tag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:/newsLiteratures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance | News2022-03-23T17:00:00-04:00tag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1441702022-03-23T17:00:00-04:002022-03-23T18:29:56-04:00Aftershocks: An Interview with Nadia Owusu<blockquote> <p>Born to a Ghanian father and an Armenian American mother, Nadia Owusu spent her childhood in Italy, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and England, before moving to the United States at 18, where she has lived ever since. <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Aftershocks/Nadia-Owusu/9781982111229"></a></p>
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<p>Born to a Ghanian father and an Armenian American mother, Nadia Owusu spent her childhood in Italy, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and England, before moving to the United States at 18, where she has lived ever since. <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Aftershocks/Nadia-Owusu/9781982111229" target="_blank">Aftershocks</a> is Owusu’s debut memoir, in which the Whiting award-winning author breaks time and space to construct a higher order of meaning — a meaning that bridges personal and generational trauma, war and natural disasters, racism, economics and slavery, religion, national policy, health epidemics, class, colorism, and linguistic hierarchies, biases, bigotry and memory. In the following interview with Owusu, I ask her to talk about the process of documenting all of the things that interest her in a radically reinvented form.</p>
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<figure class="image-left"><a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Aftershocks/Nadia-Owusu/9781982111229" target="_blank"><img alt="Cover Of Aftershocks By Nadia Owusu" height="920" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/465469/cover_of_aftershocks_by_nadia_owusu.jpg" width="600"></a></figure>
<p><strong>Arman Chowdhury</strong>: I wanted to first ask you about the narrative structure of <em>Aftershocks</em>. I wonder if you could share at what point during your writing or thinking process you came to realize that, conceptually, the stages of an earthquake were a more effective way to frame your memoir than, say, recounting stories and histories in linear time? I ask because the framing itself operates with a decolonial consciousness, and because the book takes great care in teaching readers how to approach the text, explaining in one prefatory note, for instance, that terms such as <em>foreshock</em>, <em>mainshock</em>, and <em>aftershock</em> have no strict scientific definition, implying that we are always renaming and recontextualizing our past according to our present frame of mind and circumstances.</p>
<p><strong>Nadia Owusu</strong>: Thanks for this question. I do think of my book as having a decolonial consciousness.</p>
<p><em>Aftershocks</em> started as a private project. I was coming out of a period of deep depression and had a strong sense that, to stay on the other side of it, I needed to write myself a new story to live in, because the one I’d been given had become uninhabitable. I had no intention of publishing it, and in fact was working on an ultimately failed novel at the same time.</p>
<p>Instinctually, I knew that the work I’d set out to do in my private project could not be done along a straight line. That’s not how I experience time. My father belonged to the Ashanti tribe of Ghana, and the Ashanti worldview—despite colonization and the spread of Christianity—continues to hold that our ancestors are present in our lives. They watch over and interfere with us. In many African cultures, time is circular and there are circles within circles. We move in and out of them. The past and present coexist.</p>
<p>Years into the writing, once I decided that I was going to try to write a book, using the raw material I started writing for myself, I knew that I wanted to maintain the project’s essential character. It’s a memoir, but it’s also intended to engage deeply with history. It needed to move back and forth between my more private griefs and struggles to larger forces. I wanted to show how history is always present in our day to day lives, whether we notice it or not. But I also knew that I’d need to give readers a railing to hold onto.</p>
<p>Earthquakes have always been a sort of guiding metaphor for my life, ever since, after a long absence, my mother showed up on the same day as a catastrophic earthquake struck Armenia—her ancestral homeland. In early versions of the manuscript, seismic terms were everywhere, but I wasn’t aware of what I was doing. A friend who is one of my early readers pointed it out to me, and it was an epiphanic moment. Then, I began to approach the metaphor with intention.</p>
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<p class="h3">Earthquakes have always been a sort of guiding metaphor for my life, ever since, after a long absence, my mother showed up on the same day as a catastrophic earthquake struck Armenia—her ancestral homeland.</p>
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<p><strong>AC</strong>: I can’t help but linger on the conceit of earthquakes. Throughout <em>Aftershocks</em>, certain images, facts, and revelations are invoked over and over. They reverberate like seismic waves and provoke a sort of psychic shuddering as we read, a sensation not unlike how we feel during actual earthquakes. Because earthquakes happen without warning, there’s almost always a moment of confusion when, before realizing that the ground is moving, we think that we are shaking from within. I wonder if one important question your memoir is raising is centered on this confusion. Are the waves that destabilize us, and threaten to define us, generated from within or beyond? Where does the internal end and the external begin, and is there even a separation between the two? Is it impossible to locate an epicenter for these tremors?</p>
<p><strong>NO</strong>: Yes, I love how you’ve put this. I vividly remember my father telling me about how the trauma of the Armenian genocide was in my mother’s family’s DNA. I didn’t know anything about epigenetics—how trauma can change our genetic make-up and be inherited. I was seven. But that idea stuck with me. I think it’s very much connected to what you’re saying about earthquakes. Ancestral memories mingle with our own and affect how we experience and interpret the world. I’m often overwhelmed or destabilized by strong emotions and sensations in my body that I don’t fully understand. I’ll be out walking, and a smell or sound will cause my heart to race. Or someone will say something very mundane to me, but I’ll suddenly feel a great tenderness toward them. We all carry jumbled histories in our bodies. This can make us behave in both predictable and unpredictable ways.</p>
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<p class="h3">Metaphor is a privilege, meaning metaphor belongs to those who, like me, came out less scathed.</p>
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<p><strong>AC</strong>: On the question of metaphor itself, you write, “Metaphor is a privilege, meaning metaphor belongs to those who, like me, came out less scathed.” You quote President George W. Bush proclaiming, “Our war on terror begins,” following the September 11 attacks. You write, “The word war has war inside of it. The metaphor was bloodthirsty…The War on Terror became a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, a war in Syria…No story, no metaphor, is innocent of theft, omission, or violence.” I wonder then, if stories and metaphors can heal but also harm, what responsibility do we have toward language when we are writing stories and depicting histories, not only of our own but also of others? More generally, how do you approach craft in your writing? Do you have a specific set of values regarding craft?</p>
<p><strong>NO</strong>: My work as a writer is political. I have no qualms about that.</p>
<p>In her essay “Poet as Teacher—Human as Poet—Teacher as Human,” Audre Lorde writes “I am a human being. I am a Black woman, a poet, mother, lover, teacher, friend, fat, shy, generous, loyal, crotchety. If I do not bring all of who I am to whatever I do, then I bring nothing, or nothing of lasting worth, for I have withheld my essence.”</p>
<p>Audre Lorde pushed her writing students to scrutinize the parts of themselves they most feared, and to use what they learned from that practice to shift power in the world. I believe in that. And, I believe in what Chinua Achebe said about what it means for Africans to “repossess” our stories. I think this goes for anybody whose land and histories have been stolen and colonized: Repossession needs its enabling stories and the writers to compose them, “drawing as it must, from every resource of memory and imagination and from a familiarity with our own history, our arts and culture; but also, from an unflinching consciousness of the flaws that blemished our inheritance.” In other words, we must seek to tell the truth, even the difficult truths about ourselves and our homes.</p>
<p>I’m also interested in the ideas of thinkers like Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman whose work pushes me to practice writing as though the future that I envision is not only possible but inevitable, even while engaging honestly with ongoing injustice and violence.<br>
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<strong>AC</strong>: How conscious were you of the audience while writing the book? Did you fear being misconstrued? The memoir is full of instances where the narration takes a step back from personal or family story and references literary texts, social theories, cultural histories, colonial histories, and injustices in postcolonial societies, almost as a means to seek refuge, to look for answers. These references are often juxtaposed with Nadia’s (your) frame of mind or the choices she makes at a particular moment. In the chapter <em>African Girls</em>, for example, you invoke Frantz Fanon and Toni Morrison while Nadia navigates the “racial pecking order” in a boarding school in England. I wonder what prompted you to engage the works of other thinkers in such depth, and if it is it related to the question of audience, of sensing a need to contextualize Nadia’s actions to readers. </p>
<p><strong>NO</strong>: Because I began <em>Aftershocks</em> as a private project, I didn’t think about audience at all for many years. I had a strong sense of purpose that was connected to what you’re saying about contextualizing, only I was doing it for myself, not for anyone else. Like many writers, I write to think through questions I’m carrying. And, with the project that became <em>Aftershocks</em>, some of those questions were: <em>Who am I in the world?</em> And, <em>Where do I fit into the histories of my family?</em> Especially because I grew up outside of my parents’ cultures, Ghanaian and Armenian, I wanted a deeper understanding of where they came from. This required research. And, ever since I was very young, I’ve often turned to books to help me make connections and to find comfort or courage in them. So, this is something that is just natural to me and my process.</p>
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<p class="h3">I write to think through questions I’m carrying. And, with the project that became Aftershocks, some of those questions were: Who am I in the world? And, Where do I fit into the histories of my family?</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>AC</strong>: At the end of the memoir, we witness Nadia transformed. She uncovers certain beliefs and biases within her that she hadn’t known existed. With new self-knowledge, she begins to see her relationships to her father, her mothers, her siblings, and people closest to her under a new light. She enters a state of terraformation. I wonder if writing this book, too, was a transformative/terraformative experience. Would you say it changed you as a writer? As a person? And where do you go from here? What questions have been on your mind lately?</p>
<p><strong>NO</strong>: Yes, absolutely. I learned so much from doing this work. And, although I started writing it from a place of grief, as I went deeper, I found that I was writing toward love—for myself, the people in my life, and the many places I’ve called home in complicated ways. I’ll never have an easy sense of belonging, but I embrace that now as a beautiful part of who I am. There were times when I was so afraid of my longing that it hardened me and closed me off. Now, more often, it makes me softer and more open. In terms of where I go from here: I plan to keep doing this sort of liberatory work, not just in my writing but in other parts of my life as well. I’m working on a novel now, and while it is not autobiographical in a direct way, some of its questions and obsessions build on what I was asking in Aftershocks. I find that when you ask questions, you often come up with deeper questions rather than answers.</p>
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<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Owusu Chowdhury" height="1198" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/465886/owusu_chowdhury.png" width="600"></figure>
<p><a href="https://www.nadiaaowusu.com/" target="_blank"><strong>Nadia Owusu</strong></a> is a Ghanaian and Armenian-American writer and urbanist. Her first book, <em>Aftershocks, </em> topped many most-anticipated and best book of the year lists, including <em>The New York Times</em>, <em>The Oprah Magazine</em>, <em>Vogue, TIME</em>, <em>Vulture, </em>and the BBC. It was a <em>New York Times Book Review </em>Editor’s Choice. Nadia is the recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in <em>The New York Times,</em><em> Orion, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Slate,</em> <em>Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, </em>and others. By day, Nadia is Director of Storytelling at Frontline Solutions, a Black-owned consulting firm working for justice and liberation in partnership with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. She teaches creative writing at the Mountainview MFA program and lives in Brooklyn, New York. </p>
<p><strong>Arman Chowdhury</strong> is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Notre Dame. He is a prose writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh, interested in studying and writing fiction that challenge traditional modes of literary realism and that frustrate the desire for a stable and coherent world. He studied Creative Writing and Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. At Notre Dame, he is also an Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM) Fellow and a Graduate Affiliate for Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance. His work has been supported by <a href="https://loft.org/" target="_blank">The Loft Literary Center</a>, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>Arman Chowdhurytag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1432612022-02-08T09:00:00-05:002022-02-08T10:21:00-05:00Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance Launches New Website<p style="margin-bottom:16px; margin-top:16px"><span style="font-variant:normal; font-weight:400; white-space:pre-wrap"><em style="font-style:italic">The website redesign reflects the growth of the online literary event series over the past two years, and includes an interactive feature that maps the migrations of affiliated writers, artists, and scholars. </em></span></p><figure class="image-right"><a href="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/459645/original/screen_shot_of_the_lit_of_exile_website_landing_page.png"><img alt="Screen Shot Of The Lit Of Exile Website Landing Page" height="490" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/459645/screen_shot_of_the_lit_of_exile_website_landing_page.png" width="600"></a></figure>
<p><strong>Notre Dame, IN</strong>. Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance, a research collective and lecture series focused on the study of literatures of the global Middle East/Southwest Asia and North Africa, founded by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi and housed at the University of Notre Dame’s Initiative on Race and Resilience, is excited to announce the launch of its new website, <a href="https://litofexile.nd.edu">litofexile.nd.edu</a>.</p>
<p>The website was redesigned to reflect the growth of the research collective and its online event series. The new website includes an archive of recorded events featuring transnational writers and scholars from Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Colombia, Chile and the United States whose work bears witness to truth and history and to the global struggle for freedom.</p>
<p>“Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance is a space for writers and artists who consider art as a form of transformational testimony,” said Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. “It is a space for examining in our own words and images how resistance movements and political violence in our ancestral and adopted homelands have shaped our language, narratives, and collective and individual identities.”</p>
<p>The site features an interactive map that traces the personal migration routes of featured guests, along with members of the research collective. Writers such as Sonallah Ibrahim, Sinan Antoon, Solmaz Sharif, Ibtisam Azem, Isabella Hammad, Elias Khoury, Susan Abulhawa, and Mosab Abu Toha are featured alongside scholars who study literatures that have been shaped by transformational movements, decolonization, migration, and human rights violations. Together, their migration paths illustrate trends of movement over the Mediterranean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean. Users of the interactive map can learn more about each writer/artist/scholar through links to recorded conversations, written interviews, and more. The map was developed by poet, artist, and researcher Amira Hanafi.</p>
<figure class="image-left"><a href="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/459646/original/screen_shot_of_the_lit_of_exile_interactive_digital_map_embedded_on_the_website.png"><img alt="Screen Shot Of The Lit Of Exile Interactive Digital Map Embedded On The Website" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/459646/screen_shot_of_the_lit_of_exile_interactive_digital_map_embedded_on_the_website.png"></a></figure>
<p>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance invites visitors to explore the new website and to register for upcoming events, which are held monthly live on Zoom. Lina Meruane and Nadia Owusu are featured guests on Friday, February 25, 2022 at 12:00pm EST. Randa Jarrar and Zeyn Joukhadar come into conversation with Mejdulene B. Shomali on Friday, March 25, 2022 at 12:00pm EST. Visitors can also watch videos of past events featuring literary readings and conversations between writers, filmmakers, and scholars.</p>
<p><strong>About Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong></p>
<p>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance is a research collective and lecture series taking an interdisciplinary approach to the global Middle East/Southwest Asia and North Africa. Launched by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, it is co-sponsored by the University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and housed at the Initiative on Race and Resilience, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies.</p>
<figure class="image-right"><a href="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/459653/original/screen_shot_of_the_people_section_of_the_lit_of_exile_website.png"><img alt="Screen Shot Of The People Section Of The Lit Of Exile Website" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/459653/screen_shot_of_the_people_section_of_the_lit_of_exile_website.png"></a></figure>
<p>The Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance research collective includes Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies faculty members Asher Kaufman, Ebrahim Moosa, Atalia Omer, and Ernesto Verdeja, and College of Arts and Letters faculty members Alison Rice, Perin Gürel, Olivier Morel, Ernest Morrell, Francisco Robles, and Mark Sanders. External collaborators include Chana Morgenstern, co-founder of the Archives of the Disappeared Initiative and Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literatures at Cambridge University; Sinan Antoon, Iraqi poet, novelist and translator, and Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University; Refqa Abu-Remaileh, Associate Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Film at Freie Universität Berlin and Principal Investigator of PalREAD; Amir Ahmadi Arian, Iranian novelist, journalist, and non-fiction writer, and Ammiel Alcalay, poet, novelist, translator, critic, and professor at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center.</p>
<p><br>
<strong>Media Contact</strong><br>
Amira Hanafi<br>
Coordinator<br>
ahanafi@nd.edu</p>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistancetag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1431092022-02-01T16:00:00-05:002022-02-02T21:14:07-05:00Violence and Reconciliation: A Reading List<p>The articles and essays in this reading list give a glimpse of the scholarly concerns of members of the Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance research collective, ranging from lyric reflections on migration and dislocation, to theorizing paths forward for postcolonial settler societies.…</p><p>The articles and essays in this reading list give a glimpse of the scholarly concerns of members of the Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance research collective, ranging from lyric reflections on migration and dislocation, to theorizing paths forward for postcolonial settler societies.</p>
<p> </p>
<figure class="image-default"><img alt="Dp247599 Scaled E1583967458614" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/458815/dp247599_scaled_e1583967458614.jpg"></figure>
<h2>Amir Ahmadi Arian</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/10/17/one-word-avareh/" target="_blank"><strong>One Word: Avareh</strong></a><br>
<em>The Paris Review</em>, October 17, 2019</p>
<p>I have lived outside Iran, my home country, for almost a decade, and I am yet to know what to call myself.</p>
<h2>Perin E Gürel</h2>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhaa029" target="_blank"><strong>Not without My Daughter in Turkey: Transnational Politics of Orientalism</strong></a><br>
<em>Diplomatic History</em>, Volume 44, Issue 5, November 2020, pp. 729–755</p>
<p>A riveting narrative depicting the entrapment of an American woman and her daughter in Iran, <em>Not without My Daughter</em> may still be the most well-known depiction of post-revolutionary Iran in the United States. According to the 1987 book memoir and the 1991 movie by the same name, Michigan homemaker Betty Mahmoody agreed to visit Iran in 1984 for a short vacation on the assurances of her doctor husband, a native of Iran whom she had married in the United States. Once in the Islamic Republic, however, her husband forced her and their four-year-old daughter Mahtob to stay in the country. She was allowed to get a divorce and leave; however, Iranian custody laws meant she would have had to leave Mahtob behind. She refused: not without my daughter.</p>
<h2>Alison Rice</h2>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/0957155820961639" target="_blank"><strong>Activistes féministes: Francophone Women Writers and International Human Rights </strong></a><br>
<em>French Cultural Studies</em>, Volume 31, Issue 4, October 2020, <span class="articlePageRange">pp. 318–328</span></p>
<p>Several prominent contemporary Francophone women writers have embraced activism in compelling forms. In her written creations, Maïssa Bey from Algeria has continually called attention to the lack of women’s rights in her homeland; she has also initiated writing workshops for women to reflect and express themselves. Fatou Diome, who left Senegal for Strasbourg, has shed light in her work on racism and sexism that African immigrants often face in Europe, and she has created an association in her homeland to help individuals become financially solvent. Yanick Lahens from Haiti has similarly devoted herself to activist endeavours on her island, including co-founding a library and working with youth after the earthquake. As these authors seek to create compassion through writing, they also promote empathy through their engagement outside the text, empowering people of various backgrounds by providing them with literacy skills, business acumen, and a sense that their story matters.</p>
<h2>Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</h2>
<p><a href="https://lithub.com/reading-is-a-political-encounter-on-violence-language-and-selective-forgetting/" target="_blank"><strong>Reading is a Political Encounter: On Violence, Language, and Selective Forgetting</strong></a><br>
<em>Literary Hub</em>, August 3, 2021</p>
<p><span itemprop="articleBody">History class, Tehran, 1994: Our teacher, a devout woman with a white diamond-shaped face framed by a black hijab, asked us to transcribe in our notebooks the heroic story of Ruholla Khomeini’s rise to power from our history textbook. Woven into the story was an invective against America, referred to as “the great Satan,” the impure empire against which Khomeini’s halo of purity shone brighter. We were instructed to copy the story five times. I refused, stating that I considered the exercise to be an act of brain washing. I have no idea to this day how I knew to call the exercise by its name. I’ve often wondered if what provoked me more than the attempt to indoctrinate us with the story of Khomeini’s heroic rise to power, a narrative sanctified through repetition, was how facile and unmasked her objective was. Easy does it, she must have thought to herself.</span></p>
<h2>Ernesto Verdeja</h2>
<p><a href="https://everdeja.weebly.com/uploads/1/7/3/7/17374009/verdeja_recon_postcolonial.pdf" target="_blank"><strong>Political Reconciliation in Postcolonial Settler Societies</strong></a><br>
<em>International Political Science Review</em>, Volume 38, Issue 2, 2017, pp. <span style="font-variant:normal; font-weight:400; white-space:pre-wrap"><span style="font-style:normal">227-241</span></span></p>
<p><span itemprop="articleBody">This article presents a theory of reconciliation for postcolonial settler societies. It asks: what are the scope, substance and limitations of a normative theory of political reconciliation for historical wrongs in these societies? The article begins with an assessment of communitarian and agonistic theories and then outlines an alternative based on mutual respect, which includes three core elements: critical reflection, symbolic and material recognition, and political participation. The case of the United States and Native Americans is used to illustrate this alternative theory.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<hr>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>
<h2> </h2>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistancetag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1422132021-12-03T12:00:00-05:002022-02-01T14:48:47-05:00Best Barbarian: An Interview with Roger Reeves<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Cover Of King Me by Roger Reeves featuring a painting by Jean Michel Basquiat" height="900" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/454131/cover_of_king_me_by_roger_reeves.jpg" width="600"></figure> <p><strong>Arman Chowdhury</strong>: The cover art for your debut poetry collection, <a href="https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/king-me-by-roger-reeves/"></a>…</p><figure class="image-left"><img alt="Cover Of King Me by Roger Reeves featuring a painting by Jean Michel Basquiat" height="900" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/454131/cover_of_king_me_by_roger_reeves.jpg" width="600"></figure>
<p><strong>Arman Chowdhury</strong>: The cover art for your debut poetry collection, <a href="https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/king-me-by-roger-reeves/" target="_blank">King Me</a>, is an artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat called Charles the First, which in turn is a tribute to jazz musician Charlie Parker. Both Basquiat and Parker make appearances in your poems in <em>King Me</em>. On the bottom-left corner of the Basquiat cover art, there’s a line that says, “MOST YOUNG KINGS GET THEIR HEAD CUT OFF.” In the poem "Some Young Kings," you rewrite this line as, “Most young kings return home without their heads.” I wonder if you could talk about the urge to engage other artists and art forms in your work. How would you situate your art in relation to Basquiat’s and Parker’s, for instance?</p>
<p><strong>Roger Reeves</strong>: Art, seems to me, is always a conversation with what has come before it. As artists, we are nothing but an aggregation of our influences, our loves, our desires, our hates, our experiences. Artists like Charlie Parker and Jean-Michel Basquiat, in their making, provide material for my own making. Basquiat’s paintings, and Parker’s runs and solos are not to be treated as museum pieces, but are to be taken down from the walls, taken out of the recordings, examined, revised, played with.</p>
<p>Parker and Basquiat also stand at an interstitial space for me, the interstitial line between mastery and the deformation of mastery, eloquence and the deformation of eloquence. In Parker, there’s his innovation in terms of bebop, extending the jazz tradition (a type of deformation), but there’s also his practice. Parker is famously known for getting his butt handed to him at cutting contests as a young man. Rather than think he had no facility with his horn, he holed up in his house and practiced. He revised himself into genius. I think about this sort of revision, play, and practice as useful for me—it doesn’t have to come out like Mozart—in one take—but I can revise into genius. Basquiat’s cross-outs perform a similar sort of lesson. In the quote above, you visually re-present Basquiat striking through a word he painted. This sort of revision is beyond “style” or “swag” or “flair” but is a way of thinking about error, revision, and play. In this way, he moves against eloquence and simultaneously makes an elegant phrase. Quite simply, both Basquiat and Parker “say” what they need to say in whatever color, tone, timbre, or register. It’s a Malcolm X school of poetics—by any means necessary.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">I can revise into genius.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>AC</strong>: <em>King Me</em> is filled with keen observations of the non-human world. You invite a lot of birds, animals, insects, and parasites to inhabit your poems, living or dead. You let the creatures exist on their own terms, exist next to humans but not in service of. Why is it important to include non-human living beings in your poems? How do they (productively) complicate your observations and arguments regarding the human world?</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: It is important to include non-human living beings in my work because non-human living beings exist, express sentience, and inflect upon the “human,” and we, “humans,” inflect upon non-human living beings. I can’t help but think of the opening of scholar and poet Fred Moten’s <em>In The Break</em>: “The history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” In this case, “objects” refers to Black folks. And, it’s Moten’s troubling of the “human” and playing in that abjection that contributes to my deployment and thinking about non-human living beings. I want to trouble sentience and our hierarchizing and aggrandizing the human. I’m also interested in thinking about how inadequate the notion of the human and humanity is in its relationship to subjects like human rights, philosophy, and the history of racial capitalism. In fact, the human and humanity might be the actual problem—what we think it means and what it allows us to do to those that are not considered human. My thinking is quite influenced by writers and scholars like Sylvia Wynter, Cedric Robinson, Ruth Gilmore, and Bruno LaTour.</p>
<p><strong>AC</strong>: In his novel <em>Erasure</em>, author Percival Everett exposes biases in the publishing industry, rooted in racial assumptions, that essentially dictate who gets to produce what kind of literature. The protagonist in this autofictional novel is a Black writer whose work often gets rejected by editors and is confusing to reviewers when the subject matter of his books has no bearing on his race. In the book, one reviewer writes, “The novel is finely crafted, with fully developed characters, rich language and subtle play with the plot, but one is lost to understand what this reworking of Aeschylus’ <em>The Persians</em> has to do with the African American experience.” The protagonist’s frustration lies with the fact that white writers aren’t subjected to the same standards. Would you say Black writers, or writers of color, are more scrupulously scrutinized regarding what they (ought to) write about? Given that your own work generously engages various cultures and histories, what is your opinion on what is and isn’t off-limits for an artist in terms of subject matter? And how does “authenticity” figure in this debate? Are we less authentic as artists if we write about people or issues that are apparently far removed from us?</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: Yes, Black writers or writers of color are more scrupulously scrutinized regarding what others feel they should write. This statement is not new or ground-breaking. It’s a water is wet sort of statement. However, I think it is a truth that bears repeating, bears remembering and saying—much in the way that there will be more books written about the Civil War and George Washington every year. Unfortunately, the literary critical tradition of commenting, assessing Black creative work begins in racism with Phillis Wheatley’s preface written by the twenty-one White gentlemen of Boston in 1773 authorizing and authenticating that indeed Wheatley wrote the poems in the book herself, and with Thomas Jefferson’s dismissal of Wheatley as a poet in <em>Notes on the State of Virginia</em> because ‘religion could make a Phillis Wheatley but it could not make her a poet.’ Did she/he/they write that thing that they said they wrote and is what she/he/they wrote really a poem, novel, short story, etc. are the two historically racist entry points or poles of literary criticism that focused writings by Black folks. Check William Dean Howells’ review of Paul Laurence Dunbar. However, scholars and poets like Meta DuEwa Jones, Brent Hayes Edwards, Evie Shockley, Randi Gill-Sadler are asking different questions: questions about how Black writers do what they do. These scholar-artists start from the place that Black writers have a presiding intelligence that is historically and aesthetically rigorous.</p>
<p>But you’ve asked me about writers and writing and what is off-limits. I think nothing is off-limits to the writer. But, whatever one does choose to write about, do it well, thoughtfully, ethically, compellingly. Be nuanced. Be large, gracious, complicated especially when depicting others. I will never tell a writer what they can and cannot write. However, at the end of the day, we must deal with what’s on the page and whether that succeeds.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">Fascism is en vogue in the United States (not that fascism wasn’t here before (i.e. America); it's just that it felt like before Trump, fascism was the uncle who slept in the basement and only came out every now and then to buy some Black and Milds. Over the last five years, it feels as if our feckless uncle became the school board president, mayor, chief of police, and the ombudsman at the local college as well as the dogcatcher).</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<figure class="image-right"><img alt="Cover of Best Barbarian by Roger Reeves" height="900" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/454126/best_barbarian.jpg" width="600"></figure>
<p><strong>AC</strong>: <em>The New Yorker</em> published two of your poems within the last year and a quarter: "Grendel" in September 2020, and "Standing in the Atlantic" in October 2021. Are these poems part of your upcoming collection, <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393609332" target="_blank">Best Barbarian</a>, out in March 2022? There are textural similarities between these poems and the poems in <em>King Me</em>, but the newer poems seem to have tighter focus and quieter language. The language almost approaches a narrative form in the newer poems, appearing more vital in its conviction, more total in its devastation. My reading might be far from accurate as I don’t have access to the entire collection, but I wonder what you have to say about <em>Best </em><em>Barbarian </em>in your own words. What are you grappling with in the new collection? Where does it converge with <em>King Me</em>? Where does it diverge? Has your view of the world changed between the publications of the two books?</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: The two poems you’ve read in <em>The New Yorker</em> are from <em>Best Barbarian</em>. I think the language is quieter as you noticed. And my obsessions are my obsessions—how to live as a Black man in a country that is hostile to my living, aesthetics, beauty. Yes, all of those concerns were in <em>King Me</em>. However, in this new collection, elegy is more front and center because of the passing of my father and me passing into fatherhood. When my daughter was born, one of my earliest thoughts was, “I’m going to die.” Something about her birth signaled my death in a visceral and totalizing fashion. My death became real to me in a way that it was not before. Hence the quietness. I think I passed into something there. And, in <em>Best Barbarian</em>, I’m trying to think about (not figure out) what it is that I am passing into—metaphysically, aesthetically, lyrically.</p>
<p>Also, the manuscript is written through the end of the Obama presidency into and through the Trump years. America was all ‘burn, baby, burn,’ and as my mother said, the tension in the air felt just like the 1960s. Fascism is en vogue in the United States (not that fascism wasn’t here before (i.e. America); it's just that it felt like before Trump, fascism was the uncle who slept in the basement and only came out every now and then to buy some Black and Milds. Over the last five years, it feels as if our feckless uncle became the school board president, mayor, chief of police, and the ombudsman at the local college as well as the dogcatcher). Also, overt racism could and can get you elected and help you gain Twitter followers. So you know, the world felt a little different, and that difference shaped my language, shaped the experience of language and shaped the book I wrote. </p>
<p><strong>AC</strong>: Are you working on any projects at the moment, poetry or otherwise? What are you most excited or hopeful for regarding the future?</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: I am currently working on a book of essays called <em>Dark Days</em>. We’re finalizing contracts now so I can’t quite announce it. I’m also working on a book of short stories and a novel, as well as writing new poems. Always writing new poems.</p>
<p>What am I most excited or hopeful for regarding the future? The revolution my ancestors have been and are continuing to fight for.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Portaits Of Roger Reeves And Arman Chowdhury" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/454128/portaits_of_roger_reeves_and_arman_chowdhury_.png"></figure>
<p><strong>Roger Reeves</strong>’ poems have appeared in journals such as <em>Poetry</em>, <em>Ploughshares</em>, <em>American Poetry Review</em>, <em>The Nation</em>, <em>Best American Poetry</em>, and <em>The New Yorke</em>r, among others. He was awarded a 2015 Whiting Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a 2013 NEA Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His first book is <a href="https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/king-me-by-roger-reeves/" target="_blank">King Me</a> (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), which won the Larry Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University, the Zacharis Prize from Ploughshares, and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award. His second book of poetry, <a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393609332" target="_blank">Best Barbarian</a>, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in February of 2022.</p>
<p><strong>Arman Chowdhury</strong> is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Notre Dame. He is a prose writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh, interested in studying and writing fiction that challenge traditional modes of literary realism and that frustrate the desire for a stable and coherent world. He studied Creative Writing and Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University. At Notre Dame, he is also an Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM) Fellow and a Graduate Affiliate for Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance. His work has been supported by <a href="https://loft.org/" target="_blank">The Loft Literary Center</a>, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>
<p> </p>Arman Chowdhurytag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417442021-10-08T17:00:00-04:002022-02-01T14:32:45-05:00Leaving Childhood Behind: An Interview with Mosab Abu Toha<blockquote> <p>As Mosab Abu Toha writes in his poem, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear”:</p> <p> </p> <p>“When you open my ear, touch it<br> gently.<br> My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.<br> Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium<br> when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.</p>
…</blockquote><blockquote>
<p>As Mosab Abu Toha writes in his poem, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear”:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>“When you open my ear, touch it<br>
gently.<br>
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.<br>
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium<br>
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.</p>
<p><br>
You may encounter songs in Arabic,<br>
poems in English I recite to myself,<br>
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Mosab Abu Toha was asked about the process of building a concept of “home” when physical space is under siege; how he views poetry and language(s)’s role in global society and as a means of connecting with others, crafting a deeper sense of “home”; and about his thoughts on current global society’s troubles in connecting with others, making it harder for knowledge sharing and creating a collective hominess amongst people worldwide.</p>
<p> </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear By Mosab Abu Toha" height="840" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451566/things_you_may_find_hidden_in_my_ear_by_mosab_abu_toha.jpeg" width="600"></figure>
<p><strong>Kristyn Garza:</strong> Seeing as how your poetry traverses boundaries of language and space and explores the conceptional confines of place, issues which one might consider highly political in nature, I can’t help but ask what you believe the role of language, more specifically the role of poetry is in global society? Do you think poetry is political by nature? There are many that would argue for the insistence that poetry should keep to its own microcosm of aestheticism but, then again, there are others who would argue the opposite—what are your thoughts on this? </p>
<p><strong>Mosab Abu Toha</strong>: I think that writing, especially writing poetry, is not always a decision a poet makes. A poem can be a response to an experience or a reflection on it.</p>
<p>When I think of the word <em>political</em>, I don’t only imagine my position in the world in relation to others. It’s also about me as a human. As an individual. When I write, I talk to myself, I console myself, I complain to myself. Sometimes a poem is a reflection of me in the water of a raging sea. Sometimes it’s my image on a cloud that would rain on a barren field or a flattened neighborhood, or maybe on some green fields I can never reach.</p>
<p>On other occasions, I love to create and paint beautiful new images of a place that I never saw before, primarily because I cannot leave Gaza and visit other countries when/if I wish.</p>
<p>Anyone who’s unfortunate enough to be born in a country that never knew peace, particularly in the past 100 years, cannot but be involved (in writing at least) with occupation, siege, destruction, explosions, etc. But at the same time, there is the sea, sunrise, sunset, rain, flowers, birds, and animals. Therefore, if <em>political</em> is all about engaging with life in all its components, then poetry can never but be political.</p>
<p><strong>KG</strong>: What are your thoughts on what constitutes home, place, or a space in which one belongs? Can home ever be forgotten? Can the conception and creation of “home” in relation to place be crafted using language that collects a variety of experiential details to create a sense of permanent identity as in your poem “Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear”? What are your thoughts on what language(s) should/can be used to create this metaphysical “home?”</p>
<p><strong>MAT</strong>: A <em>home</em> can be your memory of your home garden, of the hen coop, of the road to school, or of the shade of a tree on your street corner. A home is your family and your tiny footsteps that you can still gaze at, that the wind could never wipe.</p>
<p>It’s everything you take with you when you travel—in your mind.</p>
<p>You store it in your ears, in your eyes, in your nostrils, in your tongue. It’s just that you need the right place to feel and build it when you are far from it. As if it wants a special device. Maybe a phonograph?</p>
<p>It’s not easy to find a home and call it one. It may take a life.</p>
<p>It’s more difficult for us in Gaza to form the notion of <em>home</em>. Usually, one feels what it means to be home when they travel and stay away from it for some time. One feels homesick. I felt it several times when I was in the United States two years ago.</p>
<p>Because of occupation, we sometimes have a vague notion of home. I wrote a poem titled, “Like a Cloud, We Travel”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wiped out by every wind over Gaza,<br>
we are scattered on this earth,<br>
footsteps in the desert.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>We do not, or cannot, know<br>
when and how to return<br>
to the homes<br>
our ancestors loved<br>
for centuries.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Like clouds,<br>
we try to give shade and rain:<br>
the best we can.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>But deep down, we do not know<br>
whether we even belong<br>
to where we happen to exist.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Like clouds,<br>
we might visit our homes<br>
without knowing that they still are<br>
ours.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Invaders have changed much<br>
of our landscape,<br>
much or our lives.</p>
<p> </p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>KG</strong>: What is your take on English as a “global language”? There are some who view English as an oppressive force that silences other languages due to the long history of colonization and forced English acquisition. You mentioned in an interview with Philip Metres how you feel a sense of freedom writing in English, “free from the confinements of [your] existence in Gaza.” Would you say that a sharing of language, a borrowing from a “global/universal” language, helps in crafting a sense of home and global collective belonging and identity?</p>
<p><strong>MAT</strong>:I don’t think that one cares or asks who invented electricity when they use it. The same goes for medicine and airplanes, etc. English, just as all languages, is a means of communication. It’s the most-spoken language in the world. When I speak and write English, my words travel farther than they do when I do in Arabic. Arabic is a beautiful language and I write in it, too. However, there are many things that the whole world needs to hear about which are put best in English. This language is the language of science and technology. It’s also the language of colonization and mass-destruction weapons. The language Balfour used to promise Palestine to the Jews of the world. The language that made my grandfather and his family dejected refugees. The language that deprived my grandmother of picking her oranges in Yaffa.</p>
<p>In a poem I wrote titled “In the Wreck of my Library,” I wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Explosion!!!</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Both the fly and I fall,<br>
me on a mattress,<br>
the fly, oh the fly,<br>
a heavy Britannica Encyclopedia volume<br>
smashes it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>A bookmark in that volume sticks out.<br>
I open the marked page.<br>
Balfour Declaration.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I tell myself,<br>
“That volume, if it had only the 67 words<br>
of that declaration in its pages, not only<br>
the fly, but a whole country,<br>
would be flattened.”</p>
<p> </p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>KG</strong>: Knowing that Gaza and its citizens are subject to state-sanctioned violence, lack of mobility, and oppressive economic restrictions, what do you think poetry’s role is in forging community resilience and in healing psychological wounds? I’m thinking specifically of your poem “my grandfather and home” and the lines “he forgot the numbers the people/he forgot home” and “for this home i shall not draw boundaries/no punctuation marks.” I’m interested in the tension these lines express between healing and forgetting in the face of mass trauma. </p>
<p><strong>MAT</strong>: Poetry cannot change the details of people’s real lives. It cannot put food on the tables of poor families. It cannot bring back killed children from the dead. It can, however, affect how people perceive things around them if they choose to listen or read, especially those who live outside of the poet’s circle. As a Palestinian who lives in Gaza, I’m talking about people in the West, for whom it’s very hard to imagine having to live under occupation and siege for decades.</p>
<p>Most people worldwide began to feel what it means to be unable to travel and visit loved ones during Covid-19, what it means to keep social distancing and be unable to hug and kiss.</p>
<p>In Gaza, and also in the West Bank, people don’t have an airport at all. Not even a seaport. In the West Bank, people have to skip endless checkpoints to reach a neighboring village and visit a sick relative or bid farewell to a travelling cousin. A mother gives birth and may lose her life or the child’s at an Israeli checkpoint, when a pregnant mother has to wait for hours for an Israel permit to cross to a hospital.</p>
<p>Moreover, poetry can bring and spread memories of the sweet past of one’s family or nation. I live as a stateless person in my country. I cannot leave when I wish. If I leave, I cannot return when I wish.</p>
<p>But when I write and read, I can return not only to Gaza when I’m outside it, but also to Yaffa, my original hometown from which the Zionists expelled my grandfather and his family.</p>
<p>Because I cannot bring my grandfather to his home in Yaffa, I promised to build him one with my words. My English vocabulary will be the bricks that will build it. So English here is no longer a colonizing language but a liberating one.</p>
<p><strong>KG</strong>: What would you say is the importance of the internet in crafting connection and facilitating self-empowerment? In an interview with Philip Metres you mentioned practicing English with Facebook friends in Gaza when the internet was available. What are your thoughts on the violence that has become much more apparent in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in which so many, largely low-economic and BIPOC communities internationally, have been faced with a lack of connection and severe economic disadvantage due to their monetary inability to obtain access to the internet in an age in which the internet is not a luxury but a necessity?</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">I think it’s a bliss to be able to speak, in the first place.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>MAT</strong>: I think it’s a bliss to be able to speak, in the first place. Many people cannot talk because of the social and political circumstances they are confined by. Having access to the internet is not a guarantee that people would speak what they should or want.</p>
<p>Talking about internet in Gaza, people are confronted by several troubles here, the first of which is the daily electricity outages. We get access to electricity for only 8 hours these days. Sometimes we get it for 2 hours in winter.</p>
<p>The second issue is the slow internet connection. The 2G, the network in operation in Gaza, allows calls and limited data transmission.</p>
<p>The third issue is that many people, due to the merciless economic situation, do not own a device of their own, such as a smartphone or a computer, to use the internet. They would visit cafes or use their neighbors’ or relatives’ devices.</p>
<p>Many times, internet would be used by the young people of Gaza to break their constant isolation due to the siege imposed since 2007. Many of them never left Gaza to watch, from behind their small screens, the world as it moves on. This makes internet access very necessary. To enjoy something one cannot even touch in reality is sometimes liberating, too.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Abu Toha Garza" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451565/abu_toha_garza.png"></figure>
<p><strong>Mosab Abu Toha</strong> is a Palestinian bilingual poet, essayist, and short story writer from Gaza. A graduate in English language, he taught English at the UNRWA schools in Gaza 2016-2019, and is the founder of the Edward Said Public Library, Gaza’s first English language library (now two branches). In 2019-2020, Mosab became a visiting poet at Harvard University, hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature. He is also a <a href="https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/abutoha-column">columnist</a> for Arrowsmith Press. Mosab’s poetry, essays, and short stories have been or will be published by Poetry, Solstice, Banipal, Periphery, Harvard Human Rights Review, Kikah, Middle East Eye. In 2020, Mosab gave talks and poetry readings at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple University, the University of Arizona, and the American Library Association Midwinter Exhibits and Meetings. His first book of poetry, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://citylights.com/publishing-forthcoming-titles/things-you-may-find-hidden-in-my-ear/" target="_blank">Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear</a>, will be published in April 2022 with City Lights Books.</p>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://english.nd.edu/creative-writing/people/students/current-mfa/2023-mfa/kristyn-garza/" target="_blank">Kristyn Garza</a> grew up in McAllen, Texas near the U.S./Mexico border. She moved from McAllen to Austin to pursue her degree in English Literature at St. Edward’s University where she earned her bachelor’s. Her poetry has been published in <em>Apricity Magazine</em>, <em>The Sorin Oak Review</em>, and <em>New Literati</em>. During her time as an undergrad, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of <em>The Sorin Oak Review</em> for the publication of its 30th Volume. She later held the position of President and Editor-in-Chief of <em>New Literati</em> for two years until her graduation. The twenty-two year old bisexual Chicana writes a lot about her experiences, identity, and culture as a borderland native; her struggles with mental illness and trauma; and most of her work is particularly interested in: violence, connection, borders/barriers/boundaries, and healing from physical, emotional, and mental wounds both as individuals as well as a collective. She is a student in the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>
<p> </p>Kristyn Garzatag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417432021-05-07T17:00:00-04:002022-02-01T14:49:00-05:00Out of Mesopotamia: An Interview with Salar Abdoh<blockquote> <p>Salar Abdoh's Out of Mesopotamia follows Saleh, an Iranian journalist who moves between the art and entertainment world of Tehran and the battlefront of the war against the Islamic State. Saleh is caught in the middle—unable to truly take root in either world, and beset on all sides by</p>
…</blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Salar Abdoh's Out of Mesopotamia follows Saleh, an Iranian journalist who moves between the art and entertainment world of Tehran and the battlefront of the war against the Islamic State. Saleh is caught in the middle—unable to truly take root in either world, and beset on all sides by a handler obsessed with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, a Frenchman intent on dying in the warfront to escape his failed family life, a foreign scholar lurking in his emails, and various actors in the art and entertainment world hoping to use Saleh’s writing to various ends. I asked Salar some questions about the conception and execution of the novel.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Out Of Mesopotamia By Salar Abdoh" height="800" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451562/out_of_mesopotamia_by_salar_abdoh.jpg" width="509"></figure>
<p><strong>Austyn Wohlers:</strong> Saleh’s magnetic attraction to would-be martyrs in <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="http://www.akashicbooks.com/catalog/out-of-mesopotamia/" target="_blank">Out of Mesopotamia</a>was very interesting to me—I think of Cleric J telling him “You are not the kind of man who takes the call. You only want to be near the men who do.” Could you speak to that? What interests Saleh about the suicidal?</p>
<p><strong>Salar Abdoh:</strong> I wouldn’t call it “the suicidal.” Men, and women, who take the call in a time of war and/or occasions of severe resolution, do so for a variety of reasons, but it always goes back to having extreme conviction in something. That conviction is not necessarily always religious. But being around it, for a man like Saleh (or myself), is intensely attractive. To be in the proximity of the ultimate sacrifice, to experience it, and to know that beyond the dullness of one’s everyday a world and characters also exist who are impossibly romantic and potentially brutal and think nothing of dying can be exhilarating and damning. A man like Saleh is attracted to that. The adrenaline of battle is replaced by nothing and no one. It’s puerile, yes; but there it is.</p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> On the same note, some of the most gorgeous descriptions in the book were of the almost psychedelic rainbow glowing halos that surrounded those who felt an allure towards martyrdom. Where did this image come from? Is it something you’ve felt personally, or something you added to the novel towards some artistic end? I also think of the line “[A]ll the martyrs you’d known became one bandwidth of death, a rainbow of body parts and browned blood.”—There’s a real association of death with color in <em>Out of Mesopotamia</em>.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">To be in the proximity of the ultimate sacrifice, to experience it, and to know that, beyond the dullness of one’s everyday, a world and characters also exist who are impossibly romantic and potentially brutal and think nothing of dying can be exhilarating and damning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> The culture of death in Shia Islam is acute and all-encompassing. The rituals that derive from it are, to me, gorgeous and fierce. I am attracted to this world and its pageantry. The notion of the halo, in the way I speak of it in the book, first came about in the Iran-Iraq war. You can read account after account of warriors back then noting how those about to be martyred seemed to have a halo about them. I may not have seen a halo necessarily years later in another war in the Middle East, but I certainly saw that beatification and radiance. Not always, but often enough one really does sense when a brother is about to leave this world; they are ready.</p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> The novel straddles the worlds of both art and war, but I was especially interested in the ways these worlds seemed to cross-pollinate, especially in Saleh’s perception. Art infects Saleh’s interrogator H, who is extremely taken by Proust’s <em>Remembrance of Things Past</em> or <em>In Search of Lost Time </em>and continuously quotes the book to Saleh. On the other hand, Saleh sneers at the likes of Proust (the character, aka Daliri), whom he reads quite hostilely as an artistic failure (a “poor bookish fuck”) who is waiting for death. These reads seem integral to Saleh’s character—he feels warmly towards the government man who slowly develops an interest in art, but rather hostile towards a man who has pined for an artistic career since his university days. These interpretations of people seem integral to Saleh’s character to me—his conflicting attitudes towards figures of art and figures of war. Could you talk a bit about that?</p>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> Saleh is not so much hostile to Daliri/Proust, but rather sees much of himself in the younger man. Saleh knows that the world of art and literature are by now (and maybe they always were) brimming with lies. Saleh is a man who writes for television, does art reviews, teaches literature at the university and also goes to war and reports from there (not unlike myself). In each of these settings he sees, correctly, an abundance of untruth and also sees himself as an integral part of this machinery of falsehood. Therefore, he despises himself, at least a little bit, and by extension, perhaps Daliri/Proust. But it is a distaste that is also mixed with love of all the things he does.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">In Miss Homa, for instance, he finds truth in art. And in his martyred friends in Iraq and Syria he finds truth in war. Yet in both settings he also finds injustice, deceit and corruption of the soul.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p>In Miss Homa, for instance, he finds truth in art. And in his martyred friends in Iraq and Syria he finds truth in war. Yet in both settings he also finds injustice, deceit and corruption of the soul. He would like to save Daliri if he can, though the latter’s naivete certainly rubs him wrong sometimes. As for H, the interrogator, it would be easy to despise a man with such a job. But life is more complicated than that. And I have seen enough H’s in the world who are in fact not the monsters they are made out to be. Nuances are what we strive for in fiction, I would like to think.</p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> Miss Homa was such a singular character in the novel. So many novels wear outwardly the signs of failure: Saleh is frustrated with his love life and his financial precarity, Abu Faranci has lost his family, Proust/Daliri has not achieved his literary dreams. Miss Homa ostensibly <em>does</em> get what she wants—she is finally receiving fame and money from her paintings—but is disgusted by the way her life has changed as a result. How did you conceive of Miss Homa as a character? Is she based on anyone specific, or is she more a crystallization of a particular phenomenon for you?</p>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> She is both, a crystallization of a particular phenomenon and also a specific person, in fact two specific people. One already gone from this world, and one to whom this is happening now to a certain extent, as the world of high art is indeed something of a monstrosity. I guess nothing in <em>Out of Mesopotamia</em> came out of complete fantasy. Except that the reaction of Miss Homa is not typical; that part of it I made up. I needed someone good from that world. A rarity. I had to create not <em>her</em> but her reaction to fame.</p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> The way you wove the narrative of the “enemy scholar,” who wants Saleh to conduct research for her on Tehran’s Jewish quarter, into the novel was quite deft. Her email emerges very much on the periphery—so much so that it’s easy for the reader to forget about it—and eventually this peripherality is precisely what allows H to exchange emails with her from Saleh’s account. Like Saleh, the reader is blindsided by something they’ve almost forgotten about, allowing us, in a sense, to feel the same thing as him in that moment. Could you talk a little about that plotline? What compelled you to include it?</p>
<blockquote class="pull">
<p>And, as you correctly note, it also allowed me to give more body and depth to the entire novel from a perspective of love, not war, or perhaps love or potential love in a time of war.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> I will be truthful; there is indeed an “enemy scholar.” Sometimes in life you want to simply pay tribute to someone. And especially to someone whom you have, well, loved, but ultimately could not be with because of various reasons, including circumstances of history and geography and hostility between your nations. A bit of a Westside Story – I know. I’m in Tehran now and that person is elsewhere and I think of her often. I wanted her in my story. The subplot was a tribute and vice-versa. And, as you correctly note, it also allowed me to give more body and depth to the entire novel from a perspective of love, not war, or perhaps love or potential love in a time of war.</p>
<p><strong>AW</strong>: I was blown away by the dialogue in <em>Out of Mesopotamia</em>—even during exchanges with no dialogue tags at all, you could almost see the characters register what their interlocutor was saying, digest it, and formulate something to advance their own position. So much is implied in those line breaks. How do you approach writing dialogue? Is there a particular philosophy you apply to it? Do you write these scenes very carefully, or hammer them out over a couple of drafts?</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">You cannot really write about the conversations of would-be-martyrs unless you’ve been close to them, bunked with them, eaten with them, and maybe even seen one or two of them arrive at their desired end right in front of you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> I admit that dialogue writing comes more easily to me than other aspects of the novel. I can be quite terrible at the description for example. But by nature, I am a dialogue writer and I think I honed the craft by writing strict genre novels in my first couple of books. I can hear these people speak, I see them and feel them. They are there in front of me as if I were watching a movie. Usually, the dialogues happen in one shot, and seldom do I have to go back and do much more to them. I do not have the same luck with doing description on the other hand. I guess we ride on the things we are better at and try to better the things we are not so good at. In my writing, it also helps to have had proximity with certain people and situations. You cannot really write about the conversations of would-be-martyrs unless you’ve been close to them, bunked with them, eaten with them, and maybe even seen one or two of them arrive at their desired end right in front of you.</p>
<hr>
<p> </p>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Abdoh Wohler" height="668" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451563/abdoh_wohler.png" width="320"></figure>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="http://www.akashicbooks.com/author/salar-abdoh/" target="_blank">Salar Abdoh</a> is an Iranian writer whose novels include <em>Tehran at Twilight</em>, <em>The Poet Game</em>, <em>Opium</em>, and, his latest, <em>Out of Mesopotamia</em>. He also is the editor of <em>Tehran Noir</em>, and has published essays on war and politics in journals such as <em>Guernica </em>and <em>Words Without Borders</em>. He currently splits his time between Tehran and New York City, where he teaches in the M.F.A. program at the City College of New York.</p>
<p><strong>Austyn Wohlers</strong> is a writer from Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared in <em>Asymptote</em>, <em>Short Fiction</em>, <em>Yalobusha Review</em>, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>
<p> </p>Austyn Wohlerstag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417402021-02-19T16:00:00-05:002022-02-17T14:14:13-05:00Against the Loveless World: An Interview with Susan Abulhawa<blockquote> <p>susan abulhawa’s most recent novel, Against the Loveless World, traces the path of a young Palestinian woman, Nahr, from Kuwait, to Jordan, to Palestine, to an Israeli isolation cell she calls “the Cube.” After being abandoned by her husband, Nahr meets an older woman, Um Buraq, who coerces</p>
…</blockquote><blockquote>
<p>susan abulhawa’s most recent novel, Against the Loveless World, traces the path of a young Palestinian woman, Nahr, from Kuwait, to Jordan, to Palestine, to an Israeli isolation cell she calls “the Cube.” After being abandoned by her husband, Nahr meets an older woman, Um Buraq, who coerces her into working as escort for Kuwait’s rich and powerful men, until the U.S. invasion of Iraq forces Nahr’s already displaced family to flee Kuwait for Jordan. Nahr travels to Palestine to seek a divorce from her husband’s family and unexpectedly falls in love with Palestine—and with her ex- husband’s brother, Bilal. In Palestine, Nahr becomes more politically conscious and commits herself to clandestine resistance against encroaching Israeli settlements.</p>
<p>Narrated by the passionate, candid Nahr herself, this is an unapologetically political novel. In the face of exile, violence, and occupation, love—as a transformational force and radical act—nevertheless shines through. I spoke to Ms. Abulhawa about the complex women who make this novel so compelling, the many forms of violence shaping their lives, and how to situate the Palestinian struggle in its appropriate contexts.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Against The Loveless World By Susan Abulhawa" height="900" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451555/against_the_loveless_world_by_susan_abulhawa.jpg" width="579"></figure>
<p><strong>Rachael Rosenberg</strong>: I first want to ask you about the protagonist of this novel, Nahr. I found her to be such an engaging heroine and narrator. Her personality was really refreshing—she can be blunt, she has strong opinions, she cracks vulgar jokes. Nahr has some rough edges, yet we also get to see her tender side in this beautiful love story you crafted between her and the character Bilal. Can you tell us a little bit about how she took shape as this multifaceted character and what it was like to tell the story of her turbulent life in her voice?</p>
<p><strong>Susan Abulhawa</strong>: Nahr was probably my favorite character to write since I began writing novels. But the process of developing her character was very much like all the others. I had only a sketch outline of her life when I began writing. Her personality and spirit unfolded through the many iterations of the story, and in many ways, she is the one who dictated the nuances of her own character. Creating a fictional character involves getting to know them and listening to them in one’s imagination.</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: There are so many forms of violence shaping the lives of the characters in this novel: the violence of displacement, exile, and imprisonment; the structural violence of unjust institutions; the destruction of homes, cultural practices, lifeways—the list goes on. The type of violence that I found most difficult to read about, however, was sexual violence. How did you approach writing scenes that included sexual violence, and did you wrestle with the implications of including them?</p>
<p><strong>SA</strong>: The starting point for this novel, in fact, was the sexual violence. Sexual assault is something that the vast majority of women throughout the world have experienced (and/or will experience) to varying degrees. I’ve personally made no secret of the sexual violence I endured at various stages of my life, as I believe that public conversations about it is the only way to begin dismantling this particular form of violence. With this in mind,</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">I knew the subject of sexual violence was something I was going to write about, particularly as it relates to the sex industry in the Arab world, which is a big open secret. The main challenge for me, which would not have been a challenge if I were writing in Arabic rather than English, was ensuring that I was mindful of, and able to avoid, Orientalist traps and pitfalls.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: I also want to make sure to ask you about environmental violence, because the land itself is such an important presence in this novel, and through Nahr’s eyes, we fall in love with it. I was especially moved by the grove of trees, which are both a site of cultural meaning and a source of sustenance. Eventually, the trees also become a means for resistance against Israeli settlements. How does the relationship between the people and the land shape the experiences of Palestinians, both in Palestine and in diaspora?</p>
<p><strong>SA</strong>: The natural world plays a big part in all my novels, as it does in my own life. Palestinian society, in particular the fellaheen, collectively have a reverence, curiosity, and respect for trees that I’ve rarely seen in other societies. Israel has always understood this, as do their paramilitary settlers, which is why tree groves have been particular targets for their violence against us.</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: Um Buraq was a character I really struggled to come to terms with, yet at the same time, I appreciated how complex and morally gray she was. Um Buraq essentially blackmails Nahr into working for her as a sex worker, but she also takes her under her wing and tries to teach her the ways of the world, and she helps to get Nahr and her family out of Kuwait. She strikes me as one of Nahr’s most important relationships, perhaps even more important than Nahr’s relationship with her mother. Even after many years apart, at the end of the book, Um Buraq still understands Nahr on a profound level. What does this relationship tell us about both exploitation and friendship between women?</p>
<p><strong>SA</strong>: Writing the relationship between Um Buraq and Nahr was as much a pleasure as it was a challenge. I think the reader rightly will dislike, even despise, Um Buraq in the beginning, just as Nahr does. But as their friendship unfolds and Um Buraq herself comes into greater focus, you can see a genuine affection and trust between them.</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">Um Buraq herself was a victim. She was also a feminist without ever knowing the word feminism. People are complicated and the relationships between exploited women take on many layers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s nothing worse in literature than reading a novel with two-dimensional characters who are wholly good or wholly bad. It’s just not believable.</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: One of the passages that I found really thought-provoking is when Nahr criticizes the conventional framing of the relationship between Israel and Palestine as a “conflict.” Her view is the framing of a conflict between two sides creates a false equivalency and obscures the real dynamics of the situation (I’m paraphrasing). Reading those pages, I felt that I had been called out. It reminded me that scholars and scholarly institutions are often either complicit in or actively uphold systems of oppression in many ways, including the acts of naming and defining. Within the field of peace studies, many scholars now are debating whether peace and peacebuilding as theory and practice can be decolonized and, if so, what that actually looks like. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on this—is it possible to divorce our understandings of peace, violence, and conflict from coloniality?</p>
<p><strong>SA</strong>: It’s easy to fall prey to words of a discourse already engineered by others. For example, the term “peace in the Middle East” has become so common as to be cliché, but there’s a strategic reason it was never “justice in the Middle East.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">True peace is just a byproduct of justice, and that’s the word I prefer we use when describing our aims. Indeed, the colonization of Palestine is not a “conflict” any more than slavery was a conflict, or apartheid, or Jim Crow, or the annihilation of Indigenous Americans. That term cannot apply in circumstances of such extraordinary asymmetries of power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A conflict is something that happens between equal powers who disagree on something. A settler-colonial movement, armed with the most advanced death machines, going about replacing and erasing a principally unarmed, defenseless indigenous population is not a conflict. It’s a lot of things—barbarism, colonialism, ethnoreligious supremacy, cruelty, criminality, immorality, thievery—but it’s not a conflict. There are so many other such terms, intentionally injected by Zionists into popular discourse, that people take for granted and repeat without weighing the meaning of it. It’s important for us to consider the words we use when we speak about Palestine.</p>
<p><strong>RR</strong>: Towards the end of the book, we learn where the title comes from in quite a beautiful way. It’s a quote from the James Baldwin essay “A Letter to My Nephew,” which Nahr and Bilal read together while in a strict lockdown enforced by the Israeli military. Outside, there is chaos and truly dire conditions for the local population, but inside, the two are in this sort of love bubble, which makes for a very poignant parallel to the quote. Through the characters, you also draw attention to the larger resonance between the Palestinian struggle and other movements. Other scholars and activists, including Angela Davis, have also written and spoken about this connection. How does studying Palestine help us better understand the Black liberation struggle in the U.S., for example, and vice versa?</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3"><strong>SA</strong>: I think internationalism is a pillar of true resistance. Building bonds and bridges with those who are fighting similar struggles and showing up for them is about moral consistency. We cannot call for an end to Zionism and at the same time look away from the oppression and marginalization of others.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My resistance is also feminist in nature. It is a vegan lifestyle in opposition to industrialized animal cruelty. It is militant and does not under any circumstance accept Zionism as anything but a modern face of white supremacy, however multi-racial that face might be.</p>
<hr>
<p> </p>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Abulhawa Rosenberg" height="668" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451556/abulhawa_rosenberg.png" width="320"></figure>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://www.pandeliterary.com/susan-abulhawa" target="_blank">susan abulhawa</a><strong><strong> </strong></strong>is a novelist, poet, essayist, scientist, mother, and activist. Her debut novel Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury, 2010), translated into 30 languages, is considered a classic in Anglophile Palestinian literature. Its reach and sales has made abulhawa the most widely read Palestinian author. Her second novel, The Blue Between Sky and Water (Bloomsbury, 2015), was likewise an international bestseller. Against the Loveless World (Simon & Schuster, 2020) was out in August. She is also the author of a poetry collection, My Voice Sought The Wind (Just World Books, 2013), contributor to several anthologies, political commentator, and frequent speaker. Abulhawa is the founder of <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://playgroundsforpalestine.org/" target="_blank">Playgrounds for Palestine</a>, a children’s organization dedicated to uplifting Palestinian children. She is also co-chair of Palestine Writes, the first North American Palestinian literature festival.</p>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://keough.nd.edu/students/rachael-rosenberg/" target="_blank">Rachael Rosenberg</a><span style="font-weight:400"> served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Georgia, where she developed the English education program at a school near the Georgian-Armenian border and led USAID-funded projects focusing on youth leadership, social activism, and gender equity. In 2017 Rachael spent a summer as a cultural ambassador for the USA Pavilion at the World Expo in Astana (now Nur-Sultan), Kazakhstan. She previously worked on research initiatives at the Kennan Institute and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and won a Critical Language Scholarship for intensive language study in Russia from the US Department of State. </span>She is currently a student in the Master of Global Affairs program in the Keough School of Global Affairs.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>Rachael Rosenbergtag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417382021-01-15T15:00:00-05:002022-02-01T14:49:32-05:00Then the Fish Swallowed Him: An Interview with Amir Ahmadi Arian<blockquote> <p>Then The Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian's first novel in English, follows bus driver Yunus Turabi as he participates in the mid-2000’s Tehran bus drivers’ strike, is arrested, and is sent to Evin Prison, a facility notorious for housing Iran’s political prisoners. From there, a</p>
…</blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Then The Fish Swallowed Him, Amir Ahmadi Arian's first novel in English, follows bus driver Yunus Turabi as he participates in the mid-2000’s Tehran bus drivers’ strike, is arrested, and is sent to Evin Prison, a facility notorious for housing Iran’s political prisoners. From there, a bleak, absurd, and psychologically harrowing narrative of isolation and torment emerges as Yunus endures long periods of solitary confinement and manipulative questioning by his interrogator, Hajj Saeed. I asked Amir about his research process, characterization in prison narratives, class tensions in the structure of the novel, his switch to writing in English, and the task—for Arian and Yunus both—of finding the beautiful in the profane.</p>
<p> </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Then The Fish Swallowed Him By Amir Ahmadi Arian" height="913" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451535/then_the_fish_swallowed_him_by_amir_ahmadi_arian.jpg" width="600"></figure>
<p><strong>Austyn Wohlers:</strong> In <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/then-the-fish-swallowed-him-amir-ahmadi-arian?variant=32132711809058">Then the Fish Swallowed Him</a>’s Acknowledgements, you talk about chatting with numerous Iranians who spent time in solitary confinement, as well as bus drivers. What sorts of details from these conversations ended up bearing on Yunus’s story? You speak elsewhere of the fact that your work as a journalist and your work as a fiction writer has been simultaneous, rather than sequential, so I’m also interested in hearing about how those two sides of yourself might have played off one another during your research and writing, or if you had to struggle to separate them. Did your journalistic training help with the economy of storytelling, for instance? Did you find it easy to convert your notes into plot and description?</p>
<p><strong>Amir Ahmadi Arian:</strong> As a writer, you learn that there are things you can’t just think up and put to words. Certain human experiences defy language, and the only way to approach them is to either experience them yourself or to conduct very deep and thorough research.</p>
<p>The death of a loved one is a good example. Without the first-hand experience, or at least inhabiting the mind of someone who has experienced it, you can’t really write about it. </p>
<p>Before starting to work on this novel I never thought of solitary confinement as a kind of human experience that language can’t capture. I read a few scholarly books and first-hand accounts, even tried to simulate the conditions of solitary confinement, but none of that worked. The next best thing I could do was talking to people who had that experience. </p>
<p>If you lived in Iran and were involved in politics, unfortunately you will probably have multiple friends who qualify. So I called about half a dozen people, and interviewed them about their time in solitary confinement. It was a difficult, sometimes frustrating process, because many of them were unwilling to talk about it. The trauma was deep. The wound still hurt. Understandably they didn’t appreciate me trying to poke at it. But I eventually managed to gather enough material to get me through those chapters. </p>
<p>This is my roundabout way of saying that without those interviews this novel wouldn’t have existed. </p>
<p>As for my past in journalism, maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up, because there is nothing special about it. Journalism is what pretty much all Iranian authors, at least in my generation, had to do. The lines that separate different forms of writing are rather blurred in Iran. As a writer, it is very common that you publish poetry, short stories, journalism, personal essays, newspaper columns, and novels. In fact, if you say I only write fiction because I am a novelist, that sounds sort of obnoxious. Since I came up in that culture, I never thought about how these two sides of me would interact. This is a question I get in the US all the time, but since it has never been a concern of mine I don’t have a good answer for it.</p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> The structure of the book was very compelling to me: you start and end on violent, chaotic scenes of strike/protest which bookend the long, lonely, claustrophobic middle, which comprises Yunus’s time in prison. The former, the working-class bus drivers’ strike, is reviled by many of the other characters as a destructive gridlocking of Iranian infrastructure, while the latter, a youth-led protest which also interferes with infrastructure by blocking off the highway, is applauded by nearly everyone Yunus speaks to. There’s also the interesting scene where a college student approaches Yunus happy that “the working class has come out to support the strike,” then tries to get a picture with them. Could you talk a bit about these scenes, politically and structurally? Was there a class comment intended there, or maybe a comment on how attitudes have shifted during Yunus’s time in prison?</p>
<p><strong>AAA:</strong> It is very much a class comment, and I am glad you picked up on it because no one I have spoken to brought this up. The events that bookend this story are similar in that both are popular uprisings against the powers that be. Yet they are quite different from each other. The first one is a union strike, organized by workers, with a small number participants. It has a specific purpose. Every step of the way is pre-designed and thought-through.</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">The last scene is a mass uprising, a sudden explosion of rage which brought three million people to the streets of Tehran in 2009.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The last scene is a mass uprising, a sudden explosion of rage which brought three million people the streets of Tehran in 2009. It didn’t have a particular agenda or a clear goal. The former was organized and carried out specifically by the working class, the latter was open to everyone, though the crowd mainly consisted of university students, the middle class, secular-leaning residents of the more affluent neighborhoods of Tehran. There is a class tension there, which I tried to convey in the interaction between Yunus and the student protester at the end of the book.</p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> Early in the novel, Yunus resolves to search for beauty despite the miserable conditions of solitary: “Finding the beauty in the beautiful was redundant, I told myself. Finding it in the dull, the abject, was the task ahead.” From that resolution derives many of my favorite passages in the novel, with Yunus finding company in the fly who feeds off his vomit, comfort in the pigeon shit in the jailyard, et cetera. Could you speak a bit about that theme? Do you think it bears on the novel in a larger way than in Yunus’s attempts to psychologically make it through his confinement, or perhaps on your thoughts about fiction in general?</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">As a form, the novel has a unique capacity to contain all sorts of details. It gives you room to zoom in and out, to look at every small thing from a variety of angles, to deploy the power of language in order to impart importance to the seemingly insignificant.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>AAA: </strong>Famously, in one of his lectures Nabokov advised his students to “notice and fondle the details.” I think it is an excellent advice. A structuralist cliché holds that there are only so many stories, only so many character types you can create. But the realm of details is infinitely open. As a form, the novel has a unique capacity to contain all sorts of details. It gives you room to zoom in and out, to look at every small thing from a variety of angles, to deploy the power of language in order to impart importance to the seemingly insignificant.</p>
<p>I think it is no exaggeration to say that what distinguishes a great novel from a mediocre one is not so much the characterization or plotting as the way the author writes about the details. So there was a craft element involved. </p>
<p>Before embarking on my research interviews, I was aware that the little details we barely notice when we are free take on a huge significance in the solitary, but I failed to appreciate the extent of this change, until I talked to the people who have been there. </p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> In other interviews, you’ve mentioned switching to English largely due to the censorship of your books in Iran. Could you speak about that? Conversely, how did writing this book for an Anglophone audience impact your writing? Do you think it led to any stylistic or narrative concessions?</p>
<p><strong>AAA: </strong>I have published about ten books in Persian, authored and translated. I learned English early in my life and have been reading things in English my whole life, but I never regarded it as my writing language. Even after The Ministry of Culture banned two of my books I still didn’t consider switching to English. </p>
<blockquote class="pull">
<p>The very possibility of living as a writer in Iran was essentially eliminated for me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Things changed in 2009. I was closely involved in the political uprising that came to be known as the Green Movement. It got brutally crushed. The life and well-being of those of us involved came under serious threat. The newspaper I worked for was shut down. The publisher I was editing for was shut down. A lot of my friends were arrested and taken to the very prison where the events of this book take place. Every night I went to sleep expecting a knock on the door and the raiding of my apartment. So it wasn’t just censorship, or even safety.</p>
<p>I applied for PhD positions outside Iran because that was my only way of getting out other than becoming a refugee, and prioritized Australia because my partner at the time was Iranian-Australian. In my second year in Australia, in 2012, I decided to write the rest of my books in English. I was already past 30 at the time, and had never seriously considered writing fiction in English. Switching language at that age for a novelist is a huge risk if not flat-out madness, and I had very little hope that it would pay off. </p>
<p>Writing for the Anglophone audience wasn’t as challenging as I expected. I didn’t really make any concessions, stylistically or thematically, at least not consciously. There are parts in the book where I had to add a bit of context or include information that an Iranian audience would find redundant, but those are only a few passages. If I were to write this book in Persian maybe it would be a couple of pages shorter. That’s about it.</p>
<p><strong>AW:</strong> This book reminded me of many other great novels about intense relationships between two people in a setting of captivity—I think of Valentin and Luis in Manuel Puig’s <em>Kiss of the Spider Woman</em>, or Hoja and the narrator in Pamuk’s <em>The White Castle</em>. Yunus and Hajj Saeed’s relationship is complex; both seem to feel empathy for the other at certain points, and their attitudes towards one another is constantly shifting between what feels like personal attachment or hatred and the imposition of some other force. For Hajj Saeed, of course, this force is the State. What was the development of these two characters and their relationship like? Is there any hope for Hajj Saeed, in your opinion?</p>
<p><strong>AAA: </strong>Both of the books you mention have influenced on me, especially <em>Kiss of the Spider Woman</em>. My book, among other things, a story of bureaucracy. Hajj Saeed and Yunus are operating within a system. I hope I was able to convey that none of Hajj Saeed’s moves are spontaneous. The cat-and-mouse, the occasional beating, the rapid shifts from the very personal to the very general during the interrogations, all of that are already in the books. He is a seasoned, professional interrogator, strictly following a protocol. I try to lay bare a system through the interactions of these two characters, to show how the beast that swallowed both of them is pitting them against each other. </p>
<p>I am not sure if the word “hope” applies here. There is no hope for the system, that much I can say. Many of the interrogators after the revolution used to work for SAVAK, the Shah’s police. They just got back to work after the revolution and applied the same technics to their subjects, except that their former bosses were now their prisoners. As long as the system is operating so effectively, individuals are interchangeable. The destruction of this machine should be the goal.</p>
<hr>
<p> </p>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Arian Wohler" height="667" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451536/arian_wohler.png" width="320"></figure>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://www.amirahmadiarian.com/">Amir Ahmadi Arian</a> started his writing career as a journalist in Iran. He has published two novels, a collection of stories, and a book of nonfiction in Persian. He also translated from English to Persian novels by E.L. Doctorow, Paul Auster, P.D. James, and Cormac McCarthy. Since 2013, he has been writing and publishing exclusively in English. In recent years, his work has appeared in the <em>New York Times</em>, the <em>Guardian</em>, LRB, and Lithub. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Queensland, Australia, and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at City College, New York.</p>
<p><strong>Austyn Wohlers</strong> is a writer from Atlanta, Georgia. Her work has appeared in <em>Asymptote</em>, <em>Short Fiction</em>, <em>Yalobusha Review</em>, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>Austyn Wohlerstag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417392021-01-15T15:00:00-05:002022-02-01T14:49:50-05:00The Parisian: An Interview with Isabella Hammad<blockquote> <p>The Parisian follows the twenty-year journey of Midhat Kamal, a dreamer inclined toward philosophy and poetry, who struggles to define his identity under the physical and psychological siege of war and colonialism. The son of a Palestinian merchant, Midhat leaves for France to study medicine</p>
…</blockquote><blockquote>
<p>The Parisian follows the twenty-year journey of Midhat Kamal, a dreamer inclined toward philosophy and poetry, who struggles to define his identity under the physical and psychological siege of war and colonialism. The son of a Palestinian merchant, Midhat leaves for France to study medicine in 1915, in the midst of the first World War. There, he experiences the pain and pleasure of romantic love for the first time, and delights in the mystique of Parisian culture, even as he is aware of his “otherness” in the eyes of his French friends and hosts. Midhat returns to Palestine in 1919 to find his country engulfed in the intensifying fight for Arab liberation from British occupation and the growing threat of Zionism. Quickly dubbed “Al-Barisi” by the locals of Nablus, he continues to wrestle with questions of familial responsibility, duty to his homeland, and the desire for an unbounded life.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Isabella Hammad’s lushly descriptive prose immerses us in the lives of its many characters, weaving seamlessly in and out of their perspectives along the way. In unique ways for each, the personal and the political become inextricable—threaded to the backdrop of imperialism, military occupation, and patriarchy are themes of love, regret, identity, and the fight to remain whole in a fractured world. In this interview, I asked Isabella Hammad about these intricate webs, and literature’s role in illuminating their dark corners.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="The Parisian By Isabella Hammad" height="859" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451552/the_parisian_by_isabella_hammad.jpg" width="600"></figure>
<p><strong>Mary Dwyer:</strong> Throughout my reading of <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-parisian/">The Parisian</a>, I was reminded of W.E.B Dubois’ description of the African-American experience of “double- consciousness,” which he describes in <em>The Souls of Black Folk </em>as follows: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness…two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (2-3).</p>
<p>Without drawing direct comparisons between the experiences of African-American and Palestinian peoples, it struck me that a similar “two-ness” might be applied to Midhat’s experience of living as the token “Arab” in France, and then later as the “Parisian” back in Nablus. He is never “purely” one identity, and doesn’t feel that he fits completely in either place. In <em>The Parisian</em>, you veer incredibly closely to the points of view of both Palestinian characters and French characters, and you never simplify or flatten the inner lives of either. Could you speak about the complexities of such “double-consciousness” in your writing and in your characters? Do you think the pain and “dogged strength” of those who experience this “two-ness” can be a source of resistance against colonization and oppression?</p>
<p><strong>Isabella Hammad:</strong> Yes I think I even used the phrase “double-consciousness” when I was planning the book – the conditions and activities of hybridity, border thinking, shapeshifting and codeswitching are to a large degree the novel’s subject. Whether two-ness can be a source of resistance against oppression, though — I think I associate it more with survival, or at least that’s how I portrayed it in the case of Midhat. (There are other ways to talk about border thinking and resistance but I don’t think they really apply to my protagonist.) There’s another side to the coin, which is that for him shapeshifting is also about freedom. Eluding definitions. And maybe that exercise of freedom can be construed as a kind of resistance.</p>
<blockquote class="pull">
<p>...the conditions and activities of hybridity, border thinking, shapeshifting and codeswitching are to a large degree the novel’s subject.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> When Midhat comes to terms with his thwarted relationship with Jeanette, he says, “We loved our fathers too much.” Throughout the book, various characters suffer the burden of either complete obedience to, or exile from, patriarchal structures–be it the biological family, the church, the school, or the state. On page 199, your narrator suggests that patriarchal family and class divisions were not inherent to Nablus, and that they came as a result of wealth through increased trade opportunities. Given the often reductive Western view that Muslim communities are inherently oppressive and patriarchal, could you speak to the relationship you see between colonization, capitalism, and the absorption of patriarchal values into Nabulsi culture?</p>
<p><strong>IH:</strong> Well, I don’t think we can entirely blame the West for patriarchy. I think the point I was circling around there was that in pre-capitalist or agricultural societies women arguably had more freedom, and that as Nablus developed into more of a commercial centre, or a “landed port,” this affected the lives of women, who were no longer working outdoors but living in more closed environments. Patriarchy is pervasive but you’re right that it has been a classic trick by Western interventionists to claim that patriarchy in Muslim communities is particularly pernicious and ingrained.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">Patriarchy is pervasive but you’re right that it has been a classic trick by Western interventionists to claim that patriarchy in Muslim communities is particularly pernicious and ingrained.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> While we see outright violence and physical military occupation of Palestine in <em>The Parisian</em>, the novel is threaded consistently with a more insidious form of violence via surveillance: Dr. Molineau is secretly studying Midhat as a sort of specimen, and Father Antoine is writing down everything the Nabulsis tell him for his own anthropological study. Neither man sees that he is committing harm through an imbalanced power dynamic. Could you offer your thoughts on the psychological impact left on Palestinian people by these less visibile colonizing forces?</p>
<p><strong>IH: </strong> Yes, you could argue that the activities of these two characters in some ways prefigure the colonial surveillance exercised by the Israeli state. In Antoine we see scholarly observation, involving what we might call “othering,” turning into surveillance, where such knowledge gets used for political ends. Palestinians today experience a general feeling of being surveilled and watched. Mapping, profiling, census-taking – these are all important tools of colonial control used by the occupation forces, alongside body searches, identity documentation, and so on. The psychological impacts include feelings of chronic unsafety and the disempowerment that comes with a repeated invasion of privacy. Invisibility is also a method of its control: the feeling that you’re being watched when you cannot see who is watching you. The impression that the one in power is all-seeing, all-knowing.</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">Mapping, profiling, census-taking – these are all important tools of colonial control used by the occupation forces, alongside body searches, identity documentation, and so on. The psychological impacts include feelings of chronic unsafety and the disempowerment that comes with a repeated invasion of privacy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> After his education in Paris, Midhat is preoccupied more with intellectual, romantic, familial and aesthetic pursuits than his cousin Jamil, who dedicates himself entirely to a life of fighting the British and Zionist occupation; forgoing romantic love or a family life of his own. The tension between the two men had me thinking about the question of duty. There is a degree of privilege in being able to have one’s mind on personal pursuits, romance, and fulfillment, and these aspects of life are not afforded to people who live in occupied territories. Most of us who can read <em>The Parisian</em> could probably be said to possess a degree of this privilege (myself included, as a white woman living in the U.S.). As you were writing, did you find yourself thinking about the challenge of balancing one’s attention between the fight for liberation and the desire for a fulfilling personal life?</p>
<p><strong>IH: </strong>I really don’t feel that personal pursuits, romance and fulfillment should be privileges. They are normal aspects of life that regardless of circumstance everyone should be allowed to experience, and it’s just another terrible facet of life under occupation that these normal things should be curtailed or made more difficult. But yes in the novel I was trying to explore the different pulls of a certain kind of individualism versus commitment to one’s community, or one’s cause. Being a lover in a time of war.</p>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> When he is imprisoned, Hani reflects on the many microcosmic ways in which the British employ the strategy of “divide and conquer” to weaken the power and solidarity of the MENA region, and to compel Arab countries to concede to terms that are still violent and offensive. Choice becomes a cruel illusion as Hani and the other diplomats are put in the position of “making decisions” under sanctions, when they and their people are starving, poor, sick, and injured. We see imperial powers using the same kinds of strategies today, both in the MENA region and in South American countries. Do you think the literary community can play a role in making these divisive tactics more transparent in the future?</p>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">Good literature remains the domain of imagination and aesthetic pleasure. Nevertheless, it can also be a powerful domain of truth-telling, and of examining the world from a different vantage – via the imagination, and affect. There are things that can be said in literature that can’t be said, sometimes, in a more literal “objective” context. That’s why tyrants will often persecute poets and storytellers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>IH:</strong> If by literary community you mean novelists and poets, I think it’s important not to put too much pressure on their work to do the job of policy makers, lawyers, academics, and human rights activists. Good literature remains the domain of imagination and aesthetic pleasure. Nevertheless, it can also be a powerful domain of truth-telling, and of examining the world from a different vantage – via the imagination, and affect. There are things that can be said in literature that can’t be said, sometimes, in a more literal “objective” context. That’s why tyrants will often persecute poets and storytellers.</p>
<blockquote class="pull">
<p>I wanted to reconstruct some parts of Palestine before the Nakba of 1948 for myself, and in the process for others too. I do think literature can play a role there. It can make things live again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>MD:</strong> Your novel is rich with physical descriptions, and each of the characters feels so real, down to their smallest mannerisms. I read in an interview that you spoke to many Palestinian people about their own histories in addition to your scholarly research. How much was the world you were able to construct informed by these oral histories? Do you think that literature can act as an archive for the physical spaces and people lost in colonial destruction and occupation?</p>
<p><strong>IH:</strong> The oral histories didn’t really inform the physical descriptions, but I guess spending time with a lot of people I didn’t know fed that part of me that is already an observer of humans, which is a quality a writer needs whether she writes characters physically, psychologically, behaviourally. The stories I was told by my interviewees rarely fed into the book directly—my grandmother’s stories are the exception. (She really was obsessed with funerals.) The question of the archive is particularly fraught in the Palestinian case—with archives destroyed by the Israelis, libraries confiscated in the Nakba, and so on—and there are now numerous initiatives trying to rectify and take account of this both inside and outside historic Palestine. In my own literary attempt, I wanted to reconstruct some parts of Palestine before the Nakba of 1948 for myself, and in the process for others too. I do think literature can play a role there. It can make things live again.</p>
<hr>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Hammad Dwyer" height="2400" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451553/hammad_dwyer.png" width="141"></figure>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://www.rcwlitagency.com/authors/hammad-isabella/" target="_blank">Isabella Hammad</a> was born in London. She attended Oxford University for her undergraduate degree, and earned her MFA in Fiction at New York University, where she served as a Stein Fellow and the 2016-17 Axinn Foundation NYU Writer-in-Residence. She has been the recipient of a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard GSAS and the Harper Wood Creative Writing Studentship from Cambridge University. Her writing has been published in Conjunctions 66: Affinity (2016) and The Paris Review. She won the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and a 2019 O. Henry Prize. After publishing her first novel, The Parisian, in 2019, Hammad was named a ‘5 under 35’ Honoree by the National Book Foundation.</p>
<p><strong>Mary Dwyer </strong>courts obsession with both the quotidian and the surreal. Through her poetry, she is interested in exploring the ways in which trauma and institutional rigidity fragment our language, our psyches, and our relationships to corporeal life and time. Her poems blend exhumed artifacts from dreams with blips of mundane experience; pit archetypal cadences of nursery rhyme against bursts of clinical prose. After studying English and Creative Writing at The College of New Jersey, she worked in the college textbook industry for four years and served as an administrative assistant at a boarding school for three. She finds inspiration in traversing cityscapes, collaging, listening to people talk, and peering in lit windows at night.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>
<p> </p>Mary Dwyertag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417372020-11-06T14:00:00-05:002022-02-01T14:50:07-05:00The Book of Collateral Damage: An Interview with Sinan Antoon<blockquote> <p>Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator. He was born in Baghdad and left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard where he earned his doctorate in Arabic Literature in 2006. He has published two collections of poetry and four</p>
…</blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator. He was born in Baghdad and left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard where he earned his doctorate in Arabic Literature in 2006. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His works have been translated into thirteen languages. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book In the Presence of Absence won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. His translation of his own novel, The Corpse Washer, won the 2014 Saif Ghobash Prize for Literary Translation and was longlisted for the International Prize for Foreign Fiction. Two of his novels were shortlisted for the Arabic Booker. His scholarly works include The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf (Palgrave, 2014) and articles on Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, and Saadi Youssef. He returned to his native hometown in 2003 to co-direct About Baghdad, a documentary about Baghdad after dictatorship and under occupation. He has published op-eds in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Nation and various pan-Arab publications. His latest novel, The Book of Collateral Damage was published by Yale University Press in 2019. He is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at New York University and co-founder and the editor of the Arabic section of Jadaliyya.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This lyrical, philosophical, and deeply moving novel follows a young writer and academic, Nameer, from Baghdad to New England to New York. Antoon chronicles Nameer’s obsession with a mysterious Iraqi archivist named Wadood, who is attempting the impossible project of accounting for all that was lost in the first second of the American invasion of Iraq. In this novel Antoon interweaves Nameer’s narrative of exile with explorations of beauty, trauma, loss, and discovery, exemplifying Walter Benjamin’s exhortation: “He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I asked Sinan Antoon about the craft of writing and translating his hybrid and multi-genre novel, the current state of MENA literature in the U.S., and the function of beauty and humor in a narrative of loss. </p>
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<figure class="image-left"><img alt="The Book Of Collateral Damage By Sinan Antoon" height="925" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451526/the_book_of_collateral_damage_by_sinan_antoon.jpg" width="600"></figure>
<p><strong>Sara Judy:</strong> You play extensively with genre in <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300228946/book-collateral-damage" target="_blank">The Book of Collateral Damage</a><em>. </em>In the final sentence of the text, your protagonist Nameer identifies the book as a novel. However, elsewhere in the text, Wadood’s project – which is contained in the novel – is described variously as a history, an archive, and a catalog, all descriptions which could be applied to your book. The novel also contains letters, notebook pages, and references to theoretical texts; there are moments of lyricism in your prose that read like poetry, as well as moments when Nameer sings snippets of song, translates poetry, and keeps newspaper clippings. Not to mention the moment at the end of the novel, when Nameer is Xeroxing information about the Arabic novelist Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, who is credited with writing the first Arabic novel (described as an “innovation”). Is this a novel, as Nameer suggests, or is the generic category more blurred? How would you describe the genre of <em>The Book of Collateral Damage</em>?</p>
<p><strong>Sinan Antoon:</strong> The boundaries of any genre are constantly shifting and moving. There are always texts that try to play with those boundaries. Texts defy, cross, or “violate” such borders, with various degrees (and effects) of playfulness and seriousness. I’ve always thought of the “novel” as the most open space with the greatest potential to invite and host other “genres” and discourses without limits. It’s quite tempting to explore the potential, but also risky, of course. <em>The Book of Collateral Damage</em> is in conversation with pre-modern Arabic and Persian books. Its original title in Arabic (<em>Fihris</em>) refers to <em>al-Fihrist</em>, the encyclopedic work of Ibn al-Nadim (10<sup>th</sup> century). I’ve been fond of pre-modern Arabo-Islamic prose classics and fascinated by the variety of genres one could find in a single book.</p>
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<p>Wadood’s project may be described as an unfinishable encyclopedia of destruction.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Wadood’s project may be described as an unfinishable encyclopedia of destruction. Both he and Nameer are in search of the most appropriate form and genre to write about Iraq and its recent history. They write from different locations (Wadood is in Baghdad and Nameer is in New York) but are trying to collect shards and fragments of Iraq’s history and their own shattered personal histories. The book also tells its own history; how all these fragments are collected by Nameer. It is also about how a novel comes into being.</p>
<p><strong>SJ:</strong> Throughout the book, Wadood consistently resists Nameer’s offers to publish or translate any portion of his catalog. <em>Fihris</em> (translated as <em>The Book of Collateral Damage</em>) has been in the world as a published work for almost four years, and in its translated form in English for almost a year. Has your relationship with the text changed over that time? Did you have any of Wadood’s reticence toward the publication and translation of this text?</p>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> Wadood’s perfectionism, paranoia, distrust, and general despair, all make him reticent about publishing or translating excerpts from his work. Paul Valery wrote that “a poem is never finished, only abandoned.” I share Wadood’s reticence (for different reasons, mostly) but I eventually succumb and set the text free. I experience conflicting feelings whenever I’m working on a novel. I want to finish it, of course, but I find immense pleasure in residing in its world and being with my characters. Wadood’s manuscript could have included so many other objects. There was that temptation too. I know, from previous books, that I will go through post-partum depression once I’m done and will yearn for my characters, so I procrastinate and extend my stay as long as possible. With every novel there is a moment when I read it after it is published, not as its writer, but as a reader. I touch the book and smell it and realize that it has an existence that is entirely independent of me. I’d wanted to translate the novel myself, but didn’t have the time to do it, so I agreed to have it translated when the translator approached me.</p>
<p><strong>SJ:</strong> Can you comment on the state of MENA literature in the U.S., and how you locate yourself in that literary landscape? You’ve written elsewhere about the way Islamophobia in the U.S. has a homogenizing and reductive effect that ignores difference among people from Arab countries. This symposium is organized under the themes of “annihilation, exile, and resistance,” and your work engages movingly and powerfully in that work of resistance—but I imagine it’s an exhausting position to have to maintain. I’m thinking of the translation fatigue Nameer describes at various points in the novel, especially when interacting with and explaining himself to his neighbors and colleagues in New York. I’m also conscious of my own subjectivity as a white American woman asking you these questions. Are there poets, novelists, or other writers you admire, or see yourself in conversation with, who help alleviate that fatigue?</p>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> Three decades ago the late Edward Said published an essay entitled “Embargoed Literature” about the politics of translating and publishing Arabic literature. Much has changed since then and much hasn’t. Some of the structures and market dynamics that overdetermine the circulation and reception of cultural production from MENA are still there. 9/11, the ongoing War (of Terror) on Terror and its aftermath, and the rise of Islamophobia have intensified what I call “forensic interest” in Arabic (and adjacent) literature. Arabic literary works are oftentimes read as cliff notes for geopolitical events, or anthropological clues to some essence. This symposium is one of those rare sites that allow us to resist and problematize this reductive discursive violence.</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">Arabic literary works are oftentimes read as cliff notes for geopolitical events, or anthropological clues to some essence. This symposium is one of those rare sites that allow us to resist and problematize this reductive discursive violence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m in an odd position. I often feel that I’m a stranger in the literary landscape in this country. I don’t teach creative writing and am not part of the MFA ecosystem and its networks. Because I write my literary works primarily in Arabic, I’m treated as a foreign writer in many ways. I don’t mind that, because, like Nameer in the novel, I don’t feel at home in the United States. I’m aware of the many privileges my location allows me. But, as I wrote elsewhere, I feel like a barbarian in Rome. My situation is not unique. Because of dictatorship, sanctions, and wars, a disproportionate number of Iraqi (Syrian and Palestinian, too) writers live in the vast diaspora.</p>
<p>Poetry is my prayer. Reading (and translating) Charles Simic is always an antidote. The poets I admire (and whose lines I recite almost on a daily basis) were also displaced and lived significant periods of their lives in the diaspora: Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Saadi Youssef (1934-), and Sargon Boulus (1944-2007). Boulus, in particular, is a favorite and frequent interlocuter, for many reasons. He left Iraq at a young age and lived most of his life in San Francisco. He was initially enamored with America and its promise, but his disillusionment grew gradually. The brutality of the 1991 Gulf War shocked him. Some of his late poems reflect on what it means to live in the belly of empire, in a country that is destroying his homeland (Iraq). I am working on an anthology of his poems, as well as a monograph on his poetics.</p>
<p><strong>SJ:</strong> I want to end with a question about beauty, joy, and humor in this novel. As much as your work is invested in holding open attention to what is lost, and to the sorrow and unending grief of that loss, there’s also a delicate and finely tuned attention to beauty. The “Colloquy” passages are invested in looking closely and carefully at that which is delicate and ephemeral—feathers, film, postage stamps, the strings of an oud. War is an ugly thing, a violence which only makes rubble and death, but the novel tries to hold together the delicate pieces of these beautiful things for us to see. What role do you see for beauty in the work of resistance?</p>
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<p class="h3">There is plenty of pain and destruction. But there is beauty, too, among the ruins. And this beauty is at times a solace, as well as a defense against destruction and brutality.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>SA:</strong> We live in a violent world, shackled by the forces of predatory capitalism. There is plenty of pain and destruction. But there is beauty, too, among the ruins. And this beauty is at times a solace, as well as a defense against destruction and brutality.</p>
<p>The flood is an important theme in mesopotamian mythology, and in the poems of the aforementioned Boulus. The morning after the flood has uprooted and swept away so much, humans begin, once again, to reconstruct their lives. They pick up the shards and remains and rebuild homes, material and discursive. They mourn, re-member, tell stories of life, before and after the flood, and they sing, to survive. Poems, novels, and songs, are houses to shelter beauty.</p>
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<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Antoon Judy" height="667" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451524/antoon_judy.png" width="320"></figure>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="http://www.sinanantoon.com" target="_blank">Sinan Antoon</a> is a poet, novelist, scholar, and translator. He was born in Baghdad and left Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. He holds degrees from Baghdad, Georgetown, and Harvard where he earned his doctorate in Arabic Literature in 2006. He has published two collections of poetry and four novels. His works have been translated into thirteen languages. His translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s last prose book <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://archipelagobooks.org/book/in-the-presence-of-absence/?id=72" target="_blank">In The Presence of Absence</a> won the 2012 American Literary Translators’ Award. His translation of his own novel, <em>The Corpse Washer</em>, won the 2014 Saif Ghobash Prize for Literary Translation and was longlisted for the International Prize for Foreign Fiction. Two of his novels were shortlisted for the Arabic Booker. His scholarly works include <em>The Poetics of the Obscene: Ibn al-Hajjaj and Sukhf</em> (Palgrave, 2014) and articles on Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulus, and Saadi Youssef. He returned to his native hometown in 2003 to co-direct <em>About Baghdad</em>, a documentary about Baghdad after dictatorship and under occupation. He has published op-eds in <em>The Guardian</em>, <em>The New York Times</em>, <em>The Nation</em> and various pan-Arab publications. His latest novel, <em>The Book of Collateral Damage</em> was published by Yale University Press in 2019. He is an Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at New York University and co-founder and the editor of the Arabic section of <em>Jadaliyya</em>.</p>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="http://sarajudy.com" target="_blank">Sara Judy</a> is a Ph.D. candidate in the University of Notre Dame's English Department, and a Ph.D. fellow in the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. She studies twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry and poetics, with a focus on religion and literature. Her dissertation examines the ways in which twentieth-century poets self-critically adopted prophetic rhetoric—to varying degrees of success—as a way of attempting to intervene in social and political issues of their time. Sara is an active volunteer with the Moreau College Initiative at Westville Penitentiary, and she has also served as managing editor for the journal <em>Religion & Literature. </em>Sara is a 2021 recipient of the Kaneb Center Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award, and her course was featured by the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. A graduate of Notre Dame's Creative Writing MFA, Sara's poems and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in <em>The Adroit Journal, Ghost Proposal, </em><em>EcoTheo Review</em>, <em>Psaltery & Lyre, </em>and elsewhere.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>
<p> </p>Sara Judytag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417352020-10-02T14:00:00-04:002022-02-01T14:50:27-05:00The Book of Disappearance: An Interview with Ibtisam Azem<blockquote> <p>Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian journalist and novelist from the northern Jaffa town of Taybeh. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received an MA from Frieburg University in Germany. She is currently a senior correspondent for the Arabic Daily al-Araby al-Jadeed and the</p>
…</blockquote><blockquote>
<p>Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian journalist and novelist from the northern Jaffa town of Taybeh. She studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and received an MA from Frieburg University in Germany. She is currently a senior correspondent for the Arabic Daily al-Araby al-Jadeed and the author of Sifr al-Ikhtifaa, translated into English as The Book of Disappearance. In this poetic and mysterious novel set in the city of Jaffa, Azem explores the aftermath of the sudden disappearance of all Palestinians from the land of historic Palestine. Azem touches on themes of erasure, loneliness, memory, and loss as she weaves together the stories of Alaa and Ariel to illuminate the unsettling reality of the Zionist project. <br>
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As Azem writes in her novel: <br>
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“Your Jaffa resembles mine. But it is not the same. Two cities impersonating each other. You carved your names in my city, so I feel like I am a returnee from history. Always tired, roaming my own life like a ghost. Yes, I am a ghost who lives in your city. You, too, are a ghost, living in my city. And we call both cities Jaffa.” </p>
<p>“I memorized their stories and their white dreams about this place [Jaffa] so as to pass exams. But I carved my stories, yours, and those of others who are like us, inside me. We inherit memory the way we inherit the color of our eyes and skin. We inherit the sound of laughter just as we inherit the sound of tears. You memory pains me.” </p>
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<figure class="image-left"><img alt="The Book Of Disappearance By Ibtisam Azem" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451518/the_book_of_disappearance_by_ibtisam_azem.jpg"></figure>
<p><strong>Mathilda Nassar: </strong>There are many themes beautifully threaded throughout <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/100/the-book-of-disappearance/" target="_blank">The Book of Disappearance</a>. To me, the most prominent theme is that of loneliness. This loneliness assumes of loss. How has the nature of this loneliness impacted your sense of identity, as a Palestinian? </p>
<p><strong>Ibtisam Azem:</strong> This is a difficult question because it takes me back to a constellation of emotions and the initial realization of this loneliness. It assumes different meanings depending on time, place, and the space through which we move and our relationships to others. Personally, I don’t think the identities one carries within can be completely separated. At certain stages or situations one of these identities or aspects of identity is foregrounded more than others. There are various factors that influence and inflect one’s identity such as gender, class, nationality. There are moments when loneliness is compounded for me as a woman confronting patriarchy in her native society. But when confronted with the micro aggressions and sexism of Israeli society, it is triply traumatic because it is then directed at me as a Palestinian woman. Loneliness takes different forms, but there is one thread that connects them and it is of being a Palestinian and trying to tell your story to the world as you see it. It is akin to speaking to a group of people who are hard of hearing and turn their back to you. I feel less lonely when I am in the company of, or in conversation with, those who lived under oppressive systems or in settler colonial societies, because they try to listen genuinely to understand us. Listening is the key word here.</p>
<p>What I have learned is to move my internal compass and that ethical criteria and justice must be the bases. It might sound odd if I say that I no longer hate that feeling of loneliness. I try to turn this loneliness to a space for contemplation. But one must also be careful so that one doesn’t shut out the world. It is also important for me to connect with others and their struggles and to be in solidarity with them.</p>
<p>In the last scene of the novel, Alaa describes something similar in terms of his attempt to transform loneliness and to even celebrate it. In spite of being colonized, he tries to decolonize himself and reestablish his relationship to his space and homeland. To learn to love it and to exorcise the colonizer’s memory from his mind. It is a difficult process of course.</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">I feel less lonely when I am in the company of, or in conversation with, those who lived under oppressive systems or in settler colonial societies, because they try to listen genuinely to understand us. Listening is the key word here.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>MN:</strong> In the novel, Alaa’ wrestles with his grandmother’s memory of Palestine and the Palestine he knows (or doesn’t know). As a West Bank Palestinian, myself, I struggle to grasp what my Palestine is. What is your Palestine? </p>
<p><strong>IA:</strong> Home. And intense belonging to its entire topography: the coast, the mountains, and its desert, as well as its dialects, tales, music, food, arts, and the people and their resistance. That stubbornness and clinging to life and the faith in one’s rights and the desire to be free. Irrespective of maps and names that try to erase its name, it remains my homeland and I feel I’m an extension of it. But it is also more than a “piece of land.” It is an idea and a cause that lives and extends to its vast diaspora with every refugee. Palestine is also a vision for a future of justice and equality. A way of being in the world.</p>
<p><strong>MN:</strong> Generally, the world coerces and reinforces Palestinian silence. My grandmother was born in Jaffa, but she came to Bethlehem during the Nakba. Her story is as elusive as Alaa’s grandmother’s story. How can we as Palestinians ensure that our stories don’t die when we do?</p>
<blockquote class="pull">
<p>After more than a century of colonization and more than seventy years of the Nakba, the cause is still alive. We are still narrating our history and resisting. We are working so that those stories are not forgotten and the proof is that we are discussing them here.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>IA:</strong> After more than a century of colonization and more than seventy years of the Nakba, the cause is still alive. We are still narrating our history and resisting. We are working so that those stories are not forgotten and the proof is that we are discussing them here. Preserving our narratives, whether by archiving them or through other forms and genres is important, but what is more important is disseminating them widely and opening up to the narratives of other colonized peoples and learning from them and cooperating with them. It is important not to think of ourselves as eternal victims, but humans who are vulnerable and who make mistakes, but are resilient and continue to resist.</p>
<p><strong>MN:</strong> After the disappearance, the dialogue between Ariel and Alaa’s notebook keeps the story going. What did you hope to convey through this exchange? </p>
<p><strong>IA:</strong> I am not sure I would call it an exchange. In the red notebook the Palestinian speaks for the first time without waiting for anyone to listen or comment. He is writing his diary or memoir and it is the type of writing in which the writer is preconditioned to delving deep into themselves and contemplating their subjectivity and, hopefully, attaining a more expansive perspective. Through the practice of writing, the Palestinian takes charge of his own narrative. He tells his own story and, theoretically, no one can silence him or stop him. This is why Alaa’s chapters are his alone and are separate from Ariel’s who can only comment in his own chapters. Thus, for the first time, Ariel listens without being able to force Alaa to hear his response.</p>
<p><strong>MN:</strong> The story about the girl in Dayan’s memory is told through the eyes of the perpetrator. Who is the girl and why is Dayan given ownership of this narrative?</p>
<p><strong>IA: </strong> I disagree. He is not the one telling the story. It is the omniscient narrator. It is true that we don’t hear her voice. We are in his world and that’s intentional. The story here is not just about the rape. What I tried to do here is inspired by Handala, the iconic character created by Naji al-Ali. Handala was the Palestinian refugee child who appears to be turning his back to the world, but the reality is that it is the world which had turned its back to Handala and sees him as such. The story in the novel is influenced by the idea behind Handala, but I took it somewhere else. The woman in the story has been sitting outside her house in Jaffa since the Nakba and telling her stories, but no one listens to her, including her family, meaning her Palestinian society. Nor do the Israelis listen, of course. They all think of her as being insane. Like Handala, no one tried to listen to her, talk to her, or to understand what she is saying. Dayan, the perpetrator, stayed silent all these years. Like these colonizers who lived through the Nakba and at times they speak of acts they committed, or saw, and remain silent. Just as those who are silent today in regards to what befalls Palestinians. The story is about the silence that continues. Even after the woman disappears, Dayan stays silent. The silence is, in a way, a continuation of the violent act the silence is covering or denying or ignoring. What does Dayan do after the woman disappears? He blames her. The story is a mirror of sorts for the perpetrators, their silent accomplices, and the silent bystanders.</p>
<p><strong>MN: </strong>The novel implies (and possibly reveals) that the only way to fully realize the Zionist dream is through the complete erasure of Palestinians. How do you think a critic might respond to this allegation?</p>
<p><strong>IA:</strong> I beg to differ. The novel does revolve around the total disappearance of Palestinians, but it takes this event beyond the colonial ideology of Zionism which wants to erase and replace the colonized. It is primarily concerned with Palestinians and what their disappearance means. There is the actual “disappearance” that took place in 1948 and resulted in the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their land and denying them the right of return. But this right is still valid and recognized by international bodies and laws, notwithstanding all the limitations and problems with the UN and its resolutions.</p>
<p>There is another aspect to the disappearance which is the sense of liberty the Palestinian feels as if saying, through this disappearance, that the game is over as far as s/he/they are concerned. And, as a reminder, the reasons for the disappearance are never clear in the novel.</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="h3">The novel confronts the colonizer with a mirror, but, more importantly, it explores with dark sarcasm, the colonizer’s practices. It poses the question: what will states/ nations that base their identity on the “enemy” do once that “enemy” disappears?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is another symbolism in disappearance, that the Palestinian is “invisible” unless and except when s/he/ they are a “problem.” The novel poses many questions and contemplates reality from the perspective of Palestinian characters who remain the axis despite their eventual silence represented by their disappearance.</p>
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<p> </p>
<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Azem Nassar" height="682" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451517/azem_nassar.png" width="320"></figure>
<p>This interview was conducted via email following the Literatures of Annihilation, Exile and Resistance event from October 2, 2020. You can watch the recording of the event with Ibtisam Azem, featuring the discussant, <strong>Hilary Rantisi</strong>, Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict and Peace Initiative and Senior Fellow at the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School, and moderator by <strong>Nazli Koca</strong>, Notre Dame MFA alum. This event was co-sponsored by the <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="https://rpl.hds.harvard.edu/programs/religion-conflict-peace" target="_blank">Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative</a> at Harvard University.</p>
<p><strong>Ibtisam Azem</strong> is a Palestinian short story writer, novelist, and journalist, based in New York. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and later at Freiburg University, Germany, and earned an MA in Islamic Studies, with minors in German and English Literature. In 2011 she moved to New York where she lives now and works as a senior correspondent covering the United Nations for the Arabic daily <em>al-Araby al-Jadeed</em>. She is also co-editor at <em>Jadaliyya e-zine</em>.</p>
<p>The <em>Book of Disappearance</em> is her second novel in Arabic. It was translated by Sinan Antoon and published by Syracuse University Press in July 2019. Some of her writings have been translated and published in French, German, English and Hebrew and have appeared in several anthologies and journals. She is working on her third novel and she just finished another MA in Social Work from NYU’s Silver school.</p>
<p><strong>Mathilda Nassar</strong> is pursuing a Master of Global Affairs in International Peace Studies at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Her research focuses on the intersection of somatics, identity, and decoloniality. She is particularly interested in exploring embodied knowledge and its role in understanding displacement, especially in terms of coloniality. She draws on her experience as a native Palestinian, her passion for dance, her academic studies, and her professional work in peacebuilding capacities to inform her research as well as her sense of what it means to “be” in the world.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>Mathilda Nassartag:litofexile.nd.edu,2005:News/1417132020-09-04T19:00:00-04:002022-02-01T14:54:37-05:00The Limits of Whiteness: An Interview with Neda Maghbouleh<blockquote> <p>Neda Maghbouleh is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and the author of <em>The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race</em>, in which she renders historical data with lived experiences of eighty second-generation Iranian-Americans</p>
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<p>Neda Maghbouleh is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and the author of <em>The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race</em>, in which she renders historical data with lived experiences of eighty second-generation Iranian-Americans who describe what it means to grow up in America with Iranian origins; reflect on belonging to two contrasting nations at once; share the complex identity struggles caused by the fact that Iranians are labelled legally white while being treated as potential terrorists; and what it means to be targets of hate crimes for which the perpetrators are not held accountable. Maghbouleh’s book is a powerful reminder of how young adults are negatively impacted as unprotected minorities in the United States. The book also examines the racial formation processes through which young Iranian-Americans have begun to reclaim what it means to be brown in America and to examine colorism, anti-Arab, and anti-black racism within their communities.</p>
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<p>As Maghbouleh writes in her book: “Caught in the chasm between formal ethno-racial invisibility and informal hypervisibility, Iranian Americans work, love, and live through a core social paradox: Their everyday experiences of racialization coexist with their legal, and in some cases, internal ‘whitewashing.’”</p>
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<p>I asked Neda Maghbouleh not only about the many consequences of compulsory whiteness, but also about how the Black Lives Matter movement is transforming the Iranian-American community, and how sharing this work with the world has affected her as a person.</p>
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<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Neda Maghbouleh The Limits Of Whiteness" height="600" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451435/neda_maghbouleh_the_limits_of_whiteness.jpg" width="400"></figure>
<p><strong>Nazli Koca:</strong> There are several instances in <a href="http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=24756" target="_blank">The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race</a> that reveal the cruelty of children. For example, the story of the eight-grade swimmer in Chicago who gets beaten after being called “Hey, Persian!” As Iranians are legally bound to compulsory whiteness irrespective of their phenotypic difference and ethnic minority status, this is not considered to be a hate crime. How do you see the life paths of the attackers and victims of similar hate crimes play out in the current legal landscape? How would these scenarios play out differently if the attack were treated as what it is: a tragic hate crime?</p>
<p><strong>Neda Maghbouleh:</strong> Indeed, the section of the book you’re remembering is a case of assault that made the local news there. A youth had yelled the phrase “Hey, Persian!” before pummelling his Iranian American classmate to the ground, breaking the classmate’s collarbones, and after a long hospitalization, curtailing his achievements as a nationally ranked swimmer. Like others in my book – and in the Iranian Diaspora– the victim in this case is part of multiple ethno-racial communities. In particular, his mother is fair skinned and from Puerto Rico, and his father a darker-skinned immigrant from Iran. He himself possesses medium brown skin and other features that differentiate him from normative whiteness; that the assault was preceded with the phrase “Hey, Persian,” suggests that “Persianness” was somehow relevant. But—to your point—regardless of the complexities of Iranian and Latinx racialities, “Persian” was the master status that overrode other ascribed and achieved identities.</p>
<p>As we see daily around us, children and other youth are not somehow born blissfully unaware of difference; the human brain is constantly sorting and categorizing. The immoral thing we do, as adults, is socialize children into systems that are fundamentally oppressive and dehumanizing, that are anti-Black, Islamophobic, and xenophobic. So I’m skeptical that increased legal clarity about the racist nature of “white on white” hate crimes against Iranian Americans is the path to justice. But it may offer a limited – though still welcome — capacity to help Iranian Americans recognize and identify themselves in different locations within patterns of oppression. </p>
<p><strong>NK:</strong> In Chapter 3: At Home, Yara admits that she “found it challenging to identify good things happening in present-day Iran that might mitigate the negative stigma of being Iranian.”Combined with many other accounts of Iranian-American youth in the book, Yara’s statement is indicative of the harmful effects the stigmatization of Iran can have on young Iranian-American’s identity formation processes. Many of the young people you quote in the book feel the pain of not having the means to grapple with displacement in a healthy way unless they are lucky enough to go to Camp Ayandeh (Camp Future), which helps them integrate their Iranian and American identities in affirming ways. How would you say detachment from the homeland combined with the internalized shame of being Iranian-American contributes to the ongoing conflict between the two governments? How might diplomatic relations between the two countries shift if Iranian-Americans were not stuck within the limits of whiteness?</p>
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<p>...it’s important to remember that hybrid subjectivities like [these] hold great potential to undermine and transform the 'sides' themselves.</p>
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<p><strong>NB:</strong> It’s so interesting to me that the young diaspora Iranians I’ve met – in writing this book, and since the book has come out – are a variegated group in terms of class background, political attachments, sexualities, and much more—but they all for the most part continue to bridge the gaps you describe in order to sustain a sense of self, to sustain material and symbolic connections to Iran. I would say that’s the relevant pattern here – no matter the disparities in their proximities, distances, relationships, or connections to Iran – that each young person strives, or has strived, in creative ways to affirm and root themselves in that way. To be sure, what I’m describing is a highly relational sense of identity. Some sociologists would say this is evidence of “reactive ethnic identity,” that its youth in diaspora claiming and reacting to and embracing their “Iranian” side especially because that side has been stigmatized by their “American” side. That might be part of the story. But I also think it’s important to remember that hybrid subjectivities like [these] hold great potential to undermine and transform the “sides” themselves. From diaspora, this transformation could be through political work, or artistic expression, or scholarly research, or just through the everyday work of learning things that undermine, complicate, or undo the official U.S. party line on Iran—or the Diaspora’s party line on Iran—and then passing what they’ve learned forward to others.</p>
<p><strong>NK:</strong> In Chapter 3: At Home, you wrote:</p>
<p>“Though outside the boundaries of this book, it bears questioning how intensely first-generation individuals actually feel about the sacrosanctity of Iranian whiteness after extensive experience living in the United States.”</p>
<p>Have you had a chance to explore this question since then, either scientifically or on a personal level? What impact would you say this summer has had on first generation Iranian-Americans in terms of how they view compulsory whiteness?</p>
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<p><strong>NB:</strong> This answer is hard to answer without evidence from the 2016 election, and of course, summer 2020 as you suggest. But yes, my impression is that all of this has moved an emotional, or affective needle some degree away from whiteness for a proportion of first-gen, non-Black Iranian immigrants.</p>
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<p class="h3">The afterlife of 40 years of bans and sanctions can mean social death, or social life for transnational ties. I am interested in proof of life.</p>
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<p>The exclusion, criminalization, and containment of immigrants from the MENA region certainly pre-dates Trump. Nonetheless, it’s Trump’s many travel bans affecting the Muslim world since 2017 and his reinstatement of sanctions against Iran that constitute the largest invisible wall that keeps Iranian people from not only accessing the U.S. but accessing a transnational flow of commercially produced medicine, banking instruments, and essential, life-sustaining goods.</p>
<p>These bans and sanctions sweep up Iranians across all documented or prospective statuses – not only refugees but immigration lottery winners, family travelers, H1B-Visa workers, academics coming for study abroad or conference travel, or just ordinary tourists – and places them into one giant banned class of people.</p>
<p>And frankly, as we saw earlier this year at the Northwest corner of the U.S.-Canada border, the offshore work of bans and sanctions also possess the on-site capacity to sweep up hundreds of American citizens of MENA and Iranian origin at one time, with just one simple directive from within Customs and Border Patrol.</p>
<p>I suspect this has influenced the psychology of those Iranians living in the U.S. who may have previously understood themselves as “white.” But how any change in affect and identity might then translate into political and social action is not a given, especially in this summer’s environment of unrepentant legal and extralegal violence in the U.S. against people fighting for racial justice.</p>
<p><strong>NK:</strong> Have the BLM protests of this past summer changed the way you think about the limits of whiteness? If yes, in what way?</p>
<p><strong>NB:</strong> BLM and the critical tradition from which it flows certainly changed the book as I wrote it. I wrote Limits of Whiteness during the BLM uprisings in 2015; the first page of my book puts the reader inside a barbeque restaurant in Houston, Texas, where for 40 years, there has been a poster of a lynching proudly on display. It’s a staged photograph of a bearded, turbaned “Iranian” man with a noose around his neck, his mouth hanging open, and arms slack, who is surrounded by a bunch of men wearing ten-gallon hats and blue jeans. The poster is labelled with the caption “Let’s Play Cowboys and IRANIANS!” The central reference of the poster is the lynching of African Americans. It trafficks in terroristic symbols connected to the seizure and theft of Indigenous lands. It is fundamentally an homage to white vigilantism.</p>
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<p class="h3">Any analysis of Iranian American life, and the limits of whiteness, must begin with a fundamental understanding of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity.</p>
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<p><strong>NK:</strong> <em>The Limits of Whiteness </em>is an incredibly informative and captivating book. Its effect on me was similar to that of <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="http://www.graywolfpress.org/books/citizen" target="_blank">Citizen</a> by Claudia Rankine. I especially appreciated you sharing your own experience with racism from July 4<sup>th</sup>, 2002. Yet, as the academic author of this important work, you calmly stayed focused on other people’s experiences, particularly Iranian-American young adults’ experiences and emotions. How did writing and publishing this work change you and the way you feel about your two countries, fellow countrymen, and identity?</p>
<p><strong>NB:</strong> One of the best DMs I have ever received in my life was from a colleague at a different university, who wrote: “FYI just recommended your book to a very interested Claudia Rankine who looked it up on her phone to make sure she had your name right.” So thank you for the extraordinary compliment of bringing up Citizen.</p>
<p>In order to write Limits of Whiteness, I had to integrate every role I play in life. There was no way out of it, except through it. I had to figure out how to be a daughter, a mother, a learner, a teacher, a sociologist, a witness, and an author on the page.</p>
<p>Tomorrow is the three-year anniversary of the book’s release. Other Iranian Americans sometimes tell me “I didn’t grow up around many other Iranians. I missed out on knowing my grandparents, my cousins, my kin because of borders, sanctions, bans.” I relate to this condition deeply, and recognize it is shared by so many around the world, and in history, whose families and relations have been separated through violence. This book has introduced me to the other seekers, and I still get about one email or DM a day from someone I don’t know who reaches out about the book. So, I am actually much richer in relations than I could have imagined. </p>
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<figure class="image-left"><img alt="Portrait of Neda Maghbouleh" src="https://litofexile.nd.edu/assets/451442/nedamaghbouleh.jpg" width="320"></figure>
<p>This interview was conducted via email following the first Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance event from September 4, 2020. You can watch the recording of the event with Neda Maghbouleh, featuring the discussant, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, the founder of this initiative and the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame, and moderated by Niloofar Adnani, Master of Global Affairs student at the Keough School.</p>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="http://www.nedamaghbouleh.com/" target="_blank">Dr. Neda Maghbouleh</a> is Associate Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Migration, Race, and Identity at the University of Toronto. An international expert on racial identity formation with a strategic focus on SWANA immigrants and refugees, she is Principal Investigator of RISE Team, a major 5-year study of integration and wellbeing among Syrian newcomer refugees. Her award-winning first book, The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race was published in 2017 by Stanford University Press. Born in New York City and raised in Portland, Oregon, Neda now lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and six-year-old daughter, Neelu.</p>
<p><a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sites.us17.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3340c136f30cb28e610b3cc79%26id%3D7ba60217e0%26e%3D4796247367&source=gmail&ust=1637087468570000&usg=AOvVaw2EiUjD0bqqQUg6w7wwfDYF" href="http://www.nazlikoca.com" target="_blank">Nazli Koca</a> is an anglophone writer who grew up on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. Her work has appeared in <em>The Threepenny Review</em>, <em>books without covers</em>, and elsewhere. She currently lives in the US, where she continues to write about exile, disorientation, and isolation.</p>
<p><div style="text-align:left">
<strong>Literatures of Annihilation, Exile, and Resistance</strong>, launched by <a href="http://www.azareenvandervlietoloomi.com/" target="_blank">Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi</a>, is a research collective and lecture series co-sponsored by the <a href="https://al.nd.edu/" target="_blank">College of Arts and Letters</a> and the <a href="https://kroc.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies</a> at the University of Notre Dame, and housed at the newly launched <a href="https://raceandresilience.nd.edu/" target="_blank">Initiative on Race and Resilience</a>, directed by Mark Sanders, Professor of English and Africana Studies. <span style="font-weight:400">The series focuses on contemporary literature, film, and visual art that has been shaped by revolutionary and resistance movements, decolonization, migration, class and economic warfare, communal and state-sanctioned violence, and human rights violations. We aim to theorize new modes of contemporary literary and artistic resistance across national borders and to amplify the voices of scholars, artists, and writers of color whose lived experience is instrumental in forging new alliances across formal, linguistic and national boundaries.</span>
</div></p>Nazli Koca