VOICES FOR GAZA was a tremendously moving event that brought together Palestinian writers and activists and their allies to speak about Gaza, Palestine, and genocide. Before an audience of many hundreds, the speakers demonstrated one of the most important values that can sustain us in a time of seemingly unending mourning, resistance, and struggle: solidarity. This is part 1 of 2 parts of the full event.
VOICES FOR GAZA was made possible by the producers Raad Rahman (@siameseorchid) and Michiko Clark (@michikoclark), as well as Sarah McNally (@sarahcmcnally) and McNally Jackson Books (@mcnallyjackson), and took place at The Town Hall (@townhallnyc) in New York City on Sept. 21, 2025, hosted by Aasif Mandvi (@aasif) and with conversations moderated by John Freeman (@atreediary).
Transcript
Speaker 1:
Voices For Gaza. Tonight’s event is a benefit in support of INARA, the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance, and its work with children in Gaza. Palestinian authors and their allies will take the stage tonight to share their stories and their work. We ask that in this shared, intimate space, you show respect to the artists and speakers and refrain from speaking or making any extraneous sounds during this program. Please take a moment to silence your phones. Flash photography is strictly prohibited. Please limit video as this event is being photographed, recorded, and live-streamed. You will have the opportunity to access this media after tonight. Without further ado, please welcome actor, writer, producer, and former daily show correspondent, Aasif Mandvi.
Aasif Mandvi:
Thank you very much. Good evening, everyone. And welcome. My name is Aasif Mandvi and I’m honored to be your host for this evening. Thank you. I’ll be honest, when they asked me to do this, I said, “What is the evening going to consist of?” And they said, “It’ll focus on how the devastation of Gaza has had an impact on the people there and also children.” And so, I said, “Well, what do you want me to do?” And they said, “Keep it light.” So, that’s what I’m here to do. I am an actor, writer, and as many of you may know and the voice of God said earlier, you might know me from my years of work on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I’m proud to say that we were the original fake news back when that phrase meant a funny skit and not any news that displeases our dear leader.
Speaking of tyrants, you… Thanks. I think that’s the first time that’s gotten an applause, at least for me. Yeah. I mean, you know shit has reached a whole new level when the governments start coming after rich white guys named Steven and Jimmy, right? I mean, first they come for the Jimmy’s and then soon it’ll be the Wesleys and the Nathaniels. Mark my words, they’re coming. And the mainstream media has been freaking out. All the white guys on television, Chris Hayes, Ezra Klein, Van Jones, they’re freaking out like, “What is happening to the First Amendment, right? Look, what is happening to free speech?” It’s as if they haven’t been paying attention for the last two years. And I know what you’re thinking.
You’re thinking, “Well, where was the outrage about free speech when ICE kidnapped Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk?” And yeah, and sent them to detention facilities for writing op-eds and organizing protests. Where was the outrage then? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s totally different. And it’s because Mahmoud Khalil does not have a late night talk show. See, if he did, he would be fine. It’s completely a different thing. It’s like apples and racism. These are the jokes, people. These are the jokes. No, but in all seriousness, we’re so honored and grateful that so many of you have come out tonight in support of voices for Gaza. Your presence is a powerful act of solidarity. So, thank you for showing up, not just with your time, but with your heart.
So, please give yourself a round of applause for being here tonight. Now, I won’t lie to you. It’s going to be an emotional evening and you might cry. In fact, you probably will cry, and that’s why this event is also being sponsored by Kleenex. They figured they could make a few bucks off of this. Hey, it’s America. No, I’m kidding. Actually, that’s not true. We just found out this morning that Kleenex needs the FTC to approve a billion dollar merger with Charmin Ultra Soft. And so, they’re staying as far away from this place as possible. Hey, it’s America. I don’t know why. My apologies to the folks at Kleenex. I don’t know why I’m ragging on them. I just hate Kleenex, I don’t know.
The truth is that tonight, all the proceeds will go towards supporting INARA, the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance. INARA’s critical work provides critical medical and mental healthcare to children suffering under human induced and natural disasters. They step in and fill the gaps that no other organization can or will. We all know that a historically unprecedented number of children have been traumatized, starved, disabled, and killed in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In our service includes medical surgeries, mental health sessions, access to education, and housing and distribution of humanitarian aid. A number of people and organizations made tonight possible.
So, we’d particularly like to acknowledge Raad Rahman, yeah, Michiko Clark, Nina Ramrakhiani, Shruti Ganguli, Andy Shao. Julianne Petro, Simon Wesley, Kat Broderick, Jonathan Hayden, Tingo Chang, and of course the writers, artists, and performers giving their time and art to this evening. A number of wonderful companies and organizations also stepped up to sponsor this evening, McNally Jackson. The Resistance Revival Chorus, Palfest, Democracy Now, Zeteo News. Yeah. Zeteo News, Celebrities for Palestine, Film Workers for Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Artists4Ceasefire and the Asian American Writers Workshop. Give them all a round of applause. Thank you to all of them for sharing their light in this dark time.
Finally, as I prepared for this evening, I was reminded of a passage from George Orwell’s great essay, politics and the English language written in 1946. He wrote, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defiance of the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness. Tonight is a refutation of this kind of language and a reclamation of language’s greatest purpose and highest use to make vivid and clear to connect and illuminate, to find truth, not in fact, but in meaning.”
Each of the writers and artists you will spend time with tonight have taken on this mission with all of their talent and courage. Let us begin with Mosab Abu Toha. Mosab is a Palestinian poet, short story writer and essayist from Gaza, his first collection of poetry. Things that you may find hidden in my ear, won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award, a James Beard Award, and a Pulitzer Prize in commentary for his essays on Gaza in the New Yorker. Please welcome Mosab Abu Toha.
Mosab Abu Toha:
Oh my goodness. Thank you everyone. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for showing up for Gaza, for Palestine. No art. The art of losing isn’t hard to master, Elizabeth Bishop. You know everything will come to an end, the sugar, the tea, the dried sage, the water. Just go to the market and restock. Even your shadow will abandon you when there’s no light. So, just keep things that require only you. The book of poems that only you can decipher. The blank map of a country whose cities and villages only you can recognize. I have personally lost three friends to war, a city to darkness and the language to fear. This was not easy to survive, but survival proved necessary to master. But of all things, losing the only photo of my grandfather under the rubble of our house was a real disaster.
What a Gazan should do during an Israeli airstrike. Turn off the lights in every room, sit in the inner hallway of the house away from the windows. Stay away from the stove. Stop thinking about making black tea. Have a bottle of water nearby big enough to cool down children’s fear. Get a child’s kindergarten backpack and stuff tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is and the ID cards and photos of later grandparents, uncles and aunts. And the grandparents wedding invitation that’s been kept for a long time. And if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds in one pocket and some soil from the balcony flour put in the other and hold on tie to whatever number there was on the cake from the last birthday. (singing) Under the rubble. She slept on her bed, never woke up again.
Her bed has become her grave, a tomb beneath the ceiling of her room, the cenotaph. No name, no ear of birth, no year of death, no epitaph, only blood and a smashed picture of frame and ruin next to her. In Jabalia camp, a mother collects her daughter’s flesh in a piggy bank hoping to buy her a plot on a river in a far away land. A group of a mute people were talking signed when a bomb fell, they fell silent. It rained again last night. The new plant looked for an umbrella in the garage. The bombing got intense and our house looked for an umbrella in the neighborhood. And now the whole of Palestine is looking for a shelter on this world. I leave the door to my room open so the words in my books, the titles and names of authors and publishers could flee when they hear the bombs.
I became homeless once, but the rubble covered the city of my city covered the streets. They could not find a stretcher to carry your body. They put you on a wooden door. They found under the rubble, your neighbors, a moving wall. The scars in our children’s faces will look for you. Our children’s amputated legs will run after you. He left the house to buy some bread for his kids. News of his death made it home, but not the bread, no bread. Death sits to eat whoever remains of the kids. No need for a table. No need for bread. I changed the order of my books on the shelves. Two days later, the war broke out. Beware of changing the order of your books. What are you thinking? What thinking. What? You. You. Is there still you? You there? Where should people go?
Should they build a big ladder and go up, but heaven has been blocked by the drones and of 16s and the smoke of death? When we die, our souls leave our bodies, take with them everything they loved in our bedrooms, the perfume bottles, the makeup, the necklaces and the pans. In Gaza, our bodies and rooms get crushed. Nothing remains for the soul. Even our souls, they get stuck under the rubble for weeks. Thank you. Two more poems. Right or left. Under the rubble, her body has remained for days and days. When the war ends, we try to move the rubble stone after stone. We only find one small bone from her body. It is a bone from her arm, right or left. It does not matter as long as we cannot find the hena from her neighbor’s witting on her skin or some ink from a school pen on a little index finger.
The moon. She’s lying with the asphalt, her small belly, her chest, her forehead, her hands, her cold feet bear in the night. A hungry cat paces. A hungry cat paces. Shrapnel rings as it hits neighboring. Houses are really bombed. The hungry cat sees the girl. Her wounds are still warm, hungrier. The girl’s father lies next to her on his back. The backpack he wears still has the girl’s favorite candy and a small toy. The girl was waiting till he arrived to eat her lollipop. The cat gets close. A bomb pounds the street. No flesh. No girl. No father. No cat. Nobody is hungry. The moon overhead is not the moon. Thank you.
Aasif Mandvi:
Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a finalist for the pen Robert W. Bingham Prize, and the stars are not yet bells. Her third novel, Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father is coming in March. She teaches fiction at Columbia and Pratt. In 2018, she was named a five under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. Please welcome Hannah.
Hannah Lillith Assadi:
Thank you. It’s so beautiful to be here tonight and to see all of you out there. There’s so many people to think, but I do want to shout out Raad Rahman. We had an Instagram conversation about this night and I thought it was going to be much smaller than this and here we are, so it’s really beautiful. I’m going to read from my fourth coming novel, Paradiso 17, about the life of my late father. So, I’m bringing him into the room with us tonight. I don’t think you need to know much more than the scene occurs at the very beginning at the start of the Nakba and they’re leaving their home.
In Sufien’s memory, it was the very first day of Hiras’ life that day in mid-April, on which all down the mountain, the hill that had belonged to generations of their family and extended family for centuries, they heard men banging on doors. First at the house on the corner, the Issas, and then the one just beside theirs, the Hemads and then. And who could do anything, but run madly for a blanket, a few pieces of bread before they were pushed out of the door and into the yard? Sufien looked at his mother, Faras, and her arms attached to her breast. Her hijab had slipped, her head was bare, and there she stood in her own courtyard for the last time, cursing at the soldiers in Arabic. Where was his father?
Sufien almost believed he could loosen himself from the soldier’s grip if he just wiggled around enough, except all that earned him was the butt of a rifle shoved into his back. Now Sufien was on the ground and his mother was crying louder. He had never seen these people. He had never seen anything so mean. They were screaming in their language saying his father’s name over and over. Wayne Abduljaril. One asked Sufien and when she shook her head, he spit in her face. “Yella yella,” the men shouted in their accent and now they were moving them out of the courtyard toward where? Somehow, Sufien was now in the road. They were all in the road, the entire family, looking back at their house at its blue door. It had happened so fast. He would never remember how he was inside, then outside.
There was so little time or Sufien didn’t understand time. It was late in the afternoon suddenly. The sun splashed mournfully against the dim hills and this was the last of it. His house was already behind him. Wayne Baba, all the children demanded to know and Sufien yelled at them. Sufien had never heard her so shrill. He believed that his father must be dead. Now they were moving Sufien holding the hands of his brother and sister, Faras wrapped in a blanket around his mother’s chest. There was a donkey and on it they had tied one piece of luggage and towels from Sufien because she still bled a Quran and in its pages, a few bracelets and a ring of 24 carat gold. The ring Sufien later said would be the one Sufien would give to his future wife.
Sufien finally summoned the courage to ask his mother about the cat. “That cat will survive a week without us, she said. Like so many others, she believed they would return. Sufien would later religiously mark the dusk, marvel at the colors of the end of daylight and that fateful April evening, he watched it too wrapping its hues around the hills of his city like a yearning refrain. It was back there the place he was from, which he would never see again. Safad. This was it. Sufien’s defining moment in this one criminally brief life. It had already happened at five years old. No ado. Now it was behind him. Safad was already behind him. Most of us reach it later, older, that moment when we know who we are, why we are. Now I’m on a road that will end, “he whispered. Thank you.
Aasif Mandvi:
Thank you. We have a QR code. Are we going to put that up? There’s the QR code if you guys want to take your phones out. I know some of you only paid half price to get in. So, I think you can donate the other half right here. Other people paid full prize. It’s just fair. No, if you are inclined to do so in our incredible organization, there’s the QR code. It’ll keep coming up every now and then, and you can put your phone up there and donate as you would like. Next, Viet Thanh wins novel, The Sympathizer, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was turned into an HBO limited series. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundation’s his most recent books are A Man of Two Faces, a memoir, a history, a memorial, and to save and to destroy, writing as an other.
And the edited volume, the cleaving Vietnamese writers in the diaspora. Nguyen teachers at the University of Southern California, where he also serves as the Errol Arnold Chair of English. Please welcome Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Aasif. Thank you to all of you. Good evening, New York. It’s such an honor to be included here in this evening with all of these incredible writers and these advocates for Palestine. Also, I want to thank Raad Rahmen, my manager, without whom this, event would not have been possible. She’s put so much of her heart and soul into Voices For Gaza. When October 7th happened, I had just begun giving a series of lectures at Harvard University titled To Save and To Destroy: Writing As An Other. And given the theme of those lectures and given what I’ve devoted my entire life to with my writing and given how much Edward Said’s thinking has influenced me as a writer and as a scholar ever since I was an undergraduate, I felt I had to address what was happening.
And so, early November 2023, I gave a lecture at Harvard on Palestine and on Gaza. This is an excerpt from that lecture. The ultimate silencing is death. And Mahmoud Darwish argues that America’s support of Israel is inextricable from the deaths of Palestinians. In memory for forgetfulness, his memoir set during the Israeli siege and bombardment of Beirut in 1982, Darwish says of Palestinians that America still needs us a little, needs us to concede the legitimacy of our killing, needs us to commit suicide for her in front of her, for her sake. Describing the Israeli shelling of Beirut, Darwish could be narrating the Israeli attack on Gaza 41 years later. “I don’t want to die disfigured under the rubble. I want to be hit in the middle of the street by a shell suddenly.
If anything might help us rescue us from the sadness and despair found in Darwish’s memoir, it could be expansive solidarity. Limited solidarity where we define selfhood narrowly, keep our circle of inclusion small and do not contest the identity of our community leads to the most acceptable kind of politics and art in the eyes of dominant society. Expansive solidarity, where we find kinship with unlikely others in an ever widening circle is more dangerous. Two other writers who embrace expansive solidarity as they deal with Israel and Palestine are Nadine Gordimer and Amos Oz. In Gordimer’s writing and being, she describes being an other in her own country, apartheid era, South Africa.
Gordimer criticized her white ruled society, a stance complicated by being the daughter of European Jewish immigrants. “Consider,” Gordimer asks how her parents could come to South Africa and suffer hardship while opening a store in view of a community of black minors. A generation later, the immigrants and their children have become upwardly mobile and moved on, but the black minors remain where they are. The problem, “Gordimer understood was one of racism and settler colonization, both of which she and her immigrant parents profited from their Jewishness less important than their whiteness. Gordimer invokes Amos Oz of Israel as another writer critical of his own society and his place in it. Both Gordimer and Oz writing about 30 years ago are depressingly still relevant.
She focuses on his novel Fema, whose title character she describes as carrying both the embittered history, millennia of persecution of the Jewish people and the embittered history of their occupation by conquest of land belonging to another people, the Palestinian Arabs. Oz depicts Fema an outlier among his fellow Israelis saying,” We are the Kasaks now and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms. Can a worthless man like me have sunk so low as to make a distinction between the intolerable killing of children and the not so intolerable killing of children? “In one charged symbolic moment, Fema comes across a cockroach in his kitchen and raises his shoe to smash it.
But looking closely at the cockroach, he was filled with awe at the precise minute artistry of this creature, which no longer seemed abhorrent, but wonderfully perfect, a representative of a hated race. He leaves the cockroach alone. For Gordimer, the hated race, persecuted and confined is Fema’s own. He is himself the cockroach and at his moment in history in the occupied territories, the Palestinians, and he himself is the hater, the persecutor, the one with the hammer, the raised shoe. Expansive solidarity requires capacious grief. I come back to the grief of Mahmoud Darwish. At his memoirs end, he brings up Haifa, a city from which Jewish forces expelled most of the Arab population in 1948.
When Darwish asks a fellow Palestinian where he hails from, the man replies, “Haifa, but I wasn’t born there. I was born here in the refugee camp. To be from somewhere, but not born there describes an exilic feeling that descends generationally leading to an existence, “Darwish says,” In a middle region between life and death. “The sense of loss and exile that Darwish describes is familiar to me. I came to memory in an American refugee camp and I was raised in a Vietnamese refugee community that demanded that others always remember and never forget what happened to them. This demand for memory is important, but it can also trap us in our otherness and prevent us from seeing that we too can harm others.
What saves us from that trap is expansive solidarity and capacious grief, something that also exists within Vietnamese tradition. When we encounter others who have experienced loss, we like to say we Jibon, we share sorrow. Jibon saves us from drowning in sorrow and from drowning others in our sorrow. Expansive solidarity, capacious grief, and the sharing of sorrow all help us to answer the question of who we should feel solidarity with. That answer is simple and yet difficult. Whoever is the cockroach, whoever is the human animal, whoever is the other. Thank you.
Aasif Mandvi:
Hala Alyan is the author of the novel Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award. And a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize and the Arsonist City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She’s also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry. Her work has been published by the New York Times, sorry, the New Yorker, the Academy of American Poets, the New York Times, the Guardian and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with a family where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University. Please welcome Hala Alyan.
Hala Alyan:
Thank you. Thank you so much for everyone that made tonight possible, and thank you all for coming out. I’m going to read one poem. It’s called Revision. It begins with a line from Ghassan Kanafani letter to his son, Fayez. Kanafani writes, “I heard you in the other room asking your mother, Mama, am I a Palestinian?” When she answered yes, a heavy silence fell on the whole house. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen. Its noise exploding then silence. I don’t mean to hate the sparrows. I don’t mean to close my eyes and see fire. A flood of concrete leaflets the size of grotesque snow. I don’t mean to rehearse evacuation that is not mine to rehearse. From the grocery store to the house, from the house to the river, from the river to the airport, here are the rules. There is a road and it’s gone now.
There is a sea and you cannot drink its water. How far can you carry a toddler? A middle-aged dog? How far can you go in 65 seconds? 12 seconds, four, three, two? If you have a favorite flower, now is the time to redact it. If you have a mother, now is the time to move her to the basement if you don’t have a basement. I don’t mean to profit from this poem, but I do. I don’t mean to say I, but I do. Here are the rules. The rules are redacted. Redacted is redacted. Redacted is a red herring. Redacted is a billboard with 92,583 names. Here are the rules I had a grandmother once. She had a memory once. It’s spoiled like milk. On the phone, she’d asked me about my son, if he was fussy, if he was eating solids yet she’d ask if he was living up to his name.
I said yes. I always said yes. I asked for his name and it was redacted. I dreamt of her saying, redacted, redacted, redacted. How deep in the earth can you burrow with your forehearts? Here are the rules. There is no bomb shelter. There is no ship. You can leave. Why aren’t you leaving? You can resist. Why aren’t you resisting? On the phone, my grandmother would call me her heart, her soul, her two God-given eyes. She’d ask if I wanted to visit Palestine again. I never brought her back any soil, but there was a story she liked, so I would tell it again and again about the man I met at the bus station, a stranger until he spoke Arabic, calling me sister and daughter and sister. And I told her how he skipped work and drove me past the gardens to the highest point and we waved to Beirut.
I waved to her and later, she said she was waving back. Nevermind her balcony faced the wrong direction. Nevermind the sea, a terrible blue. Nevermind there never was a son, here are the rules. If you say redacted, you must say redacted. If they give you a microphone, do not sing into it. If they give you a camera, do not look it in the eye. Here are the rules. You cannot redact a name once it has been spoken. So, if you say Haze, you must say Haze. If you look, you must look until there is no looking left to do. Here are the rules. Here’s my mother given name. Here’s my small life. It is no more than any other. Here’s my grandmother dead. For five years, she’s speaking again. She calls what I’m not expecting. Keif Ibnik, she says, “Wayna, where is he now? Let me say hello.
What could I say back? What would you say back? He’s good.” I tell her he’s good. I pretend to call a child from the other room. I pretend to hear the sea from over here. I wave back, here are the rules. We bear what we bear until we can’t anymore. We invent what we can’t stand grieving. The sun sets. The sun rises on on your redaction, on your blue pencils, on your God given eyes. He’s good, I tell her. He’s good. He’s crawling. Together. We praise the sea and the sun together. We praise how much he’s grown. Thank you.
Aasif Mandvi:
Seema Jilani is a pediatrician whose humanitarian work has taken her from Kabul clinics and embattled the Gaza Strip hospitals to Ukrainian bomb shelters from refugee rescue boats on the Mediterranean Sea to documenting war crimes in Bosnia. She’s worked as a doctor in war zones, including Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Ukraine, Gaza, and the West Bank, and in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the region. Dr. Jilani was one of the first physicians to go to Gaza during the ongoing war. She sits on the board of Inara as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and has briefed the United Nations and the National Security Council. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, NewsHour, and The Guardian. Please welcome Dr. Seema Jilani.
Seema Jilani:
Thank you. The story of my life is bringing microphones down six inches. Thank you so much for being here, somebody who feels that I’ve been screaming into the void for the past two years, for the past 20 years, for the past 44 years of my life. It is spaces like these that help me to continue to do my work. I first acknowledge the people of Palestine who have shown me what it means to live with grace. And I also have a special shout out again to Raad Rahman, Michiko Clark, and everyone who made this happen. Letter to a Gazan child. You come into my emergency room in the early morning hours. Your chubby cheeks blush with the night’s cold. Eyelash is heavy with tears. Your tiny limbs frayed. You are motionless blue. Thick brown hair matted with blood. Makes it hard for me to examine your scalp.
My fingers feel for pulses. They are undetectable. My blue gloves hover over your floppy open mouth. I insert the breathing tube just between your vocal chords. I run the code blue by the book. You see-saw between the world of living and that of angels. When your soul floated up beside me, was the devil there too? Recounting my sins. Which board questions I had gotten wrong? The time I went to see a movie with friends instead of studying more. I was supposed to be able to tell your mother that yes, she would cheer at your graduation. She would dry your tears after your first heartbreak. She would dance at your wedding. I sever all her tomorrows. Of all her hunger pangs, she will thirst most for the exquisite smell of her daughter’s hair.
I ask her to engrave that fragrance in her brain and not that of scorched baby fat. Your mother probably wishes there was a smarter doctor on call that night. The time has passed for heroes. I must stop breaking your ribs with my chest compressions. It’s the usual prep now. Wipe the splattered blood off your purple neck. Wrap you tight in the sterility of hospital blankets. My fingers graze your forehead. I cover your disfigurements to craft your mother’s last memory. Television shows end with children in an eternal sleep and doctors bursting out of ER doors triumphant. In real life, when bodies bear the cruelties of war, we stay. We do the postmortem cleanup. We cradle the parents when their legs buckle time of death, 0:48 AM.
Stop the clocks, silence the pagers, the bombs. Shush the beeping machines. Calm the whimpering babies, rushed in on donkeys. Stop the drones gnawing overhead. Mute the ambulances. Bring out the ebony veils. Fetch the white lilies and let the mourners come. Allow me to sit with your ascent in stillness just one moment before I rush to the next heartbreak. I have seen your face before. I saw it on medical evacuation flights under the lights of ORs in Iraq. I saw it in waters off the coast of Libya on a refugee rescue boat where I was the one that had to keep 423 souls alive. Some faces I will never see. Maybe you couldn’t survive walking under the shadows of drones that hover over cliffs of Afghanistan.
Maybe you couldn’t risk the immigration checkpoints along the Texas-Mexico border. Maybe you were rendered a buoyant corpse in the Mediterranean Sea lapped up on the shore whilst tourists sip cocktails. I carry you everywhere I go. Maybe it is time to lay you to rest instead of reliving 03:48 so many times over. I have second reading on my next reading. I just wanted to preface this with saying that after… Thank you. After I exited Gaza this particular time, I shared many gruesome, grizzly details of my time when I briefed the United Nations, including the Ambassador, Senior White House officials, legislatures, media outlets, and I did it all in the hopes that it would lead to stopping the carnage. Then they all did nothing. This poem is entitled Deconflicted.
I am a short, brown, difficult woman. If not sultry, then inconvenient. Respectfully, sir, you want to disrespect me. Snort opium ragged off my sari stomach. Then shush me, a confused relic, a dead empires. You. The colonizer is so clumsy. Daddy vaulted oceans on dinghies, even Karachi’s mosquitoes murder. But your ashy white fingers panic fumble my bra with made in Pakistan tags. I snicker. Do I have to do everything? Your mortification is my climax. You flush imperial embarrassed? My family was macheted red by imperial markers on a map. Let’s call it even. I can transform into Eros Office Girl floody spectacles rimmed low. My dear Senator, you are a better listener before my daughter sucked my cleavage dry. Children bleed out in a Gaza in ER. No, not even morphine, blah, blah, blah.
Legless babies, toddler brains on congealed skulls. Smile pretty in pink lip gloss. My cajel, sharper than my switchblade. You prefer your conscience pummeled on a headboard. I have no poems about the moon in me. Frankly, neither should you. The Bohemian girl on open mic night does. Messy top bun, kafia, but make it fashion. She wants you to worship fuck her, desecrate her, undignify her repeat. A fantasy caricature. She smirk flirts with the audience, commodifies herself. Artist forgot to say genocide until red carpet. Let’s talk book deals over baby corpses. You can voice over all your wars in twangy Americana, but bones remain bones. If I whisper erotic of burnt baby fingers searching for their mamas, will you pencil my jawline into prime time? Embargo is not a sexy word.
I am no one’s manic pixie dream girl, but I can pull off audacity, will smother inner for empathy. Distinguished expert on blood soaked orphans. You asphyxiate my teasing statistics on famine? Do I stutter? After Rafa, I was so thin I could shove a Kalashnikov in my boot. Blase journalists, feckless ambassadors. I fantasize my stilettos, splice their spleens, use their marrow for lipstick. I practiced carving cadavers just for that moment. My stethoscope, your noose. Chinwag sanctions over cocktails. Collateral children or child soldiers. Do we really know if hospitals hospital? Morg’s flug, flood, crimson. I sacchron my tone, tenderize it palatable. Breathe ghosts on your collarbone.
Can you hear me now? Mothers still sob, I splay my nape, jugular exposed, cloaked in indignities. You, you in the conflict, chic scarf. Does my performance sway you? Thank you.
Aasif Mandvi:
Thank you so much for that. You’re my hero. You really are. We’re going to put the QR code back up there, because some of you complain that you didn’t have enough time last time to get the phone out of your purse and all that. So, this is going to give you a little bit more time to get up there with the QR code. And while you’re doing that, Seema, we can chat for a couple of minutes here. You are on the board of INARA. So, can you just tell us what do you think is the most important work that INARA is doing right now?
Seema Jilani:
Yeah. So, I think after having been in the humanitarian field for way too many years, I will say I’ve worked in massive organizations. I’ve worked in tiny organizations. This is a smaller organization, so we don’t have a ton of overhead. So, much of what we are fundraising for will go directly to the beneficiaries. INARA has the only school for Palestinians taught by Gazans in Egypt that we run. It’s incredible. We do holistic therapy. So, yes, we do medical attention to children that have medical needs, inclusive of physical therapy, PMNR, which is physical medical medicine and rehabilitation, mental health, psychology, psychiatry, food distributions, parcels. And then in Gaza itself, I can tell you with the incoming offensive on Gaza City, our clinic was seeing in Gaza City 120 patients a day.
And now, some of our staff has been forcibly evacuated. Four of them refuse to leave their people. They’re still there, and that’s an update as of yesterday. You can see we did vegetable distributions as well, vegetables that are in farmlands. There hasn’t been a source of protein for several, several months. Our program director’s little boy woke up screaming saying, “I just want an egg. I just want an egg.” And that is the situation right now. I’m really, really proud of the work INARA does. Again, as somebody who’s worked in the big ones and the small ones, I choose the small ones every time because quite frankly, I wouldn’t have been able to say what I just said if it was one of the big ones. And this is an organization that allows and pursues advocacy at the highest levels.
And it is a freedom that I don’t take for granted, especially tonight. So, thank you so much.
Aasif Mandvi:
Thank you. Dr. Seema Jilani, everyone. Okay. I think that should be enough time for all of you. Moving on. Nan Goldin is an American photographer and artist. Since the 1970s, her work has explored notions of gender and definitions of normality. By documenting her life and the lives of the friends who surround her, Golden gives a voice and visibility to her communities, especially the Bohemian LGBT communities which were deeply impacted by the devastating HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Her best known work is the Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which exists as a slideshow and monograph from 1986. Her retrospective, this will not end well is traveling through Europe until 2026.
She is the founding member of the advocacy group, PAIN Prescription Addiction Intervention Now, which targeted the pharmaceutical companies responsible for the overdose epidemic. She has been an outspoken advocate for Palestine since the 1970s. Please welcome Nan Goldin.
Nan Goldin:
Hi. I can’t see you, but I’m very honored to be here among all these brilliant minds and speakers, but I’ve come to the point where I have no more words. So, I’ve put together a film that I finished editing today and it’s 10 minutes silence, so enjoy it.
Aasif Mandvi:
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now going to take a 10-minute intermission. When we come back, our authors will take the stage for two conversations.
