March 29, 2024

A Gaza of Siege & Genocide

by Lamia Abukhadra | in Literary

Upon arriving in the US for the Palestine Writes Conference in September 2023, Gazan poet Yahya Ashour could have never predicted the events that would unfold for Palestinians in the months to come: that an accelerated Zionist genocidal siege on Gaza would leave him without a home to return to, that he would witness the horrors of this genocide through fragmented calls with his family from within the heart of the empire directly funding these atrocities, that he would be stranded in the US and relying on his poetry for daily survival and sustenance. To hold Ashour in this truly impossible time, Mizna is launching an inaugural Fellowship program, providing administrative support as he navigates US institutions on his ongoing poetry tour, and providing an outlet for his urgent and necessary work. 

As we approach the seventh month of the latest genocidal escalation on Gaza, it is with humility and profound grief that we announce the publication of Mizna Fellow Yahya Ashour’s poetry e-book A Gaza of Seige & Genocide. Proceeds from this project will go to directly aiding Ashour’s family fleeing to safety from the Zionist assault on Gaza.

Of Ashour’s book, Mizna executive editor George Abraham writes:

“A Gaza of Seige & Genocide is more than a testament to Palestinian resilience and survival, it is a political action insistent on the radical hope that poetry might play some role in saving his family and people. Through these poems and illustrations, Ashour unravels layers of complex grief, moving beyond a poetics of mere witness, insisting, ‘Rejoice, Gaza / we are no longer murdered / while the world is sleeping, / the world is wide awake.’ In Yahya Ashour’s poetry, we find a microcosm comprising the contemporary history of Gaza and the future of the Palestinian people.”

Support Yahya Ashour now