Hello and welcome back to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents podcast. I'm Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents, and I'll be your host for today. I'm really excited to have this conversation. We've been planning it for a long time. We're here to talk about two memoirs that came out this year: Tareq Baconi's memoir, Fire in Every Direction, just came out last month, but I was reading it, actually, over the summer at the same time as Sara Aziza's book The Hollow Half came out. Tareq's book, Fire in Every Direction, is a story of queer, unrequited love among two young Palestinian boys growing up in Amman, intermingled with a family history of displacement following the Nakba. And Sara's book, The Hollow Half, is a story of surviving anorexia and the ways that the body holds the intergenerational grief of the ongoing Nakba.

I'm really excited to have both of you here. I'll just give your bios, and then we'll jump into the conversation. Tareq Baconi is president of the board of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance from 2024, as well as this new memoir, Fire in Every Direction. And Sara Aziza is a Palestinian American writer whose journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper's Magazine, and Jewish Currents. And her book, The Hollow Half, just won the Palestine Book Award for memoir. Sara, Tareq, thank you guys for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having us.

So, I'm really excited about talking to you together. As I said, I read these books at the same time, and so the echoes were really strong for me. And it feels like—I mean, forgive the comparison right away, but I'm engaged a lot in thinking about third-generation Holocaust fiction, and how that genre has kind of hardened into something very particular with its own tropes, and thinking about Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated (which is a book I hate, by the way), but there's a way in which that genre has really solidified into itself in ways that feel sometimes frustrating for me, or stale. And I felt like, in reading these two books together, that something was being constituted; that there was a language asserting itself for the first time, a new language of diasporan Palestinian identity. And obviously, there isn't one-to-one comparisons for everything in these books, but I was starting to see ways in which they were speaking to each other that spoke to a kind of new literature. And I was excited about that. That's extremely exciting to see.

So, I want to talk to you guys about some of the resonances, some of the differences in these books. I wanted to start, actually, with almost a standard memoir question, which is the question about privacy. I think this actually relates also to a question about audience. What I think is interesting about both of these books is that they are very revealing, they are very intimate, but the intimacy is not for everyone. There's really a sense of layers of intimacy. For example, Sara, in your book, your partner's pet name for you is literally censored with a black bar. Tareq, I've talked with you before about how, even though I think some of the sex scenes felt, for you, like walking right up to the edge, there's also a lot of propriety in them. Like, you really fade to black before you get to anything too personal. Even though the whole book is personal, there are these moments where you can't cross fully into the experience. And also, in both books, there are Arabic words in Arabic, which, obviously, for non-Arabic readers, those are just holes; those are just silences on some level. There's a level of distancing there from the reader who doesn't speak Arabic, and also a drawing close of the reader who does. And so, I wanted to talk to you guys about how you thought about privacy in these books that are so personal and revealing, and also how you thought about privacy and intimacy as it relates to different kinds of readers.

I love this question. There were a lot of things that I had to take a lot of time and circle back to over and over again in order to arrive at the place where I felt that I could have the amount of distance to choose, as an author, what the story needed. Nothing was going on the page as a form of therapy, as a form of exposure and disclosure for a voyeuristic appetite of a reader. There were so many opportunities to write in that way, and it was maybe the most expected, or available, or easy way to write. When I was shopping the book around, talking to agents, most of them responded most to the more salacious-seeming, traumatic-seeming, stereotypical points that they were drawing out in the proposal. You know, being in a femme body; they wanted a lot of detail about my body, and the way I chose to render the body on the page was very selective for that reason, because there's this sensationalization of the traumatized body, the female body, the ethnicized body, and I wanted to make sure I resisted all of those. So, anyway, all that to say, the people that I ended up working with were all the people who recognize that the stories, the histories, and the turning around of trauma back off of my body, back off of my experience personally, back toward the structural sources, and reasons, and ramifications of my personal story. That was the sort of book I wanted to build and the story I wanted to tell. And so, the choices I made were all in service of that.

The Arabic on the page, the redaction of the intimate name between me and my partner, those were points of reminding the reader that I had agency—that this is a crafted object that you're experiencing, and you don't have ultimate access to my experience. And the last thing, to the Arabic: I wanted to write a book that really reflected more what it feels like to move around the world for me, and that's a multilingual experience. There's certain memories, or emotions, or textures of my living that I experienced through Arabic, and for a lot of my life, I was censoring myself in relation to the Arabic language, and I was cutting myself off from a lot of my authentic experience. So, rendering on the page how the world sounds to me, and feels to me, and arrives to me was important. Arabic is also, like you said, an invitation to those who do read it to feel drawn in. I think of it as a door. You can take your shoes off and come inside if you're an Arabic speaker. It's like a welcoming, in a world that often has this imposition and supposition of being catered to in English. And so, for the Anglophone reader, if there's a moment of alienation or frustration, I think that's also politically useful—or could just offer a moment of self-reflection. Why do you feel like you have this expectation that every word should be accessible to you, that everything should be legible to you and easily explained? Because a lot of people around you in this world, in an Anglophone context, may not be experiencing the world immediately through English, but they're making themselves legible to you constantly. So, what does it feel like to be denied access to that for a moment? I just think it's an invitation for a reflection in that way.

Tareq, before we get to you (because I think you might bounce off of this), I just want to read something in your book, Sara, when you're talking about being on campus, trying to be political on campus, and to try to talk to people about Palestine. And you say: “I offered my family's precious, private things, stories of my grandmother's hardships, my father's poverty. The rejection of these bids for empathy stung the worst.” And I do see a way of taking back that agency, of trying to present them in the way that feels truest to you and not the most expedient way to get through to someone else who might not be in a position to give you what you need from that—and also can refuse it in a way that is very painful. So, Tareq, I want to hear from you on this question, especially because I know that you're such a private person and that this has been a process.

Yeah, I love that line that you read from Sara's book. And I think, in some ways, it goes to the core of what Sara's talking about, what you're talking about as well, in terms of how much of oneself is one willing to give in order to elicit some reaction, or in order to elicit a political shift that we're all aspiring for, and what does that mean for the person doing the offering? I think, in many ways, I really struggled with questions of intimacy and audience. I do consider myself someone who is very private, and the idea that I would write a memoir was something that I needed to trick myself into doing. I don't actually think that I realized I was writing a memoir until years into it. I wanted to write a love story between two boys in Amman. It was a story that had formed me growing up, and I always knew that I wanted to write it in some way. And that was the only story I was interested in writing. I didn't really think about writing a story or the book that ended up being this book, which is, in some ways, a family history, starting with the Nakba onwards.

When I was approaching the writing, to think about this intimate love story between two boys, the way I dealt with intimacy and audience was I imagined that I was writing the book to this singular reader—Ramzi, the other boy, whom I had fallen in love with in childhood—and everything else faded to the background. I was writing for him and for him alone, and that allowed me to do a couple of things. One is to be a lot more intimate than I might otherwise have been if I had imagined this amorphous readership. But it also prevented me from having to explain what doesn't need explaining. If you're writing to an audience that's unknown—and especially as an Arab writing in English—often, there's an act of translation that I think is redundant. And I wanted to avoid that because I find that in other books to be—I grate against it, and I didn't want that similar experience in my readers. And so, by focusing on the singular man that I imagined was reading my text, it allowed me to stay in a certain kind of intimacy and political/social milieu that I didn't want to translate. And it allowed a certain kind of voyeurism on behalf of the reader. So, if you're coming to the text, you're almost looking in on something that you shouldn't be looking in on. You're looking in on this conversation that's happening, or this imagined conversation that's happening between two Palestinian men. And I love that. I gave my heart into this book. I feel like I really poured myself into this book. But also, this book isn't me. So, if someone reads this book and thinks they know me, they don't. And for me, maintaining that separation was something that I grappled with, and I feel like I landed in a pretty good place.

I want to talk about the way the diaspora manifests in both of your experiences. You guys have somewhat different upbringings. Obviously, Sara, you grew up in the U.S. in the Midwest but also back and forth with Jeddah, and Tareq, you grew up in Amman, parents who had been in Beirut—so multiple displacements. And still, both of you have this, at least as I read it in both books, this sense that Palestine is not really taken for granted. In the experience of being able to claim Palestinian identity and understanding what that means, it's really not taken for granted. I mean, it seems like both of you have to come to your own political awakening. Like, it's not something that's passed down. Also, Palestine itself is sometimes hidden in plain sight within your lives. Tareq, you say: “Palestine was present all around us in Amman, but was she really seen? She was everywhere and nowhere at once.” I really love that, and it also really resonated, I think, with things that I read in your book, Sara, about basically, Palestine in the diaspora needing to be actively recovered and reclaimed. Especially because there's so much from the parents’ generation that has mixed messages about what claiming looks like. And so, what has that meant to both of you, for Palestine to be everywhere and nowhere at once? Tareq, maybe we start with you this time.

I mean, I think I agree with that. I think, for me, at least, Palestine was an act of reclamation. And that's not to say that my grandparents or my parents didn't feel Palestinian or embody Palestinianness, but I mean it more in the sense of reclaiming it as a way of being that's beyond identity—that's not just about the food we eat, our accents, our sensibility, but that's about politics and reclaiming commitment to struggle. I think, in my experience, my grandparents, specifically my maternal grandmother (who was instrumental in raising me), would talk about Palestine, but she was more silent on Palestine than one might have imagined her. I think she carried her expulsion and her devastation silently, and in many ways, couched in religious faith. So, it was almost this act of the divine that had happened, and she was grappling with it that way. Whereas my mother was really the figure who was raging against the injustice and against her dispossession.

I think the reason that I grew up in a space where I felt Palestine was silent was, in many ways, because of the ecosystem in which I was in. We were in Jordan, and Jordan is a place where you can't have a similar level of political organizing or mobilization. I mean, obviously, these exist in different pockets. Especially if you go into Palestinian refugee camps outside of Amman. But in Amman, and certainly in West Amman, where we had landed, it's a sterilized environment. It's almost scrubbed clean of its politics. And so, Palestine there becomes storytelling, and it becomes identity, and it doesn't become anything more than that. No one was hiding the fact that they were Palestinian. But what did that mean, really, beyond a proclamation of an identity that was unclear? There was really no way to step into that broader identity. And so, I think that's how it was for me, as an act of reclamation. Understanding Palestinianness not just as a passive identity but one that's actually disruptive, and political and anti-hegemonic, going against these structures of domination that present certain modes of being and impose certain silences. I think that's how, for me, queerness and Palestine, then, become identities that are speaking to each other.

Yeah, I really want to get into that in a bit.

Yeah, the way that Palestine was present and also nowhere for me looked a little different. Because, yeah, most of my upbringing was in Illinois, but I did spend five years in Saudi Arabia, but that is also extremely sterilized. I spent a couple years in Jordan. Not to discount the amount of intimacy and the integral way that Palestine was always in me—I heard Arabic from my first memories, my earliest food memories are all, like, my sitto’s cooking. There was never a sense of “I'm not Palestinian,” but there was a sense of zones in which that was apparent and palpable, and then many, many zones where it felt sidelined or irrelevant. Or then, as I grew up and started to understand more about how the world worked, I understood how dangerous it could be, literally actual danger or just feeling a threat of rejection, or racism, or things like that when the Palestinianness rose to visibility.

I think my father, as you mentioned, modeled a code switching. I talk a lot about a complicated relationship to whiteness, in which assimilation and hiding ourselves in plain sight was a survival skill that my father modeled for me. He was born in Gaza but then he grew up after ’67 in Saudi Arabia, where he was physically beaten up by Saudi kids who were anti-Palestinian and things like that. And then, after many years of not being able to have citizenship or a place where he really felt like he belonged, once he did get a U.S. passport, he really did try to buy in. I think a lot of my book, the very opening passages, I talk about Palestine flickering in these moments, where I see my dad refusing to throw away food—he's eating food that's expired, and things like that, and there's these moments where I recognize the legacy of his poverty and being a refugee in Gaza. The past is still there; the past is still in his ways of moving through the world, and it is exactly those experiences that he's trying to not pass on to me. I get fresh food, he eats the spoiled food, because I'm not supposed to know what it feels like to be Palestinian in those ways. I'm supposed to be delivered beyond the reach of the Nakba, in some ways. That's his dream for me. And every parent, I'm sure, would have the same dream in whatever iteration for their children. Why would I want that horror and that pain to be re-experienced by my child?

But I think, really, if I boiled it down to just one thing, my book is about the ways in which we don't have that choice. Those things do pass on to us in a very spiritual way, in a lot of palpable, subliminal ways, and then very explicit ways. And so, just to then come and arrive at what Tareq said, that I completely agree with: To fully come into the Palestinian identity is to come into a politics. We could argue that every identity is political, but Palestinianness is very uniquely political, and it will be until we are free. And Palestinianness is, perhaps, one of the most potent identities right now, that just by uttering it challenges empire, challenges hegemony, challenges all of these systems of oppression that this world is built on. And so, you are politicized however you choose to express it. And so, becoming outspokenly, openly political as a Palestinian felt to me like another coming out that I had to choose, in that you're setting yourself up for another, perhaps more intensified type of endangerment when you are visible as a political Palestinian. But again, that's not a choice. That's just an owning of something that's already there.

You actually led me right into something that I did want to ask about, and this is a segue between the diaspora conversation and talking about love. You say: “Am I Palestinian? I did not choose this question, but the choice to answer is mine. To choose yes is to invoke, accept the catastrophe of love.” I love that line, and it also had me thinking about the various ways in these books that love moves and works. Because love is both dangerous, on the one hand—I mean, Tareq, in your case, this is a really forbidden love for this boy. And even, I think, Sara, for you, falling in love with your partner is dangerous. There's a way in which it's both home, and that vulnerability is quite scary, and then there's also the way in which love in both books sometimes becomes part of a quietism. Like your father's love, Tareq, for your mother, has him constantly pulling her from the brink of her own activism. And yet, there's also what you're talking about, this love that turns you toward resistance. And so, I'm just wondering about the multiple valences of love in both of these books.

Well, it took me five years and a whole book, maybe, to answer that question. But I have a scene in the book where I'm basically dying. You meet the character of me in this book basically on death's door from a severe eating disorder, and my father's visiting me in the hospital, and he asks me, within a few minutes of getting there: You're going to be fine, right? And it's a really discordant question. I almost didn't make it, and he's asking me just to promise him that I'm going to be okay. And I say, “It was love that asked that question.” I think one thing I try to express in this book is almost constantly, all of the characters involved are acting out of their version of love in that moment. And toward the end of the book, I talk about so many borders that I came to in my life where I was told I was unsafe. Like, in attempting to protect me, I was taught not to express Palestinianness in a certain way. I internalized homophobia from the people that I loved, sometimes, unintentionally.

Also trying to hide the fact that I was spiraling into this severe eating disorder. I didn't want to disrupt my father's extremely hard-earned, fragile, and modest peace, which was his belief that he had reached the shores of safety and given his children the life of stability, and safety, and promise that his parents tried to give him but didn't really manage to. It broke my heart; all he wanted was to see me thrive. It was the least I could do. So, I didn't want to admit that this story was breaking. And I talk about the catastrophe of love. It was a catastrophe for my partner to decide to love me. My partner didn't know that within a year of our marriage, I was going to be, again, on my deathbed. And walking with me through this brutal season—every day, there was that model next to me of this person that's choosing to show up. And it's deeply painful for them, but it's a love that chooses to continue to reckon in a sense of reality and messiness. That is the model that I eventually decide to choose for myself and to bring to my relationships with my family. If I can tell the truth, I can tell you that I'm not okay, and I can also tell you that I think that it has a lot to do with the fact that people in my lineage were suicidal. We didn't talk about that, but they were suicidal because they were refugees from Gaza, and nothing that they did, year in and year out, could seem to salvage a stable sense of safety.

And again, my book, I hope, is full of moments of joy and moments of complicated resilience, remaking, dreaming. But at the end of the day, I think that what I was really trying to introduce was this idea of: We can love each other enough to tell the truth and to hold each other's pain. We can be brave together in admitting that it's not okay, and it won't be okay. Love that can own all of the facts of these pains and these breakings is the same love that tells us that our work of resistance is ongoing. And it is actually our breaking that points us to the fact that this world is unlivable, and there needs to be a different horizon. Our horizon can't be Amrīkā. Our horizon can't be just survival. Our horizon should be some form of pushing toward a world where we aren't crushed in this way.

Yeah, a lot of this resonates with me, and I do think in some ways it's thinking about love as coming from a place of fear or diminishment, a place of wanting security, which is very understandable when you're living in a precarious position. I'm thinking specifically about my parents wanting to raise children in a household in Amman where we're not overtly political. The risk of what that means is dangerous. And so, it's a love that comes from a place of protection, and diminishment, and, in some ways, of securing the most immediate means of security. But then, there's the love that comes from a place of expansiveness, as Sara says, of breaking through these limits and breaking through these boundaries and imagining a new futurity.

And I'll speak for myself: I'm privileged. Now, I have access to citizenship. I'm not a refugee. I have financial stability. I'm able to imagine and communicate love in a different way and to receive it in a different way. I think, of course, understanding love as a political project and understanding it as the way to imagine a future where we're breaking through some of these boundaries and some of these silences, I think it's hugely important. And also, placing that within the context of precarity and who has the capacity to engage in that kind of love. To move beyond survival and into thriving, basic material necessities have to be given. So, I think there's something that's generational here, in terms of the different ways love has been communicated from that moment of expulsion in the Nakba, up until now, three generations on, four generations on; how love shapes social relations, and family relations, and political realities.

I want to get into what is, I think, the locus of both of your books. There is this nexus of shame, queerness, the body, and visibility and invisibility, on some level. And for you, Sara, that manifests also in this eating disorder, but also in queerness. It's like a soup, almost. You can't disentangle one from the other. There's a sense of being watched in both of your books. Tareq, you call it “the darting shadows.” I love this phrase: Do people see you for what you are? Do they see your queerness? And Sara, for you, you have a very vivid scene of seeing yourself and your grandmother through the eyes of these white neighbors, who are expressing disgust or repulsion. The way that those experiences relate to Palestine becomes, actually, very crystallized at the end of both of your books, in terms of thinking about Gaza, in particular, as a kind of abject or rejected place. I think it's actually wonderful. Sara, you quote Tareq talking about Gaza and queerness. I'll just read it: “Out of the queerest of spaces, the ugliest of beings, the most extreme forms of abjection, beauty and revolution abound.” That's Tareq's quote in your book. And Tareq, you say: “The power of the abject is revolutionary. What power can be harnessed if our sites of abjection are embraced, brought out in the open, the swords of vilification healed? That is where our liberation lies.” So, I wonder if you could expound a little bit on the way that queerness works in these books, the way that shame works as it relates to Palestine. I think also, Sara, in your case, how that gets transmuted through the body.

For me, it's very clear in my mind that I came to Palestine through queerness. And it's very clear that I understand Palestine as a political reality—and not just a political reality, obviously, all the other realities, but specifically as a political reality and a social reality through queerness. For me, there's something about what we were just talking about: What goes unsaid, and why? What are the silences that structure our environments and our social realities, and what's so scary about going into those silences? And for me, queerness was a place of shame. It was everything that I wanted to not be, because that was not only not accepted; it was outwardly demonized and seen as a foreign implant, specifically in the region. So, everything that goes against our politics and political reality, sense of loyalty to Palestine, to who we are as a community, I was seen as foreign and as abject. So, there was deep internalized shame.

Now, Palestine, when you're coming to Palestinianness, there's no shame, necessarily, but there's something about maybe the shame of defeat—the shame of the Nakba, the shame that we haven't been able to protect Palestine. Certainly, two years into a genocide, the shame that we haven't been able to stop the genocide. So, there are similar valences that are, at least for me, bodily and emotionally evoking how I come to Palestine and how I understand queerness in similar ways. And so, politically, it was really about understanding: What are these silences that we accommodate? And why are we accommodating them? It's going back to also the question about love and fear versus love from a place of abundance. What are we so scared about that we feel like we can't go into these places and ask the questions that we should be asking? So, there's a lot of interplay for me between these two things.

The quote you read about abjection, I wrote that two years before the genocide. And so, in my mind, I was already trying to understand Gaza as this place that was both hypervisible and completely invisible. Before the genocide, it's nowhere in our collective imaginary. But when it does come into collective reality or discourse, when there's spectacular violence, it's as abject, it's as this humiliated place. There's no space for Gaza to exist as a normal space of being, as just visible. It's not hypervisible or invisible, just seen. And that's what queerness is. You go from becoming, somehow, the representative of queer people to going in dark rooms and the underground, to have emancipated spaces. There's no way, at least in Amman, to exist as a queer individual without that being a political statement. And so, I'm just interested, going back to your first question: What's private? What's public? Where do we draw the line? There's something about, as a queer individual, having to publicize the intimate that, in some ways, is expected in a way that's not expected from non-queer individuals. So, there's all of these things, I think, about the spectrum between what's said and what's unsaid.

So much of what Tareq said resonates. The question of what's said and what's unsaid and why, where do we learn these things? I mean, that's kind of what I was getting at earlier when I was talking about how I learned each of these borders. There was a time where I didn't know if I was speaking Arabic or English; I was just speaking. There was a time in which the channel between my body's desires and my actions—there weren't these filters, and these judgments and these, again, borders that I felt like I had to enforce. So, these are all learned, and almost certainly, it's in service of some story or agenda or power structure. At the very least, it bears intense scrutiny and reckoning, probably dismantling. I tend to think that about borders and walls.

But, I mean, talk about shame. I felt shame about an eating disorder, of course, and then shame about putting that in a book next to things like the Nakba, trying to reckon with this internalized sense of: What right do I have to be sick in this way? What right do I have to spoil the dream? What right do I have to feel so depressed, so upset? I mean, I even had my psychiatrist saying: You have no reason to be so upset. I really believed I didn't have a right to be falling apart in this way. And so, what I feel like I've really learned through this process, and what is a lot of the book, is understanding that the body carries an archive, whether or not we want to acknowledge it. And the body knows, and remembers, and speaks. I mean it so far beyond the now-cliche line of “the body keeps the score.” There's something very spiritual and very ineffable, to me, about what the body knows and what the body can channel. So, that was a big part of the eating disorder for me; I couldn't reckon with the legacy that I had no language for yet, because of the silences that we've been speaking about. I had no language to really know how much the Nakba really existed in me and defined everything about my life. I didn't have language for that, but my body knew.

Also, queerness was something I repressed my whole life and still hadn't really spoken. But my body knew. So, there was so much need to cut off from my actual, just physical experience because of the knowing, the silences that the body might want to break despite us. So, I think that's a big touch point between Palestine, queerness, and body for me, is: There was one place in which all of these things were whole and intermingled, unknown. Even when my verbal, cognitive, Descartesian sense of self, of like: I can separate.. I think, therefore, I can decide my identity. Those things are false, and my body was the point of the dissolution. I guess the one other thing I realized is how much of my going astray—my falling ill, my losing my way, my losing myself—could have all been prevented if I had been taught to have Gaza as my North Star instead of this marginalized thing. Again, my father was born in Deir al-Balah. My family is all like, pre-Nakba, they're from the greater Gaza governance, so they're really Gazan. But I wasn't, really. I mean, I grew up—when people found out I was Palestinian, and they kind of gulped and then asked me what part? And then I said: My family's from Gaza. I saw the flinching or the wincing. There was this additional layer of: Oh, no. There's this ostracization, or much, much worse.

But even in my family, there was this wistful sense of something lost and irretrievable. I never dreamed of it as a place I would ever go to meet. I never dreamed of it as a place that was actually a part of the world I inhabited. And that's by design. That's part of what the Zionist state wants us to experience. If they're not going to demonize it as a terrorist den, they want us to at least forget about it and think of it as not a part of us, but it actually is the place of disclosure of so many truths about every part of our lives, every one of us, wherever we are. Because it is a place where the current neocolonial order, capitalism, this idea of disposability of populations that is operating below the surface in so many places is absolutely made explicit. And so, what if her beauty, and her dreams, and her strength, and her humanity—and also the actual implications of all that she suffers—was actually what I was taught to look at when I look out at the horizon, instead of: Go to an Ivy League school, and make a small seam of safety for you and your people, and love Palestine, but love it in a way that isn't going to endanger you or endanger the story. That is what we believe is the best we can hope for.

I feel like you led me right into a question about the land. I have to say, as a diaspora Jewish person with Holocaust history, where my family was—and also as someone whose, as Tareq knows, my mother's family is actually from Haifa. Like, Palestinian Jews from long before the state, and actually left before the founding of the state. One of the things that I find the most difficult to relate to, or extrapolate into, is the connection to the land. I mean that also from my perspective of going back to Greece, where my family was deported from during the Holocaust, and where they lived for hundreds of years, that was their lives. And yet, when I go there, I feel nothing. I feel alienation. I feel, for better or worse, I'm American now. And maybe it has to do with the way that Israel colonized that whole imagination around what reintegration into the world could have looked like after the Holocaust. But I really want to understand what it means for the both of you. Both books deal with returning to the land, in some cases, returning to—in terms of Ibdis, the village, Sara, that your grandmother came from; Tareq returning to Haifa, where your grandmother was from. Both books really profess a strong attachment to the land, and both of you spend time in the West Bank, and that feels very salutary, and connecting, and rooting. Like I said, I have to admit, I struggle to understand it. So, I want to understand what it means to feel connected to the land at this distance.

I mean, it's hard to explain. I wasn't promised—you know, I didn't have the whole birthright narrative of, like: You're making this millennial ancestral return. It was quiet when we went, but it was profound. It was really profound. I can't explain it. It's a strained place, where violence is constantly very near, but there's still a sense of existential, for me, ease while I'm there. It's profound and mysterious, and it makes sense that the Zionist regime tries so hard to keep people like us even from visiting. Because after that first visit, I started coming back and coming back, and they make it harder and harder every time. But even just when I was living in Amman, just if I could go for three days. It was exhausting, but there was also something so renewing about it. And it's very dangerous. It's very dangerous to the colonizer. I'll leave it at that.

For me, the return, there was something about the familiarity. The minute I landed there, it felt like I had been there, even though I had never been there before. There was something about that that meant a lot of the sense of dislocation— the restless energy, the anxieties that we have and we embody outside of Palestine—land there. They land in our bodies. There's a calmness, a groundedness that's there. And so, I think, for me, the way that I think about the land is obviously—on the political level, it's the land that we want to reclaim. So, all of the work that I do, all of the work that we do, the broader movement is grounded in the idea that the land must be reclaimed; that it has to be decolonized and liberated. But what that means on a personal level, and maybe more emotional level, is that it becomes a North Star. It orders the way we live our lives, and it becomes: Even if I can't now, I can't physically return, I enact return in everything that I'm doing. And so, it becomes this way of anchoring my day-to-day. It becomes this way of grounding me. I think there's the material reality of reclaiming the land, but there's also, somehow being there, all of these things click into place. And one feels—or at least for me, it felt clarifying. All of this noise in my head, it was suddenly clear what it was all about.

I wish I had another hour to talk to you both about even just that because there's so much, I feel, to explore there. But I wanted to end by talking a little bit about survivors’ guilt. Both of you struggle with privilege in both of your books. And obviously, also, Sara, I've been watching you process the deaths of hundreds of members of your family in Gaza in real time. And Tareq, obviously, you've done all this field research in Gaza, and you're watching the destruction there, but it also goes back to your family in Beirut being in a better position as Christians than many other Palestinians, and friends and close loved ones being in Tel al-Zaatar when it's under siege and when many people close to your mother's family were killed. What does it mean to write these books amid a genocide and through this history? How do you manage to give yourself permission? Because obviously, I think these books must exist, and I'm glad that you did give yourselves permission, but I imagine it was not easy.

Yeah. I carry a lot of shame about this book. I started writing this book in 2017, and it was mostly done by fall 2023. I never would have imagined it coming out in this world. Not that there was no guilt before, but there's something obscene (and I’ve said this before) about publishing a memoir at the time of genocide. The way that I've rationalized it in my head—so there's the intellectual rationalization, which is, both of these books are books about the Nakba and break us out of the idea of the genocide being something that is contemporary, or seated outside of time. It grounds us in the century of colonization, and I think that's really important. But emotionally, it's unresolved. I sit with a dissonance all the time. And this obscenity that I'm talking about isn't just about publishing the book. It's about everything. It's about doing this podcast, it's about going to dinner with friends, it's about traveling, and having holidays. It's obscene that life is still happening when we're watching people being killed. There's no way outside of that, and short of suspending our lives and going to Gaza, there's no way to transcend that temporality. There's no way to transcend that I'm existing in these dual spaces where I walk out of my flat here in London, and everything around me is relatively normal, and there’s a genocide in my head. This is a reality. This is where we're at. So, yeah, there's a lot of shame even as I understand what this book is doing and think of it as important political work.

But I mean, there has to be the right of Palestinians to be human, and also to live, and also to write, and also to—I mean, if you're not fighting for that, on some level, what are you fighting for? And are you supposed to put that on a shelf until the date where everything is resolved?

No, and I agree, and I think that we are—not we should be—we are fully human, and these publications are coming out of the breadth of our humanity. I agree with that. I think the shame that I feel is toward the martyrs and toward people who haven't survived to tell their stories. The fact that I can tell mine and they can’t tell theirs—that's the shame I feel. What right do I have to live this life in this way when their rights were taken? That's the guilt.

I was reading some writing yesterday by Paul Gilroy, a post-colonial scholar who theorizes about the Atlantic, and he talks about how in Europe during the time of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, rationality itself becomes pathological. Just the logic that you have to use the fact of moving around an ordinary day—there's something deeply pathological and sick about the way that we're forced to live. So, there is a lot of shame. I do wrestle a lot with the fact that, yes, I wish that more people from Gaza were telling their stories. Some of what I'm trying to do on the other side of publishing this book is focus more on: How can I translate? How can I bring the voices of people in Gaza to the world? There are a lot of people in Gaza who would like to be translated to English, so I can do a little of that.

There is a reason that they assassinated Ghassan Kanafani, and Hiba Abu Nada, and Refaat Alareer—all of these people that are storytellers. Refaat talks about how we should be wary of saying someone's just a poet or just a writer; they are a part of it. I don't want to ever fall into the trap of thinking that it is the work, that we've done it. I consider this so small compared to some of—you know, if I can raise money and help someone get medicine, my cousin get antibiotics in Gaza, that's so much more important than a sentence or a book. But I will say that my family in Gaza felt extremely excited to see the book come out, and they feel seen and not forgotten. There is a battle against our memories, and our histories, and our narratives, and our bodies, and there's just so many fronts. So, I just see it as one front, and it doesn't make me immune from the shame. It is impossible and obscene to live in these times, and yet, there's something in the Palestinian that won't let you not, up to a certain point, I think for many of us. Just like the attachment to the land, there's something that keeps us going, sometimes (to a point, anyway). And so, I'm still doing it to the best of my ability.

Yeah. I mean, I think what you just said is so important because in books that wrestle with invisibility as a mode of repressing politics within generations of Palestinians, it's like these books are doing some of the work to clear that away, and that may make room for more of the political to bubble up. Thank you guys so much for joining me. I know we went over time, but I just didn't want to stop having this conversation. This has been another episode of On the Nose. Thank you to our editor, Jesse Brenneman. Thank you to our guests, Tareq and Sara. Thank you guys so much for giving us these two beautiful books and your time today. If you like this episode, leave us a review, share it, and subscribe to Jewish Currents, JewishCurrents.org. See you next time.