Fady Joudah

I think in English, some people for sure would read these things as some kind of a propaganda motion in the poem.

But the truth is, you know, like recently I've been revisiting an uncollected Darwish poem called Passersby and Passing Words.

And the whole idea of the poem is...

if you cannot accept that we are here to remain, then just take whatever you want, but leave.

I think Palestinians are just

tired of the violence imposed on them.

And I don't think that, you know, you get these comments from a lot of thinkers and philosophers and historians and pundits and whatnot about some kind of mutual vengeance taking place.

But usually history proves in many cases, of course not all cases, that often the oppressors just like the oppressor to get the hell off their back.

That's all.

I had a file of a few poems because I started actually after Tethered to Stars or actually after Footnotes, started writing in Arabic.

I wanted to see what happens if I sort of like doing a brain scramble, you know, that I would scramble my brain and see what happens to language.

Maybe return to some kind of a...

code that connects all languages instead of getting too caught up in the American specific, if I even was good at that.

And so I had some poems in a file.

Then, of course,

october 7 happens and the genocide begins and um in a matter of six weeks i um i wrote uh the book uh and uh included some of the previous poems and you know composed it um that's really it in a nutshell i had been thinking prior to that that um uh you know um

that we've reached a point in civilization, I am first, not the first to discover this.

We have Walter Benjamin, for example, who never published a book and has all this incredible writing and it's, even in its sort of sequential manner or fragments that still make perfect sense, you know, you follow them.

But he never published a book and just, you know, so I was always wondering as a poet, you know,

How did it come to this idea of the poetry collection having to be theme focused and having to have a title and each poem having to have a title?