Graphic by Antonio Mochmann
How do you make someone care about something? One might offer statistics of suffering.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 41,600 Palestinians have reportedly been killed, many of them women and children, and 96,600 injured in the year of war beginning on Oct. 7, 2023. Nine in ten people across the Gaza Strip, at least 1.9 million individuals, were displaced according to The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Yet the war continues, and these figures continue to rise.
Priscilla Wathington, a poet and humanitarian worker based in the San Francisco Bay Area, says that poetry counters harmful narratives and discourses aimed at Palestinians, especially in spaces where facts and data fail to garner empathy. While she doesn’t want to mythologize the capabilities of poetry, she says it pushes on people who are not receptive to facts that contradict their beliefs.
“You can give them table after table of data, and it’s not very convincing to a lot of people,” Wathington said. “The human encounter, the shaking of hands, or the looking into someone’s eyes — it means more.”
Wathington was born in the US, but raised in Jerusalem with a Palestinian mother and a white American father. She is currently studying for a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and has previously worked for Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP), Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the Arab American Action Network.
As managing editor for DCIP, where she worked for six years, Wathington sought to create change in children’s human rights in Palestine through the curation of writing and research, videography and photography, multimedia materials and UN petitions and meetings. While she has held many different roles, her focus on language connects her work for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to her poetry.
“[Both] are asking questions about what kinds of change are possible through language, through storytelling, through discourse, care, work and through consciousness,” Wathington explained. In her work as a poet, she says that the pressure for Palestinians to be silent is constant in the United States.
“I absolutely feel that pressure in every, every institution that I’m a part of whether it is stated, or whether it is communicated by people, sometimes in positions of power, whispering that they support me, but not publicly,” Wathington said.
The marginalization of Palestinian writers has created a hostile environment among American literary institutions. Many literary magazines and organizations, such as The 92nd Street Y (92NY), Poetry Foundation, Palette Poetry, Frontier Poetry, PEN America and Guernica Magazine, are facing scrutiny for their negative relationships with Palestinian writers and advocates or for their silence regarding Israel’s war in Gaza.
On Oct. 20, 2023, writer Viet Thanh Nguyen posted on Instagram that 92NY canceled a reading for his book, “A Man of Two Faces.” In a statement to Reuters, a spokesperson for 92NY clarified that the event was postponed, citing the author’s stance on Israel and the October 7 attack by Hamas. In a post uploaded the day after the event, Nguyen argued that “their language was ‘postponement,’ but no reason was given, no other date was offered, and I was never asked. So, in effect, cancellation.”
As a result, Nguyen, with the help of affected staff from the 92NY event, hosted an alternative gathering at McNally Jackson at Seaport, an independent bookstore in Manhattan, where he spoke openly about the crucial role of art in times of crisis.
“Art is silenced in times of war and division because some people only want to see the world as us vs. them,” Nguyen said in the post. “But art is one of the things that can keep our minds and hearts open, that can help us see beyond the hatred of war, that can make us understand that we cannot be divided into the human versus the inhuman because we are, all of us, inhuman and human at the same time.”
92NY is a cultural and community center that has connected people through culture, arts, entertainment and conversation for over 150 years. The center identifies itself as a proudly Jewish organization that has “harnessed the power of arts and ideas to enrich, enlighten and change lives, and the power of community to repair the world,” according to its website. 92NY did not respond to requests for comment regarding Nguyen’s experience.
Literary organizations have faced staff resignations, refusals to submit or publish work and open letters calling for institutional reform as a result of these kinds of strained relationships with writers in support of Palestine. The cancellation of Nguyen’s event sparked outcry amongst community members and participants of 92NY’s programming. Critics and writers — including Christian Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, Paisley Rekdal and Andrea Long Chu — canceled their participation in 92NY’s events. On Nov. 2, 2023, a group of writers crafted and signed an open letter to the 92nd Street Y that urged “the Y to recommit to its core values of intellectual pluralism and free speech before it does irreparable harm to its reputation and legacy.”
Sarah Ghazal Ali shared similar sentiments in her letter of resignation as the editor-in-chief of the online literary journal Palette Poetry. “As writers, our medium is language, and our work is in pursuit of clarity,” Ali said. “Silence in this case obfuscates, condones, and implicitly bolsters the project of settler colonialism. To choose silence and passivity is to choose a side, and it is the side of the oppressor.” Ali cited the company’s neutrality regarding the occupation of Palestine as her reason for resigning. Saba Keramati and Sarah Cavar — editors of Frontier Poetry, a related magazine — built off Ali’s statement in their resignations.
Over 2,000 poets and writers, including Ali and Keramati, have pledged to boycott the Poetry Foundation and its literary magazine, Poetry, for its silence. The publication was founded in 1912 and has become one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English language. On Nov. 3, 2023, an open letter penned by poets Noor Hindi, Summer Farah, Omar Sakr and George Abraham expressed disappointment with the board of the Poetry Foundation and the editors of Poetry for their recent instance of prejudiced silencing.
The authors cited an incident of censorship reflective of a larger institutional failure to uphold its commitment to diversity. “Joshua Gutterman Tranen’s review of Sam Sax’s collection ‘PIG,’ which engages with anti-Zionist politics — Joshua’s and Sam’s — was ‘shelved’ indefinitely by Poetry magazine on Oct. 8, 2023, because the magazine doesn’t want to be seen as ‘picking a side’ in the genocide unfolding in Gaza,” they said in the open letter.
On March 26, the Poetry Foundation published a statement responding to the letter after the boycott was lifted by organizers. It maintained that while it is not its role to make institutional statements about geopolitical crises, the Foundation can provide a platform for poets impacted by those crises. It also committed to re-evaluating its investment policy and improving transparency with the members of the poetry community. The authors of the letter lifting the boycott played a significant role in pushing the Foundation to interrogate and adjust its position through discussions with leadership. They also recognize that this issue is larger than one institution.
“All cultural and arts bodies must do away with the fantasy notion of neutrality in the midst of catastrophic violence,” the authors wrote. “Instead of protecting artists and championing free speech…too many organizations are choosing the side of silence, they are looking away, and in so doing [are] enacting a profound moral cowardice.”
PEN America — a constituent of PEN International which stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression — has also received criticism for its relationship with Palestinian writers and advocacy. On February 8, an open letter signed by over 600 writers, including Wathington, condemned the institution for its relative silence on the unfolding genocide in Gaza, its platforming of ceasefire opponent Mayim Bialik and its forcible removal of Randa Jarrar for protesting at a PEN Out Loud event. In another letter penned March 13, writers withdrew from the PEN World Voices Festival because of PEN America’s continued silence which contradicts their commitment to free speech and the struggle against repression.
In a letter to the PEN America Community published March 20, PEN America reaffirmed its organizational principles, specifically its commitment to offering a space for dialogue on divisive issues. The organization also defended its recognition of the war in Gaza and support of Palestinian writers. They invited the signatories of the open letter to meet with PEN America leadership, called for an immediate ceasefire in Palestine, planned to host a public event on literary and artistic responses to the war and expanded their financial support to Palestinian writers through a $100,000 contribution to the Netherlands-based PEN Emergency Fund for distribution to Palestinian writers.
Despite their letter, PEN America announced the cancellation of their 2024 awards and World Voices festival on April 26 because of the withdrawal of authors. The awards would have given $350,000 in literary prizes to writers and translators, and the festival — which was first announced in 2005 by Salman Rushdie to amplify essential dialogue — celebrates international literature and writers. The cancellation came after another open letter critiqued the language of PEN America’s statements and their slow and limited course of action, revealing their “complicity in normalizing genocide.”
“We do not believe that we have remained silent on the war. Over the past year, PEN America has issued more than 60 statements on the war and its repercussions for writers, journalists, and free expression, including on US campuses. We have clearly voiced our concerns for the impact of the war on writers, artists, and other cultural figures, and the destruction of cultural and educational institutions in Gaza,” Summer Lopez, chief program officer of Free Expression Programs at PEN America told The Press. “Our 2023 Freedom to Write Index — one of our organization’s signature publications, which includes a global count of writers in prison — included Israel among the top 10 list of countries that have jailed writers for their expression, with 14 new cases of Palestinian writers detained as part of the crackdown on free expression that followed the October 7 attacks.”
As a free expression organization, PEN America respects the rights of writers to act on their conscience and personal convictions, and they invite writers to engage with their work on Israel and Gaza. “We also remain committed to open discourse and to fostering dialogue among those who disagree on even the most contentious of issues, in accordance with the PEN Charter, which calls on us to ensure that literature remains ‘common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals,” Lopez said.
For writers seeking to uplift Palestinians in the media, submission and publication has become a difficult process because some institutions are hostile to speech critical of Israel. Editors and writers working within these literary institutions have revealed the faults in the literary scene across the country. Their work in critiquing these institutions often builds on Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS), a Palestinian-led movement inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement. BDS upholds that Israel maintains a regime of occupation over the Palestinian people through international support. Through boycotts of cultural and academic institutions, one of several facets of BDS’s strategy, the activism of writers and editors can be seen to dismantle the occupation and colonization of Arab lands.
Novelist Isabella Hammad connects her withdrawal from the PEN World Voices Festival to the silencing of student protesters across the country in an essay for The New York Review of Books. She wrote that PEN America “had failed to offer support to Palestinian writers and journalists at risk of being killed in Gaza and the West Bank…and it had condemned the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in clear violation of its own mandate to protect free speech.”
More than 3,100 people have been arrested or detained on US campuses for demanding accountability from their institutions, including that universities disclose their financial investments, divest from companies associated with war profiteering, and reinvest into Palestinian studies and scholarships for Palestinian students. Hammad’s essay draws a comparison between institutional responses to Palestinian artists and their responses to student protesters which both focus on free speech. She wrote, “This focus on the speech used to support Palestinian rights does more than obscure the context in which protesters are speaking; it also obscures the reality about which they speak.”
At Stony Brook University, 22 students, two faculty members and five others were arrested shortly after midnight May 2 for their involvement with the encampment on Staller Steps. During an earlier protest March 26 involving a sit-in demonstration at the Administration Building, seven students, one alumnus, and one community member were arrested for disrupting operations by assembling in a public building and refusing to disperse.
The next day, March 27, a student, Zubair confronted Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives and Operations Hedieh Yazdanseta, noting what he described as the hypocrisy of her support of the student’s protest organizing in lieu of her allowing for their arrest at a peaceful demonstration. “You know what she told us, ‘You don’t want to do this. Think about your future,’” he told staff and other protesters in the Administration Building, including Yazdanseta. “Think about the 13,000 dead Palestinian children. How dare you? You’re an adult, I am 19 years old; why am I the one standing here?”
Regarding the May arrests, SBU officials said that peaceful demonstration escalated to include intimidation and harassment, the erection of tents were in violation of the university’s stated policy and demonstrators rejected offers to meet with administrators to de-escalate growing tensions. Similarly, the students demonstrating March 26 were arrested after violating the Code of Student Responsibility and policies associated with the rules of public order.
“Protests and demonstrations cannot be allowed to disrupt the academic environment, create safety issues, or violate long-standing university guidelines regarding time, place and manner. When necessary we will take appropriate action to enforce these rules to ensure that all campus voices can be heard, not just the loudest or the most disruptive,” officials told The Press. “Occupying a public space like the Staller Steps that other members of the community have reserved and unfairly denying them the very thing they demand for themselves, the right to be heard, is unacceptable.”
Hammad wrote that when those in opposition to the rhetoric of protesters claim it endangers free speech they rarely address the material conditions and context of that speech. “The context here is a quantity of ammunition dropped on Gaza that is equivalent to more than three times that of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. A high proportion of those bombs were US-made and supplied. Those bombs were not made of language, and they certainly were not metaphors,” she wrote.
At a University Senate meeting May 6, former President Maurie McInnis claimed that while the university administration did not want to arrest demonstrators they felt it was necessary in order to clear the Staller Steps for use by other student groups.
During the University Senate meeting, Shobana Shankar, an associate professor of history, asked, “What evidence was there that the protest on Wednesday night would interfere with the Hillel event that wasn’t until the next morning?” McInnis responded that they wanted to choose a time when the clearing of steps would happen to allow for setup the following morning, and that there would have been criticism of any time they chose.
In June, prosecutors and attorneys offered adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, meaning those individuals can agree that in six months all charges will be dropped as long as they are not arrested in the interim. Still, the university administration’s precarious language surrounding protesters and demonstrations mark a continuation of the concerns articulated by Hammad and others.
On August 14, Interim President Richard McCormick sent an email to the Stony Brook community with guidelines for keeping the campus safe during demonstrations. He emphasized that the university will enforce rules in a way that is viewpoint neutral. He also highlighted a section of their guide for demonstrations which says “open expression is an essential part of how the university fulfills its role in society, but it does not extend to events and activities that impede university functions and operations.” His statement marks a continuation in the administration’s view that students may only protest in ways that are non-disruptive, a view that clashes with both the core values of the BDS movement and the history of student activism in the US.
Just like the reminders of disciplinary action issued to students for protesting, writers face professional pressure for their activism. Poet and memoirist Javier Zamora, while resolute in the duty of writers to oppose violent and dehumanizing language used against Palestinians, recognizes the precarity of voicing support. “People’s jobs [are] at stake for merely saying that they disagree with genocide,” he said.
Zamora explained he is strangely privileged in his activism. Because of the success of his book, he does not rely on affiliation with a university. His critiques of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza are not undercut by any institutional ties to Zionist companies. Still, he says this shouldn’t hold people back from voicing support for Palestinians.
He condemned literary institutions’ silence on the violence in Palestine. “I think we’re seeing the hypocrisy of a lot of these organizations,” Zamora said. “As a writer from a marginalized community, I could tell you that I’ve always felt the hypocrisy of institutions.”
As a poet who has been published in several literary journals, Wathington shares this recognition of some institutions’ failure to uplift marginalized communities. In her experience, there were so few places that published Palestinian work in the past that she would publish with any organization that took her work. With her experience and growth as a writer, she has come to ask more complex questions about institutions’ past commitments and publication values, and she is working on ways to avoid tokenization in literary spaces.
“Because Palestinian voices are being allowed into many spaces, [we now] have to consider: is there a certain kind of Palestinian voice that’s being allowed in, a certain kind of poem?”
Wathington emphasized the plurality and diversity of Palestinian voices. “There is a very big difference between my experience here in the Bay Area and Mosab Abu Toha’s experience of fleeing Gaza,” she said. “It’s really important that we don’t sort of glaze over that, or talk for or instead of other people.”
Despite her weariness of institutional attitudes toward Palestinian work, she also remains hopeful. “I think we’re in a moment where it’s starting to change,” she said. “I am seeing people speaking out much more readily, much more comfortably on Palestinian rights.” As an intern working as part of the Students of Color/LGBTQ+ community group at Warren Wilson, Wathington says she feels “a beautiful turning of the tide.” She is building the kind of diverse, inclusive space she wants to see and be a part of.
The tides are beginning to turn at SBU, too. On September 19, “Voices from Gaza and the West Bank: Healthcare in Crisis” brought together faculty, students, and community members for a discussion of medical issues posed by the war in Gaza. The event was a collaboration between more than 15 community non-profit organizations, multiple departments and centers at Stony Brook, including the Asian American Institute of Research, the Center for Changing Systems of Power and the departments of Africana Studies, Sociology, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
The event featured three speakers presenting their professional experiences and a medical evacuee who shared her experience leaving Gaza for treatment. This included Dr. Syed Sayeed, a plastic surgeon who presented his volunteer work in Gaza through MedGlobal and the absence of medical care to people in Gaza, especially children whose medical evacuations have been blocked by Israeli policies. Tom Lewendon, a Berlin based photographer, also shared his work capturing the children of Gaza from his recent trip. Additionally, Steve Sosebee, co-founder of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, explained how HEAL Palestine, a non-profit organization he founded in January helped coordinate medical evacuations to address humanitarian needs in Gaza.
Sara Bsaiso, an 18-year-old girl born and raised in the Rimal neighborhood in Gaza, was the last to speak at the event. “My life before the war was normal. I had just started my last year of school and was thinking about what I wanted in the future,” she said. She went on to describe the deaths of her two brothers, her own burn injuries and her long struggle to receive proper medical treatment.
Bsaiso described being at home with her family when “suddenly everything went black.” She couldn’t walk because her feet were burning, and her 15-year-old brother Ahmed was killed immediately. Her father took her out of the fire, but five days later her 8-year-old brother Mohammed also died. Bsaiso was there for 90 days without proper medical support for her severe burns before being moved to an out-of-service hospital.
Bsaiso then traveled with her sister Seham from Rimal in Gaza City to the south. She called it “a journey of death” because the Israel Defense Forces were in the areas surrounding them. She and her sister stayed at the crossing border for 17 days before being moved to the US on February 6. She was in the intensive care burn unit for three months and is currently doing traditional therapy three times a week. She told her story to a nearly full auditorium, nearly everyone rising to their feet in applause when she was done, some in tears.
Manisha Desai, director of the Center for Changing Systems of Power, explained that events like this “engage knowledge outside the academy to be in dialogue with knowledge in the academy so that we can have a more reciprocal, mutual understanding.” This is in line with the Center’s mission to further epistemic, aesthetic, and social justice locally and globally. By bringing in voices that aren’t normally heard, the Center seeks to advance how the university approaches education, research, and policy.
Abena Asare, an associate professor of Africana studies and history involved in hosting the event who was one of the May arrestees at SBU, said that they faced institutional challenges in the run-up to their evening panel. This included the removal of A-frame easels and posters set up in the Health Science Center Atrium and a series of meetings with administrators who scrutinized the event. They also received comments that suggested they may be unable to use the MART Auditorium which undermined their capacity to host the event safely for all attending members, Asare said.
SBU denied these claims: “This symposium was subjected to the same standards as any other event held on campus. Throughout the planning process, we were in communication with the organizers to manage logistics and address potential safety concerns in the days leading up to the event. Publicity and use of the MART, which is a shared clinical area, were permitted once clarifications regarding sponsors, food use, and attendance were explained,” officials told The Press.
That the event ran at all marks a shift in the campus environment. Desai, a sociologist who focuses on social movements, says “change seldom happens at the individual level, which doesn’t mean that individuals who are particularly gifted as artists and musicians may not have an impact, but they can’t really change institutions. For institutions to change, you really need collective action over a sustained period of time.”
“Things also depend not just on the actors and the collective actors but also the institutional context in which they work,” she said. She described how administrative actions are shaped both by the local context, like being within Stony Brook, and also the larger context in which it’s happening, for example the nationwide college protests and the various responses across different types of academic institutions.
According to Desai, the confluence of collective actors in sustained action and local and larger contexts must align before change can occur. Discursive changes, for example how administrators talk about a subject like protesting, may shift quickly, but institutional practices are more entrenched. “When we think about transformation, it’s always a long term process,” she said.
Wathington’s poetry offers a unique perspective on both the experience of Palestinian life and the distant administrative perceptions of it. Her chapbook, Paper & Stick, explores how official documents like laws, archival texts and military orders obscure the lives of Palestinians, especially children. While she had a positive experience publishing with Tram Editions, her work charts the complex relationship between Palestinians and literary, academic and governmental institutions.
Her poem “Grant Proposal for Your Emergency” considers how international institutions must contend with global power structures and how individuals push against those domineering dynamics. “People in a lot of countries are stuck in these positions of asking the West to fund their life, as the West makes a sort of military playground or proxy war situation out of their homeland, and they are then in a position of asking for money, for work, for opportunities.”
For Wathington, “poetry is a way to start asking questions about how we know what we know.” In refusing to platform Palestinian writers and advocates, many American literary institutions are failing to counter the dehumanizing rhetoric that justifies and hides violence and occupation. Instead, they recirculate language that perpetuates complicity.
“Poetry feels really urgent to me, because it feels like a way out of those closed circuits,” Wathington said.
In many ways, the failure of institutions to respond to the atrocities in Gaza is not merely a failure of rhetoric. The speech of those who stand with Palestine—in poems, statements, and demonstrations—has been consistently overlooked. Yet the persistent efforts of writers and organizers are pushing institutions to reconcile them. Statistics, stories, and demonstrations alone can’t transform an institution overnight, but together, in solidarity and community, they chart a path toward change.
Correction: Priscilla Washington was not born in Jerusalem, but in the US. She was raised in Jerusalem. This article has been corrected to reflect this.
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