LENA KHALAF TUFFAHA

In an interview you did with The Poet Salon in 2019, you were asked how you see the relationship between activism and poetry, and responded that you “don’t know if [you] can tease them apart.” You went on to say that activism was an essential part of your life even before you considered yourself a poet, as you regularly volunteered for the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, helping to educate naturalized Arab citizens on their civil rights, protesting on their behalf, translating language for them, etc. To what degree would you say this and other activist experiences have informed your poetry? Do the voices, stories, or concerns of folks you helped often come into your writing?

I think it’s a really important education in being human. Is it Alice Walker who said, “It’s the rent we pay for living on Earth”? I have to check the source, but especially as a Palestinian, having access, being a citizen, when I’m aware of so many people in my own community who have more precarious situations, and then, of course, extending beyond my own community, folks all over the world who live in various states of precarity. The complicated privileges and access afforded by citizenship—If you’re going to have a privilege, you better do something useful with it. Something that’s useful beyond your own needs, and so that was where I came from as a young person in my thinking. It keeps me connected to what’s truest in our lives, which is that every one of us, to some degree, has some sense of precarity and instability. We’re actually very similar and very connected in these weird gradations of systems that are man-made and legalistic but arbitrarily separate us and aren’t fundamentally interested in caring for us. Working in community is a great education to learn how to listen, and to be attuned to people’s emotional narratives and their lived experiences, and to be humbled and let go of a lot of assumptions you might bring to the work.

The way you describe it, it feels like an extension of the work you do as a translator. Seeing how many writers you’ve translated, it’s clear that you’re someone who listens to people, and also listens to language itself, thinking a lot about the individual words folks use and all of the history and context packed into them. There was this blog post you wrote that I came across, and this is going even further back to 2015.

Wow.

It's about the complexity and power of translation, where you talk about these historic holdovers in language. You said, “Colloquial Palestinian and Syrian Arabic…are filled with souvenirs of occupations past. Upon closer examination, many of the unusual words our grandmothers used have roots in English and French. To translate grandma, one must identify the regime that colonized the homeland during her childhood.” It’s incredible to think about the subtext and history that can be hidden inside of language, whether you are conversing, translating, or even doing activist work. Could you speak to what you see as the value and, perhaps also, the limitations of translation?

There’s immediate translation in service of helping someone or giving them more access, sometimes even preventing harm. Because people can be in sites where they’re dealing with government officials or healthcare institutions and the like. That’s one set of skills, but then there’s literary translation, which is a different exercise, and an art unto itself. First and foremost, it’s the work of writing a text. Translating is a work of writing that you’re doing, and all of the rules and burdens and wonders of writing apply. But there’s also a relationship that’s being built with the original text that already lives in another world, in another language, within a different set of references and cultural experiences and histories. And if the writer is living, certainly, you’re building a working relationship with that writer. Literary translation is rich and fraught, and a place where I always return feeling like a student. And I love that necessary instability. No matter how confident you feel about your own work, translation will humble you really fast. I think it’s good for all of us to find spaces in which we can still be students.

Yeah.

In that sense, the postures are similar. Listening, deep listening. But also, it feels multidisciplinary to me. There’s the text and the integrity of the text itself as a literary work that’s first and foremost. But I personally think a text exists in a historical context. Pretending it doesn’t, I’m just not interested in that, like… You know, folks will argue that and… I don’t care.

So you’re not into that objectivist, New Critical type of reading, I guess?

Not so much. I just think the reality is that we write as ourselves. There has to be, not just knowledge, but an amount of respect and care for the context in which the text was written. The historical moment, the various powers that acted on it. There’s a responsibility to understand as much of that as possible and engage with that, and then think about my positionality. Who I am as a Palestinian, translating a text from Arabic, might be a different relationship than, say, a white American person who might have learned Arabic and is doing that work. That is a different relationship. There are a different set of power dynamics working there. Understanding where you fit in the picture as someone who is engaging with the work, and making the very political decision to carry it over. Those are all questions worth interrogating and exploring in the work.

One thing that amazes me about your poetry is how its political resolve coexists with formal ingenuity and lyricism. In your work, I never get the sense that you are sacrificing the sonic and intellectual joys of poetry to arrive at a neat message or something that is too tidy.  Is balancing craft and systemic critique something you’ve had to consciously work at, or is it something that comes naturally, especially as a Palestinian poet, realizing your lived experience will often be politicized, whether you like it or not?

Maybe a little of both. I think it’s worth pausing here for a moment around the word “political,” because it is so complicated, um…

Yeah, or like, is there even such a thing as “political poetry?” It feels like it might not be the most productive term.

Yeah, the way we think of it, its usage at this moment in the American context, in the American literary context, is still something I’m resistant to. It feels dishonest. Only because I don’t really know what it means to have a text that isn’t political, in the sense that politics is about power. It’s also a description of the powers that act on our lives.

So what else is there to write? We still have a limited imagination in the American context. We haven’t come up with a better term. All of us, myself included…. But America also politicizes Palestinians. The minute I open my mouth and say where I’m from, that is viewed by, still, a not small number of people as an oppositional statement. I’m not understood as a whole person, I’m one side of a conflict, and there’s this other… lurking… like, why? I can just be, but that’s not the reality in which I write.

Yeah, like when you’re watching the news, and it’s like, "to be neutral, let’s consider if you weren’t a person.” And that is an equally valid position in American media.

Yeah, also, that’s a whole other layer. If I’m just writing a poem, like the one in my first collection, and the spark for that poem comes from the experience of making a traditional bread.  That is the most mundane thing. But I don’t trust that it’s possible for it to exist in American English, and to be free of the way in which the language and the culture of the language politicize Palestinian existence. It feels like a lot of wasted energy to fight that.

I’m writing from my own intellectual interest and from my own life. Not autobiographically, though. That’s really important for me to say. I think there’s this assumption sometimes that if a Palestinian is writing a poem, they’re narrating something that has personally happened to them.

Mm-hmm.

But beyond that, it’s not so much about what I think about politics; it’s more that the language in which I’m writing has made a set of decisions, because it comes from a culture. It has made a set of decisions about me, my existence, and my people, and so that’s just the currency I have to work with.

Yeah, and I’m glad you brought up the idea that your poetry is not necessarily autobiographical. I guess the way that I see it is more of a polyvocal poetry, wherein you’re often inhabiting collectivities. In your brilliant latest collection, Something About Living, you have epigraphs from folks like June Jordan, Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and a number of Centos, poems that contain different voices that are blended together like a collage or patchwork. These Centos are inhabited by Palestinian poets like Naomi Shihab Nye, Fadwah Tuqan, Nathalie Handal, and others, and it feels like they are using polyvocality to transcend the self and embody a larger diaspora. You also use the “we” pronoun throughout your book, which has a similar effect. I was wondering, though, what the challenges are of that approach? I’d imagine it might feel scary to speak on behalf of a collective.

Yeah, and the antidote to that for me is I’m not. I’m not trying to speak on anyone’s behalf. I am writing from my own reading experience, as well as my own lived experience. I am Palestinian. My father was born in Jerusalem. There is a lineage that I belong to that includes his stories, my stories. I have my own experiences as a Palestinian walking through the world, places I can and cannot access, and those are determined and informed by the experiences of my community.  I think there’s a particular training we get in the U.S that is a bit rigid in how we think about belonging and community.

I grew up in the Arab world, and I went to different schools. I was in an American school system for a while, then a Jordanian school system. I attended both an international school and a Saudi all-girls school, and so my reading life and my reading history reflect a rich mix. I was reading British literature, American literature, and European literature in original languages and in translation, as well as traditional Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic era to modern Arabic poetry. So, those are the references and the frameworks that I bring to my own writing. I spent a long time studying Edward Said, and I loved discovering the work of June Jordan for myself.  Those are the voices and conversations in my mind that I'm writing with and alongside. I think that poetry generally is a conversation with all the poets who have written before, and all the poets who are writing now and will write.

And for me, they all fit in a kind of constellation of influences, and that might be unusual to someone who might only read within the culture they were raised, or something like that, or only read in one language, but it’s actually extremely natural, in my case.

I see.

In most of the world, folks are raised multilingually; that’s the more normal experience. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, was a poet and a translator who was the Poet Laureate of Jordan.

Yeah, I read that online somewhere. That’s really awesome!

Yes. I bring him up in this context to illustrate the kind of language environment I had. He was, I believe, the first Arab writer to translate into English, the works of the great Indian writer Tagore. So, for me, that’s the house that raised me and taught me about access to literature. There’s a kind of loving correspondence with the world that is the norm. That was the model I had, one of curiosity and of access.

I’m wondering, have you ever attempted to or wanted to translate any of your grandfather’s works?

Um, maybe, like, quietly and secretly. It’s still… You know, it’s so close, it feels like a big responsibility, and so it’s something I think about from time to time. He has some writing he did in dialect, which I think is really special and beautiful. A lot of different forms like the Arabic Ghazal, which is distinct from the Ghazal of the Urdu tradition, and then the Zajal, which is a kind of improvisational spoken form. But then most of his poetry is in the traditional qasida form, like the two-hem stitched traditional rhymed poem. The forms are a little intimidating, but yeah, it’s something that’s always sort of in the back of the mind.

You mentioned, too, being involved in a lot of different school systems, going from one country to another, and I think that a really refreshing thing about your book is all the fondness you have for teachers in your writing.

They are my people. I love them.

Haha, me too! In your previous collection, Kaan and Her Sisters, you have a few poems that celebrate a Miss Sahar, someone who you’ve described as an amalgamation of many teachers who have had an impact on your life.

Mm-hmm.

In a favorite poem from that collection entitled “Lemon Blossoms,” this Miss Sahar starts by conjugating the word “Saar,” a word meaning “to become,” but then uses the word in a cascade of images describing the affectionate labor that goes into the making of a traditional Syrian cheese pastry. Listening to Miss Sahar, one feels like a young writer learning to savor the contours of language, the bittersweetness of an image like “the pistachios now a spring-colored dust, / the lemon blossoms a blood-bright garnish.” I wonder if, in the writings of poems like this one, there were any insights you gleaned into the role of a teacher or how you approach leading a class when you teach?

Yes, Miss Sahar is an amalgamation. There really was a Miss Sahar, but the character is not just based on her.

Yeah. She gets expanded a little bit.

That’s right. Part of what informs that book and that character specifically is the really special experience of learning a language. I am truly bilingual, but I was born in the U.S, and the language I used more first was English, so I still have actual memories of language acquisition moments.

Oh, wow.

Which is really wild and amazing. Moving into an Arabic school system early on, like in very early elementary school, kindergarten, and elementary school, I have memories of having to make the letters and thinking about them in what I describe as an English language brain, and then having that change.

That’s incredible. 

And having the primary become Arabic. And I hold onto that like it’s a treasure, because it is an incredible experience to have any memories from then. And then also there are moments where what something means fully becomes apparent to you through the lens of the other language. You know, those kinds of clarities, and then the elision between both languages. It’s sacred space to me.  I thought a lot about that space as a kind of lens, the way you would change lenses on a camera if you wanted to make a wider image, or a close-up or whatever. I thought about that as a lens to illuminate the work that language can do.

I love that thinking, that’s such a beautiful way of putting it.

Thank you. For Kaan and Her Sisters, the word “kaan” is the Arabic verb, and it’s an auxiliary verb, but we’re taught the verbs in a group, and they’re described as a sisterhood, “Kaan and her sisters.” Saar is one of them. “Saar” is “became,” and “kaan” is “was,” and there’s a whole set of other verbs that are sprinkled throughout the book.  In one of those language elision moments, I remember early on, thinking about how interesting it was that those verbs of the past were sisters. They were women. It’s just a little thought that has germinated over many years, and it became, again, a lens to enter into an exploration of the ways that language can work, and the power that it can have, whether it’s an alienation or a belonging, or a way to stay connected, and for me, it certainly was in my life. It was my language aptitude that rooted me back among people whom I loved and who I cared for. That was my entry into thinking about teachers, because for me, those Arabic teachers really were that gateway. My mom was my first-grade teacher.  Some of that closeness to teachers probably comes from that first special experience, but beyond the emotional, there’s a way in which reteaching someone something that belongs to them brings them back home. All of those experiences are at the heart of that book.

Thinking a little bit about the transition from Kaan and Her Sisters to Something About Living, both books definitely consider the power of language to both confine and liberate, to construct an identity. Something About Living, though, delves even further into the violence of Israel's occupation. Yet within that violence, it reflects on the small beauties that hold off despondency, and give, maybe, a sense of hope. “Transit,” the brief proem that opens the book, was a wonderful gateway into the collection and instructive on how to read it. The voice here is curious and perceptive, “noticing / all the smallest relics.” It does not promise bold proclamations about life or to erect vast monuments, but instead it focuses on “a temple / I’ve chosen of unremarkable rock” and “geraniums [that] might be foraged for sustenance…[or] pressed for keeping.” There’s such a tenderness towards the world and its inhabitants in these lines. Can you talk about how this poem came to initiate the book?

It was a last-minute choice at the end of organizing the manuscript. I had it somewhere else, and I don’t know; sometimes the poem is smarter than the writer, or maybe most times. The poem is smart; it’s way out ahead. Right? You’re like, “Oh, oh, I had no idea, I thought that. Okay, great, good to know!”

I find that too, yeah.

There was something about the disclosure of it that felt appropriate and intimate, and that opening a book with that sort of intimate disclosure about what’s possible and what’s also just beyond reach was a way to welcome the reader into what would unfold. It strangely goes back to that tension about the political. Writing and literature are distinct from what happens in protests and these other spaces, because it’s supposed to ask questions. It’s not about statement-making and proclamation. It explores, and, hopefully, it muddies. And complicates, and destabilizes in a productive way. For me, that small poem really captured a moment of tenderness, which I hope there’s a bit of in the book, but also of not knowing, of not being able to promise much. I felt like it was important to share that up front.

And that jives so well with the title, because the title is kind of vague, right? It’s general, it’s open-ended. But it also gives me a sense of openness and humility, that you are ready to see what you can discover here about living. And there’s that connection to June Jordan, which I thought was really great. Was she part of the entryway into this collection? Like, a kind of tethering point for you?

Yeah, absolutely. June, I’ve discussed in different spaces about finding on my own, not having June's work introduced to me, not in a class, not by anyone, just sort of literally stumbling upon the book, and being just blown away.

Oh, yeah.

For being seen and named. In the way that I want to be seen and named fully as a human being, which I had just not experienced in any other American poet’s work at that time. But also for June’s incredible ability to write directly and authentically. I don’t believe that the art is sacrificed. I feel like June’s actually deeply musical; she’s doing incredible work in each poem. You feel addressed fully. Like, there’s an urgency, it’s a grab-you-by-the-shoulders kind of poetry, and you know, that was really riveting to me as a younger person.

Yeah, yeah.

And finding Palestine in it somehow. I was like, “Oh, this makes so much sense.” I’ve lived with my love for her work for years, and have watched as she fell out of favor in some poetry circles for her tenacious commitments, I think, for a while, or I don’t even know if she was ever really in favor in the way that some other poets are. Her contemporaries are also wonderful poets and have done incredibly important work, but none had the consistent clarity that June did.

I remember as a kid, in school, being told this expression in Arabic, which means… get ready for this visual: “You’re trying to carry a ladder horizontally through a doorway.” 

That’s a great expression!

Right? And it’s like, why are you doing things the hard way? If you’re going to speak up for truth, if you’re going to resist any injustice, it will seem ridiculous at first. It will be the hard way. The doorway is not shaped to fit your ladder. You are made to feel like what you’re doing is not convenient and difficult, and you could just make your life easier. And June was just relentlessly pushing that ladder through. There’s an affinity I have for her spirit and her insistence. I don’t dare think I’m nearly as courageous as she ever was, but she teaches me to be a more honest poet. I felt at some point a need to really explicitly honor the effect that her work had broadly. And that specific set of poems from the book Living Room, in which the poem “Moving towards home” is, and several other poems in that collection. I felt like the conversation between that poem and my experience as a Palestinian learning the news of Sabra and Shatila, and the waves of impact that had on Palestinians worldwide, was the place to do that.

Yeah. And that was in the Lebanon War in the 80s?

Yes, yes. Yeah, it was right after the siege of Beirut in 1982, after that ended. Part of the deal that was made was that Palestinian fighters had to leave Lebanon, and they were literally put on ships and sent off into the Mediterranean.

Yeah, oh wow.

So a lot of these fighters lived in refugee camps. There were many Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and so who was left in these refugee camps? Women. Children and the elderly. And they were left at a time of an extremely contentious, gruesome civil war, in which the Palestinian factions were allied with other groups. This was not a neutral situation that these refugees were left in. And the Israelis worked with the Phalange at the time, a right-wing Lebanese group, to light up the sky for them so that they could go in and massacre the remaining refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps. The numbers are hard to think about now, because numbers have been so horrific and extreme over the past two years of genocide, but over the course of about three days, two and a half days, 3,000 Palestinians were butchered. Literally butchered.

I’ve heard about that, and I’ve seen historic photographs of stacked bodies from that massacre; it was just a really horrendous sight.

Yeah, and there’s no lack of histories of massacres that Palestinians have had to endure over the past 77 to 100 years, but there’s a particular way in which that affected us. I have spoken to so many Palestinian friends from very different backgrounds living in the Arab world, living in the West Bank, living in the diaspora, and all of us have a similar experience as very young children of that moment… I think because of the footage and the context of the war, it became a defining news event.

There are many moments in this new collection where thresholds are broken and borders dismantled, where the present is troubled by the past. “Variation on a Last Chance,” in the first section, begins with the declaration, “The fence does not hold,” and then returns to that same line later, suggesting a real and symbolic breakdown of empire’s protections. Later, in the haunting ending of “Tantoura Redux,” the speaker asks, “Have our dead now arrived at the threshold / needed to unsettle the sunbathers / stretched out above our families’ corpses?” The word “unsettled” there feels especially poignant, knowing that it can work as a disruption of leisure or of the occupation itself. And yet other thresholds, like the “city gates” in your poem “Enter Here,” feel more like a refuge for survivors or a safe haven. Could you speak to the obsession this book has with both psychic and physical thresholds?

Oof, that’s a great question. Some of that might just be a function of the number of thresholds Palestinians have to cross to get anywhere. Not to take this from the very eloquent question you asked to the mundane and literal, but…

No, that makes sense to me and highlights something that many readers might overlook. 

It is a life that’s defined by checkpoints, for example, if you live under occupation whether in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, if you are a refugee, just the range of travel documents Palestinians have, everything from the storied laissez-passer, which literally means “you belong to no one, no nation is responsible for you, but you have permission to move from this point to this point at this moment,” which is absolutely wild to me. To citizenship in other countries that still might limit your access to your homeland. Even as an American, you still may or may not be granted access by the occupation forces to visit your city of origin, or the place where maybe your parents or grandparents still live. Maybe you own property.

It’s always part of our lives as Palestinians, even in the U.S. and in Europe and wherever, but in times like these, that’s even more pronounced and more terrifying. Even if a Palestinian is here with a visa, or a green card, or whatever, we’ve seen what can happen to them if they speak about their lives, if they dare to speak about their rights, if they advocate against a genocide, if they act in any way like the citizens they are told they are, the sword comes down. We’ve just seen the way Palestinian students were brutalized on American college campuses, regardless of their legal status, for protesting genocide during both Biden and Trump’s administrations. In the US, we saw the detention of Mahmoud Khalil and others, and Leqaa Kordia remains in ICE detention in defiance of a judge’s order to release her. In the UK, we saw a Palestinian British doctor, today (EDITOR’S NOTE: This interview was conducted 10/21/2025), who was arrested, and there’s a video of her being arrested. She’s asked, why am I being put under arrest? And she’s told that she violated laws about speaking out against Israel.

That’s so dystopian.

So, you know, there’s no Palestinian life without multiple thresholds, and they are most often ones that are difficult to cross, or you cross at great cost, and there’s always a precarity of return. I think that that is such a deeply embedded part of who we are as a people in ways that I didn’t even realize a few years ago. I’ve taught myself about that through my own writing.

Do you consider part of that threshold to be a Western consciousness? Like needing people to be aware of what’s happening, understanding it, and understanding the historical developments that led up to it?

Absolutely. It’s interesting, there’s no silver lining or positive anything about a genocide. I don’t traffic in that kind of language, and I find it actually really troubling, and during this most violent iteration of an ongoing genocide, more and more people have been simply unable not to know what it means to be a Palestinian, and at what cost. And so, there is a lot more global consciousness about the Palestinian experience and the injustices that Palestinians have suffered broadly and very specifically and most acutely in Gaza. Seeing evidence of that while traveling to cities outside the U.S. In many, many countries, Palestinian flags are regularly displayed on people’s balconies. In Italian cities, for instance. It’s a small thing. Or watching people who are definitely not Palestinian just walk around in their keffiyas… it’s such a strange thing… It’s almost like a walking through the looking glass experience for a Palestinian, because every aspect of our self-expression at some point, to some degree, is criminalized or restricted or inhibited.

Yeah.

So to watch that change in real time during a time of horrific strife and for it still not be enough to make the violence end has been very, um… I’m struggling to find the right weight for the language. It’s just strange. 

Yeah, no, I can see why you would want to be careful about how you put it.

It’s maybe somewhat heartening, but the cost is so horrific, it’s hard to sort of… say it like that. But yes, a threshold, let’s just say a threshold has been crossed in awareness, and that’s gotta be good in the long run, but at what cost? I definitely think Western consciousness is the ultimate threshold, unfortunately.

Yes, and I don’t want to try too hard or inauthentically to veer into hope since, like you’re saying, there is so much darkness and difficulty, but I do feel that so much of your book is written from a place of love, and that becomes even more apparent as the book progresses. There’s love in the places you go to, and the stories you tell, in the traditional dishes you describe, in the words you wield and scrutinize at the same time.

That final poem, “Dukka,” is kind of a lovefest, but also an examination of love in all its great and small manifestations. Could you speak to the role love plays in this book and its interplay with other emotions?

I think it’s a very deeply Palestinian love, and I think love for any of us, no matter what our experiences are, where we come from, real love is messy and fraught, and shows up when things are terrible. That’s the love you want. That’s the love I want. You know, it’s not a Hallmark card, it’s not a sentimental love, it’s a love that protests in the rain, it’s a love that loses things, because it’s worth it. It’s a love that comes back. The real stuff.

I agree.

I’ve seen you talk in the past about a lot of Palestinian poets, many of whom I plan to read in the future. But I did want to ask, are there any Palestinian artists working in other artistic mediums that you’d want to shout out? Maybe painters, filmmakers, novelists, people who you’ve just been taken by their work?

Yeah. Oh, so many, and I’m gonna freak out about who I forget here. This always stresses me out.

I wish you had told me in advance, because I would have thought about it!

Haha, I’m sorry! I don’t want to overwhelm you!

 She is a friend, I will confess, but my favorite Palestinian filmmaker, Annemarie Jacir. I wish everyone would just sit down and watch all her movies. She’s made beautiful films, and I think that she is exceptionally good at telling our stories. She’s also a poet, and you can tell from the films that she’s a poet.

Oh, wow, that’s cool. I wish I knew more fillmmaker/poets!

Her newest one is Palestine 36, which I just had the great privilege of seeing at the Toronto Film Festival, and anywhere, anyone can see it; you must go see it immediately. Annemarie is also someone who deeply loves and inhabits Palestinian consciousness and memory, and so I’m a huge fan of her work, and my writing is very informed by her films.

I got to translate the screenplay for her film, لما شفتك (I Saw You), which she was making in Jordan at the time that I was living there for a few years.

And was that the first time you’d worked with the screenplay? I mean, translating one?

Yeah. One of the writing highlights of my life. Yes. Yeah, yeah, just, ugh, even thinking about that. So that’s someone who comes to mind. In terms of painters, there are so many, and I’m especially taken by the work of Malak Mattar, who is a young painter from Gaza. Her work continues to evolve magnificently. She has a painting that’s a kind of Guernica for Palestine that I also saw in Toronto last year. They brought it for the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, and it fills up an entire massive wall in a room, and it is all done in grayscale, and it’s just shattering and exceptional, and it’s really a challenge to take the whole thing in. It’s so distinct from all of her other work, which is rich in its colors and in these magnetic faces with large eyes and intense gaze. I’m a huge fan of Malak’s and all of her work. There are Palestinian musicians whose work I really, really love. I’m a big fan of Nai Barghouti. She is a Palestinian singer; she’s a vocalist, and she does these beautiful arrangements on some traditional Palestinian songs, but she puts her special spin on them. She has this… dandana technique that she has innovated... I don’t even know what to call it, because I’m not musically trained, and I don’t have the language.

Yeah, I don’t know if I have the language either.

Anyway, people should look up Nai Barghouti. So that’s just off the top of my head, an absolutely not exhaustive list. The minute we get off here, I’m gonna be like, there are 17 other people I wanted to name, but that’s just what came to mind.

It has been so amazing to listen to you, and just to hear your depth of knowledge, in history, in poetry, and all the brilliant things you have to say. Thank you so, so much.

Thank you, thank you.

Interview Posted: March 2, 2026