Notes from the Field of Arabic Literature in the Time of Genocide

It is the twentieth month of genocide, our planet’s second rotation around the sun, drenched in Palestinian blood, 600 days of Palestinian slaughter, and nothing is new except the finality of the massacre. The world has sacrificed the Palestinians with its complicity and silence, and it will soon start rehabilitating itself by erecting monuments of guilt, reciting land acknowledgements, mythologizing the Palestinian, and cannibalizing the myth.

Given the scale of this historic calamity, the concerns that motivate me here as a scholar of Arabic literature are petty and small. Nevertheless, they strike at the core of the work we do, not only as scholars of literature but as humanists and human beings. How do we study the poetry of a people as they are being eradicated? What is new and what is old on the timeline of genocide? What is time? How do we study an entire tradition, in this case the Arabic literary tradition, when we are witnesses to the annihilation of its people, their culture, and their memory?

*

Palestinian literature is not literature for times of crisis, and its study is not an afterthought or a “safe” way to show solidarity.[1] Just as I insist that the study of modern Arabic literature is incomplete without Palestine, I insist that it is crucial to study Palestinian literature in the larger context of the tradition to which it belongs. Last spring, I taught a course titled “Resistance Literature from Pre-Islamic Arabia to Palestine,” in which we read selections from Arabic poetry and prose exploring the themes of resistance, community, individual agency, and revolution in its various forms (social, political, and literary). My purpose in this class is to place Palestinian literature in the context of the Arabic tradition to which it belongs and to show that Palestinian resistance in this moment of genocide has a centuries-old language with an ethnically, religiously, socially, and politically diverse vocabulary. 

I was attacked, harassed, threatened, and described in the US Congress as “endorsing hatred.” Two congressmen, one of them waving my syllabus and butchering my name, described me as a threat to the university and to the safety of students because I was teaching them Palestinian poetry.[2] The complicit system was threatened not only because I was teaching Palestinian poetry but more so because I was teaching it in context, within the vast, ancient, rich, and ever-living Arabic poetic tradition.[3] We are not allowed context in Empire and its institutions. History is meant to delete us, make us dispensable. Empire is most threatened when we claim our history; when we tell our version of history as it befalls us, we “who know the sting of history/more than most.”[4] 

If our work doesn’t neutralize and safely package Arabic literature for the extraliterary interests and investments of the system, we are a problem. We, and especially those of us who are Arab scholars of Arabic literature, have very few options in these academic institutions—we can either be silent tokens that make the traps of the program, department, and institution we are in look good, or else we are disruptive and threatening. We are not afforded a voice, not allowed real intellectual contributions in our fields. We are trained to be native informants, ourselves subjects of study. And that’s all we are capable of in the eyes of Empire: reporting, adding to the record, providing raw information.

When a horrendous death toll continues to rise on our watch, enabled by our tax money and the blood-drenched investments of our universities and their corrupt donors; when our own students have been shot, arrested, harassed, and driven to hunger strikes; when our students have taken it upon themselves to give their morally bankrupt universities an education in courage, integrity, and basic human dignity, it is our most basic responsibility to follow our students’ lead, to heed the call of Gaza not only as a moral compass pointing toward what’s left of our humanity but also as a call that will save what remains of our dignity and our lives’ work (as scholars, artists, educators, and thinkers) from opportunism, despicable careerism, and hypocrisy.

There is no responsible study of modern and/or contemporary Arabic literature without Palestine. Many trends and movements in modern Arabic literature and art during the second half of the twentieth century were a reaction to or a conversation with Palestine and the Nakba of 1948. The states of exile and refugeedom into which the Palestinian people were cast across the Arab world and beyond became vantage points from which Palestine was projected as a motif, a metaphor, a framework, a reading context that continues to have far-reaching consequences in Arabic cultural production.

Palestinian writers and thinkers were central in developing and theorizing the concept of commitment in literature, artistically and politically. Prime among them is Ghassan Kanafani, by whose statement, “I am politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite,” we continue to be guided, especially now, in this moment of genocide.[5] Kanafani knew that it was his duty as an artist and as a Palestinian to imagine the world differently. He insisted that art is a weapon for transforming the world, because if it is not, it becomes a tool for preserving the status quo and recycling its existing injustices.[6] He also avoided abstract theorizing about history and literature. His personal experience, the Palestinian experience, does not tolerate theorization, he insisted. The Palestinian experience itself is theory and practice at once. It is a hermeneutic, an epistemology, an ontology, a critical framework—every little detail of Palestinian life is a critical intervention, a critical questioning of all systems of thought in society, politics, history, language, and so on.  And if we are to guard a sliver of dignity and integrity as scholars of Arabic literature, now, in the time of genocide, we are necessarily committed to the universal human cause of Palestine and its people. And Gaza from here on after will become a critical lens, a reading tool, a theorizing framework through which we ought to conduct any responsible work and thought in the sciences and the humanities, on history and the future, the planet and climate change, racial justice and human rights.

*

On day 460 of genocide, I was at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in New Orleans. I had prepared a presentation on a poem by the Palestinian poet Hiba Abu Nada about whom I first learned on October 20, 2023, the day she was murdered by an Israeli airstrike on her family home in Khan Younis. I first heard Hiba’s voice reciting her poem “Yā waḥdana” in a video that was going viral along with the news of her murder, and I received her voice as a call from which to launch my work thereafter, at least while we live in genocide, from Gaza that is no longer just a place but a locus and ethos, a signpost in place that has also become a source point of time, a counter point in history, an end and a beginning.[7]

As a writer, translator, and scholar of Arabic literature, and from my distance in the US, I have always prided myself on maintaining a close connection with the literary and cultural scene in the Arab world. But still, I hadn’t heard of Hiba Abu Nada until she was murdered. This underscores the unforgivable abandonment of Gaza even by those who claim solidarity, by those who are closest in geography and in commitment. 

Since then, I have translated several of Hiba’s poems to English and have been returning to them—and thinking them through—in relation to the purpose and direction of any scholarship in the humanities while the shedding of Palestinian blood continues. The poem from which I had planned to launch my MLA presentation is a short, masterful piece through which Hiba Abu Nada builds on a conversation with her towering immediate predecessor, Mahmoud Darwish (died 2008), through his instantly recognizable phrase: yā waḥdanā (O, our alone-ness / O, how alone we are!).

O! How alone we are!
All the others have won their wars
and you were left in your mud,
barren.

Darwish, don’t you know?
No poetry will return to the lonely
what was lost, what was
stolen.

How alone we are!
This is another age of ignorance. Cursed are those
who divided us in war and marched in your funeral
as one.

How alone we are!
This earth is an open market,
and your great countries have been auctioned away,
gone!

How alone we are!
This is an age of insolence,
and no one will stand by our side,
Never.

O! How alone we are!
Wipe away your poems, old and new,
and all these tears. And you, O Palestine,
pull yourself together.[8]

Darwish’s phrase is unusual in its construction and its bending of Arabic grammar. The use of the particle yā brings to mind both the nidā, the second person address or apostrophe (O! or O, you…!) and the verbs of wonder and exclamation (O how…!). What follows is the adverbial “alone” which Darwish uses with a first-person plural suffix nā. The phrase waḥdana itself is common. It is how we would describe being alone (kunnā waḥdana, we were alone) or indicate doing something alone (qātalnā waḥdana, we fought alone). But when Darwish combines the yā with waḥdana, something is disrupted in the ear and mind of the Arabic speaker, something that lands like an error, that feels like trespass, as if to say that language must be defamiliarized or made new to contain the magnitude to the Palestinian tragedy.

Darwish made this pronouncement of utter Palestinian alone-ness in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Beirut and the horrors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres.[9] Between 1500–3500 Palestinians and Lebanese were brutally killed by the invading Israeli army and its Lebanese collaborators in Sabra and Shatila, underscoring Palestine as a paradigm of defiant alone-ness and just resistance in the face of Arab and World complicity. Darwish’s phrase’s resounding finality not only brings to mind the many Palestinian tragedies that preceded 1982 and that riddle history since 1948 and even earlier, but it also carries echoes of other noncompromising Palestinian voices who called out the world's abandonment and betrayal, such as the writer, journalist, and leader Kanafani (assassinated by the Mossad in Beirut in 1972).

Darwish later varies this phrase in the refrain of his monumental poem “In Praise of the Tall Shadow.”[10] In the aftermath of the massacres Israeli and Lebanese allies committed in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, Darwish left the city after the leadership of the PLO was expelled from Lebanon to Tunisia. The PLO gathered a year later in February 1983 in Algiers for the conference of the National Palestinian Council, where Darwish performed his poem.

Hiba was only 32 years old when she was murdered by the Israeli airstrike. She had a whole world of poetry ahead of her, and, as her short poem shows, she had a remarkably learned and confident poetic voice through which she was able to interrogate her immediate and distant tradition. Her confrontation with Darwish and her cooptation of his phrase present a subtle critique of a major poet who is sometimes accused of elitism and an exceptional experience that doesn’t reflect the plight of the ordinary Palestinian: “Darwish, don’t you know?” Like every serious poet, Abu Nada confronts her predecessors and contends with her immediate and distant past. She takes Darwish to her Gaza by choosing to write in metered and rhymed Arabic verse, in a way claiming a poetic stance closer to the Arabic archetype, to the original sound, than Darwish and free verse poetry. Her formal commitment more closely links her to the archetypal Arabic qasida, the master form in Arabic, which always launches from a confrontation with Time.[11] In doing so, she conjures in the mind—or summons to the surface of her poem—a long legacy of Arabic poetry to which she and Darwish belong. Her metered, rhymed piece adheres to the classical rules of Arabic prosody while making a resounding timely proclamation of utter “alone-ness.” Addressing Darwish, her immediate predecessor, Abu Nada also conjures up a long Arabic legacy of confronting time and its calamities with defiant “alone-ness,” from al-Shanfara (died c. 525) to al-Samawʾal (died c. 560) to al-Khansa (died c. 645) to al-Mutanabbi (d. 965).

These were the poets I was hoping to bring with me to the MLA: Hiba Abu Nada and the voices of a fifteen-hundred-year-old poetic tradition to which she belonged. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Hiba and I along with all of them were already excluded, left for dead, by the organization that refused to take a stand against Gaza’s eradication. Presenting my paper at the MLA convention did not only feel like a compromise of myself and my integrity as a scholar but also, and more importantly, like a betrayal of Hiba’s memory.

My fellow panelists, Nouri Gana, Jeff Sacks, Anthony Alessandrini, and I decided to abstain from giving our papers. Instead, we used our panel, “Poetry after Gaza,” to protest the convention and to voice our horror and disappointment at the organization that relinquished its mission as a “champion of intellection freedom” and a supporter of “impartiality, fairness, and justice throughout the humanities ecosystem.” That was our last MLA convention. We were there to announce our exit from the organization whose Executive Council had shamefully refused to allow its members to debate the proposed Resolution 2025-1 to Endorse the 2005 Palestinian BDS Call.[12] The MLA had decided that it was safer and more profitable to remain complicit in genocide than to uphold its own values and principles. Its Executive Committee was hiding behind “faux-legalistic language” not merely out of cowardice but also out of greed.[13] They had already “cravenly signed anti-BDS clauses in order to obtain contracts, without informing or consulting with members.”[14] And for many of us, it was clear that we can’t and won’t be part of an organization whose leadership was willing to step over the widening pool of blood, the blood of our colleagues, the blood of our students, which might as well be our own blood, and keep on conducting their business as usual.

*

It would have been treason to present my paper at the MLA, an organization that didn’t feel called to action when Israel destroyed all the universities in Gaza. Students and professors, our own colleagues, and people who could have been us, have been arrested, humiliated, tortured, disappeared, and burned alive.

I didn’t give my talk at the MLA because on my mind was Shaaban al-Dalou, the young man we all watched burn alive. The scene doesn’t tolerate commentary. It doesn’t leave room for the parasitical to pontificate. We all saw a young man burn alive, and the best we can do is not ever move on, and live with the fact that, yet again, the unspeakable was singed into world memory.[15] Shaaban was injured in the head lying in a makeshift bed in a tent outside al-Aqsa Hospital. He was a software engineering student at al-Azhar University. I know that he was working on his statement of purpose while he lay injured in the courtyard of the hospital: he and I were part of a mentoring network founded by my friend and colleague Ahmed Issa, Scholarships for Ghazza, which helps students in Gaza secure scholarships to continue their education. Despite Israel’s massacres, starvation, border closure, and other violences, the network encourages students in Gaza to imagine a time after this horror. One of those students was Shaaban. He was planning to apply to graduate school. “Thank you for the opportunity,” he had typed in a message to a group at one point. He was grateful. After he was injured and members of the groups sent him get-well wishes, he wrote back: “Inshallah. I will. Alhamdillah I am better now.” We all saw him burn alive a few days later, on October 14, 2024.[16]

And on my mind was Hiba Abu Nada herself, her laptop, which her sister Somaia told me was retrieved from under the rubble with her body. Hiba was gone but the family hoped the laptop would be resuscitated so that they could publish a life in writing taken too soon. Hiba’s confident, composed voice was echoing in my head. I didn’t want to drag her and the other poets she summons as corpses into the conference room in New Orleans. She wouldn’t have wanted to participate in the spectacle. That would have been violence. That would have been complicity. Instead, I was silent and made room for their voices. I read Hiba’s poem and the poems it engages with, a long lineage of defiant alone-ness that would occupy the space. I wanted Hiba’s assertion that “No poetry will return to the lonely what was lost, what was stolen,” to ring in the conference room, so that the walls of “the ivory tower” would crumble, so that we may all remember, if ever we forget, that this is genocide and none of us will survive it, dead or alive.

Gaza is not the subject of the next paper. Its writers and artists are not bait for a new grant or fellowship. Its murdered children are not the subject of the next ethnographic study, or the next anthology or the next art installation or digital humanities project. Gaza is a counterpoint in history. The end of the world as we know it. Nothing should ever be the same after this, in Arabic studies, the larger Middle Eastern studies, and the humanities at large. Nothing should ever be the same after Gaza, especially for those of us who study language and live in it, those of us who read history and claim to learn from it.

In the moment of genocide, there is no room for the stuffy scholarly approach and its pretenses. There is no luxury of feigned objectivity, the arrangement and rearrangement of knowledge, the flaunting of expertise, and the subscription to the tidy and constructed historical approach and its artificial periodization. This is history, unfolding now, and we are all implicated and complicit.