RLU: You’re calling me from Jordan, where you’ve been as the U.S. incursion into Iran started. How are you doing? What does a typical day look like for you?


Y: Usually, I’m writing a bit throughout the day, and I try to fill my life with downtime in between all of the different things—organizing, writing, non-profit management and daily life—so it's kind of in constant flow. I’ve been in Jordan since January, before the war started. The war’s start meant immediate airspace closures and just absolute chaos. When the first rockets went past Jordan, I woke up that morning to the sound of sirens and the entire apartment shaking. When I heard the sirens, I immediately thought, “I'm not leaving,” which was the exact opposite reaction to what most people had. Most people felt, “My God, I need to get out of here.” I just felt, “No, actually, I'm staying. This is the closest to dying with my people that I get if it comes to that.” I wanted to be of use on the ground; I'm still out here, my things are still in Oakland. My life has been chaotic the last decade and a half—it's not abnormal for me to be living between two different countries. This is the longest I haven't traveled since the summer before October 7, and then I'm not planning to leave until August, and that will be the longest I've been anywhere since 2010. I haven't spent six whole months or seven months in a place for the last decade and a half, so it's also kind of nice to just be here, watch the sunset, and do the work that I need to do on the ground here as I figure things out.


RLU: I want to begin with talking about diaspora. You were born in Jordan, and I believe I read that you have never been to Palestine. I want to begin here because the first poem in your collection Blood Orange is called “Diaspora.” The poem reads, “being in the diaspora / is having genocide / at your door / and you’re not home to greet it.” Other poems grapple with loss, like “Mother Tongue,” which reads, “i have a tongue / i have languages / and i have lost / my mother / tongue.” So much of the collection explores an experience of being dis-located from one’s home and one’s people. 


I was reminded of Mahmoud Darwish, and his words about Edward Said, “[Said] says: I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here.” In After the Last Sky, Said writes, “the stability of geography and the continuity of land – these have completely disappeared from my life and the life of all Palestinians … Homecoming is out of the question. You learn to transform the mechanics of loss into a constant metaphysics of return.” 


So, I’d like to ask, poetry seems to be a place where the echo or shadow, the ability to name a gap, is recoverable. In being “neither there nor here,” what are the other places you locate yourself in? 


Y: The displacement began when my dad's side of this family were displaced from Yaffa into the West Bank, and then from the West Bank to Kuwait, where my dad grew up. My mom's family are from Jenin and they were displaced to Kuwait in the 60s. My parents met in Kuwait and married there. When the Gulf War happened they were displaced again to Jordan, where I was born about seven months later. I went to elementary school in the U.S., middle school in Canada, high school in Jordan, came back to the U.S. for college, went to Switzerland for a year, then back to the US, and then there's like five other countries in between all that. 


Then it comes to Diaspora, where I start the collection, Blood Orange. It’s interesting to me because diaspora is not a concept I connected with until October 7. I was used to Palestinian communities—and so many other displaced communities—thinking of displacement as being a single instance where roots are planted somewhere else, and in that place you get to blossom. That dynamic, where you have your new home and you're barred from your old home, wasn’t the case for me. I experienced constant displacements and was never really rooted anywhere. There was no second home to root in. 


When October 7 happened, the divide between being outside Gaza versus being inside Gaza became so enormous I felt for the first time as if I had roots. For the last several years I’ve been carrying that feeling with me—of the extreme levels of rootlessness that happen and recognizing that there are different scales to it. There's the scales of genocide versus the scales of warfare. There's a single generation's displacement in a single country versus the dozens of countries that you could be displaced to without anywhere ever really feeling like home.


I've learned that home is really in my body. It’s in my mind, it's in the things that surround me, it's in whatever land that I'm at, it's in the service that I provide to the indigenous communities in the stolen lands that I've lived in, it's my service to trans community and Muslim community and Palestine. It's this strange space of somewhat always being home, but never being physically home, always on this metaphysical level. It's just out of reach physically. 


Poetry can speak to that metaphysical existence, it speaks to that in between world, where reality doesn't look like a certain thing. Poetry exists outside of the confines of your typical language structure, it can be created and recreated from scratch—it's limitless. It is able to encapsulate that emotion of having home within you, but never being able to be home, while at the same time having to make do, because there are no other possibilities. I don't know how we would survive otherwise. 


RLU: On The Final Straw radio show you remarked, “Poetry has always been a part of Palestinian resistance ... It was always a part of Palestinian life before resisting was necessary in the way that it is.” 


You are prolific—writing full poetry collections, novels, running a small press as well as an organization that resources queer and trans Muslims. 


In the wake of and amidst the ongoingness of violence and atrocities against the people of Palestine, I’ve heard some use the word “unspeakable” to categorize the violence. I would disagree, not only are we able to speak of the violence but we must. I’d also wager that poetry is precisely what allows the so-called “unspeakable” to be spoken. 


That Palestinian life is now, by some measure, in part a life that demands resistance, or where living is resistance. In thinking about your relationship to writing, the positioning of poetry as a method of resistance, of poetry’s ability to articulate the ineffible, and of Palestinian life becoming partially synonymous with resistance, I’m wondering how your approach to poetry has changed over your life. 


Y: Poetry just is. I always tell people, “If you've texted, you're basically a poet.” It's the practice of poetry that kind of changes over time. I've always viewed myself more as a novelist than a poet. It was extreme circumstances that led me to poetry. My sister had stage four cancer at the time, and I was taking her to doctor’s appointments and treatment. Poetry was something I could do in between appointments, between the surgeries, between everything that was happening in that world. This is a couple years before October 7. Poetry became my pathway for expression, for allowing my life to be processed and to exist in all the ways that it is. People will say that these things are unspeakable. I actually think it's really easy to speak. I think the harder part is that capacity to be able to witness, to be able to listen, and to hear all the things that can be spoken. I think my work is an example of that, right? 


Still, there's nothing I can bring to the table that other Palestinians didn't 100 years ago when the British colonized us. What changes over time, though, is how we live within those words. I want to be clear that poetry is not the work itself. Poetry is the entryway to world building. It's not the end, it's a beginning. Some of my favorite poets, like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Mahmoud Darwish, are remembered for their literary work, but when you look at their lives you see that they were always moving towards liberation in their personal and communal lives. 


RLU: I really like what you were saying about poetry being the entry point into the opportunity or this field where action not only is possible but must be taken. I forget which poet said “poetry is a way of seeing,” but that formula resonates. As I've gone along in my journey with poetry and developed my own poetic voice, I have grown more attuned to the world. You start to notice different things, and from there, you have the opportunity to act on what you know. 


At one point last year I was grappling with the question: “What is the point of poetry if it doesn't move you to the streets?” That question led to a conversation about all of the reasons that artists create.



Y: For me, it's always about how we are doing culture work through the arts, and in particular, how we are building the liberated world that we want to live in. The arts are such a powerful medium for world building. Not everything that I’ve written will be published—some work is only for me and some work will only be shared with a few people. Everything I publish has to be strategically in line with my world-building goals. Still, it's a bit more complex than that, because I don't really control any of the outcomes. Someone out there might be listening right now, or maybe it will take years for them to listen. 


As an organizer and culture worker, I can be really strategic and mindful of how I put things out there. What are the messages I'm sending? I can put intentions and hopes out there, but I don't control how anyone will receive it. When artists do expect a certain reaction, a lot of times we get severely disheartened. It’s really about how I can allow art to move through me. I'm just a vessel, but there’s always the intention, building art not just for the sake of art itself. 


RLU: The world of literary arts is, like many other venues, invested in maintaining a zionist imaginary and regime of power that centers a canon of white western thought. You chose to self-publish Blood Orange and engender a space where you’re the arbiter of what is worthy poetry. Can you talk a bit about making your own door into publishing? I’m curious about this in part because of what I see as a core part of queer or trans embodied life — making one’s own way into the world. Deciding for oneself how one should be rather than accepting scripts from others.


Y: The plan before October 7 was to launch a publishing house in 2025. As an organizer and culture worker, I'm thinking decades in advance, so when October 7 happened, it made sense to align the timelines and speed things up. There's definitely the aspect of wanting to build our own doors and our own infrastructure, but I also come at it from a practical standpoint of understanding the limitations of the existing structures. As it is now, the publishing industry will take two to three years to put out a collection. If a genocide starts in October 2023, we're not actually seeing literature about that genocide until 18 months after that. That's hundreds of thousands of people already killed. When I was thinking of what it looks like for us to be telling our stories, what came to mind was that we need literature about this immediately. We need things that will facilitate those conversations and that world building as quickly as possible.


From the starting point of writing to landing in stores, Blood Orange took a month to get out into the world. That's unheard of in publishing—even independent publishers and people who self-publish don't usually do that. When we think of creating our own pathways, for some that means mimicking the existing pathways: “Let's build traditional publishing, but ours.” When we're creating these systems, not to replicate, not to build the same as the existing structures, but to build beyond them, it's just a completely different scale of possibility when we do that.


RLU: How I understand what you said is that literature, in its highest form, can find a crack or an opening in a political moment and shift the way that a situation unfolds. But literature, as it is upheld by these institutions, usually is past-facing or backwards-facing, commenting on the past rather than building or alchemizing any sense of the present. 


I want to connect that to one of the poems in Blood Orange, “Trans and Palestine.” The poem reads, If I was not trans, would Palestine be free? No. Then how fucking dare you bring it up instead of saying free Palestine? There’s so much organizing in these lines, redirecting the reader and redirecting the person who, as we know from your other writing and from your interviews, is both an archetype of a white person who is imposing their views onto you, but also the transposition of very real interactions you’ve had. In your public life, people have made assumptions about who you are within your family. White people have imposed orientalist assumptions that your family doesn't love you and celebrate you, and I've been curious about this. 


In the U.S. context, this sort of libidinal concern with the bodies and psychosocial realities of trans people, this paradigm of cis people inserting themselves into the lives of others while maintaining these ideologies of neglect and violence, the underlying statement is that there is something socially abject to trans life. But really, these assumptions, these are the very forces that bulldoze the world and that see a potential in the decimation of Palestinian life. After all this finger pointing at what these systems of power find reprehensible, it's really these systems that are grotesque. I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about this line, or more broadly, the poem's ability to redirect and to say what needs to be said.


Y: I love that entire reflection. So much of my work involves being conscious of the deflections and the redirections that systems of oppression are constantly throwing at us. These systems have built a culture where you have to be on the defensive to say, actually, “not all trans people are bad, not all Palestinians are bad.” Or, like, “not all Palestinians hate trans people.” We’re constantly trying to counteract this messaging, but that means that they set the agenda. 


In all of my work, I’m really conscious about how we avoid falling into the traps of those reflections and those distractions. One thing that I've been thinking about this Pride season in particular, is how harmful it is to generalize about different groups in both good and bad ways. It's incredibly harmful to say that Palestinians are transphobic—fully fits into white supremacist imperialist thinking and messaging. 


At the same time, it is incredibly harmful to say the exact opposite because when we say that any of our groups of people are great at whatever it is, we've basically set the bar of what's possible and where we need to grow. It means that we have robbed ourselves of that growth, and the same goes for Palestine. For example, a lot of people will say that Ireland and Spain are the most incredible to Palestinians. I used to live in Ireland, and that narrative means that the people on the ground who are fighting for Palestinian liberation against the Irish government have a near-impossible job because the nation state gets to fall on that belief that they're already good no matter what happens. The Irish government has also brutalized Palestinian organizers, the Irish government has also mistreated Palestinians in Ireland.


My entire purpose is to build a liberated world, and I don't need validation from transphobic folks, from white supremacists, from people who hate Palestinians, or disabled people who hate any part of me. I don't need that validation. I'm here to do the work that I need to do. In my writing I will always try to bring us back to the actual assignments of what we’re doing—we're not talking about my comfort as a trans person somewhere that has nothing to do with trans politics. Those conversations are important to have, it's just a matter of the right time, the right place, and how we do it. 


Responding to deflections will not be the thing that moves us towards liberation, because by design we are meant to focus on something other than liberation. My work is liberation, it exists beyond systems of oppressions and their narratives. We existed before these systems and we will exist after they’re barely a memory.