Mizna+RAWIFest 2023

With a keynote address from Hala Alyan, join us for a weekend of poetry, dance, and art celebrating SWANA artists and beyond!

RAWI Craft Talk 1: An Exploration of Kinships with the Olive Tree

RAWI is holding a craft series! The first of our talks comes from Layla Feghali of River Rose Re-Membrance and the SWANA ancestral project.

Established in 1993, RAWI is a national organization that provides mentoring, community, and support for Arab American writers and those with roots in the Arabic speaking world and diaspora. We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) literary organization dedicated to supporting and disseminating creative writing and scholarly writing by Arab/SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) Americans and those from the Arabic speaking world–which often means creating space and highlighting voices and people threatened by erasure. We put on readings, panels, workshops, roundtables, conferences, and festivals that emphasize inclusivity.

On the left, the cover of Sarah Ghazal Ali's poetry collection Theophanies, with a grayscale drawing of a saint with arms crossed over their chest kneeling on the ground, looking down at the ground. A column of light pours from their face, and where the light touches the ground, flowers grow. On the right of the image is a headshot of Sarah Ghazal Ali, in a burgundy hijab, looking into a mirror confidently, surrounded by a black background.

1. How did you come to writing? Who were the guides, teachers, guardian angels, or ancestors who brought you here?

I have loved to read since childhood, but really took to poetry in high school when I wrote a research paper on Sylvia Plath’s poem “Tulips.” It was the first time I really lived in the world of a single poem for an extended period of time. I loved the experience of finding and checking out every book about Plath from my town library, and trying to contextualize the poem within what I was able to learn of her life and work. It brought poetry alive and made it feel serious and important. In college, I was lucky to have an encouraging teacher early on, the brilliant poet and translator Whitney DeVos. She introduced me to the work of Natalie Diaz and Claudia Rankine, and made it feel possible to devote myself to a life in writing. I look to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Parveen Shakir, Etel Adnan, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Mahmoud Darwish as ancestors and guides.

2. What do you write towards? What do you write against?

I write towards the untouchable and unknowable divine. I write against silence and erasure.

3. How did you find the title of this book? What kinds of negotiations were involved—with yourself, the work, or the publisher?

The moment I encountered the word theophanies for the first time I knew it would be the title. I don’t remember the moment of encounter, but I remember clearly the conviction that followed—it was completely natural, as though there had never been and could never be any other options. I never questioned it, and my publisher didn’t, either. When I’m stuck, I still sometimes write the title “Theophanies” at the top of a page and see what happens. I think I could write into that title for the rest of my life and not be done with it.


4. We would love to know a little about your process of writing 

. How much planning vs discovery was involved? Did anything about the experience of writing or revising surprise you?

It was almost entirely discovery. I originally set out to write a very planned book about something else entirely, but every poem I wrote was stale and absent of risk or real emotion. I felt compelled at some point to write into my namesake, the matriarch Sarah, and when I finally gave myself permission to write a persona poem in her voice—the result of which is the poem “Annunciation”—it unlocked a new obsession. The most surprising part of revision once the book was accepted for publication was how painful the experience was, how much it hurt to reread and relive the hurt that led to the writing of certain poems. The things they grieved—patriarchal teachings, domestic violence, loneliness—didn’t stopped being relevant for me just because the book was done.

5. How do you want this work to be read? What do you most wish for from your reader?

I want it be read with generosity, an open mind, and a willingness to learn. I come to poetry to be challenged and to learn new words, concepts, and ways of seeing. I hope readers will take the time to explore new-to-them narratives about figures they might think are solely Biblical. I hope they’ll google what they don’t know rather than assume that their not knowing means this work isn’t for them. Please join me in my love of cross-narratives, and of the many valences of a story, dear readers!

6. One of the central tenets of RAWI's mission is promoting literary engagement with

SWANA writers. Are there any SWANA writers, past or present, who you feel have not received the readership or critical attention that they deserve?

As a South Asian, Muslim writer, I feel much kinship with my SWANA peers. Some contemporary SWANA poets I’ve encountered and been lucky to befriend / admire / learn from are Lubna Safi, Summer Farah, Hajjar Baban, Ladan Osman, Saba Keramati, and Sadia Hassan.


 we want to know: how did you celebrate this book's birth? How would you like us to celebrate with you?

I celebrated with my nearest and dearest friends, with a book cake, and with a beautiful launch in a beloved bookstore. I celebrated with my daughter, an infant, and cherished seeing her little hands try to turn the book’s pages. I would love for you to celebrate with me by paying a visit to your favorite tree and telling it hello from me, or by requesting 

 is a poet, teacher, and editor. She is the author of 

 (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of 

 poetry prize, her work has appeared in 

The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review,

 series, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for 

 and lives in the Bay Area, California.


"I write towards the untouchable and unknowable divine. I write against silence and erasure."

ZAGHROUTA!: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali

below the Radius of Arab American Writers logo with moon and stars in black and turquoise, turquoise text on white background with turquoise clouds reads: National Poetry Month: prompting us toward resistance & refusal, toward honesty & action with Rasha Abdulhadi

It is too late in this genocide to use more words when a few will do, or to withhold or delay all that we might offer each other from our hearts and hands. My heart breaks for how this world keeps us from each other, through labor or borders, by miles or money or bombs.

May any words you write or speak this month, to yourself or others, pull you closer to life—from rubble, from loneliness or desolation—and out of despair. Whatever you might say in your life, do not delay it. Do it now. Say it now.

Take 15 minutes or 30 minutes to try any of these. An hour if you really want to.

But no more than that in one sitting or per day.

May you find renewal, refreshment, good grounding in these practices.

offered in courage, with deep care, R. A.

Week one: Writing ourselves into the living archive

So many prompts are about content or form. I invite you to write about purpose, context, and curation this week. Be as specific as you dare. You have permission to be intimate, ambitious. See references below for texts you might write with or against.


Who do you trust to help you mean what you mean even more and express it more like you want to?

How would you like to be nourished by this work?

What fulcrum do your words lever against, and what do you seek to move by this effort?

What archives do you want your work to sing inside?

What would it mean to be published if there were no paper or websites?


(for even more, read through posts tagged here https://lithub.com/tag/open-letter/)

 An Update on the Boycott and Holding Cultural Institutions Accountable

Palestinian campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel 

Week two: Writing for ourselves and others

Write once for just you. What do you need to say most right now that you’re holding back, censoring, editing or softening. Or if softness is what you’re holding back, let yourself melt as much as you are able.


Write a second time for people you know, the people you share your daily life with, the people you talk to, the people closest to you—and these may not all be the same people, even if they overlap. Tell them what is obvious to you, everything that is so plain inside your skin or in the world that you might assume it doesn’t need saying or that they already know or understand or have heard it and agree. Say it anyway, directly, say it openly, say it plainly or elaborately, say it exhaustively. You are allowed to take this risk.


Write a third time into the world beyond who and what you know. Grow “what you know” and consider that your idea of limits on action, reach, impact might be bigger than you know. Whether you embrace uncertainty or push toward something new, stretch a bit. See how wide you can get.

 Let words live in relationship. Let words take up physical space!

Choose at least one thing from any of these prompts and share it with someone, anyone. Could be as a poem or just in conversation. Could be in a meeting or at a protest or action. Could be in a letter or work email, over dinner or the phone. Read on a streetcorner, send voice notes of you reading poetry to friends, post a poem on a wall, try wheatpasting, print zines and hand them out to strangers or leave them on a table at a school/library. Testify at a city council meeting!


Link to Palestine zines to print or paste from:

: Collection of Palestine Solidarity Zines 

Week three: Honoring anger and grief, peeling the layers with a freewrite

Who are the people you’re offering care to?

 Practice grieving, by yourself or with others, online or in person. Plan a memorial ritual

Practice embracing uncertainty as possibility. Perhaps anxiety isn’t exactly excitement, but perhaps there are ways to embrace paradoxical sources of energy to move outwards/forwards/through rather than feeling trapped, pinned, detained by despair or desolation. As much as you feel able and willing, ask some of the questions you don’t know the answer to yet. Let possibility bloom in that silence rather than certain doom. What is needed to nurture such possible flowering, fruits, harvests, or even jailbreaks?

Try a shared version of this, with one person or with a group.

You can create new writing for this or use this method to revise existing work

1. Easy to understand: speak plainly what you most long to say right now.

2. Harder to understand: rewrite it as something baroque, obtuse, vague, hidden, oblique, opaque.

3. Start a fight: rewrite as a cruel truth, something rude, insulting, unfair, or hurtful.

4. Avoid a fight: rewrite it to be very kind, polite, or careful.

5. Comfort yourself: rewrite it as what you most need to hear/read, what you’re waiting for

6. Discomfort yourself: rewrite it as what you would do anything to avoid admitting

7. Revise it to help someone else, using only a remix of what you’ve written in the above versions.


The Manifesto of Hope and Dignity, the Unity Intifada

A high-contrast black and white photo in which a genderqueer Palestinian person is leaning to the right and staring sidelong at the viewer against a dark background with graffiti. They are wearing black lipstick, large cat-eye glasses, a grey and black rippled scarf, and have long hair with a pale streak in front.

Rasha Abdulhadi. Photo courtesy of the author.

Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.

Mentorship

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ZAGHROUTA!: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali

Prompting us toward resistance & refusal, toward honesty & action