#  Video: Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader 

 





April 22, 2025

 

 

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The Arabic word sumūd is often loosely translated as “steadfastness.” Both a personal and collective commitment, sumūd is people determining their own lives, despite the environment of oppressions imposed upon them. This book talk featured Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader. Co-editors Jordan Elgrably and Malu Halasa discussed this anthology, which covers the 20th and 21st centuries of Palestinian cultural history. The collection celebrates the power of culture in Palestinian resistance with selections of memoir, short stories, essays, book reviews, personal narrative, poetry, and art from 46 contributors.

Moderated by Hilary Rantisi, Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative. This book talk is part of the RCPI 2024-25 Book Series.

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Sumud, A New Palestinian Reader. January 30, 2025.

HILARY RANTISI: So welcome everyone, and good evening. I'm delighted to see so many of you here, especially on this freezing, cold day. My name is Hilary Rantisi. I'm the Associate Director of the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at the Religion and Public Life Program at the Harvard Divinity School.

Welcome to our first Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative event of the semester. This is part of our new book series. We showcase new books that have come out that align with the themes and the focus of our work here. And when we say new, in this case, this book came out nine days ago. So this is hot, hot off the press. So get your copy before you leave.

And so we're really honored to have the editors with us today who will walk us through the book and we'll have an opportunity to discuss it. But before I introduce our programs, I just want to thank my colleagues here, who without them, this program would not have been possible. So I want to thank Reem, Tammy, Natalie, Rachelle, Delis and Mariam. So big applause for them.

And our book today, Sumud, A New Palestinian Reader is a perfect way for us to start our semester. As I mentioned, it connects to our themes and what we teach here at HDS and at RCPI in particular. So our work at the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, for those who aren't familiar with it, centralizes an analysis of structural injustice, violence, and power in everything we do. So you will find these themes and our focus on these core issues.

The primary case study that we look at is Israel-Palestine. And our aim is to stretch the scholarly discourse around religion and the practices of peace building, and to examine how decolonial potentialities of art, religion, and identity transformation. So this book is full of art, and we will be learning and seeing some of it today.

I'll introduce our co-editors shortly, but I just wanted to share briefly as I was reading this book today, because I just got it because it's so new. In the foreword by Salim Haddad, the beginning, he writes about the Native American concept of survivance, one of active resistance, endurance and regeneration. And then he talks about Sumud. It's not only a project of survival, but also of remembrance, record keeping and revitalization. And soon, we will hear about how the book talks about Sumud and in many different ways, very powerful.

But one of the descriptions was it's the immediate and stubborn insistence on holding on. It's a shared process of bearing witness and creative remembrance and enraged and engaged act of love. We talk a lot about that here. Sumud is a call for a radical and daring act of imagination.

Last year here at HDS, we all studied Bell Hooks book on love. And so it's also mentioned in the foreword. And so I thought it was apt to read a little bit about how it's mentioned here. So Bell Hooks once said that the function of art is not just to tell things how they are, but to also imagine what is possible. Sumud asks us to train our imagination as a necessary precursor to visualizing liberation.

So I want you to think about these words as we look at the art and as we engage what's in this book. So the reader features memoir, poetry, literary and art criticism, art, posters and illustration, food, and humor, so really wide. And there's a lot here and a lot for all of us, whatever we're interested in.

So as we will now engage the book and hear more about it, first, I want to introduce our amazing guests, the co-editors of Sumud, Jordan Elgrably and Malu Halasa. Malu Halasa is a literary editor at the Marquez review. She's a Jordanian-Filipina-American writer and editor. Her latest edited anthology is Woman Life Freedom, Voices and Art from the Women's Protests in Iran published by Saqi Books in 2023, which was shortlisted for the 2024 Bread and Roses Prize for radical publishing.

Previous co-edited anthologies include Syria Speaks, Art and Culture from the Front Line, others The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie Intimacy and Design, Kaveh Golestan, Recording the Truth in Iran, and the short series inspirations with Maziar Bahari. She's also-- she was the managing editor of the Prince Claus Fund Library in Amsterdam, editor at large for Portal 9 in Beirut, and a founding editor of Tank Magazine in London.

She has written for The Guardian, Financial Times, Times Literary Supplement. And her debut novel, Mother of All Pigs by unnamed press in 2017, was described as a microcosmic portrait of a patriarchal order in slow motion decline by The New York Times. Halasa has been writing about Palestine for the past 30 years. So welcome.

Jordan Elgrably is a Franco-American and Moroccan writer and translator whose stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews, including Apulée-- sorry.

JORDAN ELGRABY: Apulée.

HILARY RANTISI: Apulée, Salmagundi, and The Paris Review, editor-in-chief and founder of the Markaz Review.

He is the co-founder and former director of the Levantine Cultural Center, the Markaz in Los Angeles, and producer of the stand up comedy show, The Sultans of Satire, and hundreds of other public programs. Most recently, he's the editor of stories from the Center of the World, New Middle East fiction. And he's based in Montpellier, France, and in California. So, without further ado, please join me in welcoming our guests today.

MALU HALASA: The academic Stephen Sheehi has written about the techne of Palestinian Liberation. Techne is the art, skill, or craft, a technique, principle or method from which liberation is achieved. Many of the techniques he identifies, quote, "rebuff the military violence of the settler state now known as Israel, with sacrifices and commitments of the Palestinian resistance".

Sheehi cites the spoon, the one which six Palestinian prisoners dug their way out of Gilboa prison, one of the apartheid states in Gulags that was hastily constructed during the Second Intifada. It took the prisoners nine months to dig through 6 inches of concrete wall, metal plates in the floor, and hundreds feet of dirt and tunnel to freedom. Eventually, after a frenzied manhunt, the six escapees were, of course, caught. During their arraignment, one Ayhan Kamamji yelled out, "We see clearly the resistance promise. Victory is coming despite the nose of the occupier."

Other techniques of liberation. The gliders of two PFLP fighters in 1987, a Tunisian and Syrian who had powered their gliders with lawnmower engines flew into Israeli's occupied Southern Lebanon and attacked an Israeli base before the two fidayi were killed.

For Sheehi, the gliders recall the Kites of Gaza flying over Israeli defenses and guard towers and the burning tires every Friday of the Great March of return from 2018 to 2019, which, quote, "blinded" IDF snipers from targeting protesters. And for those that don't know, and I'm sure that everyone here does know, Gaza has one of the highest rates of amputated people because the IDF routinely shoot people in the legs simply for standing next to the wall that encloses Gaza.

As this academic writes, objects associate with one another to make meaning within a history of popular mobilization. Like the balloons with banners stating, Biden, you're part of Israeli apartheid, over the former president's visit to Bethlehem and Shereen Abu Akleh's camera. On the day of her murder, the Israeli spokesman said that Abu Akleh had been filming and working for a media outlet amidst armed Palestinians. They are armed with cameras. At her funeral, it was the Palestinian flag on her coffin that triggered Israeli violence.

Sheehi tells us, while the Revolutionary Movement politically has largely been marginalized in the Palestinian polity, the popular culture, and psychological, social, and cultural identification, it is forged remains at the bedrock of Palestinian national identity. Among the spoon, the glider, the kites, burning tires, the stone, the camera is Sumud.

The Arab word Sumud often translates as steadfastness or standing fast. It is above all, everyday resistance in the face of Israeli occupation. As the Palestinian author and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh writes from Ramallah, Sumud is, quote, "practiced by every man, woman, and child here, struggling on his or her own to learn to cope with and resist the pressures of living as a member of a conquered people."

Sumud is watching your home turned into a prison. You choose to stay in that prison because it is your home, and because you fear that if you leave, your jailer will not allow you to return. It is developing from an all encompassing form of life into a form of resistance that unites Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. Despite the constant oppressions imposed on Palestinians, Sumud is both a personal and collective commitment.

On its history, Palestinian activist and physician, Dr. Mustafa Barghouti offers, while pain and struggle are universally present in Palestinian experiences, Sumud also allows for other experiences and expressions, including a deep felt joy and appreciation of Palestinian culture. Of the thousands of books published about Palestine and Israel, comparatively few explore the relationship between culture and resistance.

During times of war, violence often obscures everything. Yet poetry, literature and art are the very spaces, even during extreme, difficult times, in which people reveal cherished aspects of their existence and the ideas and philosophies that underpin real and imagined lives.

As promised by the subtitle, Sumud is a new Palestinian reader. We have memoir, poetry, fiction, reportage. It was important, we felt, to have literary and arts criticism, posters, illustration. The anthology explores creative defiance by Palestinians and others who stand beside them, people who believe in the Palestinian right to self-determination in a Homeland.

Much of the material has been drawn from the Markaz review, the Arab and Middle Eastern Literary Arts Publication that Jordan is the head editor of, and I'm there as a literary editor. Some of the writing was published before October 7, and explores issues and ideas long associated with Palestinian life and culture. Since the reader has been compiled and edited amidst Israel's day in and day out bombing of Gaza, one can sense an urgency to the more recent contributions. The ongoing killing of journalists and writers in Gaza prompted Jordan's essay, They Kill Writers, Don't They?

The inclusion in the reader of literary essays and book and art reviews allows for a deeper, more critical appraisal of important, creative expression and ideas. The Saudi American novelist and literary critic Iman Quota provides an overview of the potency of Palestinian poetry. Many of the poets she writes about in her essay have been included in our anthology.

And also, she's reviewing the latest collection by Fady Joudah, a physician and translator Joudah, brought Maya Abu Al-hayat poems about memory, loss, and motherhood to English speaking audiences. Poetry like the Spoon, the Kite and Burning Tire has been one of the best tools in the Palestinian arsenal to counter Israeli oppression and instill in Palestinians and others a great belief in resistance, no matter the level of violence.

This was acknowledged by Moshe Dayan, who once likened reading one of Fadwa Toucan's poems, to facing 20 enemy commandos. The Sumud anthology closes with Hala Alyan's poem, Habibti Ghazal, part love swoon, part warning. Alyan is an award winning poet, author, and clinical psychologist. The title of her 2024 opinion piece for The Guardian, I am not there, I am not here, a Palestinian American poet bearing witness to atrocities, references to Bach counterpoint, an elegy for the late Edward Said written by the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

In this article, Alyan explores an essential aspect of contemporary Palestinian life. Quote, "The idea of Sumud has become a multifaceted cultural concept among Palestinians", she writes. To its usual meaning of steadfastness, she adds that the word in Arabic is a derivative of arranging, saving up, even adorning. It implies composure braided with rootedness, a posture that might bend but will not break.

I want to close with a story that came to me when I was writing the intro to the anthology. During the war on Gaza, there have been scores of trophy videos posted on the internet by Israeli soldiers in the strip. Excuse me. One that appeared on TikTok shows a devastated home. The Palestinian family who owned the property discovered it by chance, having been forced out of the same house months earlier, and sent the short, disturbing film to relatives and friends.

In it, an IDF soldier films his unit. Helmeted and armed combatants yelled to each other as they make their way through the debris on the stairs and utterly trashed rooms. Sunlight streams in through the windows. Every now and then the family-- the soldier points the camera downward, and a family memento, perhaps a framed picture, can be glimpsed among the smashed furniture and detritus strewn across the floor.

From the layout of the house and the curved metal Banister on the stairwell, it was obviously a once gracious family home. It's unclear why the film was uploaded in the first place. By the time it arrived in one of our WhatsApp chat groups, a comment in Hebrew had been posted on the video. It read, in the midst of battle, I see a mirror. These words seem less triumphant and more self-reflective.

One could even suggest that the person who made the comment felt ashamed. In this time of brutal, the occupation continues. The war-- yes, we're in a ceasefire, but a lot of the violence continues. At this time, what really is the power of culture? It not only reveals who we are to others, but in many ways demonstrates the essentialness of who we are to ourselves.

The elderly Palestinians who own this house, who brought up their many children and their grandchildren in it were also shown the video. Afterwards, they said to themselves, we can fix this, we can do this. All the bombing and death of family members had not broken them. They still had the expectation of returning home. And we've been watching on social media the expectation of that return of thousands of people returning home. This can be no better embodiment of Sumud. Thank you.

Let me help you. Do you want to do our first? You should read.

JORDAN ELGRABY: Thank you. Can you hear me? OK. Because I can't hear sound. That was an important introduction to the book. And I'm just going to read a couple of poems from the book and a little bit from the essay, that I wrote about how writers are being targeted.

The first poem is by Noor Hindi. It's called Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying. Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks, seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don't see the moon from jail cells and prisons.

It's so beautiful, the moon. They're so beautiful, the flowers. I pick flowers for my dead father when I'm sad. He watches Al Jazeera all day. I wish Jessica would stop texting me, Happy Ramadan. I know I'm American because when I walk into a room, something dies. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. One day, I'll write about the flowers like we own them. And that was Noor Hindi.

Write my Name, Zaina Azam. Write my name on my leg, mama, use the Black permanent marker with the ink that doesn't bleed if it gets wet, the one that doesn't melt if it's exposed to heat. Write my name on my leg, mama, make the lines thick and clear and add your special flourishes, so I can take comfort in seeing my mama's handwriting when I go to sleep.

Write my name on my leg, mama, and on the legs of my sisters and brothers. This way, we will belong together. This way we will be known as your children. Write my name on my leg, mama, and please write your name and baba's name on your legs too, so we will be remembered as a family.

Write my name on my leg, mama. Don't add any numbers, like when I was born or the address of our home. I don't want the world to list me as a number. I have a name, and I'm not a number. Write my name on my leg, mama. When the bomb hits our house, when the walls crush our skulls and bones, our legs will tell our story, how there was nowhere for us to run. Wow, that is a powerful poem.

MALU HALASA: That went viral during the war.

JORDAN ELGRABY: I started out my-- started out my life as a young journalist in Europe during this Lebanese Civil war. And I was always interested and interviewed lots of Palestinians and Lebanese and even Israelis. I talked to a lot of people about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And so as an American and French citizen, I've been accustomed to complete liberation. And I never had any fear that as a journalist, my life was in danger.

So over the past 15 months of the war on Gaza and seeing so many media workers killed, many of them intentionally targeted, I was quite shocked. More journalists, more media workers have been killed in Gaza, in South Lebanon in the last 15 months than all of the journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam War, which is a shocking statistic. And you don't have to believe me. You can look up the Committee for Protection of Journalists or Pen International. It's very well-documented.

So I put together this essay called They Kill Writers, Don't They? Murder is the ultimate form of censorship. Yet when a regime kills a writer, a poet or a journalist, the writer's words live on. Spain's dictator, Francisco Franco, who ruled the country for four decades, pursued a brutal policy of repression against Spanish poets and writers, evidenced by the fascist murder of poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

The irony is that if you go to Granada today, where Lorca was killed, his spirit lives on. There's a cultural center named after him. His books are everywhere. And where is Franco? Nobody talks about him anymore. His books are gone. His writing has disappeared. So I just want to jump out of this and point out that, killing writers is a failure of the imagination.

Ghassan Kanafani would be among the first writers to be killed by Israel. It is the brevity of his life, and the manner of his death that strikes me as not only harrowing but ironic. For despite his assassination, the writer has remained omnipresent with us over the years, almost as if his killers had never fulfilled their nefarious mission.

Kanafani was born in Akka, Palestine in 1936. He was 12 years old during the exodus from the war that would set the stage for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that endures to this day. In 1948, as a result of the Nakba, his lawyer father fled with the family, first to Beirut, and then to Damascus, where Kanafani attended University to become a writer, and along with Samir Azzam, a forerunner of contemporary Palestinian fiction.

On July 8, 1972, Kanafani was killed when his car blew up in downtown Beirut. With him was his sister's 17-year-old daughter, Lamis, who was visiting from-- visiting Beirut for the first time from Damascus, eager to see the sights. I go on to talk about several other Palestinian writers and translators who were assassinated in the '70s. And then I skip ahead to decades later.

Not satisfied with silencing short story writers, novelists and translators, an unknown Israeli politician or military commander would order the extrajudicial killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shereen Abu Akleh. 1971 to 2022 was her lifespan. She was reporting for Al Jazeera from Jenin in the occupied West Bank, when she was shot in the head by a sniper on May 11, 2022. A television journalist wearing blue body armor marked press, visible from a great distance.

Abu Akleh had been an intrepid reporter covering Israel, Palestine and the Arab world for more than two decades. Her death caused a great commotion among all Palestinians and members of the press, who feared that if Israel could shoot a journalist and American citizen no less, point blank in broad daylight and get away with it. Then more than ever before, our lives as journalists would be greatly endangered around the world.

Now, I go on to talk about the dozens and dozens of poets, writers and journalists that were killed after October 7, 2023. And I talk about the different examples of cultural annihilation that have gone on and yet-- excuse me. Let me-- I picked up a little cold here in your cold city. I'm from California. I can handle fires and earthquakes, but not cold weather.

So today, Israel declares itself, quote, "The only democracy in the Middle East and insists it follows international law. And yet it offers no explanation or legal justification for having murdered more writers than any other country in the world." Now, I did attempt to get some explanation from the Israeli government as to all of these deaths.

For example-- and I contacted a number of the ministries, including the Office of the Prime Minister, Minister of justice, Minister of Defense, Minister of Education. Why did you resolutely decide not to allow any foreign journalists coverage of your campaign in Gaza? Even during World War II, Foreign journalists were able to cover the fighting. Just as foreign journalists are now covering the conflict in Ukraine with Russia. Don't you want the world to hear your side of the story from independent, objective reporters? No reply.

Palestinian journalists and educators in Gaza have reported receiving phone calls from Israeli military units, threatening them with death before they were, in fact, targeted either by missile, mortar, or sniper fire. How do you respond to the suggestion that Israel is deliberately targeting and killing journalists in Gaza? No answer. Almost all of Gaza's universities and libraries are now partially or completely destroyed. Is there a policy of dismantling or destroying Palestinian educational facilities in Gaza? And if so, can you explain your reasoning? No answer.

As long as Palestine writes, Israel will be reminded of its vain attempts made in 1948, 1972, 2023 to 2024, and all the years in between to stamp out and silence Palestinian culture. By reading Palestinians, we can refuse to allow Israel's assassination of writers, poets, journalists, educators and others, who are part of the cultural narrative to succeed at erasing their memories. For they can kill writers, but they can never kill their words. And with that, I don't know if you want to open it to questions.

MALU HALASA: Let's see the art.

JORDAN ELGRABY: Let's see the art. Yeah.

MALU HALASA: One of the-- I've done, like maybe seven anthologies, and I think seven from the Middle East at different times. And I find that the inclusion of art widens the discussion. Because the art-- there's something about looking at art that tells us something. And sometimes it's not really--

Here's a Khalil Rabah's Palestine Philistine. And it's a Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus on one side. And this is what's on the inside. And he's drawing attention to the word Philistine. Of its many synonyms in the 1997 Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus, ignoramus and barbarian are more widely known.

So I wanted to include this artwork to give like a kind of history so that we can see where we're coming from. This is by-- this is an artwork by Hazem Harb. He calls this series Gauze. And the next, the charcoal drawings, Dystopia Is Not a Noun, He called them his urgent works. And I'll quote. We did an interview with him for the book.

"These were created during the genocide that is now taking place in Gaza. I used to work with collage and archival imagery. I did my research and analysis, took my photographs, and spent time in making art. After the arrests and torture of my father and the killing of my family and friends in Gaza, what was public suddenly became intensely personal. I don't know how to explain it. I've never experienced anything like this in my life. I was following my family's situation. And at the same time dealing with anger, sadness, and trauma."

He told-- what was interesting about the interview was that it was on Zoom. And so it was really like, I was inside his artists studio. He brought out books that he had when he was a young artist growing up in Gaza to show me that the sculpture that he had done with Gauze.

And Gauze is particularly poignant for Gaza, since the English name for the raw silk fabric, or Shosh in Arabic, is said to have originated there. Harb is a collector of historic artifacts from Palestine. And on the back of Sumud, we have a watermelon that he's taken from a Fresco in a Villa in Nazareth. And when I was talking to him, he said to me, I've seen so many ugly watermelons. This one was beautiful.

There's also-- those artists are more older generation. They're established. But what also the Gaza war did was that it brought younger artists to the fore. This is Samir Harb. I don't think he's related to Hazem Harb. And this is a screen grab from an animation that he did that he posted on Instagram, and the animation had the sound of bombing, actual bombing. That was what he used for his animation.

And this is from Mohammad Sabaneh, who lives in the occupied territories. Like millions of others editorial cartoonist, Mohammad Sabaneh was touched by the video of a little Gazan girl that went viral in the first weeks of the war in Gaza. Still bereft from the death of other family members, she finally lost her mother in an Israeli airstrike. The Arabic text in the drawing reads, this is my mom. I know her from her hair.

This is a younger generation artists, and she did a series of portraits of the fishermen of Gaza, but also other catches. And an Israeli blockade limits fishing off of Gaza's Coast to six nautical miles in the North and 15 nautical miles in the Middle East. Yet Gazan fishing boats, a half mile out, have been shot at and harassed by the Israeli Navy. Rehaf Al Batniji is a self-taught, social documentary photographer from Gaza City. The photographs in the fables of the sea series combine oral testimony and portraiture of intergenerational fishermen and their catches.

There is also photographers who are not Palestinian, who are photographing olive trees. And this is an olive tree by Adam Bloomberg and Rafael Gonzalez. And if you notice, they have-- the name of the olive tree is where that olive tree is in the occupied territories. So every two years, Al-badawi an olive tree in Palestine that is 12 meters tall and approximately 4,500 years old, yields more than 800 kilograms of olives. Since 1967, over one million Palestinian olive trees have been burned to the ground or uprooted by Jewish settlers or the Israeli authorities.

What I'm really proud of in the book is that we have-- Palestinian modern art was started by four artists, and one of them is Vera Tamari. And this is her series. It's called Going for a Ride. And this was done during the 2002 Israeli incursion into Ramallah. So when the tanks went through Ramallah, they crushed cars. And so she took the crushed cars. And I think it was on the friends, maybe the quaker friends field. She did an installation. She arranged it. They had an opening.

And this is one of the two photographs that she took of that opening. Because later that night, the Israelis tanks came again. And they rolled over the crushed cars again. And then they got out and they peed on the crushed cars, which is something that Vera Tamari also documented. She ran-- I think she was-- I don't know if she lives across the street. I've been always trying to figure this.

HILARY RANTISI: She used to. Yeah.

MALU HALASA: She used to live across the street, so she filmed it, and they made an art film of it. And I kind of felt that this-- in my long years of writing about Palestine, I've known of this exhibition. And it's something that-- it makes me so excited to know about it, and that the book has the two photographs that she took herself, the artist took herself of the installation. I'm kind of thrilled, I have to say. I am thrilled.

This is a very interesting portrait by Raeda Saadeh. In her art, Raeda Saadeh is every woman, as she writes, living in a world that attacks her values, her love, and her spirit every day. She is in a state of occupation. This is Raeda Saadeh's words.

In self-portraiture and performance, sometimes a separation wall is literally on the artist's face, like she photographs herself with the wall on her face. Other times, she's knitting amid the ruins of a demolished house. The subject matter of keys is both the dreams and the weighty expectations of Homeland that effectively tie her eyes shut.

This is another founder of modern Palestinian art, Tayseer Barakat. He grew up by the sea in Gaza. His series Shoreless Sea is a meditation on the large numbers of Arabs becoming refugees and crossing the perilous Mediterranean, while the world watches on, indifferent to their tragedy. The artist acknowledged how the monotone tones of his paintings, quote, "reflect the hardship of our time and our present life. I think the pressure on us makes us use dark colors."

And here, again, is another-- one of the founders of Palestinian modern art, Sliman Anis Mansour, who captures the penning of-- in this charcoal and acrylic drawing on Canvas, he captures a penning of Palestinians waiting to cross from Gaza into Israel through the Eras checkpoint. The artwork also intimates the travel restrictions placed on Palestinians in the West Bank, the settler only roads close to them and the continued denied access to East Jerusalem. There are people caged in plain sight since the Nakba, a year after the artist was born in 1947.

Khaled El Haber is a musician, and he's done this poster. His songs uses a Palestinian. The lyrics are Palestinian poets, and his poster takes the title from one of his songs. We are doing fine in Gaza. What about you? And I wanted to talk about the cover of Sumud.

On the right is an artwork from Steve Sabella. Sabella is-- he lives in Jerusalem, or I'm sorry, in Germany. He's from-- originally from Jerusalem. In the book, we also have photographs that he's taken of a house that he lived in for 38 days, a house that was abandoned during the Nakba.

And he photographed it. And he printed the photographs on pieces of plaster from his parents' home in Old Jerusalem, in the old city of Jerusalem. This is his-- the metamorphosis. This is barbed wire that he's showing. And then the back cover with a very wonderful quote for the book by Nan Goldin is Hazem Harb's historic watermelon. Thank you.

HILARY RANTISI: Thank you, first of all, for taking us on a tour of your very rich reader. And one of the pieces that I read this morning--

MALU HALASA: They want you to hold it.

HILARY RANTISI: Can you hear me? No, you can't hear me. I thought I'm loud enough. OK, I'll carry it. I like that you included humor, Black humor, because people who don't know Palestinians may not realize how important Black humor is in survival, and is also a way of smooth. And there is a sci-fi story here about Gaza applying to be the city for Olympics in what was it, 2038 or something?

MALU HALASA: Yeah, a dystopian future.

HILARY RANTISI: Yeah, a dystopian future. And I'm wondering if you could just maybe give a brief description of that.

JORDAN ELGRABY: Well, it's about two friends who-- one of them decides to-- well, it's a prank. It's a prank, and they get caught. But then it turns out that somebody in the administration thinks it's a good idea. So it's a play between-- it's sort of satire because, on one hand, they may get punished, and they even are afraid potentially for their lives.

On the other hand, someone starts to think, well, maybe this isn't so implausible. Maybe we should go for this competition. They apply, on behalf of the Gaza administration, to the Olympics. And so then the Gazans are confronted with, do we want to go through with this or not?

MALU HALASA: But also, what's interesting about the story by Ahmed Masoud is that Ahmed Masoud is from Gaza. And what's really interesting, or I found really interesting, was that these are two hackers. So they're always dealing with drones coming and looking at them. And one of them is hacking with some sort of handheld device. And as the war in Gaza went on, that story was so prescient, that we had aid workers where drones came down and said, what's in your boot? Who are you? Show us what's there.

And I kept going back to Ahmed Masoud because he has that in his story. I mean, it's very funny. The Palestine of the future is like they're all city-states because they're not-- they can't-- they're not allowed to be next to each other. So Ramallah has a city-state, Gaza has a city-state, and everyone's jealous. But it is Black humor. And I kind of felt it was-- we felt it was important to the point.

JORDAN ELGRABY: But also in the anthology, we include an essay by Diane Shamas, an American educator in Gaza. And she talks-- she goes-- she's they're teaching off and on. And the issue of drones, Gazans have become used to for years. They're omnipresent. The buzz of the drone is everywhere all the time. And it goes back to 2008, 2009.

HILARY RANTISI: Yeah.

JORDAN ELGRABY: So it's not really the future. It's now.

MALU HALASA: Yeah.

HILARY RANTISI: Yeah. Absolutely.

JORDAN ELGRABY: We're going to sign copies if you would like. And then I would just ask you, if you get the book and you like it, you dislike it, whatever, you post your review on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever. It'll help us to get the word out, get more people reading the book. And you could also recommend it to your local library, because it is an excellent primer for people who heard about Palestine but don't know a lot. It's a good introduction because there are so many different avenues to start with.

MALU HALASA: Yeah.

HILARY RANTISI: And introduces an important word to our vocabulary that is-- so thank you for naming it, Sumud. And thank you for joining us today. And please join me on--

MALU HALASA: Thank you for having us. Thank you for having us. Oh my God. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative at Religion and Public Life.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2025. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.



 

 

 



 

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