What is home: it is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted. It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled. It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum. It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes. It is the café where I watched football matches and played— My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said
Library, Gaza’s only English-language library. He is a former visiting
poet at Harvard’s department of comparative literature. Photo credit: Mohamed Mehdy
You were so small in my hands no shrapnel could hit you, but the dust and smoke of the bomb rushed into your lungs. No need for any gauze. They just closed your eyes. No need for any shroud. You were already in your swaddle blanket.
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet and founder of the Edward Said
Library, Gaza’s only English-language library. He is a former visiting
poet at Harvard’s department of comparative literature. Photo credit: Mohamed Mehdy
Statement on the destruction of the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza
January 22, 2025
My name is Mosab Abu Toha and I’m a Palestinian poet and writer from Gaza.
Today [this] morning with a heavy heart I received the news of the destruction of the Edward Said Public Library in Beit Lahia, north Gaza.
The news and pictures came through just three days after Gazans were allowed to return to north Gaza.
Starting 2016, I started collecting books from around the world to build Gaza’s first English language library. With the endorsement and support of authors and intellectuals around the world, I raised the needed funds to open the library in the summer of 2017.
It took me around eight weeks to receive each box of books that friends and supporters were sending from the United States and Europe.
A few people were sending a selection of books from their own home libraries, and I was planning to name certain shelves in the library in Gaza after them.
In September 2019, a second branch was opened in Gaza City. News of the horrible damage done to the branch was relayed to me a few months ago.
All the dreams that I and friends in Gaza and abroad were drawing for our children have been burnt by Israel’s genocidal campaign to erase Gaza and everything that breathes of life and love.
The destruction of the Edward Said Public Library is just one war crime committed against Gaza and Gazans in the past 15 months.
The obliteration of Gaza’s universities, schools, cultural centers as well as religious sites must be condemned.
Moreover, the world of culture and literature must respond to this atrocity by publicly it and by boycotting Israeli cultural institutions and anyone coming from that part.
I demand that the American Library Association (ALA) issue a statement condemning the destruction of the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza and boycott Israeli libraries and cultural institution.
In January 2020, and as part of the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia, I delivered a presentation about the struggle libraries in Palestine face, and I told the story of the Edward Said Public Library.
I also urge American libraries and authors, some of whose books were on the shelves of the library, to stand in solidarity with the libraries in Gaza and to express their commitment for a protected cultural life in Palestine.
In December 2023, Do’a Al-Masri, the librarian at the Gaza City branch of the library, was killed in an air strike with her mother and siblings in Tuffah neighborhood.
Lastly, I’m committed to rebuilding the library, its two branches, and even expand the project to build one in Rafah and another in Khan Younis.
My only two concerns now are whether I can get books into Gaza and also whether I will find children who are convinced that this is safe and important to visit the library, especially after all the trauma and losses each of us experienced.
Mosab Abu Toha,
Author and founder of the Edward Said public Library-Occupied Palestine
Edward Said Public Library established in Gaza 2019
Edward Said Public Library today 2025- destroyed by Israel
*Edward Said 1935-2003 was a Palestinian American Professor of Literature at Columbia University who was born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1935 to a Palestinian Christian family.Said's father served in the United States Army during World War I.
Besides having been a public intellectual & academic, Edward Said was an accomplished pianist.
Mosab Abu Toha taught English at United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA) schools in Gaza from 2016 until 2019, and is the founder of the
Edward Said Library, the only English-language library in Gaza.[5] In 2019-20 he was a visitor at Harvard University, as a Scholar-at-Risk Fellow at the Department of Comparative Literature,[5] a librarian at the Houghton Library, and a fellow in the Harvard Divinity School.
In 2022, he published his first book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (City Lights). It won the Palestine Book Award and an American Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Walcott Poetry Prize.[1]The New York Times said, "Abu Toha’s accomplished debut contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."[12] For the National Book Critics Circle, Jacob Appel
wrote, "What makes Abu Toha’s work resonate so strongly is his gift for
the particular. By avoiding panoramic generalizations, he hones in upon
evocative images that capture the larger plight of his people."[13]
You refer to Israel as “a militarised society in which dissent
is punished” and liken 7 October to an “incredibly violent jailbreak”.
I was being precise. The idea that 7 October was an invasion is
completely wrong. This is a captive population in a ghetto, basically.
You can’t exercise self-defence against a population that you are
occupying militarily. The BBC will shout down a Palestinian guest and
say, well, that’s not what the Israelis would say. Of course it’s not
what the Israelis would say – they’re upholding an apartheid regime in
which they’re exacting a genocide on a captive population. To say that
Israel is a militarised state in which dissent is punished is precise.
They don’t let journalists into the Gaza
Strip; they put in prison people who like a social media post from
Gaza. I’m just trying to be precise with language – that’s the least we
can do.
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‘I remember being very taken by a poem that described waves breaking on a shore like eggshells’: Isabella Hammad. Photograph: Maria Spann/for The Observer
Isabella Hammad: ‘I heard Edward Said speak when I was seven’
How do you feel about the future?
I’m not an oracle. But many, many people who don’t have anything to do
with Palestine are devastated by what they’re seeing, which has
shattered all sorts of illusions they had about their societies and
their governments and about what’s humanly possible in terms of
destruction. I don’t know that it’s necessarily an optimistic thing to
say, but there’s no going back from this, whatever that means.
Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrativeis published on 26 September by Fern Press (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
Twenty years after his death in 2003, Edward
Said – a man variously known for his groundbreaking scholarship, dogged political advocacy, fine-tuned musical abilities, and serious sense of fashion – continues to inspire. This time
around, Said’s words and presence appear to answer a specific need prompted by
Israel’s assault on Gaza, a campaign so calculated and unrelenting that it has
been ruled plausibly genocidal by the international court of justice. It’s not
easy to know how one should respond to such evil, and many appear to be turning
to Said as their guide.
Finding old clips of Edward
Said on social media was never very difficult, but since the Hamas attacks of 7
October, Said’s ideas, quotes and archival clips have been widely disseminated
across a range of books, journals and platforms.
After Columbia University
suspended its campus chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish
Voice for Peace last November, the satirical website the Pigeon Post ridiculed
Columbia, Said’s stomping ground for nearly 40 years, with Said’s very words.
“Edward Said once wrote: ‘Our role is to widen the field of discussion, not to
set limits in accord with the prevailing authority.’ Therefore, Columbia
University is suspending Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for
Peace,” the website read, pigeon tongue planted firmly in pigeon
cheek. Gerrie Lim, the twentysomething creator of the Pigeon Post,
followed it up with a TikTok explainer video about Said highlighting
Columbia’s hypocrisy of once supporting Said’s right to free speech on
Palestine but now curtailing students’ speech on the same topic....
READ MORE
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/edward-said-palestine-israel-gaza?CMP=share_btn_tw
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Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Oh shining star testify, 2019
Installation view at Art Institute of Chicago, 2021
If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust
–
If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust—the
first exhibition by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne
Abou-Rahme in a major US museum—combines a site-specific installation of
the artists’ ongoing multimedia projects with a commissioned work
created specifically for the Art Institute of Chicago.
Working in film, installation, performance, sound, and text,
Abbas and Abou-Rahme sample self-authored and existing media and
materials to reframe and activate narratives that they describe as
everyday erasures of Palestinian experience as a means of resisting the
illusion of one immutable history. The interconnected works in this
installation critically examine how bodies, images, language, memories,
and narratives exist within contemporary archives, media, and
institutions. Often reflecting on ideas of amnesia, erasure, and return
within the Palestinian condition, the artists see these artworks as
potential tools for the politically oppressed to become unbound from
colonial systems.
Central to the exhibition is an immersive multimedia installation combining new versions of two multi-channel video works. Oh shining star testify(2019–21)
focuses on CCTV footage taken from a surveillance camera that
circulated online after Yusuf Shawamreh, a 14-year-old Palestinian boy,
was killed by Israeli forces. The layered footage, sampled from
recordings of the event, brings attention to how images that circulate
online can offer a testament to historic events, though that testament
can be obliterated when the internet becomes oversaturated with imagery.
Foregrounding the simultaneous accumulation and disappearance of data
and images, the artists make visible how those “uncounted bodies counter
their own erasures, appearing on a street, on a link or on a feed.”
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other, 2019
Installation view at Art Institute of Chicago, 2021
The second video, At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other (2019–21),uses fragments of Palestinian postcolonial scholar Edward Said’s poem “After the Last Sky”to
interrogate what it means to be constructed as an “illegal” person,
body, or entity. The text fragments are interspersed with human avatars
created from images of demonstrators in the Great March of Return, a
series of protests that began in 2018 and advocated for ending a 12-year
blockade and returning Palestinians to their ancestral homeland. The
avatars, which are rendered with software that represents missing data
as glitches, scars, and incomplete facial features, seem to exist
between the past and the future.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. Once an artist, now just a tool, 2021
The exhibitionalso presents for the first time the series of prints Don’t read poetics in these lines
(2010–21). Abbas and Abou-Rahme began producing this work in 2010 by
screenshotting and archiving tweets that responded and continue to
respond to the Arab revolutions. The selectively erased texts distill
the rapid-fire reactions that unfolded on social media, thus standing as
a testament to our time and offering a physical counterweight to the
internet, which the artists consider an “amnesiac archive.”
Extracted from this archive,Once an artist, now just a tool (2021)wascommissioned
by the Art Institute and critiques how museums perpetuate the legacies
of the colonial apparatus. In repositioning these sampled fragments, the
artists assert language’s capacity to challenge systems and histories
of power, critically pointing to the shifts that occur between events
and discourse.
The exhibition’s visceral and material narratives
raise timely and urgent questions about the ways history is constructed
and continually obliterated—encouraging viewers to imagine the potential
futures that emerge from the immersive sonic and visual environment.
If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust is curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, Neville Bryan Associate Curator, Architecture and Design.
Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family By Najla Said Riverhead Hardcover, August 2013, 272 pages, $19.00 Reviewed by Shams Hanieh
“I
am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman, but I grew up as a
Jew in New York City. I began my life, however, as a WASP,” writes Najla
Said in her funny and poignant memoir, Looking For Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family.
Najla grew up in New York City, as the daughter of a Lebanese mother
from an academic family and Edward Said, the famous Palestinian
intellectual and scholar. While Najla’s father affirmed Arab culture and
Arab rights, his daughter was completely unsure of her identity or
history. Was she Christian, American, Arab, Lebanese, Palestinian, or
all of the above?
Her
humorous yet melancholy biography begins with her speaking about her
childhood, going to the elite Chapin School for girls, where she was the
only Arab. She recounts funny anecdotes about her classmates living on
New York’s Upper East Side, thinking her home in the Upper West Side was
dangerous or had tumbleweeds. Her struggle with her identity eventually
led her to become anorexic as a teen. A family trip to Palestine in
1992 was even more stressful when she witnessed how Palestinians really
live, especially in Gaza. Making things worse, that first and so far
only trip to Palestine came right after her father was diagnosed with
leukemia. Najla saw how Palestinians struggled and how her father
struggled, and so she wanted to ache and hurt as much as they did. On
the other hand, Najla tells of both traumatic experiences during the
civil war in Beirut, as well as fun, heart-warming memories with her
family in Lebanon. After brilliant studies at Princeton University,
Najla decided to pursue a career as an actress. She ended up meeting
fellow Arab-American actors and began her journey to self-acceptance.
Edward
Said’s death had a huge effect on his daughter. She went to Beirut the
summer after his death, and the one following, and finally came to terms
with her Arab identity. She spent amazing summers in Lebanon rebuilding
after the civil war, helping her recover and giving her peace and pride
in her origins.
This
book is important for Palestinian readers who want to learn about
Edward Said, the man and the father, and for readers in the diaspora,
because they can relate to the frustration Najla feels about the way
non-Arabs view Arabs and Arab society, with discrimination, ignorance,
or hostility. Local readers can relate to the feeling of having no real
country or homeland, given that theirs got taken away from them. The
title of the book may be misleading for some, however, because the book
is more about accepting oneself and coming to terms with one’s many
identities - especially the fact that Najla is more attached to Beirut,
where she has family, friends, and diverse memories, rather than to
Palestine.
Personally,
I could especially relate to Najla Said’s memoir as a Palestinian
teenage girl with multicultural educational experiences. I enjoyed the
informal tone of the book, which is written like a conversation, so that
no matter how serious or disturbing the topic at hand is, it is written
in a light and funny way. The
book is actually adapted from Najla’s one-woman show, which she has
performed throughout the United States. Hopefully, she will soon be
invited to perform in Palestine so that we can enjoy her show and so
that she can rediscover and connect with her father’s homeland.
PBS’ mission is to create content that educates, informs and
inspires. To do this, PBS offers programming that expands the minds of
children, documentaries that open up new worlds, non-commercialized news
programs that keep citizens informed on world events and cultures and
programs that expose America to the worlds of music, theater, dance and
art.
Late professor Edward Said (born in Jerusalem (then in the British Mandate of Palestine) on November 1, 1935) was one of the most significant public intellectuals of our time. (AFP photo)
"No
concept was more central to Said's thought than that of agency and
intentionality. In championing secularism as an ethical model for
intellectual activity, Said was emphasizing agency and the essential
question of intention and affiliation. Intellectuals must not be
detached "professionals," hiding behind academic method and
intellectual rigor to avoid responsibility and decline solidarity with
constituencies that shape the world in which we live." Hussein Ibish
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TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN
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ALGORITHMS (and
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