Mohammed El-Kurd
speaker
488 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2023
last heard 24 May
Mohammed El-Kurd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You know, I was born and raised in Jerusalem. I speak perfect Arabic. I think my Arabic writing is much superior to my English writing, but I choose to write in English because...
I think there's a disparity and there's a chasm between what is said in Arabic on the street in Palestine and what is said here about Palestinians, both by anti-Palestinian racists and people who are pro-Palestine and advocates for Palestine. And I believe I and a few others from my generations, or many others actually from my generation, are working to fill that chasm.
And I also believe that literature, culture, the public sphere, changing the public opinion, changing the narrative is important to affecting policy, to affecting change, affecting material change. I'm not going to go read a poem in front of a checkpoint and watch it catch in flames. I'm not that delusional about the power of words. But I do think that
I have a responsibility and I have a privilege even to have a voice, to have some kind of platform. And if I'm not defining myself, if I'm not talking and representing myself, then other people will define me. And their definitions of the Palestinian people across the few past decades have not been kind or generous to the Palestinian people. That's one thing.
The other thing is I believe in the United States as a front for change. I believe we have a lot more leverage here than we do back home. Again, I believe in... Someone said the other day, I can't remember their name, but someone said, no stone unturned. I believe in fighting on all fronts. But here, really, I can go protest in front of the Israeli embassy without getting shot.
There's a lot of work to be done here. There's a lot of people waking up. I would even argue that a reckoning is coming in the American public. More and more American people are concerned where their tax money is going, are concerned what their politicians are invested in. More and more American people are saying, not on our dime, are saying, not today, not here.
Also, there's many Palestinians in the diaspora here in the United States and Europe who benefit and could benefit from political education in the English language because the diaspora across history, the Palestinian diaspora has been effective in the 70s and the 80s. And I'm hoping ever since 2021, there has been a resurgence of the power and influence of the Palestinian diaspora.
I think everybody in the world should be able to vote for American elections, actually.
Yes, yes. I don't have a preference whatsoever. I don't. You know, I saw Cornel West on CNN. I don't think, you know, I don't know if he's going to go far with his campaign. Cornel West is running with the Green Party, and I don't think he's going to achieve much success, but I saw him on CNN berating Anderson Cooper, and I enjoyed that very much. Wouldn't mind seeing that on my screen.
Regularly, but don't really have an opinion about, you know,
I signed the book when I had a lot less visibility in the world. So when I didn't think thousands and thousands and thousands of people would be reading it, I decided to include many poems, which I wrote when I was young. Because it's a long journey, this book. It starts in Jerusalem, it goes to Atlanta, it goes back to Jerusalem, and then it ends in New York.
And Rifqa is the name of my grandmother. It's an Arabic name, a Hebrew name, and it means to accompany someone. And I wanted to write about displacement in a way that was beyond what we read about in English. Poetry as a medium, I don't know if I have much faith in it anymore, to be honest. Maybe I'm turned off by it, and I'll revisit it again in a few years.
But at the time of writing this book, Poetry as a Medium, it... really was a source of hope and inspiration for me. So my mother was a poet and she would, you know, her and my dad would play this game in the morning.
She would read her poems to him and he would guess which lines would be red penciled by the Israeli military censor because she would submit her poems to the local newspaper, al-Quds newspaper. And you know, the military censor has to go over it. And, you know, she would get her poems back with a bunch of words erased and they would laugh about it. Blah, blah, blah.
So poetry was very much part of my upbringing. And, you know, as a Palestinian, when you're excluded from mainstream spaces, including media and journalism, poetry tends to be a place where you can say what you want to say without repercussions. And I say that, I realize that our greatest... Writer Ghassan Kanafani literally had his car bombed, exploded because of his writings.
And, you know, recently Darin Tatur, a Palestinian poet with an Israeli citizenship, was imprisoned for a few months for publishing a poem on Facebook in which he said, resist my people, resist. So even that is not necessarily true. But anyway, it just felt like it's a place where I could talk and express large ideas in a simplistic way.
And the best example I could give you is one of my favorite poets, Rashid Hussain. When the Israeli authorities decided to do the land law, which classified, I believe, 93% of historic Palestine as Israeli-owned, state-owned, forgive me.
And then when they also did the absentee property law, which allows the Israeli government to take over homes that were depopulated from the Palestinian owners, he wrote a poem called God is a Refugee. It's a kind of a sarcastic, sardonic poem in which he goes, you know, God has become a refugee, sir.
So confiscate even the carpet of the mosque and sell the church because it's his property and sell our orphans because their father is absent and do whatever you want. It's a sarcastic poem that was in reaction to these laws.
that translated to the everyday Palestinian, to the farmers, to the landowners, what these bureaucratic, complicated laws meant to them, what they meant to their land, what it meant, what effect are these laws going to have on these people's lands? And that, I think, is the role of poetry that I try to achieve.
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