If you’re being censored or policed, “you learn to recognize the signals your body sends you,” writer Anna Badkhen explains. A few months ago, Anna had turned down an invitation to participate in PEN America’s World Voices festival to protest their “absolutely despicable treatment” of Palestinian writers and journalists. She articulated the reasons for her boycott in a letter which she posted on social media, and in response, Anna received a missive from PEN America that, to her, sounded very much like a threat. She realized right away that it physically triggered memories from when she was a young journalist working within the totalitarian state structure in Russia.

Censorship did not always mean obviously grisly modes of surveillance and violence, and Anna understood this early on in her career. Her recent article titled “The Pen and the Sword: Censorship Threatens Us All” exposes the ways in which dissenting opinions are censored without any legible arm twisting involved. In publishing and in journalism, the “machine of censorship” does not simply involve strikethrough edits or refusal to publish a particular author or a straight-up ban. It can be much subtler with an editor pushing for certain line edits, tonal changes or asking for the use of different terminology. It can also come in the guise of a conversation where the threat to comply is veiled. It is about making the writer bend to a particular narrative through subtle turns in language and style.

Anna has refused to take off her keffiyeh for the last two years, and says that Palestine has unmasked everything and everybody. She believes that “the literary establishment and all the so-called liberal intelligentsia in the United States and in the West overall” can be placed in three categories today: “Groups that are genocide deniers, groups that are unable to stand by in silence, and then a group that is racist enough to be okay with not saying anything.”

For Anna who is a writer with 7 books to her name and over 30 years of experience in writing about war, it is the third group, the silent ones, that are deeply disconcerting. Their silence is not only a sign of complicity but of a more troubling type of self-censorship. Even if any individual writer or journalist or academic has everything to lose from speaking out about Palestine, Anna insists that we should all be cultivating a “moral sense of proportion.” After all, it is not her home that is being “firebombed” but it is the Palestinians that are living with extraordinary levels of savagery wreaked upon them for over 600 days.

Yet another mode of stealthy censorship that Anna exposes is the kind of journalism practiced by the New York Times who have succeeded in creating and sustaining a caste of people who are “Progressive Except for Palestine.” This PEP group has fomented deep divisions in the US and Anna believes that the New York Times must be taken to court “the way that Radio Mille Collines went on trial after Rwanda.” Justice could come sooner, however. Resistance would require journalists to walk out of newsrooms right now yet the structures of dehumanization are so deeply embedded within the very people who claim to do the work of truth-telling. This dehumanization has become the norm because we are currently living in “a world order facilitated by the absolute failure of love.”

As we contend with gloomy, existential questions about a world gone awry with hatred and violence, Anna insists on snapping out of it to speculate upon radical futures for our planet. She evokes James Baldwin’s beautiful line about how love has never been a popular movement: “The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people,” Baldwin said. Anna builds on Baldwin to remind us that “love is an active verb” and that love has “to be practiced, to be maintained.” It is simple. Rising out from the spiral of hatred and from the ashes of violence can only happen if we “cultivate love.”

What is the role of writer in a time of genocide, I ask? Her reply comes through a poem by Zbigniew Herbert who wrote that “you were saved not in order to live, you have little time, you must give testimony.” For Anna, this translates into an “obligation to remember to speak with humility” and “an obligation to remember the difference between professional risks and the daily life and death of the people to whom we owe witness.”

Further reading:

-The Pen and the Sword: Censorship Threatens Us All by Anna Badkhen, The Markaz Review: https://themarkaz.org/the-pen-and-the...

-For all the writing by Anna Badkhen: https://www.annabadkhen.com/

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Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

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Whether its legacy figures like Cecil Rhodes, Mahatma Gandhi and B.R Ambedkar, or various military men or aggressive phallic sculptures, statues are the public’s direct and unavoidable encounter with institutionally constructed histories. They represent the supremacy of colonialism, race, caste and gender, and so movements centered on either dismantling  or building them have become critical for understanding charged debates around history and memory today. Rahul Rao’s book The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire explores these global controversies, and offers radical insights into how the past, present and future is made and re-made through statues and monuments in the public spheres. 

Rahul’s inquiry began with a simple question: “How can an apparently inanimate object like a statue arouse so much fervor, and affect those attacking it and those seeking to preserve it?” These questions about arousal and attachment led to the realization that like large advertisement billboards, statues are non-consensual: “They enter our sight lines without permission, right?” They wield power because of their assaulting presence. Rahul found himself turning to the language of psychoanalysis to understand our collective relationship to statues and to move past the “ordinary observation that statues are phallic objects. He found that statues are a “a peculiar combination of aggression and vulnerability,” and this is precisely why their exposure in the public sphere “makes them vulnerable to attack and to reinscription.” 

These questions prompted a journey through places where statues and monuments have elicited a frenzy: South Africa, Ghana, US, UK and India where protesters were dismantling statues, as powerful political institutions were erecting new ones. These overlapping and opposing actions were occurring at a dizzying speed, as movements like RhodesMust Fall, Black Lives Matter as well the Covid-19 pandemic were unmasking systemic inequality worldwide. 

India, for Rahul, is at the heart of this book with two of the middle chapters dedicated to exploring statues of figures of Gandhi, Ambedkar, Vallabhbhai Patel who are in a volatile constellation of moving and shifting,  resurrected and felled within the Indian polity. The popular Indian culture of “darshan”—the act of making eye contact with god (rather, the idol of a god) —is a significant moment of worship and, in fact, manifests itself in the building of statues not just of gods but also of revered figures. They become ways to both claim space, and of“asserting identity, asserting pride in a particular community, in its history, in its mythology, in its icons.” From the 1960s onwards, the Dalit movement was successful in building statues of Ambedkar all over India and this was “probably the most viral statue building phenomenon anywhere in the world.” 

However, Rahul zooms in on the last 10 years, as the Hindu right-wing attempts to respond to history and memory-making through their own rush to build statues. He travels around Gujarat in the hope of understanding the ways in which the legacies of Vallabhai Patel and Gandhi are being valorized and desecrated, respectively. In an attempt to build tourist infrastructure for the museumization of figures like Patel, indigenous people are forcibly displaced from their land. Thus, within this “heartland of Hindu right politics” Rahul encounters a dystopic new India where dynamics of settler colonialism are “unfolding in the postcolonial state.” 

The book, as well as our conversation, returns to decolonization, and ways in which the concept has been co-opted and corrupted by right-wing movements. Even as the world looks bleak and the situation in Palestine only worsens, Rahul urges new ways of reading and re-engaging with old school thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ambedkar. “We need to relate to these figures less like trophies or canon. We need to engage in less of the sacral reading and in a more comradely reading.”

Further reading:

The Psychic Lives of Statues: Reckoning with the Rubble of Empire by Rahul Rao (Pluto Press, 2025) https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745350769/the-psychic-lives-of-statues/

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Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

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Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist, prolific scholar, and active participant in the Algerian war of independence against France would have been 100 years old this year. He wrote about a wide range of topics yet it is his reflections on colonial violence and the counter-violence of the colonized that loom large even today, 64 years later.

Despite filmmaker Hassane Mezine’s and my own fairly immersive knowledge about Fanon’s life and work, our conversation inevitably turns to Fanon’s theory about violence. Fanon believed that the colonized have the right to use violent means to fight their colonizers, and that, in fact, this violence can be “cleansing” and transformative for those oppressed by colonialism.

For Hassane, growing up in an Algerian family in France meant that the conversation about the war of liberation was all around him yet many aspects of it were also taboo. As a teenager, Hassane had come across Fanon’s work and instinctively knew that it carried the “keys” to the real story of the Algerian-French war as well as to colonialism, slavery and racism; explosive topics that Hassane had become introduced to from listening to reggae music and books like Alex Haley’s Roots. 

As Hassane went deeper into Fanon’s works and began working on a documentary project about Fanon, he had a poignant realization: “Fanon is talking about love. And the path toward love in a very violent system is to defend yourself.” Influenced by the writer and activist Houria Bouteldjia’s ideas about revolutionary love (and who also appears in the documentary), Hassane finds that Fanon is advocating for dignity through self-defence and is advocating living together peacefully, without any hate and supremacism.

Hassane’s empathetic approach to Fanon is apparent in his 2018 documentary film Fanon Hier, Aujourd’hui (Fanon Yesterday, Today). It is divided into two sections; the first half is biographical (yesterday) and the second half is focused on theory and praxis (today). The first section combines intimate portraits of Fanon’s life with a historical overview of French colonialism, and the Algerian liberation war in which Fanon became involved. The second section features a vibrant global journey that excavates the pertinence of Fanon’s ideas in Algeria, South Africa, Niger, Palestine, Martinique, France, Portugal and the United States. Hassane interviews writers, activists and artists who view themselves as the “wretched of the earth” whether due to oppressive conditions in the Global South or as mistreated migrants in the Global North. Fanon’s ideas unequivocally offer them a path towards liberatory futures.

I ask Hassane to look back at the documentary’s journey of the last five years. The film has been screened in several countries and Hassane has been invited to speak about it in slick Western academic auditoriums, as well as in scrappier settings in Niamey and Bethlehem. The screenings and encounters in the Global South are the most memorable to him because even if people may not have read Fanon, they connect with the documentary instinctively.

We come to the question of Palestine and wonder about the potency as well as the futility of Fanon’s prophetic writings, since it has now been 22 months of a broadcasted genocide.. Palestine was central to Hassane’s film about Fanon and he concluded Fanon Hier, Aujourd’hui with an interview with Samah Jabr, the only woman psychiatrist out of about a couple of dozen practicing psychiatrists in the West Bank. Hassane explains that in Palestine, “we have a typical 19th century type of European colonialism with 21st century technologies" and this is why Fanon’s ideas continue to resonate.

As Fanon turns 100 years old, revival might be in the air but Hassane warns against “fetishism” around the thinker. Rather, Fanon must be viewed as a “toolkit.” Hassane’s hope is that his film can inspire people to read more Fanon and if they are able to see the “future with a different perspective, then to me, this is mission accomplished.” 

Watch the documentary film Fanon Hier, Aujourd’hui (2019) directed by Hassane Mezine: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/fanonhieraujourdhui/487559888

Further reading:

“The radical afterlives of Frantz Fanon” by Bhakti Shringarpure, Africa is a Country https://africasacountry.com/2019/06/the-radical-afterlives-of-frantz-fanon

Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love by Houria Bouteldja, MIT Press https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781635900033/whites-jews-and-us/

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure

Editing: Didier David Moutou

Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

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Podcast was recorded in French. English subtitles are available in the YouTube video included below.

Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist, scholar and revolutionary, would have turned 100 years old this year had his life not been cut short by leukemia at the age of 36. By then, Olivier Fanon, the son of Frantz and Josie Fanon, had already spent his childhood in Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana and other places where his parents were active participants in the anti-colonial struggle for Algerian independence. He was five years old when his father had a serious relapse and was flown to the US for advanced treatment, and where he passed away. 

Today, 64 years later, Olivier is a living embodiment and vocal defendant of his parents’ anticolonial ideas, their fierce loyalty to Algeria, and their searing critique of France, despite Olivier’s choice to live a quiet life outside of Paris. 

Olivier reflects with some heaviness on the 100th anniversary of his father’s birth, remembering him as a man who had “a short but intensive life.” Even though 100 represents a long passage of time, Olivier says that for him, “Fanon is alive every day, because I was brought up in the memory of my father, which was kept alive by my mother after my father's death.” 

Perhaps inadvertently, the conversation becomes Olivier’s love letter to his mother, Josie, who guarded her husband’s legacy with a ferocity, and herself lived her husband’s anticolonial ideas. Frantz and Josie were companions in life and work, and they were not simply “contemplators or historians of the revolution, they were actors in the revolution.” 

“My mother was a moudjahida,” Olivier declares. And after Algeria’s independence, Josie chose to renounce French citizenship and made her life in Algiers with her son. More importantly, Josie blazed a trail of her own as a prolific journalist who reported on political movements and upheavals in Haiti, South Africa, Vietnam and Iran.

Olivier and I spoke about his mother’s solidarity with Palestine. In 1967, Josie sent a telegram from Algiers to Paris, to the publisher of Les Damnés de la Terre, asking them to remove Jean-Paul Sartre's preface from future editions of the book. Like several other French intellectuals, Sartre had taken a pro-Zionist stance and signed a manifesto in support of Israel during the Six-Day War. For Olivier, it is a plain illustration of his mother’s steely political will. He called it a Josie trademark: “She's not into nuance, she's not into discussion, she's not into compromise, she's not into diplomacy.” She insisted on swift and politically charged action. 

This year, even as his globally influential father turns 100 years old, France continues to snub his legacy, and perhaps even actively seeks to bury it. Yet, Fanon seems to be everywhere. As the genocidal war on Palestinians continues into a third year, Fanon’s words and ideas are evoked again and again. 

I ask him about the challenges of preserving his father’s fraught but important legacy. He is clear about what he has been tasked with, and believes that reading and rereading Fanon is urgent in 2025, especially for the sake of empowering liberation movements in Palestine and Western Sahara. Unsurprisingly, he has been plagued with invitations for talks and conferences to commemorate his father’s centenary. But talking and having fancy receptions is not enough, Olivier says. “If you want to claim Fanon, do something. Act.”

Further reading:

“If you want to claim Fanon, do something: Act." - Olivier Fanon. By Bhakti Shringarpure. https://www.radicalbookscollective.com/p/if-you-want-to-claim-fanon-do-something

Frantz Fanon, a biography by David Macey (2000) https://www.versobooks.com/products/2272-frantz-fanon 

“Josie Fanon and her fidelity to Palestinian liberation” by Jessica Breakey: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/josie-fanon-and-her-fidelity-to-palestinian-liberation

Fanon Hier, Aujourd'hui (film). Directed by Hassane Mezine (2018)

Fanon. (film) Directed by Jean-Claude Barny (2025)

Chroniques fidèles survenues au siècle dernier à l'hôpital Blida-Joinville au temps où Dr Frantz Fanon était chef de la cinquième division entre 1953 et 1956. (film)Directed by Abdenour Zahzah (2024).

Credits:

Production: Pauline Bigotte

Research: Bhakti Shringarpure & Greg Pierrot

Editing: Didier David Moutou

Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

Anthropologist Maura Finkelstein had always incorporated Palestine in her university teaching and felt that, as an anti-Zionist, Jewish American academic, it was her moral obligation to do so. She knew well the type of repression and harassment that Palestinian academics experienced at US universities, but thought that being a Jewish scholar would likely protect her. Absurdly, Maura became the first tenured American academic to be fired for allegedly making Jewish students at the Muhlenberg College campus feel unsafe due to the “antisemitic” content of her coursework and social media posts. 

As Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine began escalating, academia was one of the earliest industries to start collaborating with governments and other powerful institutions to bring pro-Palestinian faculty, students and staff to heel. Repression, sanctions, harassment and censorship of pro-Palestinian sentiment is being normalized everyday. 

From the outside, these efforts on behalf of academic institutions appear like a chaotic barrage of intersecting events, but Maura reveals the shocking levels of sustained coordination required for the harassment to result in punitive action such as suspensions and terminations. For example, the Muhlenberg chapter of Hillel International, which was involved in attacking Maura, is directly connected to Israel and to the Israeli Defense Forces. The board of trustees and many high-level administrators also boast ties to Israel. Additionally, powerful Zionist organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) play instrumental roles in influencing policy and actions on American campuses. 

For two years, Maura has been put through the wringer and experienced the full might of these repressive entities. It started when Maura received what she calls a “completely monstrous email” sent by the college president to a campus-wide listserv. The president condemned the October 7th attacks and insisted that “now is not the time to think about history, now is just the time to mourn Israel.” Maura replied with an email corrective to that same campus-wide listserve. Within a few days, a student complained about her Palestine-focused readings in the classroom. That is all it took - one complaint and one email - to rapidly activate an entire campus surveillance network: Attacks on her snowballed; complaints multiplied; entire Whatsapp groups were created with pro-Israel students monitoring her every move, both in person and on social media platforms. Soon there were warnings from administrators, then a suspension, then an investigation. Finally, Maura was fired. 

Recently, it has become evident that academia has been very quick to cede authority to these malevolent, coercive forces. This has caught many by surprise, as American universities have historically projected a faith in progressive, liberal values with missions to uphold academic freedom, increase diversity and speak out in the name of human rights. 

What is wrong with academia, we both wonder? Maura accepts that most academics are trying to hold onto their jobs in a horrible economy, and refusing to engage in this resounding moral challenge of our time is, alas, the easiest way to keep getting a paycheck. Yet, she is also enraged because she does not see the point of holding on to our vocations if “we can't actually be committed to the theoretical and ethical claims that we make in our work.” It is this silence, and this inability to commit to an ethical stance, that is “part of the reason that academia has been so easily dismantled over the past few years.” 

“I think everyone who has ever written anything or taught anything that had the word ‘liberation’ or ‘decolonization’ or whatever…everyone who's done that and hasn't said anything about Gaza, then none of your work matters. It doesn't mean anything.”

“It sucks to get fired,” she admits. “We work most of our adult life to get to this position. But also, it's a small thing to give up when everyday I'm watching Palestinians in Gaza who've lost everything.” 

Maura’s resolve has only strengthened since her firing from Muhlenberg, and she plans to continue speaking out against the genocide while learning how to sharpen her activism for Palestine through work with The Sameer Project on fundraising for Gaza.  

Further reading

Maura Finkelstein’s substack: https://maurafinkelstein.substack.com/ 

The Jewish supremacy at the heart of the Zionist project by Maura Finkelstein

https://mondoweiss.net/2025/06/the-jewish-supremacy-at-the-heart-of-the-zionist-project/ 

Hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure. Radical Futures is produced by Warscapes

Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

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For the last two years, Huda Fakhreddine has endured a barrage of harassment by the US government and her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, for the simple reason that she writes about, teaches and translates Palestinian poetry. 

The witchhunt for academics associated with Palestine is not new, but has ramped up immensely since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in the autumn of 2023. The stage has been set over the years and the villains have been pre-decided. In December 2023, Harvard, Columbia and UPenn were questioned at congressional hearings supposedly investigating rising antisemitism on American campuses. In a cartoonish portrait presented to Congress, Huda was held up as an example because of her involvement in the Palestine Writes Festival held some months before at the UPenn campus, where she has worked for several years in the department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. 

Slander, slurs and death threats followed, and the danger to Huda’s life was palpable. Over the ensuing months, any semblance of a normal working environment fell away, and there was a “dropping of masks.” Everything one had suspected about the violence and racism embedded in American university structures had become so transparent that Huda found it “unfathomable that we had navigated these systems” for so long. 

Today, as the agonizing genocide of Palestinians continues, Huda says that “Gaza has offered us so much that we don't deserve,” and one of these offerings “is the courage to just not accept this anymore.” And so her voice only got louder as she refused to back down, even as the situation at her university got worse.

UPenn, like several other universities, received a letter from the congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce demanding they hand over records and all emails of UPenn staff to aid in their “antisemitism” inquisition. There was no subpoena, nor was this a legally binding order, but UPenn had decided to capitulate to these demands. Refusing to let this McCarthyism go unchecked, Huda and a colleague filed a lawsuit against UPenn in January 2024 to stop the university from sharing private information with Congress, saying such disclosures endangered them.

A year later, their case was dismissed with prejudice, but Huda explains that there was no expectation of winning. “The win here is that you're not silenced,” and the goal was “to use the lawsuit to say things around it - in the media, on social media, in the school paper.” 

“You make use of every platform to make the statement. And our statement was Gaza.” 

What does it feel like to be a problem? I ask her. “It feels like a responsibility,” she replies. Unsurprisingly, Huda is writing and translating more than ever, and has made sure that Palestinian resistance is at the core of everything she teaches. “Nothing should be smooth. I'm going to be a pain and it’s fine. I'm paying the price. If every moment can become a return, a refocusing on Gaza, because we are so easily distracted, and if this is resisting that distraction, then I'm glad to be that problem.”

Huda recently wrote that “Gaza is no longer just a place; Gaza is a locus and ethos; it is a signpost in place that has also become a source point of time.” This is her most urgent insight and message to the world. She explains that, “everything has to launch from Gaza, whether it's in literature and politics and climate studies and gender studies, anything. We are witnessing it and literally witnessing it like nothing has ever been witnessed in history before. It's on our pillows, in our car, all the screens are massacres and bloodshed.” 

Huda is painfully aware that the many forms of resistance she articulates certainly do not assure success, and that the situation is devastating. “But there have been breakthroughs. I think being a problem, and we're placing “problem” in quotation marks, is not making it easy for the system.

Further reading:

Intifada: On Being an Arabic Literature Professor in a Time of Genocide by Huda Fakhreddine https://lithub.com/intifada-on-being-an-arabic-literature-professor-in-a-time-of-genocide/ 

“Palestinian” by Ibrahim Nasrallah. Translated by Huda Fakhreddine https://proteanmag.com/2024/03/24/palestinian/

Huda Fakhreddine on ArabLit https://arablit.org/tag/huda-fakhreddine/ 

Huda Fakhreddine & Yasmeen Hanoosh: Translating Arabic & Gaza https://themarkaz.org/huda-fakhreddine-yasmeen-hanoosh-translating-arabic-gaza/

“Pull Yourself Together” and “Seven Skies for the Homeland” By Hiba Abu Nada. Translated by Huda Fakhreddine https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/

University Presidents Testify Before House on Anti-Semitism and Violent Protests Transcript https://www.rev.com/transcripts/university-presidents-testify-before-house-on-anti-semitism-and-violent-protests-transcript 

Judge dismisses Penn faculty group’s amended ‘McCarthyism’ lawsuit with prejudice. By Ayana Chari  https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/02/penn-faculty-palestine-lawsuit-dismissed-prejudice

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Title Music: "Cottonstorm" by Bayern Boom Beat

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The mythology of the city of Sana’a writes itself: nestled in a valley; the charming, crumbling architecture; the winding alleys; and a history and heritage older than time itself. As Yemen’s largest city and its capital, a literary anthology through the lens of Sana’a seems like a natural choice. The Book of Sana'a joins an illustrious list of city fiction anthologies published by Comma Press in the UK. Their series titled "Reading the City" now includes over 30 books.

Yet, Yemen today is at a political crossroads and exalting Sana’a did not sit well with many of the writers in the collection. “Yemen right now is extremely divided,” explains Laura Kasinof, editor of theThe Book of Sana’a. “Maybe, emotionally, Sana’a comes with some stigma, particularly for Yemenis who are against the Houthis.” 

Contributing writer and sociologist Rim Mugahed echoes Kasinoff: “It’s now such a political thing to mention Sanaa. I'm working in a think tank called Sana’a, and this caused us a lot of issues to reach out to people from the south, especially from the south, and to work with them and to let them trust us or believe us.”

“But it's Sanaa,” Mugahed happily exclaims. “It’s one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.” She adds that no matter where in Yemen someone might come from, Sana’a always makes you feel at home. “Even those who now hate Sanaa because of the Houthis or because of the history of the previous regime led by Saleh, because of all the grievances…they still belong to Sana'a.” 

Traditionally, Yemeni literature has encompassed writers from many cities but Kasinof admits that she jumped on a chance to assemble this collection of stories about Sana’a: “I'm a big fan of translated literature and its ability to bring a place alive in a way that nothing else can.” Kasinof’s relationship to Yemen and to Sana’a, in particular, is now decades long. She lived there for many years and her book Don't Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen (2016) covered the 2011 protests and political turmoil in Yemen.

Kasinof is self-conscious about not having a background in literature but started by reaching out to her many connections. It took a long time for the right stories to make their way to her. The war in Yemen created an urgency among contributors to amplify voices from the country but also simultaneously slowed things down. Those fleeing Yemen are now scattered across the world and the already small publishing industry in the country has been completely destroyed. Despite the challenges, The Book of Sana’a brings together 10 stories that include genres ranging from political satire, speculative fiction, the absurd and realism. War certainly echoes through many of these narratives as do themes of gender justice. 

Mugahed, whose story “The Ruse of Sana’a” leads the collection, states that even though the situation in Yemen makes it impossible to think of anything but politics, she has found that it is only through fiction that the world can stop misunderstanding Yemen. She believes that, to some degree, Yemenis have simply been forgotten. “Even now, they are talking about Yemenis as numbers or as an issue or a crisis.” Mugahed declares that it is her responsibility as a writer “to humanize this narrative and to share people's stories.”

The Book of Sana’a has been published by Comma Press, UK and is available to buy here: https://commapress.co.uk/books/the-book-of-sanaa 

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When a little boy drowns in the Nile, a Sudanese village is forced to confront its racist past in Reem Gaafar’s debut novel A Mouth Full of Salt. Narrated through a choral protagonist, the novel weaves together the lives of villagers who are suddenly beset by a curse: the drowning is followed by another death, and cattle begin to contract a mysterious illness. 

The village is an allegory intended to reflect the broader history of Sudan. A Mouth Full of Salt moves across time, from the 1940s to the 1980s, allowing the reader to glimpse the turbulent civil strife that led to the formation of South Sudan in 2011. Entwined stories of three women from different generations are narrated through flashbacks; Fatima and Sulafa are Arab and from the North, and Nyamakeem is Black and from the South. 

Gaafar was keen to explore the history of anti-Blackness and systemic oppression experienced by Black Southerners. She is further perturbed by the fact that ever since South Sudan became a country, there has been an illusion that the problem of anti-Blackness in Sudan was a thing of the past. But there is “the undertone of racism” that still lurks in Sudanese society. 

A Mouth Full of Salt was published just as war erupted in Sudan in April 2015, and many of the themes of the novel seemed prescient. The book, however, had been in the works for several years. Gaafar has been passionate about writing since childhood, but succumbed to family pressure and became an emergency medicine doctor. She continued writing, but time was not on her side until she switched to research-based public health work. 

Gafaar also moved around a lot as a child, living in Jordan, the UAE, and New Zealand, though her parents ensured that she returned home to Sudan for long spells. Not only is Sudan at the core of her work, but it seems that Sudan and writing itself are connected for Gaafar. “I started writing more during medical school because that was the first time I had lived in Sudan,” she shared. 

After several years of laboring over it, Gaafar submitted A Mouth Full of Salt for a manuscript competition called the Island Prize for a Debut Novel from Africa in 2023. To her surprise, she won. “This is not a big prize and doesn’t give you lots of money,” she explained, “but it gives you editorial support. I wanted someone from the publishing world to look at my work and to just hold my hand through it.” 

A year later, the novel was published by Saqi Books (UK), and Gaafar now joins a small but successful group of Sudanese writers (Leila Aboulela, Safia Elhillo, and Fatin Abbas) writing in English rather than in Arabic. Gaafar has not looked back since and is working on yet another novel featuring women across different generations.

A Mouth Full of Salt by Reem Gaafar: https://saqibooks.com/books/saqi/a-mouth-full-of-salt/

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Sim Kern’s journey as an outspoken and empathetic activist for Palestinian liberation began when they realized, as a teenager, that global warming would blow up our planet one day. Back in 1999, saving the environment was not a “mainstream” topic and for Sim, these early climate justice concerns became an entry point for understanding that our global system was catastrophically racist, colonial and capitalist. Nonetheless, Sim admits that it was particularly hard to unlearn Zionist indoctrination about settler colonialism, apartheid and occupation in Palestine that was part and parcel of growing up Jewish in the US. It is this journey of becoming anti-Zionist and finding creative ways to resist it that they map in their book Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History and Collective Liberation. (Interlink Books, 2025).

Part memoir, part rant, and part manifesto, Sim writes about having found themselves in the position of an activist after their posts on Palestine started going viral in October 2023. Sim’s posts were informative and analytical, and they were able to break down complex concepts and explain the troubling histories of Zionism and settler colonialism in a clear, accessible style. They went from being known as a speculative author, to a book influencer to becoming a fierce voice for liberation, and justice, condemning the occupation and genocide in Palestine. I asked if their insistence on positioning themselves as Jewish American might efface Palestinian identity since this identity has emerged as oppositional to Palestinian existence because of Israel’s genocidal war. They replied that while you simply need to be human to oppose genocide, their identity as a US Jew is constantly being brought to bear upon Palestine and so they have no choice but to speak from that position: “I have nothing to do with this region. But Israel insists that that I do have a special right to Palestine, that Palestinians who actually lived on that land or their parents or grandparents lived on that land for tens of generations don't have.”

Sim admits that as the violence in Palestine plumbs unimaginable depths, it has gotten harder to practice Jewishness even at a light cultural level. But they firmly believe it is imperative they hold on to their anti-Zionism because as “an American Jew, my voice is given special power and special attention in this conversation and whether that's fair or not.”

Sim also unpacks American propaganda about the memory of the Nazi holocaust and how it engenders a Jewish exceptionalism, effectively shutting down conversations on the histories of other genocides. As a former middle school teacher, they wish that the histories of colonialism and genocide were taught with a comparative approach.

In addition to decolonizing their Jewishness, Sim’s witty take-downs of Israeli pinkwashing have become particularly important. They explain that “there's this bullshit idea that Israel is some haven for gay people” while  a false narrative circulates about  the Palestinian culture of killing gay people. Not only does this Zionist propaganda erase  queer Palestinians, but also  generates consent for the idea that it is okay to erase a population because they might be anti-queer. 

Lastly, I asked Sim about their following of half a million people on social media, and whether this means they might have broken out of the echo chamber. They admit that “people are living in very different informational realities,” and emphasize the importance of  continuously using different approaches, formats and styles because “you don't know what video, what comment, what post is going to be the little crack in someone's worldview.” 

Further reading:

Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern. Buy here: https://interlinkbooks.com/product/genocide-bad/

Follow Sim Kern: On Instagram @sim_bookstagrams_badly https://www.instagram.com/sim_bookstagrams_badly

TikTok @simkern https://www.tiktok.com/@simkern

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Writer, editor, and publisher Marcia Lynx Qualey remarked that “the literature currently in the spotlight, in many languages, is Palestinian” while accepting the Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature in 2024. 

As Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues, Marcia said that the demand for Palestinian literature has grown exponentially. Submissions to prizes and magazines have ballooned, as have requests from publishers asking Marcia’s advice on various manuscripts. These are not works necessarily written by Palestinians, but that “deal with Palestine in some way,” she added. 

Historically, writers, translators, and editors have struggled to get Palestinian writing published, so this should be good news. But unfortunately, Marcia said it should give us pause. 

While some publishers are certainly trying to engage from a solidarity perspective, many approach it with an extractive motive and to capitalize on the disaster. Luckily, Marcia explained how readers can discern between the books that might be exploiting the moment and those that might come from a place of activism and a desire to amplify Palestinian voices. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, Marcia also offered insights into this and several other problems that plague publishing about Palestine at a time when Palestinians, Palestinian culture, and Palestinian history itself are being erased before our eyes. 

She explained how the Publishers for Palestine came about—a coalition we are proud to be part of as the Radical Books Collective. P4P’s growth is the industry’s overwhelming desire to decenter big corporate publishing. Marcia discussed the shifts in Arabic-language publishing with the coming of new book fairs, prizes, and presses in Qatar and the UAE, though she worries that they seem to be imitating Western corporate conglomerates, after all. 

Finally, Marcia spoke of how ArabLit, the digital magazine and ArabLit Quarterly, the print magazine—which she was instrumental in creating—have attempted to provide material support and foster community for writers, poets, and translators trapped inside Gaza. 

With people in Gaza atomized and their lives completely fractured, putting writers, poets, and translators in contact with each other remains the first priority for ArabLit. Their most recent issue on “Grief” illustrates that grief and mourning are not about being “alone and sad, but to be together and to propel ourselves forward.” 

At this moment of bitter despair, Marcia insisted that editors and publishers find alternative routes to create business structures that might be decolonial, abolitionist, and anti-capitalist. 

“We need these new ways for talking about Palestinian literature, not these old extractive, profit-seeking, iconizing, boiling down ways of it,” she said. “I think it involves making partnerships, it involves changing the way that we do business.”

Further reading:

“The Landscape around Us”: Marcia Lynx Qualey’s Ottaway Award Acceptance Speech 

https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-06/marcia-lynx-qualeys-ottaway-award-acceptance-speech/

Arab Lit Quarterly, the GRIEF issue: https://arablit.gumroad.com/l/glwto?layout=profile

ArabLit, the digital magazine: https://arablit.org/

Publishers for Palestine: https://publishersforpalestine.org/