New York: Book Launch for The Hollow Half, May 8

Join Asian American Writers Workshop in person or online for a celebration of The Hollow Half, an urgent and groundbreaking memoir by Sarah Aziza, one of the most important new voices in contemporary literature and criticism. Sarah will be in conversation with Hannah Bae, with featured readings by Kamelya Omayma Youssef, Ghinwa Jawhari, H. Sinno, and Ladan Khoddam-Khorasani.

A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back.

Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

Find out more and reserve your free tickets here.

New York: Cinema for Liberation

Join Writers Against the War on Gaza, in partnership with Anthology Film Archives, for a screening series (May 2-31) that gathers together struggles in Palestine and the United States: for home, livelihood, and liberation, against exile, capital, and imprisonment. Rather than collapsing these confrontations, Cinema for Liberation documents forces of subjugation and displacement and the movements that rise to face them.

In one film, Palestinian laborers sabotage an oil pipeline they built under British colonial rule. Another follows New York City workers organizing over wages and working conditions at Amazon, that global behemoth whose cloud computing services store Israeli surveillance. The final program in the series, a double feature, interrogates the prison as the pinnacle of exile and extraction in both the U.S. and Palestine.

Click here to find more details about the films and purchase your tickets. All proceeds from the series will be donated, including to The Sameer Project, an initiative led by diaspora Palestinians working to supply emergency shelter and aid to families in Gaza; PALSHIELD, which supports farming communities in the West Bank through the provision of life-saving medical supplies, protective gear, and training programs against settler attacks; and the RAPP Campaign, which seeks to free elders and those serving lengthy sentences from incarceration in the U.S.

London: Concert and Fundraiser for Ghassan Abu Sittah Children's Fund, 29 April

47SOUL single-handedly sowed the seeds of the Shamstep genre. The Palestinian musical collective formed in Jordan in 2013 taking influence from hip-hop, electronica, and R&B and melding it with the sounds of Dabke, a traditional folk dance, and other Shaa’bi roots music from Bilad Al Sham.

With three studio releases and multiple world tours to their name, 47SOUL marches the Shamstep movement forward with infectious energy and thought-provoking Arabic and English lyrics exploring the political, the philosophical and rousing direct calls to the recognition of the common humanity of all people.

In their new album, the band explores the bipolarity of the Palestinian experience in a two-part musical odyssey:

Dualism Pt.1 presents a tapestry of songs, each weaving together lyrical, musical, and visual elements to explore the themes of grief and resilience.

Dualism Pt.2 will shift to more celebratory themes. This transition captures the duality and bipolarity of the Palestinian experience—moving from sorrow to hope, resistance to dreams of a long-awaited celebration.

All the organising parties (47Soul, Marsm and TicketSouq) will donate the profits to GASCF, The Ghassan Abu Sitta Children Fund. This Fund is dedicated to the children of Gaza & Lebanon: providing medical attention to the children who need it the most and helping to relieve the medical sector.

The first initiative for the Fund, under the expert guidance of Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, is the transportation of critically injured children with their caretakers from Palestine to Lebanon, where they can receive the best possible medical, psychological, and social care, before returning home to Palestine where they will continue their recovery.

Tickets are priced on a sliding scale, and attendees are encouraged to pay what they can to support the Ghassan Abu Sitta Children Fund. For more details, and to reserve, click here.

Amsterdam: Past Disquiet, Now Through May 25

The Amsterdam-based art platform Framer Framed is exhibiting Past Disquiet through 25 May. Drawing on over a decade of research by curators Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, this documentary and archival exhibition uncovers a largely forgotten history of politically engaged artists and initiatives and their role in anti-imperialist solidarity movements from the 1960s to the 1980s.

This iteration of Past Disquiet also casts a special focus on the history of artistic solidarity within the Netherlands, and particularly in Amsterdam where many solidarity organisations were based. It explores how international movements from the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, such as the anti-apartheid, anti-Vietnam War, and Chilean resistance efforts, were met with local activism. The exhibition celebrates the creativity and enduring influence of these movements.

Past Disquiet traces its research to four forgotten ‘museums in solidarity’: the International Art Exhibition for Palestine (Lebanon, 1978), the Museum of Latin American Art in Solidarity with Nicaragua, the International Museum of the Resistance Salvador Allende, and Art Contre/Against Apartheid. These initiatives were intended as acts of solidarity, supporting the liberation struggles of the Palestinian people, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, rejecting the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and opposing the apartheid regime in South Africa. Despite their significant scale and impact, the presented collections have largely faded from historical memory – until now.

Curators Khouri and Salti’s research journey followed threads from Beirut, Paris, Rome, Rabat, Baghdad, Tokyo, Venice, Santiago, Managua, Cape Town and Amsterdam, back and forth. Their investigation uncovered thousands of intersecting stories of visionaries who organised exhibitions, intervened in public spaces, and created a particular form of museum as an embodiment of their causes. Through compelling archival materials – documents, photographs, pamphlets, press clippings, posters, interviews and videos – the exhibition brings this shared counter-history of art practice and political mobilisation to light.

Past Disquiet is a vivid rediscovery of collective artistic resistance, shedding new light on the intersection of cultural practice and political action that continues to inspire solidarity today.

On 10 May, exhibition curator Rasha Salti will give a guided tour of the exhibition. For details on the exhibition, including guided tours, printmaking workshops, and other public programming, visit the Framer Framed website.

Book of the Week

This is a collection written by 30 people of Gaza, while enduring war, still in Gaza—a physical manifestation of chronicling history as it happens.

Surviving war isn't a blanket experience; there are many facets which remain unheard. Letters from Gaza brings into focus the diverse human stories behind the crisis, the emotions that rang loudly in the silence of the night, when the shutters went down and the dust had settled. ​Over the course of 2024, 30 people living in the Gaza strip, of varied ages and backgrounds, penned their feelings, fears, memories, thoughts, and hopes amid the tempestuous days of war. Each story is a reminder of the world held within every person.

Collected and compiled by Mahmoud Alshaer and Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq, two prolific writers in Gaza, this collection stands as a testament to unparalleled resilience and unveils the unimaginable emotional scars of war.

Letters from Gaza publishes worldwide tomorrow. You can order it from our Bookshop (US / UK) or directly from the publisher.

Media Roundup

On Parallel Time – A letter by the late Walid Daqqa, translated by Nour Eldin Hussein, about how the Zionist prison system colonizes the time of those it holds: “We are a part of history, and history—as it is well known—is a condition and an action in the past. Except us: We are a past continuous and neverending. We address you all from it presently, so that it does not become your future.”

Poetry Begins at STOP: Etel Adnan & Arabic – Huda Fakhreddine writes about how Etel Adnan traffics in the tropes and themes of Arabic literature, even as she wrote primarily in English, to explore the relationship between place, time, exile, and anti-colonial memory in her work.

The Space Between – Abdelrahman ElGendy interviews Sarah Aziza about her new book The Hollow Half, to think about the truth that exists in the fragmented, ruptured, embodied experience of exile.   

Tactics of Disruption – Huda Ammori interviews a co-founder of Palestine Action, who lays out the workflows of weapons manufacturers like Elbit Systems and the need to disrupt their operations in order to slow the imperial provisioning of weapons to Israel.

I Wish You'd Known the City: On The Films of Mohammad Malas – Séamus Malekafzali reviews the films of the Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas, which preserve the trace memories of places depopulated and destroyed by Israel “as a monument to all that Israel has taken, and as a reminder that this could happen to any Arab city, to any Arab country, to any Arab people, should circumstances shift.”

A People on the Brink: Life and Death in Dheisheh Camp – Part 1 – Reporting from the Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank, Brendan Maslauskas Dunn captures the ways that residents have been resisting the occupation since prior to October 7.

How The Declining Support for Israel is Impacting U.S. Politics – Michael Arria speaks to an American political consultant about how Israel’s fall from grace among the American electorate is realigning longstanding political logics across multiple demographic groups.

New Gaza Ceasefire Proposal Contains “Red Lines” for Hamas on Continued Israeli Occupation and Disarmament – Jeremy Scahill and Jawa Ahmad report on a leaked ceasefire proposal which would maintain Israeli military positions in Gaza even as it demands the total disarmament of resistance groups in Gaza.

Fatima Hassouna, A Photographer who Made a Difference – Asmaa Abdu writes a eulogy for her friend the martyred photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who “brought dignity to every frame” she shot.

A Swarm of Ants – A new poem by Nasser Rabah, translated by Wiam El-Tamami: “Who gives a damn about a mirror in the dark, / other than the darkness itself? / Who gives a damn about a dead country, / other than the dead?”

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