Writing the Palestinian Diaspora

This year saw the release of two memoirs concerned with the Palestinian diasporic experience. Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction is a story of queer adolescent unrequited love, braided together with a family history of displacement from Haifa to Beirut to Amman. Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is a story of surviving anorexia and the ways that the body holds the intergenerational grief of the ongoing Nakba. In this episode of On the Nose, Jewish Currents editor-in-chief Arielle Angel speaks with Baconi and Aziza about what it means to claim Palestinianness as a political identity, not just a familial one, and the radical necessity of turning silence—around queerness, Gaza, the Nakba—into speech.

Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).”

Books Mentioned and Further Reading

The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza

Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi

Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi

“Al-Atlal, Now: On Language and Silence in Gaza’s Wake,” Sarah Aziza, Literary Hub

“The Work of the Witness,” Sarah Aziza, Jewish Currents

“The Trap of Palestinian Participation,” Tareq Baconi, Jewish Currents

Black Atlantic by Paul Gilroy

“Selling the Holocaust,” Arielle Angel, Menachem Kaiser, and Maia Ipp, Jewish Currents

Transcript forthcoming.