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
memoir is bizarre because, you know, I'm so young. So it's not really my memoir, but rather a memoir of the neighborhood which I grew up. The title, the tentative title is A Million States in One. And it's a nod to how many different realities and universes exist in this tiny one country. And it's, you know, it's kind of...
It's kind of a documentation of the two waves of expulsion in 2009 and 2020 and 2021. And the kind of behind the scenes of the campaign that took place, the diplomatic and media campaign and grassroots campaign that took place to save our homes. And it's also an exploration of other...
that are threatened with expulsion and other communities who are resisting in their own way, be it in Beita, in Nablus, or South Herbon Hills, in Masafaryatta, or in Silwan, or in the Naqab, all these communities that are dealing with different forms of expulsion. And, you know, the emphasis that I'm trying to achieve with this book is dignity. I want to write a book about, you know, my...
my experiences that is like super that is super dignified that kind of kicks its feet up on the table and says what it wants unabashedly because you know we are told not only are we going to be victimized but we are going to be polite in our suffering and i want to reject that completely and i want to lean into the humor of the past few years of my life because i think that's really what the world needs and what i need to be writing
I don't know if that's my mom's saying, but I don't know if it's probably a proverb that I first heard from my mom, but it's like, the most evil of atrocity is what makes you laugh. And it's open for interpretation.
One school of thought would say you should be wary of the things that make you laugh, but another school of thought would say this is a commentary on our natural reactions to tragedies, right? In 2012, 2011, something like this, we had a protest. And after the protest, all of the women of the neighborhood were sitting down under the fig tree of our neighborhood, which they always do.
And a bunch of soldiers, maybe 40 soldiers, started marching down the street and everybody dispersed and hid in their homes. But my aunt, who has now passed away, my aunt refused to go home. She wanted to gather her teacups because she really cared about her teacups. So I was begging her to go inside and she refused. She was gathering her teacups.
So a soldier grabbed me and squeezed me between his baton and an electricity pole. And it was very excruciatingly painful and traumatizing for me as a child. But it was... It's also a funny memory in a way, despite the pain, despite the trauma that came with it. There's still something funny about it. The absurdity of it. Yeah, and it's dignifying to find humor in these kinds of things.
It makes you realize you are not so weak, you are not so powerless. Another thing is, my same aunt, who was super obsessed with cleanliness, would... insists on not going to sleep before washing the dishes. And I would always tease her and say, what, you're just gonna give them the house clean? You can leave it dirty so they have to clean it up.
And these little things, although incredibly absurd and telling of a harrowing reality that our family and many in the neighborhood were living, are also the coping mechanisms that we were using to deal with our everyday reality. And so much in the public framing of Palestinians, be it in media and novels and diplomacy and so on and so forth,
is that of the powerless victim, is that of the person who only weeps. Israeli propagandists, for example, will show pictures on Twitter of a house in Gaza, and they'll be like, look, this house has windows. They're talking about their BCs, but they have a balcony on their house. What are they talking about?
Or they'll show a video of a supermarket in Gaza, and they'll be like, how come they're talking about a blockade when they have a supermarket, and blah, blah, blah. As though, you know, the ceiling has been so lowered that we can't even afford joy anymore. Or, you know, a little supermarket in the neighborhood.
It's a lot more neat than like this conversation. It's like I am obsessed with sentences and it takes me a long time to like finish a piece of writing. I'm a perfectionist.
I edit all the time and I like can't move on from one sentence until it's perfect. But I will say my other writer friends here in New York do not face is how easily disrupted my writing is by other news.
I'll pitch a story to my editor about something, for example, and then as I'm writing it, 20 minutes in, some kid was shot and killed by the Israeli military, so I have to say something about it, and then 30 minutes later, as I'm writing it, there's news about a home demolition in Silouan.
And there is this relentless onslaught of news that prevents us and deprives us of the ability to analyze, to frame, to think, to conceptualize, to write beyond the current affairs. We're stuck in the relentlessness of the occupation. that a lot of the time I worry that the things I'm writing are always in reaction to a crime that took place, to a bombing that took place and so on and so forth.
And I think that's unfortunately true for so many Palestinian writers. So, you know, I would say isolation and like stepping away from the news is very important to do, but I don't do it.
I mean, there is the timeless, you know, it's not even timelessness, it's timeliness. I think what you write is always timely because the occupation is ongoing. But the struggle is, you know, moving beyond the news and tackling more nuances and
Because in Arabic I can, in Arabic I can philosophize, I can talk about violence, and I can talk about my complicated relationship with violence, or like my complicated... I can complicate and nuance and give things nuance, but in English people still do not believe we are under occupation, even though it is an internationally recognized fact that is broadcasted 24-7 through the world's most watched screens.
So we're stuck in a practice of providing facts and figures, and actually this happened, and this person did this, and according to international law, and blah, blah, blah. So we're stuck in this because the basic truths about our own existence are denied. That we don't even have the luxury of evolving our writing beyond it, or at least evolving my writing beyond it.
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