Volume 3, No. 44: My Liberation is Bound Up With Yours

Greetings, book and treat people. It’s hard to come up with words right now. I’m haunted by numbers that are not numbers. Yesterday I took a walk on my beloved ridge, watched the orange sun slide into the dusky blue hills, my dog bounding through the brown grass, the wind, the cut of it, the scent of winter blowing in, the most sacred time of year, the beginning of the season of light. I walked and walked, thinking about the numbers that are not numbers. Israeli airstrikes have killed 10,000 Palestinians in the last weeks. I am stuck on the numbers stitched into just one death. The worlds. It is unfathomable.

You know the prayer I’ve been praying every morning for a while now, right? The call your reps prayer.

This week activists in St. Louis blocked the entrances to a Boeing facility that manufactures bombs for Israel. Activists in Washington blocked a weapons ship heading to Israel from leaving the Port of Tacoma, delaying its departure. This was after activists in Oakland delayed the same ship from leaving the port for many hours. I am inspired by the steadfastness and urgency of these actions.

It is in this spirit of steadfastness and urgency and ongoing struggle that I bring you today’s books. Instead of the usual three (or the more recent one), I have six mini reviews for you: a coming-into-self novel about a queer Palestinian Canadian woman visiting her father in 1980s Cairo; a brilliant work of nonfiction about disability justice; an anthology of essays by queer Arabs; a wild, anticapitalist speculative romp; a memoir-in-conversations by a Black trans revolutionary elder; and a picture book by a local-to-me Palestinian American author. On the surface, these books don’t have much in common, but when you look a little closer, it’s easy to see the threads that tie them to each other—and all of us to each other. All systems of oppression, across the world, are connected. All freedom movements, across the world, are connected. Our liberation is bound together. Our liberation is bound together. It takes slow, hard work to truly embody and understand this truth. It takes the work of a lifetime. I am still learning it. Every day.

The Books

The Philistine by Leila Marshy (Fiction, 2018)

This is a beautiful queer coming-into-self book set in Cairo in the 1980s. Nadia is a Palestinian Canadian twenty-something living in Montreal with her white boyfriend, working a meh job. Her father left for Cairo almost ten years ago, and though he promised to come back, she hasn’t seen him since. Frustrated, she books a trip to Egypt to visit him.

She only intends to stay in Cairo for a week, but soon after she arrives she meets Manal, an Egyptian artist working at a small gallery. The two of them become friends and then fall into a kind of easy, nourishing love. Nadia cancels her return ticket and spends the next several months getting to know the city with Manal. At first her father avoids her entirely, but as Nadia gets more comfortable with herself and her new surroundings, she demands that he spend time with her. Their reconnection is poignant and messy. She arrives looking for the father she remembers from her childhood, and finds instead a complicated, flawed man with his own life—and family.

I loved almost everything about this book. It’s very quiet, and there isn’t a lot of plot. Manal guides Nadia around Cairo, and the city comes alive—another complicated, messy character. Their romance is built of conversations, small shared moments, and, most of all—space. For maybe the first time in her life, Nadia has the space to simply be who she is—Palestinian and queer. "I have spent my whole life wanting part of myself, then pushing it away, then wanting it, then pushing it away,” she tells Manal at one point.

Marshy writes brilliantly about context and setting and how much it matters. Cairo certainly isn’t perfect, and though Nadia falls in love with the city, too, she also sees and experiences its oppression, strife, and poverty. But she meets Palestinians everywhere, and they speak about Palestine openly, with passion and longing. All the secrets and whispers of her childhood in Canada become a pulsing, urgent reality in Cairo. She hears Arabic everywhere, and she’s slowly able to find her way back to the language of her childhood. All of this helps her see her father differently. Seeing him as a whole person with memories and traumas and desires leads her to her own wholeness. It’s a beautiful, understated novel about the power of so many different kinds of connection—familial, cultural, romantic. It’s about the tangled threads that connect Nadia to her ancestral homeland, a new city, a language.

I can’t stop thinking about this one line from the beginning of the book, in which Nadia is describing her childhood with her white mom and Palestinian dad: “Palestine was a ghost and her father did not want to be haunted.” I’ve been thinking about what it means to shed a haunting, to refuse to become a ghost. Maybe this is what lies at the heart of this book: the work it takes to face the things that haunt you, even when they are out of your control, to follow the haunting wherever it takes you, to honor it instead of running from it—to choose to live vibrant and loud instead of living haunted, even when that choice is hard, and painful, and explodes your life.

The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Nonfiction, 2022)

I read this a few months ago, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. One of its central tenants is that liberation takes many forms, and is rooted in relationship. This has been on my mind as I think about what I can do in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Another of its tenants is the crucial role that imagining new worlds plays in justice movements. This, too, has been on my mind.

This book is a retangling, a brilliant and beautiful book of disabled wisdom. It made me think about so many things in complicated and often uncomfortable ways: grief, friendship, different kinds of communities, mutual aid, interdependence, art, home, joy. Part of what makes Piepzna-Samarasinha's work so powerful is their worldview: disability is at the center of everything they write and do and feel. Disability justice isn't just a movement for creative and beautiful access, it's not just a framework for liberation, it's not only a set of principles for building a better world. Disability justice is in the way they cook, the way they process emotion, the way they connect, the way they make art, grieve, experience pleasure, talk, laugh, move, travel, love, visit with friends, read, think.

This centering of disability is so rare in non-disabled spaces. It's not the way I move through the world. In the introduction, Piepzna-Samarasinha writes: "This is, like everything I do, a love letter to other QTBIPOC. Others can listen in, but you are not my primary audience—disabled BIPOC are." I could feel the truth of these words throughout the book, the not-for-me-ness of the whole thing.

It’s worth thinking deeply about this idea of books being written for some people and not others. When someone puts a book into the world, it leaves their sphere of control; it belongs, in some sense, to whoever picks it up. Piepzna-Samarasinha is an accomplished author. They know that white non-disabled people are going to read this book. To assume otherwise is patronizing.

There’s this danger, a kind of trap, something I’ve noticed in myself and that I work actively to avoid, and it’s treating the “this book wasn’t written for me” framework as an invitation to disengage. When a book isn’t written with me in mind (and there are many, as there should be), it can be easy to use that as an excuse not to grapple, not to let myself be moved and challenged and made uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable is the place where growth happens.

A book that is not written for you can still be for you. I read this book from far outside the center. I hope that all my fellow white, non-disabled people read it too. I hope that we can all “listen in”, as Piepzna-Samarasinha invites us to, with humble gratitude, openness, curiosity, and a willingness to grow.

This Arab is Queer edited by Elias Jahshan (Essay Anthology, 2022)

This is a wonderful anthology of essays by queer Arab writers, edited by Elias Jahshan, a Palestinian Australian writer and journalist. There were one or two essays that didn’t work for me, many I liked a lot, and a few I loved. No anthology like this will ever represent all geographies and identities (nor should it try to), but I did appreciate the range. There are writers from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and more, some in diaspora and some writing from their homelands, and many with mixed heritage. A few standouts:

• Mona Eltahawy on being queer and poly and coming out and into herself in middle age. “Like nesting dolls — where one doll opens to reveal an identical doll fitting inside it, and so on — every time I spoke a secret I found a more intense version of myself which in turn demanded I say more of what I could not say, and so on, until I got to the core of my silence.”

• Zeyn Joukhadar on opera and transness.

• Saleem Haddad on visiting Beirut and living between places. “There is an impossibility in this process of putting things back together: it does not involve a simple return, but a complete reconstruction.”

• Amrou Al-Kadhi on drag, performance, Islam, familial expectations, and what it means to claim an identity.

• Danny Ramadan on the traps of representation for authors from marginalized communities. “My characters will never fit the white-gaze version of what a Syrian refugee would ever be like; they are written to perform truthfully as their authentic selves.”

• Anbara Salam on writing from life and not from life, shame and silence, and the pain of conversations spoken and unspoken.

• Omar Sakr’s beautiful collection of wisdom, humor, meditations, odes, and longing songs in ‘Tweets to a Queer Arab Poet’. “You will have heard by now a burgeoning call for joy, a weariness of ‘trauma’, which increasingly seems to mean ‘anything too hard for a middle-class upbringing to bear’. Too many people say joy and mean easy. Sometimes instead of hard they say heavy, without ever wondering if their weakness, rather than an imagined weight, is to blame.”

Many of these essays are concerned with themes of multiplicity and wholeness. The whole book rejects simple binaries and invites in complexity instead, especially with regard to place, Arab cultures, migration, liberation movements, and family relationships. I loved reading nonfiction from authors whose novels I’ve loved, as well as encountering lots of new writers. This is an essential read.

Lambda Literary recently put together a fantastic resource, ‘Queer as in Free Palestine’, a collection of articles, documentaries, books, and other media by LGBTQIA+ Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish writers. You can learn more about several of the writers in this anthology there. There’s also information about queer Palestinian resistance, and the absolute garbage that is pinkwashing. I highly recommend checking it out.

Sterling Karat Gold by Isabel Waidner (Speculative Fiction, 2023)

What a weird and glorious book. It is full of queer performance art, time-travel, spaceships, strange talking animals, prophetic dreams, nonsensical bullfighting, a deeply broken criminal justice system, punishment as theatre.

Sterling is a trans artist who is attacked one morning in their London neighborhood. What follows makes little logical sense: they are unfairly arrested and proceed to put on their own trial, with the help of their friends. The trial is a party, a show, a caper—and it’s also a smart and searing indictment of capitalism, fascism, white supremacy, and all their interlocking injustices.

At one point Sterling’s best friend says, “correcting falsified narratives is important; but conjuring counter-realities even more so.” This sentence shook me right down to my core. I have been sitting with it for months.

This book is a counter-reality, a magical conjuring of expansive futures. It’s not logical, it’s not linear, it’s not ordered. It’s a wildly fun and spacious queer universe. It’s about queer and trans abundance. It’s about the world-expanding possibilities of queer friendship. It’s about mundane transformations—the perfect outfit, great set design, a beautiful football game—and the sacredness of those small, beautiful moments, especially in a world intent on policing and destroying queer and trans joy. It’s trans fashion as high art. It’s hilarity as healing. It’s looking into someone else’s eyes and seeing yourself, and them, and all the places you tangle. It’s about going all in for your people, whatever it takes. It’s a high-pitched, full-throated, lights-flashing anticapitalist screed.

I don’t know how to describe it, but it filled me up. There is so much delicious vengeance and quite a bit of tenderness, and these two feelings braided together sum up how I feel most days: incandescent with rage, grief-sick, overflowing with sweet love for my queer fam.

Miss Major Speaks by Toshio Meronek and Miss Major (Memoir, 2023)

This is another book I read earlier this year that I’ve been thinking about a lot these past few weeks. A lot of people are becoming radicalized by this moment. This is a book about how to turn a moment of radicalization into a radical life. It’s about how to sustain and transform rage and grief into lifelong power. It’s a fierce and beautiful book of Black trans wisdom.

Miss Major shares her thoughts, feelings, experiences, lessons learned, delights, annoyances, and hopes with crackling honesty. She absolutely skewers white gay assimilationists. She gives no fucks about mainstream values and nonprofit bullshit. She has no patience for the corporate gay rights movement. She explains with deadly clarity where every last cop can go. She calmly destroys narrow binaries and ideas about gender with sparkling humor and much delight. Her abolition is rooted in a deep knowledge of the systems built to kill Black trans folks, and a deep love for her gurls, her people, and herself. “You’re never done,” she says, and repeats, in a thousand ways, throughout the book. Again and again she asserts that the only way through is in how we take care of each other.

What struck me the most, though, is the book’s format. It’s a compilation of conversations between Miss Major and her friend and co-author, Toshio Meronek. I can’t stop thinking about what this structure allows that a more conventional memoir would not. Meronek asks questions, of course, but Miss Major also interrupts, goes off on tangents, teases, makes jokes. Speaking with someone is different from writing words on a page. There’s a beautiful flow and ease in a conversation, a different kind of intimacy. Writing this book as a conversation highlights the center of Miss Major’s life: people. It’s also a way to honor her while she’s still here, a way to celebrate a living elder. She speaks, and at the same time, Meronek listens. As readers, we hear both the speaking and the listening. I found this so poignant and moving.

Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine by Hannah Moushabeck, illustrated by Reem Madooh (Children’s Fiction, 2023)

Hannah Moushabeck is a local-to-me Western Mass Palestinian American author who’s been doing amazing activist and advocacy work. She is also part of the Books for Palestine team. They are currently running an auction in support of several Palestinian organizations with some truly incredible items to bid on. I picked up this picture book on a whim because I wanted to support her work, and I was reminded how powerful books like this can be.

In this beautiful story, three sisters listen to their dad’s bedtime stories about their homeland, Palestine, where they have never been. He tells them about visiting with his sido and teta as a child, and about the sights and sounds and scents and tastes of Jerusalem, where their family lived before the Nakba. The story is so warm. The illustrations are vibrant and joyful, full of the thrum of everyday life: the bustling family-run cafe, street vendors with big baskets of bread, greetings exchanged in many languages, a garden full of pigeons.

Most moving to me is the last page, which shows the family cooking and talking in their kitchen in America, the table overflowing with many of the same things from their father’s stories of Jerusalem: olives, cucumbers, pink radishes, ka’ek.

It reminded me of a scene at the end of Salt Houses by Hala Alyan, where a new mother, two generations removed from her homeland, sings an old Palestinian lullaby to her child. Stories, cultures, traditions, knowledge—it all lives on through people and what they carry with them out of disaster. It shouldn’t have to be this way. It should not be this way. It is devastating that it is this way—and it is also so beautiful, so joyful, the carrying, the continuing, the offering.

The Beyond

Celebrating the End of Daylight Savings Time with Food

The end of daylight savings time is a personal holiday for me. I love the early sunsets with my whole being. I love the way the evenings stretch and lengthen. I love what the darkness offers. I love the way it illuminates. I come alive. It’s my favorite time of year to cook.

I made a warming and delicious pot of soup over the weekend—a variation of Italian wedding soup. First I poached some chicken thighs and made a fragrant broth. I mixed up some quick meatballs (pork, garlic, shallot, breadcrumbs, egg, parsley, salt and pepper, Parmesan) and browned them. I sautéed onions and garlic and carrots in lots of butter. I added the meatballs, shredded chicken, orzo, and all the broth to the pot and let it bubble away. I finished it with a big handful of spinach and tons of grated Parmesan. I’ve been eating it for a few days now and it’s divine.

I also made a variation of this buttered walnut cake. I switched out the walnuts for pecans and added chocolate. It’s perfect.

Recent Audiobooks

The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi, read by Fajer Al-Kaisi: This is a brilliant and comprehensive history of Palestine from 1917-2017. I learned a ton, and I won’t summarize it here. I highly encourage everyone to read it. There’s so much rigorous historical analysis about how Israel’s settler colonial project came to be, (thanks to the UK and the US), 19th century Zionism and its stated violent colonial aims, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people (and outright denial of their existence) that has been going on for over a century. It’s chilling, enraging, and thorough.

One thing that stood out to me is Khalid's commitment to complicated historical realities. He examines interlocking systems of oppression, webs of power, the fraught entanglements of various political ideologies (both Israeli and Palestinian) throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—and much more. It is, in fact, very complicated. Most of human history is complicated. Khalid delves into all of these intricacies, and in doing so, lays bare the ongoing crimes of the Israeli state—an unjust, oppressive, destructive regime that murders and murders and murders.

The horrifying systems that keep colonial regimes in power are complicated. Liberation movements are often complicated. Khalid's dedication to Palestinian liberation is unwavering. Complexity is a tool he wields in service of liberation—with grace, accuracy, and passion. Complexity is not the enemy of freedom movements or fierce moral clarity and conviction. Don’t get it twisted.

(Though, to be clear, the relentless bombing of thousands of civilians is not a situation that requires anything beyond the absolute most basic why is this even a conversation moral clarity.)

Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh, read by Fajer Al-Kaisi: I just started this and it’s amazing so far.

Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott, read by January LaVoy: I can’t concentrate on hefty nonfiction in the evenings, and since I like to listen to books while I’m cooking dinner, I’ve been switching it up with this contemporary fantasy that draws on Jewish and Eastern European folklore. I already had it on hold on Libby, but this post from the author is what inspired me to actually start listening.

Further Reading

Over the weekend, I spent a few hours reading. I haven’t been able to read for more than a few minutes at a time in weeks, so it felt good. I got into Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Y. Davis. My current poetry collection is The Tiny Journalist by Naomi Shihab Nye. I’m (slowly) reading Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa.

My library holds of Fire from the Sky by Moa Backe Åstot, translated by Eva Apelqvist (queer YA by a Sami author) and Blackouts by Justin Torres (queer fiction/history) just came in, so I’m hoping to get to those soon. Our liberation is connected.

The Bookshelf

Around the Internet

On Book Riot, I wrote about the joys of reading an author’s catalog in publication order. I also made a list of some of the new and upcoming cookbooks I’m most excited about this fall.

A Taste of the Commonplace

This week I searched through my commonplace book for passages tagged with ‘winter’. This paragprah from The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag, translated by Katharina Rout, is a beautiful description of why I love the end of daylight savings time, and 4:30 sunsets, so much. 4:40 sunsets forever. Or at least for 3 months. I also highly recommend the book, a coming-of-age story about a Tuvan boy living in the Altai Mountains in northern Mongolia.

Most beautiful were the winter evenings. The stove would drone or hum, and the sound would travel and make the kettle resonate while the meat bubbled inside, and the smell would flow from the kettle and would, moment by moment, grow dense until it seemed to send out its tendrils and blend and become one with everything we could see in the flickering light. In these moments I believed I could sense life itself. The sensation was as corporeal and palpable as if I stood in a river and felt the prickling, cooling water on my skin.

Queer Your Year

Thanks to everyone who participated in the October raffle, and congrats to Sophie, who won!

Because I take a break from the newsletter at the end of every year, I’ll be doing a combined November/December raffle in early December. There won’t be any winning prompts this time. Anyone who’s completed at least one prompt can enter! The prize: a $20 gift card to a queer-owned bookstore of your choice! You can select any queer-owned bookstore, in any country, as long as they offer gift cards that can be delivered via email. Open internationally.

• 1 prompt completed = 1 entry

• 12 prompts completed (1 per month) = 4 entries

• All prompts completed (wow!) = 8 entries

I’ve had a blast reading queer books with all of you this year and I will definitely be hosting Queer Your Year again in 2024, with a few changes. More information to come in December. In the meantime, if you have questions, ideas, or other thoughts you’d like to share about the challenge, please reach out!

And Beauty

First, some words I’ve been sitting with this past week:

• Ijeoma Oluo on how to keep going.

• Callum Angus on natural history museums in Palestine and Israel (this is a great read).

• An interview with Rashid Khalidi (author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine).

• This is a gutting read.

• A beautiful (heartbreaking) poem.

• I already mentioned it, but the Books for Palestine auction is live. There are so many amazing items.

As always, a little bit of beauty to send you on your way: The first snow of the season came on November 1st. It lasted a whole day. I love winter so much, so much, so much. I don’t have words for the way it makes me feel, the bone-deep joy, how my body come alive. Nessa and I took a snowy sunset walk and a snowy morning walk the next day. Winter forever and ever amen.

A note on what this newsletter will look like through the end of the year: In January, I started sending out longer essays and other reading reflections to paying subscribers only every other week. I haven’t sent out one of those issues since the end of September. It just hasn’t felt right to put anything behind a paywall. The support I get from paying subscribers means the world to me (truly) and I couldn’t do what I do without it. I’m also in the midst of reevaluating what I want the newsletter to look like in 2024, and that includes rethinking what kind of paid content I create. Until then, everything will be free. If you’d like to pay for a subscription anyway, you can do so here. Catch you next week, bookish friends!