Fady Joudah

And yeah, I think for us writers, these works come to you

And you know them when they come knocking.

And it was, I mean, just, yeah, it had to be done.

Yeah.

It had to be done.

I mean, you know, not to be humorous, but, you know, we wouldn't be in this room without it, at least for most of us.

So it is quite... Again, I go back to what I said earlier.

It's quite a normal function to encounter love.

A normal function.

And... But it also goes back to what I said earlier, that, you know...

This isn't a way in English, I think, where a Palestinian or an Arab is really... I mean, it's one of the things that I recognize.

I don't think that English knows how to receive an Arab or a Palestinian speaking about love.

I don't think that English has even thought that that's not what it's capable of or has resisted.

I don't think this is an exceptional experience for the Palestinian or the Arab in English.

But, you know, so I think that's why, as I say in the opening poem, these things for me are not hard to see.

And so you just work on them because they're there and there is like this kind of,

and things are slotted.

So I begin to think of how do I speak about love

as an ordinary thing, as an ordinary desire for us, even though it's not easy to wrap our being around love often in the way that we hope or aspire to.

But how do I speak of it in the midst of speaking of all the other things?