Tag: Huda Fakhreddine

54. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha (LKT): During the past nine months, you have translated some incredibly powerful poems by living Palestinian poets, including Ibrahim Nasrallah and Samer Abu Hawash, and by poet Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed by Israel’s bombardment in her home in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on October 20, 2023. Why has it been important to you to make the work of Palestinian poets available to English-language readers during the unfolding genocide in Palestine? You’ve said before: “I need these poems, they don’t need me.” Can you reflect on what the emotional or even spiritual impact of such a deep engagement with these texts has been like for you in this time of genocide?
56. Huda Fakhreddine (HF): Palestine, its history, and its cultural production are an integral part of any responsible reading of Arabic literature in the last one hundred years and more. Centering Palestine and Palestinian literature has always been important in my writing and teaching. It is a clear way of signaling to students and colleagues in the field of Arabic studies, the area of Middle Eastern studies, and the larger humanities my commitment to studying Arabic literature with integrity and not in response to outside, imposed imperatives. Palestine is at the core of my intellectual and academic concerns as a scholar of the Arabic literary tradition. I’m convinced that literature is a continuum, and one cannot truly read a poem written today without knowledge of the tradition it belongs to; similarly, one cannot truly engage with a poem written a thousand years ago—as poem and not an artifact—without a connection to its legacy and its consequences in its language, and to that language’s creative consciousness in this present moment. 
58. Translating the works of Palestinian poets while a genocide unfolds in Gaza has been a lifeline for me. Gaza has been speaking for decades, and we must listen and learn. At this counterpoint in history, we look to Gaza and its artists and writers for a language, for ways of existing and resisting, and for an alternate history to counter the one written by the oppressor.