How Hope Outlasts Despair: An Interview with Yahia Lababidi
Yahia Lababidi | Palestine Wail | Daraja Press | July 2024 | 116 Pages
Yahia Lababidi’s newest collection, Palestine Wail, comes at a time when well over 50,000 Palestinians, approximately one third of them under the age of eighteen, have been slaughtered. In fact, in The Lancet’s article “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” from July 2024, Rasha Khatib states “it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” Lababidi’s collection addresses not only this violence committed against the Palestinians, but perhaps more poignantly calls out all of us for indifference. In his afterword, he writes:
The systematic, cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent children, in the name of so-called ‘self-defense,’ is an unjustifiable moral obscenity . . . It is appalling that there remain democratic nations as well as civilized individuals who find it difficult to unequivocally condemn such depravity and call for a ceasefire.
Even Lababidi’s original publishers pulled out of publishing this book because they were afraid to name what was happening “murder” or “genocide.” We, Shaymaa Mahmoud and John Brantingham, read Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail at the same time and wanted to engage with it further through collaboration. After 20 years as adoptive New York Quaker father and Arab-American, Muslim spiritualist daughter, we come to the work believing disparate cultures must call out and battle evil alongside Lababidi. As members of this culture and humans with intact empathy, it is our responsibility to not only denounce genocide and occupation but to work against its efforts however we are able. Lababidi’s Palestine Wail calls for the simplest, barest humanity, and it reminds us that loss of life, occupation, and genocide take an impossible toll on everyone. Finally, it holds us all accountable to address injustice, to dispel oppression and to work toward collaborative and restorative justice. In our interview, we focused on what he saw as our responsibility to humanity.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Shaymaa Mahmoud and John Brantingham: One of the most interesting aspects of Palestine Wail is the tension that exists between the poetry and the prose foreword and afterword because while the prose takes our inaction to task, the poetry often seems to be simply asking the reader to understand the humanity of the people living in Palestine. It feels like one of the major missions of the collection, if it can be said to have a mission, is to connect with non-Palestinians who might be disengaged because they have not understood the humanity of those people being affected by this genocide.
Yahia Lababidi: Very interesting point, which I was not (consciously) aware of. I do believe that poetry and prose serve different functions. Prose, as I regard it, is more direct, can be topical and concerns the mind; whereas poetry, as I understand it, is more mysterious and a matter of the heart or spirit. So, while my foreword and afterword are calls to action engaging with the specifics of our lamentable political moment, the poetry attempts to make a more universal appeal, as you put it, to remind us of our shared humanity.
Mahmoud and Brantingham: In “Pity the Looters,” you seem to be vague in a couple of key ways. One of which is that you use the pronoun “they” but don’t specify which looters. Later, you use the terms “birthright” and “broken glass,” which themselves have their own historical context. Are you doing this to create a connection in our minds with all people who suffer atrocity, to show that group identification is in itself a division and that we need to see our shared humanity rather than focusing on differences that exist mainly in detail?
Lababidi: Even Martin Luther King, Jr. who advocated for nonviolent resistance, which I wholeheartedly agree with, recognized that 'political riots were the voice of the unheard.' The point of a poem like “Looters” is to appeal to people’s pity and make a case that all those who find themselves in unimaginably unjust, oppressive, cruel circumstances might behave in less than ideal ways, out of desperation. In other words, those to whom great moral harm is done can, in turn, be capable of physical violence. It is wise and compassionate to tell ourselves that, there but for the grace of God go I… There are no others, there is only Us.
Mahmoud and Brantingham: You make this point throughout the collection that we are all one people. Do you see this as the main goal of what you’re writing or is there another more open ended goal?
Lababidi: I don’t know that there is ever only one goal to any work of art, my one or others. But, certainly, when we dehumanize others and see them as separate from ourselves, we permit ourselves to behave in bestial ways. There is no exchange rate for human lives, all lives are sacred and equal. As the Quran says: whoever takes a life… it will be as if they killed all of humanity; and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved all of humanity.
Mahmoud and Brantingham: We love the reading of your poem “Red Sea” by the Jewish poet and activist, Aurora Levins Morales. The poem highlights the universality of humanity across difference and that we all must carry each other, really underscoring and echoing your message. The collaboration is itself the exact sort of cultural reunification that you are calling for. It felt connected a bit to your poem “Who is Innocent?” in examining a different interpretation of religious figures/narratives. What would you say these reinterpretations have to offer when talking about heritage and justice?
Lababidi: I have tried to read on my Youtube channel in this difficult year and a half, poems of peace by Israeli, Jewish, Palestinian, Arab and Muslim poets, to underscore that no one people has a monopoly on truth and that we are all in this together. In this regard, I was honored to have the warm support of Jewish Voice for Labour who introduced my Palestine book to a sympathetic audience within the Jewish community of the UK & bravely stand with the oppressed people of Palestine:
It is my belief that there are people of conscience everywhere and that the only borders are those of our compassion. This is why I’m also in contact with poets in Israel (who teach my poems in their classes) as well as Palestine whom I try to get more widely published, such as Mohammed Abu Lebda, whose philosophical/spiritual poetry I champion: ‘To Be a Gazan’ - DAWN
Mahmoud and Brantingham: The fact that you’re in diaspora trying to write through this trauma, while simply trying to survive, and also advocating for your people with your work makes us wonder about those moments when you question whether you have been accountable or should be more accountable. What did Palestine Wail teach you about accountability, and both your and our responsibility to humanity?
Lababidi: On a metaphysical level, in the words of Kafka: guilt is never to be doubted. Since we are commanded to be our brother/sister’s keeper, we are all implicated in these crimes against humanity, the great sin of Genocide. Vastness of spirit is our only way out of the narrow-hearted mess that we find ourselves in.
Mahmoud and Brantingham: Ultimately, Palestine Wail reveals that the century-old propaganda that humanity is and should be broken into tribes perpetually in competition with each other must be destroyed, as this type of connection leads to a continual crisis of and for humanity. Could you comment on this?
Lababidi: I could not have said it better myself. We belong to one another and at the heart of all our catastrophes is a crisis of love: of ourselves, of one another as ourselves and of the Divine.
Mahmoud and Brantingham: Part of what this book is doing is unraveling decades of expensive and largely effective propaganda and the deliberate silencing of voices of anyone who might speak up. We find it shocking but not surprising that the original publisher of this book backed out because you used words like “genocide” and “murder” when that is the truth of what is happening. What has your experience been trying to share this truth in a Western context within Western literary spaces?
Lababidi: I hesitate to go into great length, since I believe the balance of light has been greater than darkness and that I’ve met with more support than censorship. But, I regret to say, cowardice is real and even fine, cultured minds that ought to know better have allowed themselves to be intimidated, silenced or brainwashed. It pains me how widespread the bias towards Israel and the confounding of Zionism with Judaism.
Unfortunately, this extends to literary gatekeepers, such as publishers, who are part of the larger machinery of violence. For example, after working, closely, for six months on my Palestine book with an editor I deeply admire (respected scholar and poet) my once enthusiastic US publisher lost their nerve and dropped my book for fear of offending Jewish readers.
In a two hour meeting, this publisher let me know that they were uneasy with my use of words like Genocide, even murder — as they felt that it was “prejudging a legal matter” — and they went so far as to suggest that if they were to publish my Palestine Wail, it would result in scandal for the publishing house and some of their authors would walk out!
I don’t want to use names, because I respect my editor, who threatened to leave this publishing house as an act of solidarity, and to whom I’m deeply indebted for helping to shape this book, but I’ll quote an excerpt from a private note of support he shared with me:
We proved to be a press unworthy of your prophetic and mystical gifts. I regret that and apologize, on behalf of my short-sighted colleagues, for it. We failed not only you, but the millions of vulnerable Palestinians who must daily face the brutality of a reckless military assault--aided and abetted by US weapons and allowed by the passivity and cowardice of the current US administration.
Devastated, I moved on… Mercifully, before too long and with the passionate assistance of many principled friends — activists and artists from around the world, some Jewish, I am grateful to add — I was able to find a less alarmist, more courageous publisher: lifelong Kenyan activist, Firoze Manji, whose Daraja Press is based in Canada and was able to carry Palestine Wail forth to the world.
Another reason I hesitate to complain, because I believe there is goodness everywhere, is how warmly my book has been embraced. Less than a year after my book’s publication, it continues to receive favorable reviews in the press, internationally. Poetry from Palestine Wail has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and translated into Arabic, French, Malayalam, Gaeilge, Spanish as well as Dutch by the Poet Laureate of the Netherlands, Babs Gons. Further my poems for Palestine from this book have, also, been read in literary festivals in the UK, Canada, Scotland, Holland and peaceful protests in the US, are used in classrooms and were included in Democracy in Exile's Top 10 Most Popular Articles of 2024. Most encouraging of all, and as an indication of the extensive interest and support of the Palestinian people, as part of the annual global publishing event, #ReadPalestineWeek, in just one week 3,351 e-copies of Palestine Wail were downloaded, directly, from my publisher, Daraja Press: Palestine Wail: Poems – DarajaPress.
Mahmoud and Brantingham: We feel that if this vastness of spirit can be practiced by you in diaspora during this conflict, the rest of us should too. What are practices that you have used to stay focused and responsible as a human? What would you like your readers to take from Palestine Wail?
Lababidi: I would hope that readers of Wail might be moved, by pity, to better imagine the lives and dignity and heroism of the Palestinian people. My wish is that their compassion for the suffering and loss of the beleaguered people of Palestine will embolden readers to speak up and take their governments to task for turning a blind eye or worse supporting the atrocities taking place. By questioning the false narratives by corrupt politicians and compromised media, the dream is that we might, finally, live to see war criminals brought to justice and a Free Palestine in our lifetime.