October 7, 2025

The Memorial Folio

by Mizna Staff

Reflecting on Two Years of Genocide

It is unfathomable that we have reached this moment. Two years of live-streamed, US-backed Zionist genocide against Palestinians in Gaza; two years of heinous acts expanding on decades of settler colonialism; two years of total blockade of humanitarian aid and basic necessities; two years of silencing voices on the ground and around the world.

Marking this moment of profound grief and rage, today Mizna offers a literary memorial. These works, extending a space of mourning, resistance, and imagination, include: 

• • a new sequence of ekphrastic poems by Omar Berrada, responding to the works of Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abourahme
• • a new poem by Nima Hasan, translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine
• • an essay from 2021 theorizing return in the present tense by Sarona Abuaker, republished here due to its relevance today
• • a curation of poems republished from Gaza Poets Society, including works by Mohammed Moussa, Nadine Murtaja, Omar Moussa, Raneen Azzazi, and Raneen Abdelwahab. Some of these works date back to 2019

Gaza Poets Society

Nima Hassan

Sarona Abuaker

Omar Berrada

From our very first piece by Ismail Khalidi on October 23, 2023, Mizna Online has served our community by honoring urgent work of responding to and protesting the genocide in a way that our biannual print publication timelines cannot accomodate. We have honored Palestinian martyrs such as Heba Abu Nada and Walid Daqqa alongside our kin in Gaza who are surviving day after impossible day: Anees Ghanima who writes “come scream with me,” Nabil S who mourns even the details of books left behind in during multiple displacements, Haya Abu Nasser writing from the “cliff of death” in February 2024, Huda Soboh who writes of the “brief hope that kites bring,” and so many more. We have uplifted kin with family in Gaza, such as Diaa Wadi who has been witnessing his family survive the genocide while seeking asylum in South Africa, joining other exiled Ghazzawis Najwa Juma, Nadine Murtaja, Sarah Aziza, Mosab Abu Toha, and Mizna Fellow Yahya Ashour, all of whom write to raise funds and keep their families alive. 

These voices join Palestinians grieving both in Palestine as well as in diaspora, including Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Noora Said, Farah Barqawi, Mira Mattar, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Olivia Elias, Rayya Tuffaha, and Sarona Abuaker. We have bolstered the sacred abundance of Palestinian books that have guided us these past few years, including US-based authors like Fargo Tbakhi, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Fady Joudah who have embodied what it means to resist capture by literary institutions, as well as Samer Abu Hawwash who return us to Palestine in the most ordinary details of daily life, as well as Ahmad Almallah and Huda Fakhreddine who are unafraid to look unflinchingly into the ruins that constitute this world order. We have welcomed kin from our broader SWANA and BIPOC diasporic communities who join us in resistance, including Omar Sakr, Danez Smith, Abdelrahman ElGendy, Aurielle Marie, Athena Farrokhzad, Sima Shakhsari, and many more beyond our pages.
 
We remember how our Sudanese kin have been our accomplices in anticolonial struggle, while resisting and surviving a genocide that has also long passed the two-year mark: Mohammed Zenia whose poem inverts the entire world order to free Palestine and Sudan from Gaza to Khartoum, or Umniya Najaer who articulates a vision toward the necessary planetary double consciousness, in lineage with Black, Palestinian, and Indigenous feminist thinkers, needed to survive and upend this world order. It is here, in the depths of two years of despair, that we are reminded that we are not alone: that millions of kin across the world are still taking to the streets, escalating the scope of their strikes and resistance, to fight for a Palestinian tomorrow as Randa Jarrar reflects from Ghassan Abu Sitta. In this time of rage and mourning, what else can we do but heed the call of Ghazzawi poet Nima Hasan: “When the roads are blocked, draw a new map. Become Rome. Be Gaza.”