you have to ask yourself a question as a Palestinian. If it is normal to be racist against one people and not racist against another, then what other questionable things do you ask yourself about one's own moral integrity? As a people, as a nation, not just the figure of Bill Clinton.

[00:18:03] If you think about Biden being the thing that would save us from the madness or some of us as Americans of Trump, then what does it mean that we basically elected a genocidal president? So these kinds of things that, you know, America still refuses for a Palestinian to bring up or an Arab or Muslim to bring up. Or a black person.

[00:18:26] It's difficult to engage in the culture industry when you're just also trying to live your life as a writer as well. Lena? I'm not unlike many writers who are Palestinian American, Arab American, and to some degree broadly writers of color in that every single thing is hard won in a way it shouldn't have to be where it comes to publication. The invisibility is glaring. And so every poem is questioned in ways that it shouldn't be.

[00:18:56] Every maybe use of Arabic that I want to include is treated as some sort of, you know, strange antic instead of part of a poetic. Every publication is described or discussed as a kind of political work or a work of witness. As if my existence and my naming myself is somehow a political act when in fact it's this country that racializes and politicizes all of us with different, you know, valuations based on whatever.

[00:19:25] For me, that has always been the case. So this book was published. It was selected by Adrian Matika, a poet I respect. And I was really thrilled that he selected it for the Akron Prize. So, yes, it was published, but it was invisible when it was published in the same way that often a lot of my work is, you know, it has like little small places where it's allowed to kind of exist quietly.

[00:19:52] And so then we have this nightmare of the most horrific annihilatory violence against our people and our lives, which makes the work more visible. And so it's really hard to deal with that. But I will say that, like, it's interesting that we veered into a conversation about presidents and politics because that is a lot of what's in the work.

[00:20:16] And oftentimes I find in, you know, so-called mainstream poetry circles in the United States that's looked at sort of funny or strange. Like maybe that might not be the stuff of poetry, but it's the stuff of our lives. This is how we are contextualized and read or misread or made legible or made invisible in the American experience and in American culture. And so we're writing from the vantage point of our lives.

[00:20:44] I'm writing from the vantage point of my life and my American experience. One of the freeing moments for me as a writer was realizing that I have to walk into every room and approach every page with the certainty that my humanity is not up for debate. I'm not in the business of humanizing. I am a human being. Palestinians are human beings.

[00:21:05] And if there is a reader or an editor or someone who is consuming the work who doesn't understand that, then that is a problem that they have that I can't possibly fix for them or fill. So just learning how to move with that reality has been a process. And, you know, some days are easier than others.

[00:21:24] I want to push back a bit because I think even as you say you approach the page not having to fix or humanize, a lot of the poems in Something About Living, there are a few different ones that have lines about making sure that you have a name or that your name is there or it's not a race or, you know, the words that you use are still not our names. Which that's not really humanizing, but it's denoting the erasure.

[00:21:52] And so in presenting works that are reflective of the times, but also highlighting the erasure that is happening and the erasure to come, because both of you all talk about how the history has changed depending on who gets to write it, you know, to the victor goes who spoils in the pen.

[00:22:16] And do you find yourselves in literary spaces having to defend your work in ways that other writers don't? I think there is an expectation that we should in a lot of spaces. And the question is just how I choose to deal with that, whether you participate or not.

[00:22:35] In my mind, whether it's successful or not is up to the reader, but there is a distinction between, you know, participating in the game of humanization and writing for the historical record and writing on your terms. And so that's what I hope my work does. I hope that the work has built itself a home in the future and can live on its own terms. And so that necessitates using a vocabulary that I believe to be true. And naming is an important part of that.

[00:23:06] Yes, when you start writing, the pushback you get is often just to question things that are just very basic to humanity, like your name, like the geography of where you come from, in ways that are genuinely shocking. And the sooner you learn to stop participating in that and to refuse the premise of a lot of those questions or demands, the freer and more authentic you can be.

[00:23:32] And so I think it's important to acknowledge that that happens, but then to take a position against it. In most human traditions, the engagement with the self is essential to the art of poetry. The starting point comes from the speaking self, which is our par excellence human thing.

[00:23:54] So to say my name is, and I come from there, as Darwish once wrote, is what humans lean on poetry for and has leaned on poetry for through millennia. I wanted to actually get to your books. I should have asked you in the beginning, do you have them nearby to read something from them?

[00:24:14] Fatty Judah's sixth poetry collection, entitled with the bracketed symbol of ellipsis, and Lina Halaf Tufaha's award-winning fifth collection, Something About Living, both detailed the atrocities Palestinian people faced in Gaza before and after October 7th, while also telling joyful stories of playing children, loving families, the necessity of defiance, and the longing for home. Here's Fatty and Lina.

[00:24:43] So I'll read three, and I'll let you choose two, or whatever. Cease fire now, before Thanksgiving, by Christmas or the New Year, on MLK Day or Easter, forever, before old tricks find themselves out and genocide is seen through this year or the next decade,

[00:25:12] and scholars sign off on it. Repetition won't guarantee wisdom, but cease now before your wisdom is an echo. We need to differentiate between the dead and the not here. We require you to restore your mind to your heart, its earliest version, before the world touched it.

[00:25:40] After the massacre, who will emerge innocent? And I, a serf, on line or behind fences. Cease fire now, sure you will have to grant more rights, seed new ground, sure, revolution shall not last, shall not end.

[00:26:05] They did not mean to kill the children. They meant to. Too many kids got in the way of precisely imprecise one-ton bombs, dropped a thousand and one times over the children's nights. They will not forgive the children this sin. They wanted to save them from future sins,

[00:26:33] or send them rapt lifetimes of reconstructive surgical hours pro bono, mental anguish to pass down to their offspring. Will the children have offspring? This is what the bomb droppers did not know they wanted. To see if others will be like them after unquantifiable suffering.

[00:27:01] They wanted to lead their own study, but forgot that not all suffering worships power after survival. What childhood does a destroyed childhood beget? My parents showed me the way. Sunbird Sunbird I flipped I flipped From gleaming river To glistening sea

[00:27:29] From all that we To all that me Fresh east To salty west Southern sweet And northern free There is a lake Between us And aquifers For cactus And basins Of anemone From the river To the sea From womb From womb To breath And one With oneness

[00:27:59] I be From the river To the sea Thank you. Lena Lena My request And I will only make one Because I have several Is I believe it's on translation About the couple I'm so glad you picked that I was hoping to read that today On translation Even when he told her it was imminent

[00:28:28] Mita refused Mita refused to break up To break up with him Readers might be moved If they imagine The fiancé had a fatal injury Or a terminal illness Mita tells the reporter That her fiancé Entrusted a counselor At the courthouse Where he tried to break off Their engagement With his last will And testament Tell her she's the best girl In the world Tell her she is the most beautiful

[00:28:57] Tell her Tell her these are my exact words The word martyrdom Fails Mita's heart And her beloved's The word trauma Does too Mita says Sometimes he would talk About settling down About a home But he also kept Trying to let her go You have a life to live You are too young To be a widow His last words to Mita

[00:29:26] Are where language breaks To translate Is to believe There is a reader When he turned To leave the courthouse The counselor ran after him With the final question In her arsenal But the drones Circling overhead Drowned out his reply Don't you want To see her before you go? The narrow alleys Of old Nablus

[00:29:56] Are cross-hatched In light and jasmine vines That a heart Will not back down When an armored vehicle Barrels toward it Is also a love story Mita said I'll be a martyr's wife then In the final hour Her father called the fiancé And translated Listen son Whatever happens To you Happens to us

[00:30:23] In case of emergency This is how you open the box When I am no longer here One of these Might be the combination 1975 The year you were born 1967 The year we lost The rest of our country 1936 The year your grandmother

[00:30:51] Swallowed her gold coins To hide them From the soldiers This is how you keep yourself Safe Keep parts of yourself In different boxes Trust no one With everything In 1949 The year my father died 1979 The year the checkpoint Taught you the difference Between your name And your passport 1999

[00:31:21] The year the last of our olives Were uprooted And the wall obscured Jerusalem This is how you know It will end When night falls The windows of the city Become mirrors A key recalls The shape of its doorway The stones of this land Nestle in young hands Letter to June Jordan In September

[00:31:49] I cannot pass the anniversary Of that first news event Of childhood Without returning To your poem How from my home 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 mustaches Macabre arrangement

[00:32:19] 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 dailiness 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

[00:32:48] 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

[00:33:18] 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 Thank you My first question Is an ignorant one For me and others Who may not know What does From the river to the sea Mean Like truly mean

[00:33:48] It's a geographic Description Of the land From which Palestinians Originate So Regardless of The current political Situation Some of us Are born in Haifa Some of us Are born in Jerusalem Some of us Are born in Jericho So historic Palestine Existed from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea Interestingly that particular Slogan is actually a slogan

[00:34:17] That was used by Zionists To describe the area That they wish to colonize So it's very rich That they get all worked up About it now Part of the reason I asked that question And really to have it on record Is because when I hear The slogan From the river to the sea And I hear How Zionists Or Zionist Sympathizers In America Feel like You know They're calling for the Genocide of Israel Right

[00:34:46] I think about America the beautiful And the line From sea To shining Sea Which Is really Fucked up Because I'm like From sea To shining Sea You colonized This whole land That was not Yours And murdered The people Who lived here And yet We're getting ready To sing it Again At the Super Bowl Tangent But not At all Actually I mean right There were a lot

[00:35:16] Of different nations Between sea And shining sea That's I think A fantastic Corollary That you have Landed on Thank you In writing Fatty So urgently In the month After October 7th And then The genocide Started You chronicle So Much Was it Urgent That you felt Like You did that Because you Wanted to have It on record

[00:35:45] Talking about The health Issues That people Died from In addition To the Bombings To as you Mentioned Your friend Being assassinated Who ran The soup Kitchen And then Now we Have a year Later The bombing At world Central Kitchen Which now Makes me Think After you Told the story About your Friend That that Wasn't an Accident I know You don't Mean it Casually But the Ease With which You recount Atrocities And the Same in Your poem On translation Where the

[00:36:14] Fiance knows That it's Coming Does it Make you Feel better Writing and Witnessing in The way that You're doing Because reading It was heavy So does it Feel that way Is it still Heavy How are you That's the Question How are you Not good at All I think That we Can have A whole Podcast To talk About how We feel And what It's like To go Through our

[00:36:44] Days And how Many emotions Go through Us every Day At the National Book Awards The reading Night I had been Aware that I would Not read From the Book And wrote A new Piece Whose Opening Lines Are Is this The banality Of evil Reconvened Are you Gen G Did you Vote To make It great Again Or was Genocide Never Genocide

[00:37:14] To you Because I Was aware That I Live my Days Surrounded By Indifference As a Horrific Thing In the Best case Scenario It feels Psychotic Sometimes To just Walk around And realize That you're Living in A country That administers And Supplies The Genocide And then We're Just All Walking Around So Many Of us Walking Around Not Really Knowing What To do About It In The Best Case Scenario Most Most Are Deniers

[00:37:44] Of It Apologists And Actually Are Afraid Because They're Aware But They Won't Say A word There's Nothing To Risk It Has Taken A Long Time For Most Americans To Get To The Point Where We Say We Are On This Episode We Knew It Was Genocide From Day One From Hour One So It's Very Difficult To Feel Like I'm Not Sure Who's The Crazy One Me Or The Rest Of

[00:38:25] Particular People On The Carousel Of History But Yet When It Happens To Particular People It Is Unique To Them I Do Not Know What To Do In My Anguish With This Feeling That To Speak Of This In America The Place That Genocides Me In Fact The Alphabet That Genocides Me Too I Have To

[00:38:55] Political Translation Because None Of This Matters If We Can't Change The Political Process And So There Is A Corruption In That Path That American History Has Laid Bare For All Of To See If You Engage In Your Pursuit Towards Justice Through

[00:39:25] Colored Faces In High Places Won't Save You But To Go Back To Your Question On The Poems I Wrote Them With Urgency Because I Was Aware The Minute The Genocide Started In Its Most Acute Form To That The Day Will Come Where People Will Go Back And See How Palestinian Art Insisted On Being Art Even During The Unspeakable Times Of Genocide And I Just Added One Document To

[00:39:55] That I Don't Think That The Books That Some Of Us Have Written Lena's Book Mine A Few Others Will Be Read Properly For What They Offer In The Present And It's Sort Of Like As I Say In The Opening Poem Of The Book I Write To The Future Because My Present Is Demolished And In That Sense It Is A Balsam Or A Bomb It's Temporary I Forgotten About My Book Already As I Write New Stuff

[00:40:25] And It Feels Like I've Lost My Relationship To Time Really I Don't Think That We Understand What Genocide Is We Have Examples In America Many Of The Aftermath Of Genocide To A People And The Passage Of Time Which Is Different For The Nations Or The Black Experience Or Of Course The Jewish Experience They're All The Aftermath For Those Holocaust Or Genocides But As A Palestinian Who Is Experiencing The Genocide

[00:40:55] In The Now Knowing Exactly What Further Annihilation Awaits Me In My Life What Have You Done To The Remainder Of My Life Is A Question I Ask You Know My Children You Know How Can They Escape The Rest Of Their Lives Without Like Feeling That This Will Mark Them Will Mark Their Hopes And Dreams And Their Need To Stand Up And Resist And So For You Ask Me How

[00:41:25] I'm Doing I Will Say One Of The Most Devastating Things For Me Is To Feel That My Existence In English Seems Largely Confined To Defining Myself As A Victim Of Genocide For The Culture That Genocides Me And There Is Far More Beautiful Things In Life Than To Think That The Beauty Of My Life Is To Perform That Resistance For The Place That Genocides Me And Denies Me The Fact That They Genocide Me Sorry I

[00:42:02] The About Devastated Isn't Even The World I Think We've Been Permanently Altered By What We Have Experienced Granted From The Vulgar Safety Of Living In The Empire Right We're Not Immediately Under The Bombs But We Are Absolutely Shattered But Our Kids Who Are Growing Up Here And This Is Part Of

[00:42:34] Start Reckoning With That Something That Came Up As You Were Talking Fadi That I Wanted To Note Was The Rest Of The World Doesn't Like This The Minute You Set Foot Outside Of The United States Maybe With The Exception Of Germany But Even In Germany There Are Protests Most Folks See This Really Clearly And Are Not In Any Way. Concerned About Saying

[00:43:01] what is morally and ethically sound and just instinctively human, which is there's never an excuse for genocide. The ability of Zionist propaganda to take hold in the U.S. is unique. They try other places, but the grip it has on the American imagination is unique. And so many of us who at various points have had the ability to leave the U.S., whether it's to visit friends

[00:43:29] or family in other countries or for whatever reason, work, whatever, you know, there's a kind of, oh, okay, not everybody has lost their minds because the visible signs of support for Palestinians, not political support, but like popular human kind of rushing to the scene of a five alarm fire kind of support for people who are enduring a genocide exists everywhere in the world,

[00:43:56] in Western Europe, in the global South, throughout the Arab world. Like, but you come back here and you just enter this like very creepy zombie-like scene where you're looking at people and it's so disturbing and that's made it worse. It's made it significantly worse. I think about the night of the National Book Awards a lot because I had to get up on that stage and find something to say that I could live with.

[00:44:24] I was like, just say something that you feel good about tomorrow. That was my one kind of criteria for myself. And then afterwards, some folks who I like to assume are well-meaning came up to me and said something about courage. And I found that so offensive. Courage. What? You know, I'm in a ballroom getting a literary award. I'm sorry, what courage are you talking about? The way people tell on

[00:44:53] themselves and confess the limitations of their own ability to empathize or willingness to act in an emergency is just shocking. And it has made this year so, so much worse and so much harder. When talking about how do you begin to explain these horrors to children, how do you help them survive

[00:45:16] them? How are you showing them not just how to survive even while living in the empire, which I know makes it very easy, but how to thrive emotionally? Because those things are very different. Are we showing them? It's a valid question. Yeah. I mean, I hope we are.

[00:45:40] You know, some of that insistence on names and language and that defiance that comes from the generation of our parents is an inheritance that's an important tool. Sometimes thriving requires a kind of obstinance and an insistence on inconvenient words and practices because they connect you, they tether you to the people who came before you. And so that's in the mix. But this year,

[00:46:08] you know, I have not felt successful all the time. I think everybody is really, really struggling. But maybe writing is part of that and getting up in the morning and continuing, even if you're flailing, is sometimes the only thing you can do, modeling that you do that. But I think there's also an important piece of connecting them, like even though we're here and

[00:46:34] we are distant by geography and it's normal to want to keep your children safe, I think connecting them to folks in Palestine and actually not having them fear that connection and not investing too much in the facade of safety that is provided by the empire is really important part of thriving. That yes, you're actually Palestinian fully, just like those folks. And it's just an accident of

[00:47:01] history, maybe that you're here. And that can be scary initially, because it implicates you in all of the violence and terror that folks are experiencing. But in the long run, the ultimate safety is to stay connected to your people and to know that your fate and their fate is the same and not to let that division set in. But it's been exceptionally hard this year. At some point in my youth, I realized, I can't really pinpoint the moment, that my parents had lost their

[00:47:30] childhood and that that is part of what they were responding to when they raised us as solid-ass Palestinians, fierce and clear-eyed, but also wanted to protect our childhood for us. They didn't drown us in some, you know, we have to live our lives as revolutionaries or chanters or, you know, they

[00:48:00] wanted us to be children because they figured we would be stronger that way if we had a childhood to hold on to. And because they lost theirs. And I think that that's part of what the major part I learned from my parents is that this agony of wanting to pass on the torch of something that is burning brightly and burning us alive with it was to also maintain that kind of insistence on the sanctity of childhood as a universal right.

[00:48:30] If we lived in a perfect world and there was peace and the boundaries were and would remain from the river to the sea, what would you be writing about or would you want to write about? I know this sounds so cheesy to say, but I think I was born of a lover soul. I'm always in search of how to fall in love again in a mystic sense. And I think turning an eye to nature and animals is a tendency

[00:48:59] I can't escape. But also to this ancient concept of like wanting to experience what it's like to maintain your soul and lose your body as if I can know what it's like to become in ancient ruins and then come back to the present. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that would be a bit of a dreamy state. It's very existential poetry, environmental poetry, love poems, you know, the things that

[00:49:25] unfortunately people of color don't always get to write. And when we do, it's written off as frivolous because we are assumed that we should cover more important topics or there are more important issues happening that demand our attention besides and beyond love and nature or our existential fantasies.

[00:49:52] I'm thinking specifically of the poet Camille Dungy. And while her last book, Soil, was a memoir, it was a book about the environment, but it was also a very political book as well in a book about the environment. And she talks about how white men poets are often able to go off in the woods and explore and write about the floor and the fauna and not have to deal with any of the political shenanigans. And she's not afforded that same privilege.

[00:50:22] But their poems are boring. I'm just going to put that out there. Sorry. I'll make a blanket statement. Lena, the floor is yours. I hope I don't end up writing boring poems in a perfect world. I think poetry is about longing. That's a great line. Right? Like, what a disaster that would be. It's poetry is about longing. And for me,

[00:50:51] the central longing is for freedom and for a homeland that is free now. But, you know, I think poetry for me always follows longing. So who knows what the longing would be for? I think this whole thing about the political for the POC literature, it's not real. It's a construct that we've made to believe and repeat. Is all you read in James Baldwin political? Or when you go back

[00:51:17] to see how Langston Hughes's some of his poetry circulates or recirculates? It's, as Lena says, logging toward a light. And the light is myriad and not one thing and not one being. I would argue that it's a gimmick of the publishing industry since the dawn of the publishing industry.

[00:51:40] And especially once people of color were able to read and write legally to sell books and consider themselves enlightened about other experiences. My final question for you all today is, when you are dead and gone and among the ancestors in the ruins, what would you like someone to write about the legacy of words and work that you've left behind? That's harder than I thought it would be.

[00:52:11] Yes, because it's hard to believe that one would think about it. I mean, there's no telling. I am constantly surprised by some people who write about what I've been doing in the present that I didn't think of or didn't think that they would see in the way that I would see it in my own privacy. You

[00:52:37] know, there is no telling. But I love this quote by Mahmoud Darwish, who knew he would probably, quote unquote, achieve a form of immortality through his artistic greatness. And his answer was, is there anything worse than immortality? You know, he says, that's when everybody has a go at you, for better and worse, you know.

[00:53:01] So a good thing, maybe that one's not alive to hear the self-aggrandizing absurdity of humanity going on and on about itself, because you just, you know, you'll get used for God knows what, for better and worse. So at that point, you're completely out of the context. People miss the point. You know, I think we all have an instinct that we hope at some deep level as human beings, we all want to be accepted and loved. And so to our work. But I think in the long run,

[00:53:31] I hope I'm more thorn than rose. I think it's important to be difficult. Even if you come at it slant, even if you're like a nice middle-aged lady who sometimes says difficult things. But I hope more thorn than rose on balance. Big thank you to Fatty Judah and Lena Halaf Tufaha for being here today on Black & Published. You can follow Lena on Instagram at Lena Tufaha, and Tufaha is spelled T-U-F-F-A-H-A.

[00:54:01] And make sure you check out their books. Their collections are out now and available everywhere books are sold. That's our show for the week. If you liked this episode and want more Black & Published, head to our Instagram page. It's at Black & Published, and that's B-L-K & Published. There, I've posted two bonus clips for my interview with Lena and Fatty. Lena discusses

[00:54:29] how the Palestinian experience is braided with the American experience. And Fatty does an excerpt of his prose poem, Dedication. Make sure you check it out and let me know what you think in the comments. And since this is a two-episode premiere, make sure you go to the next episode in your feed right now featuring Iris Mwanza, author of The Lion's Den. Homophobia is strong and powerful. Transphobia,

[00:54:59] it continues and it makes life not just difficult but dangerous for a lot of citizens who have and should have the human rights of every single individual. So I really think it was important to me to talk about something, even though it was historical, that would resonate for today. I'll talk to you soon. Peace.

[00:55:27] What's going on, family? This is Derek Young and Ramonda Young, owners of both Mahogany Books and the Mahogany Books Podcast Network. We really want to thank each and every one of you for listening to this episode. And if you enjoyed what you just heard, drop us a review and rate us on whatever platform you download podcasts on. We truly appreciate each and every one of you for supporting us and making us your go-to for Black books. And we look forward to connecting with you all sometime in the future. Thank you again, fam. And always remember Black Books Matter.