Renowned aphorist Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail writes alongside a catastrophe beyond words, trying to shelter in words what remains of our humanity. To be a Minister of Loneliness and Lightkeeper, tending to the light. — Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge
Palestine is personal for writer, Yahia Lababidi. His Palestinian grandmother, Rabiha Dajani — educator, activist & social worker — was forced to flee her ancestral home in Jerusalem, at gunpoint, some eighty years ago.
As an Arab-American, Lababidi feels deeply betrayed by the USA’s blind support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
In Palestine Wail, he reminds us that religion is not politics, Judaism is not Zionism, and to criticize the immoral, illegal actions of Israel is not antisemitism — especially since, as an Arab, Lababidi is a Semite, himself.
Using both poetry and prose, Lababidi reflects on how we are neither our corrupt governments, nor our compromised media. Rather, we are partners in humanity, members of one human family. Not in Our Name will the unholy massacres of innocent Palestinians be committed (two-thirds of whom are women and children) nor in the false name of ‘self-defense’.
In turn, Lababidi reminds us that starvation as a weapon of war is both cruel and criminal, as is collective punishment.
Palestine Wail invites us to bear witness to this historical humanitarian crisis, unfolding in real-time, while not allowing ourselves to be deceived, intimidated or silenced. We are made aware of the basic human truths that no lasting peace can be founded upon profound injustice and that the jailor is never Free…
Yahia Lababidi, an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background, has crafted a poignant collection which serves as a heartfelt tribute to the Palestinian people, their struggles, and their resilience in the face of an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The collection, described as a love letter to Gaza, draws inspiration from the rich literary tradition of Palestinian resistance literature. Lababidi, known for his critically-acclaimed books of aphorisms, essays, and poetry, brings his unique voice to this personal, political and spiritual work.
Palestine Wail addresses us in a variety of voices: outrage, lamentation and pity, in attempting to honor the pain of the oppressed Palestinian people, while also celebrating their enduring spirit.
Lababidi’s Wail, ultimately, is a prayerful work seeking peace, healing and reconciliation—a testament to the transformative power of literature to keep hope alive in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
These are necessary and truthful poems. Yahia Lababidi powerfully illuminates this heartbreaking time and terrible season in the history of our world. This book, like a lantern in darkness, brings to light the truth of lives we must learn to honor and remember. — James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion
Yahia Lababidi’s stunning and resonant collection, Palestine Wail, addresses the outrage felt by many of the oppressed Palestinian supporters and more. He also speaks of the lamentations of his people and the show of pity, compassion, and empathy from many members of the human family from all around the world. — The Indefatigable Longing For Peace And Rapprochement In Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail By Michael Parker.
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Yahia Lababidi, author of eleven collections of poetry and prose. His aphorisms and poems have gone viral and are used in classrooms and religious services and have been featured at international film festivals. Lababidi has also contributed to news, literary,…
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Nikesha Breeze has taken pages from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, taken his words, and forced them to leave his colonized mind. She has made the words her own in poetic form. She illuminates the invisible Black voices inside, a radical, surgical, and unapologetic Black appropriation, at the same time as a careful birthing and spiritual road map. The resulting poems are sizzling purifications, violent restorations of integrity, pain, wound, bewilderment, rage, and, sometimes, luminous generosity. This is a work of Reclamation. The author, Nikesha Breeze, has slowly, page by page, reclaimed the text of the book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. This racist turn-of-the-19th-century book was pivotal in the continued dehumanization of Black people and in particular of African people, as it painted an image of bestiality on the Congo people and the continent. It is laced with racist imagery and language. The author has reappropriated the book, page by page, making “BlackOut” poetry for each page, isolating methodically the words to create new poems of power and black voice within the text —stealing the language and reappropriating the power.
Truth be told, I never thought I would write another volume of poetry after the last, I will not Dance to Your Beat (2011). The reason was that my previous volumes were reactive to the circumstances of the times. Patriots and Cockroaches (1992) was a reaction to the socio-political corruption that had engulfed Africa and dimmed the enthusiasm that had been built by the years of struggle for independence. Whereas we thought we were stepping into a post-colonial era, what we stepped into was a vicious neo-colonial times. The next collection, Poems on the Run (1995) was a reaction to military autocracy and the repression that followed. The volume was literally written underground. This was followed by Intercepted (1998) all written while detained at Kalakuta Republic of Alagbon Close. We Thought it was Oil But it was Blood (2002) responded to two things primarily – extractivism and the accompanying human and environmental rights abuses in the Niger Delta and elsewhere. The massive erosion of biodiversity and attacks on food sovereignty through the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into our agricultural system inspired I Will not Dance to your Beat.
What you have in your hands, or on your screens, is a compilation that is largely more meditative than the previous collections. There are moments of reflection on the colonial and neoliberal foundations that permit a willful disconnection from nature and the resultant destructive extractivism.
Some of the poems came through conversations and poetry writing sessions with Peter Molnar, Maryam al-Khawaja — Rafto Human Rights laureates and Salil Tripathi, a member of the board of PEN International, in August 2017. The sessions held at a beautifully rustic location in Celleno, Italy, were documented on celluloid by the duo of Maria Galliana Dyrvik and Anita Jonsterhaug Vedå of SMAU, a multimedia firm in Norway. Poetic relationship with Maria and Anita has continued over the years and their work continues to inspire more and more poems.
Morocco, 1359. The people of Fes are living in deprivation under the rule of an unjust sultan. Zakaria is a young Muslim scholar trying to sustain his family while committing to a rigid moral code. To provide for his sickly daughter, he sacrifices his principles and seeks a job at the palace, where he gradually becomes entangled in a web of intrigue, his conscience tormented by serving the sultan. In the hope of fleeing from the constraints of his world, he joins the quest of Muhammad ibn Yusuf, the exiled king of Granada, and his enchanting sister, Aisha, to reclaim their throne. Together, they set out to Andalusia on a journey that will call into question all of Zakaria’s beliefs and change the history of the Iberian Peninsula for decades to come.
Then He Sent Prophets is a story about the suffering of young idealists in a world of inevitable compromise. Throughout his journey, Zakaria faces internal struggles that are timeless and universal, strives to reconcile his faith with the world, doubts the motives behind his desire to live morally, and ends up wondering whether a life consisting of one compromise after another is one worth living.
Then He Sent Prophets is a novel for our moment. Set around the political struggles of fourteenth-century Granada, it is a deeply sympathetic and passionately human look at how one might make—or fail to make—moral, decent choices when living in a violent, indecent world.
— Marcia Lynx Qualey, founding editor of ArabLit
Circumstances present Zakaria with a position at the palace. […] Can someone critical of the sultan and conscious of his corruption maintain integrity while serving at the palace? And what’s the line between complete innocence and partial complicity? These are the questions at the crux of his ethical dilemma. […] It’s easy to make connections between Zakaria’s inner dilemmas and those many of us grapple with today.
— Hafsa Lodi in The New Arab
Fanon Today: Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth is about how new generations are discovering their mission of humanizing the world by claiming Fanon as a thinker for our times. Why Fanon, why now? For the wretched of the earth, conditions have not improved since Fanon’s time and in some cases they have worsened. Reason and revolt are inescapable, quite simply because, as Fanon wrote, it has become ‘impossible for them to breathe, in more than one sense of the word’. To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Fanon’s death (in 1961), the contributors to this book address the resonances of Fanon’s thinking on movements of resistance and mass revolutionary uprisings occurring in response to repression or state violence in Algeria, Brazil, Ghana, Ireland, Kenya, Pakistan, Palestine, Portugal, South Africa, Syria, Trinidad, USA and beyond. The driving force of each chapter of this unique collection of writings is Fanonian praxis, engaging with Fanon the thinker and Fanon the revolutionary.
The book explores the challenges Palestinian filmmakers confront to develop a cinema that gives expression to the national narrative. The research is based on collaborative work to research and screen Palestinian films involving Film Lab Palestine, Sheffield Palestine Cultural Exchange and Sheffield Hallam University as part of the Creative Interruptions research project (https://creativeinterruptions.com/palestiniancinema/). We explored the political, economic and cultural factors that impact on Palestinian film production and some of the barriers encountered in profiling and screening Palestinian films in Britain.
Beside the Sickle Moon is near future literary activism based on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The story tells a first person narrative through Laeth Awad, a Palestinian who lives above his convenience store experiencing days pass through smoke clouds with his cousin Aylul. One night upon returning to their village from Ramallah they encounter an Israeli checkpoint within the buffer zone that hadn’t been there before. It isn’t long until the two stumble upon Israel’s plans to construct a luxury hotel for incoming settlers, Ma’al Luz. Demolition crews and military personnel are due to fulfill this contract in the months to come and with them as overseer is the infamous Meir Cohen, a Mossad operative who played a key role in the fall of Gaza.
Aylul believes from their father, an Al Qassam militant who died in the battle for Jericho, that only the threat of annihilation breeds the best of human action. They use their contacts to connect with the factions, who grant them strength to defend their village from occupation. With these resources in hand Aylul forms Al Mubarizun, a group crowning themselves Palestine’s final resistance.
Laeth doubts the existence of a future, lost in philosophical ambivalence as he tries to follow his cousin into the depths of guerrilla warfare. He questions the futility of resistance when all former allies have normalized relations with Israel. And what of the innocents on the other side of the Wall who had no say in where they were born? Though a minority of the population, he is not alone in this sentiment. Palestinian youth begin to empathize with this logic enough to create a new social movement, the Forgotten Ones. Coining the derogatory term that their critics slung, the NGO advocates for a peaceful transition to Israel’s colonization where most Palestinians hear whimpers of surrender.
Set in a hauntingly plausible future, where Israel has marked a century of Palestinian occupation … As a novel of the future, Beside the Sickle Moon is, unsurprisingly, preoccupied with temporality, attempting to reconcile the vastness of macro-historical events with the immediacy of everyday life. … One of the most chilling features of Husien’s novel as history is the world’s renewed abandonment of Palestine. In a future of systemic global crisis, nations have closed ranks and shut their eyes. Israeli mines run on the slave labor of Palestinian captives, and refugee camps have become invisibilized death zones … — Londiwe Gamedze https://africasacountry.com/2024/11/reading-the-present-as-history
The book is a literary project with extra-literary objectives and implications. The texts combine various original writing styles to provoke the reader’s creative imagination and make auratic social space attainable. For realizing its main goal, through its creative aesthetics, the book debases normalized forms of social violence, exclusionism, and tribalism. It is meant to be universally relatable by an average reader regardless of her perceived and proclaimed identities. In a way, it is an embodiment of postnihilism, which is a philosophical theory that emphasizes the significance of negativity in the face of unspoken social rules of exclusionism. Postnihilism has been theorized in Revolutionary Hope After Nihilism (Bloomsbury 2022). “Auratic space” is a concept advanced in Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura(SUNY Press 2019) and The Death of Home (De Gruyter 2024).
S. Bahozde’s (Saladdin Ahmed) Elsewhereness antipoetry actualizes its stated marching orders via forceful dialectical serial logic and keen humor (hilarity, really). This book is an “act of attacking the unimaginability of a better world. The Bikonian-Fanonian bursts of anti-poetics, their counter-measures break past the givens to model how such—proper name, place, political calculus—engender and resist, repel and authorize cunning sequences of anti-capitalist trespass. An (anti-) poetics that playfully negates its aesthetic medium of refusal and choice, all the while setting its sights on its key mark: encroaching nihilism in the face of brutal displacement. S. Bahozde’s work dismantles claims in favor of negations, clearing forth space for open-ended, future liberatory claims. Its poetry as propositional logic’s meditations on completion, works, and absence is shudderingly smart. This is poetry as food fueling revolutionary exilic work.”
— Jeremy Matthew Glick, Professor African Diasporic Literature and Modern Drama. Hunter College, English Department, City University of New York, author of The Black Radical Tragic
A voice speaks here which is at once profoundly Kurdish and cosmopolitan. While tracing the melancholy of the spaces of exile, its loneliness and longing, Bahozde takes the reader into spaces where the disillusionment with history does not lead to nihilism. Here the brevity of aphorism tackles the tangled metaphysics of absence and existence. Here is a foreignness that take us away from “pickled banalities” and disturbs our complacent belonging to places, nations, and histories
— Rohit Dalvi, professor of philosophy, Brock University, author of Deleuze and Guattari Explained
This is a passionate and bold set of works that range over topics and concerns widely with an almost febrile intensity. Bahozde’s poetic negations of “normalcy” gain their strength both from rich philosophical insights and from a searching, provocative imagination. Even when set in moments of apparent languor, they have an evident, restless energy.
— Gaurav Majumdar, Whitman College; author, Illegitimate Freedom: Informality in Modernist Literature, 1900-1940
Spoon and Shrapnel uniquely combines poetry and recipes to explore the experience of surviving the Iran-Iraq War through a child’s eyes. As a survivor herself, Sheema Kalbasi brings forth raw memories of fear, loss, and resilience through verse, while accompanying these poignant moments with simple, nourishing recipes that sustained her family amidst scarcity and danger. Each poem is paired with a recipe, alternating between the emotional depth of poetry and the practical art of cooking traditions that offered hope during wartime. The poems deliver vivid, emotional insights into life during the conflict, while the recipes—crafted with scarce ingredients—represent moments of comfort and survival. Together, they form a narrative tapestry where food and poetry intertwine, reflecting how one family, and an entire culture, persevered.
Kalbasi’s work goes beyond her personal experience to present a universal story of resilience, illustrating how, even in the harshest conditions, humanity finds strength in the simple rituals of cooking, eating, and storytelling. Spoon and Shrapnel is a tribute to both physical and emotional survival, offering readers a rare glimpse into everyday life during war.
Richard Modiano
Yahia Lababidi’s new collection of poetry Palestine Wail offers a profound and poignant exploration of human emotions, social injustices, and the resilience of the human spirit. Lababidi weaves together themes of hope, suffering, and solidarity with a keen sensitivity that resonates deeply.— Richard Modiano https://synchchaos.com/richard-modiano-reviews-yahia-lababidis-poetry-collection-palestine-wail/
Angele Ellis
Angele Ellis: Love in a Time of Genocide | In Palestine Wail, Yahia Lababidi seeks the redemption of the human soul: Yahia Lababidi’s eleventh book draws on the spiritual and aphoristic traditions of Middle Eastern and Arab American poetry—from Rumi to Kahlil Gibran—as well as on its vein of political and social critique. This makes Lababidi’s brief free verse poems at once meditations on peace and bulletins from the battlefield.
In his introduction to this collection, Lababidi references not only the Sufi mystic Rumi and the Christian allegorist Gibran, but a range of notable writers and rebels of the past century, including Martin Luther King, Scott Peck, Leonard Cohen, and Elie Wiesel.
In a passionate afterword, Lababidi evokes the spirits of Palestinian poets Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972) and Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)—separated by a generation, yet both killed by Israeli bombs, along with members of their families. He advocates for an end to the “daily horrors” which since this past October, have deprived 2.3 million Palestinians of their homes. According to the latest figures provided by the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks, and thousands more are buried under rubble and threatened by illness.
Tina Bexson
‘Palestine Wail’ by Yahia Lababidi, reviewed by Tina Bexson
Lababidi began writing Palestine Wail – in effect, a love letter to Gaza – after October 7th last year. Its introduction and afterword, both written by the author, include ample references to others; mostly poets such as Rumi and Gibran, but also writers, activists, artists, scholars, and intellectuals.
How any poet can hope to do justice to the magnitude of Gaza may seem baffling. For it is mostly beyond words. But Lababidi does, at least as far as it is possible to do so. Also by acknowledging the futility of words – especially if insincerely expressed – he deftly uses his prose and poems to explore the relentless horror, anguish, and suffering; the understandable resulting anger; and then something – however intangible – resembling trust, compassion, and hope. He warns us that if we ignore the latter – which he refers to as ‘spiritual laws’ – the repercussions will be insurmountable. Throughout Palestine Wail, he ultimately attempts to transcend ire and embrace hope, emphasising the moral duty we have towards each other.
In light of recent evidence including that from Israel’s network of torture camps and prisons, these monstrosities likely extend way beyond what has been exposed so far. Then there is the growing 95,000 injured and the 1.9 million people displaced.
Lababidi calls out the complicity of so-called democratic Western leaders in one of the world’s longest running, unresolved wars of the twenty-first century. The seeds of which in truth were partly planted by Europe – especially the British with Balfour – over a century ago – resulting in a ‘war’ that has cumulated in the genocide of all genocides.
The continued danger of this blinded complicity means that Israel will not only extend its atrocities but will never be held accountable in any way either.
By far one of the worst genocides of the twenty-first century, Gaza will go down in history for generations to come, just as the Holocaust did. And does. And along with its silence and complicity, not dissimilar to that of Nazi Germany.
Israel is now seen to be exploiting its war on Gaza to justify actions against Palestinians and to expand control over Gaza and the West Bank.
I await further work from Yahia Lababidi.
Amanda Holmes Duffy
Poetry is also song in language. And what is song if not harmony in which we might find healing? Writing from the Palestinian diaspora, Yahia Lababidi, an Egyptian American of Palestinian descent, dedicates Palestine Wail (Daraja Press) to his grandmother, Rabiha Dajani. “Forced to flee her ancestral home in Palestine at gunpoint nearly 80 years ago,” he writes, “she went on to become a remarkable educator, activist, and social worker.”
The collection’s opening section, “Unbearable Casualties,” is angry, confused, and conflicted. You feel the poet trying to write himself sane (his phrase to me in a recent communication). Perhaps some of these poems hatched a little early, but the subsequent sections, “Lingering at the Threshold” and “On a Far Shore,” are marked by spiritual and philosophical yearning. For him, during Ramadan:
To fast is to slow down
Almost to a stillness
And distill what is necessary:
Sacrifice, patience, obedience
— In other words, radical gratitude.
He also reaches for wise humor in such poems as “Minister of Loneliness,” which is an actual position recently formed by the U.K. government. He writes:
Successful candidates must be virtuosos of suffering
sensitive, of course, yet impervious to lingering sadness
tirelessly capable of encouraging others despite,
at times, feeling defeated or assaulted by pointlessness
Lababidi continually endeavors to tend the light during times of darkness. To breathe in his poems is to embark on a journey from a heartfelt wail of sorrow and despair into silent prayer.
—Amanda Holmes Duffy https://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/features/on-poetry-september-2024
James Crews
The collection, described as a love letter to Gaza, draws inspiration from the rich literary tradition of Palestinian resistance literature. Lababidi, known for his critically-acclaimed books of aphorisms, essays, and poetry, brings his unique voice to this personal, political and spiritual work.
Palestine Wail addresses us in a variety of voices: outrage, lamentation and pity, in attempting to honor the pain of the oppressed Palestinian people, while also celebrating their enduring spirit.
Lababidi’s Wail, ultimately, is a prayerful work seeking peace, healing and reconciliation—a testament to the transformative power of literature to keep hope alive in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
These are necessary and truthful poems. Yahia Lababidi powerfully illuminates this heartbreaking time and terrible season in the history of our world. This book, like a lantern in darkness, brings to light the truth of lives we must learn to honor and remember. — James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion
Michael Parker
Yahia Lababidi’s stunning and resonant collection, Palestine Wail, addresses the outrage felt by many of the oppressed Palestinian supporters and more. He also speaks of the lamentations of his people and the show of pity, compassion, and empathy from many members of the human family from all around the world. — The Indefatigable Longing For Peace And Rapprochement In Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail By Michael Parker.
Shohreh Laici
Yahia Lababidi’s poems conjure a seemingly impossible future in the Middle East that readers can imagine now. He shows a kind of world that can only exist if there is freedom of expression in the first place. … Lababidi attempts to build a language in Palestine Wail that challenges the dominant lexicon about Gaza and Israel. He is protecting language—the ability to call things what they are—and in doing so, he is protecting humanity. … Because of his struggle to get Palestine Wail even published, Lababidi’s poetry, and its cry for peace, took on new meaning for me—about the ability to speak openly, to express yourself freely. A poet’s identity is to use words to create new language. A poet’s responsibility is to create language that challenges institutions of power and revolts against the domineering narratives in society, especially when they try to restrict any alternative. When a publisher like the one who dropped Lababidi’s book threatens words themselves, free expression itself is threatened.— Shohreh Laici https://dawnmena.org/on-yahia-lababidis-palestine-wail-and-the-poetry-of-free-expression/
Jewish Voice for Labour
https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/a-poetic-love-letter-to-gaza-a-belief-in-hope/
Palestinian poets have long been – and remain – important within the struggle for justice. Yahia Lababidi has published many collections of poetry an d prose and we commend his latest. Below we also publish an interview with the publisher of his latest work. But take it perhaps from Ken Loach who says of “Palestine Wail”: ‘In their simplicity and poignancy these poems are immensely touching. They show that Palestinians, like all of us, find solace from the eternal rhythms of the natural world. And this at a time when they struggle to survive in the midst of the horrors and cruelty inflicted on them by Israel and their powerful supporters. Please read Yahia Lababidi’s poems, and share his glimpse of hope in the darkest of times.’ Yahia Lababidi cannot help but be political and he, like so many who speak out, has faced censorship; in an interview with PEN America when asked about experience of censorship he said: “In a two hour Zoom meeting, the publisher let me know that they were uneasy with my use of words like Genocide, even murder — as they felt that it was “prejudging a legal matter” — and they went so far as to suggest that if they were to publish my book, it would result in scandal for them and some of their authors would walk out.” (his complete answer to the question and link to the interview is at the end of this post, Ed.)
Ken Loach
‘In their simplicity and poignancy these poems are immensely touching. They show that Palestinians, like all of us, find solace from the eternal rhythms of the natural world. And this at a time when they struggle to survive in the midst of the horrors and cruelty inflicted on them by Israel and their powerful supporters. Please read Yahia Lababidi’s poems, and share his glimpse of hope in the darkest of times.’
Rebecca Romani
Lababidi links Gaza clearly to other genocides, passing through Elie Wiesel to the memories of genocide at the hands of the American government for the Lakota and Dakota Sioux at Standing Rock. It is these genocides as well as the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century, which formed the backbone of the Final Solution and now find their echo in the events in Gaza.
Lababidi invokes other writers, other voices such as the Persian poet Rumi and the Lebanese writer, Khalil Gibran to lend fullness to his grief. But Lababidi also uses this opening essay to encourage the reader to be open to the thought that wounded people (those acted against), often turn that violence on others and to reflect that our modern societies are often wounded both by what was done to us and what we have done in return.
[…]
Flowers, trees, birds, music, and sunshine, break through the fog of despair that lingers over the collection. It is no accident that Lababidi invokes nature, almost like a major component of hope and healing. The garden, a collaboration with nature, is stronger than the urbicide – the murder of urban centers. Olive trees that have stood for centuries, flowers that bloom every season recall the beauty and magic of Islamic gardens which themselves serve as invocations of Paradise.
—Rebecca Romani https://www.palestinechronicle.com/to-mourn-is-to-be-human-a-review-of-palestinian-wail-by-yahia-lababidi/
Soha Hesham
This poignant collection in Palestine Wail is a blend of poetry and prose in which Lababidi underscores a crucial distinction between religion and politics, and Judaism that should not be confused with Zionism, articulating how people are not defined by their governments or the biased narratives of the media. The collection delves deeply into the humanitarian crisis that’s been going on for more than a year in Gaza and is a call for people to speak out against lies and silence. Lababidi captures the struggle of the Palestinian people as well as their exceptional resilience. — Soha Hesham, https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/536781.aspx
Narendra Pachkede
In just under 100 pages, Lababidi weaves grief, rage, and compassion into a tapestry of moral clarity, forcing readers to confront the cost of indifference. If his words are not heeded, Gaza will indeed stand as a testament to one of the most egregious genocides of the century, its suffering echoing across generations—much like the Holocaust, with silence and complicity damning us all over again.— Narendra Pachkede, https://timesheadline.in/en/2024/12/31/peace-lily/
Omar Sabbagh
These poems are raw and moving. While in one sense Lababidi is realistic enough to recognize “The Limits
of Love,” as one title has it, in another, he can speak of the “limitless heart” (“Walls”). This returns me to Gillian Rose [Mourning Becomes the Law]. One of her final insights in life turned on the capacity of the individual to recognize that the only “unconditionality” of love was to be found in its very
conditionality. And Lababidi’s book lives this out, by its continuous questioning of and between self and other, there and here, now and then – our wounds, again, as “peepholes.” And at the last, the Palestinian wail has been heard – and may it be heard the more and more and more.- Omar Sabbagh, review in Two Thirds North, 2025 p164-8.https://www.su.se/department-of-english/research/publications/two-thirds-north-1.645406