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Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates‘s The Message was both a humbling and galvanizing experience. Coates‘s journey—spanning Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine—compels readers to confront the stories we inherit and the myths we perpetuate, particularly those that uphold white supremacy and obscure the realities of marginalized people. I‘ll be buying a physical copy and referencing it for years to come on how to craft stories—fiction and nonfiction alike.

Hammad, in a speech she delivered at Columbia, uses the concept of narrative shift in literature and applies it to our current place in history. 4⭐️

Getting my nonfiction itch scratched by the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story—hard to understand and even harder to solve. Any interference from the outside world is immediately castigated as naïve at best or anti-Semitic at worst.

This an incredibly moving, heartbreaking, collection of poems written by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha as he worked to keep his family alive during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In doing so he has given a voice to the now dead and the still suffering voiceless. This horror must end.
Note: The author and his immediate family managed to gain clearance to escape Gaza. Many of members of his extended family remain in there.

My current audiobook. I'm only 24% in, so not entirely sure where it's going, but it looks like nowhere good 😅 The MC is an utterly unlikable ball of narcissism and unresolved trauma. I can't help thinking that if the Women's Prize really had to have rich people immigrant problems , this is a better choice than the boring Persians. And if they wanted women being gross and transgressive, All Fours has nothing on this woman's skincare rituals.

This is a hard book to read, especially considering what‘s happening now in Israel and Gaza and that it was written in 2014.
It‘s so complicated, Arabs and Jews living in and fighting for the land they feel it‘s theirs. What if all Palestinians vanished from Israel one day?
Ibtisam Azem tries to write from various pov‘s and that just shows how complicated it all is.
A poignant #InternationalBooker book.

This is a re-read for my book club. I enjoyed it both times I read it but I was a bit more critical the second time around. It certainly made for a good book club discussion. 📖

“These Olive Trees is far more than a picturebook about a refugee experience. It provides a distinct look into the resilience and culture of the Palestinian people.“ See the full review of this picturebook here: https://wowlit.org/on-line-publications/review/xvii-1/8/

I included Toha‘s biography in this pic so people realize that when I say these poems are brutal, they get a sense of how brutal I mean.

It seems inappropriate to judge the overall style, or lack thereof, of this collection. These are not meant to simply be poems. They are documents. Rapid fire snapshots of war-torn lives.

These poems don‘t need to prove themselves; they only need to be.