All Strangers: now for your ears!

Hello friend,

I realized recently that I miss working at magazines. So I’m structuring this more like a magazine, with a few short, “front of book” bits to start, and then a couple slightly more substantial items, and finally a feature. It’s all a little long, but hey, why not.

Green Border, a film by Agnieszka Holland, is about migrants on the Poland-Belarus border, a topic I hadn’t followed very well. Spoiler: It’s a terrible situation. But this film is gorgeous, with excellent acting. With a thriller pace, it weaves together stories of refugees, local residents, activists, and a Polish border guard (which reminded me of Francisco Cantu’s excellent memoir about his time with US Border Patrol, The Line Becomes a River).

Last month I sat in on a call with Lina Sergie Attar, head of Karam Foundation, talking about her first visit home since before the war. Her photos were eye-opening: some absolute ruination, but also heartening pics of the intact parts of Damascus, and little new details such as vendors selling fruit, which had for years been limited. She said she saw one kid asking his dad for “the little tree”—took a while to figure out he meant a pineapple!

There’s a tremendous amount of work to do, and Karam is committed to supporting long-term, especially through education. Their goal is and always has been to raise new Syrian leaders. Donate if you like!

There’s also severe hunger and shortage of shelter—Karam is covering that a little, but for these short-term needs, I also recommend Syria Relief and Development. Ramadan is starting soon, so it would be nice to support people with food!

I love this newsletter because no sooner did I mention in my last one that AS is trying to work in medicine again, after arriving from Afghanistan, than one reader (thanks, April!) wrote to say her state, Tennessee, was the first to enact a law waiving the US residency requirement, meaning foreign-trained doctors can get a license to work there. With a little digging, I found that several other states—including Virginia, Alabama, Florida, and Massachusetts—have recently followed suit. And then reader Elizabeth let me know of a nonprofit, Upwardly Global, that specializes in getting immigrants recertified.

I relayed everything to AS, which got him excited — and recently he messaged and said he’d gotten a job for now as an assistant in a cardiology practice in San Antonio. He sent a smiling pic with one of his coworkers. Great to see him with a stethoscope around his neck!

At long last, All Strangers Are Kin is an audiobook, and I am really pleased with the result! The narrator, Julia Farhat, speaks Arabic, and it was great to work with someone who was also on the same page regarding accents and pronunciation.* (And I read the tiny preface.)

Many of you are reading this newsletter because you’ve already read ASAK, so obviously zero pressure to buy the audio. But I would really love it if you could:

(Libby and Hoopla are great resources for ebooks and audiobooks; your public library probably has access to one, and maybe both. They’re fantastic!)

If you want to go straight to buy-buy-buy, I recommend on Libro.fm (where your preferred indie bookstore gets a cut), and you can find it on Apple Books, Audible, Spotify (you have to search with the title and my name), Audiobooks.com, and pretty much everywhere else you can think of. (But do let me know if you can’t find it somewhere you think it should be!)

And FWIW, all the royalties are going straight to me. Thanks to windfall money from Covid-era unemployment, I was able to produce this myself. I probably won’t make back the investment, but that’s fine—I just would love more people to be able to hear the Arabic and meet all the lovely people I met.

*Accents: minimal! And why would anyone have an accent when they’re speaking their own language?! Pronunciation: matters! I talked to one narrator who literally said, “Oh, no one cares about that!” And then as proof, they shared an anecdote about confirming with an author how reviewers had criticized his vetted-with-the-author pronunciations of names of fictional characters in a completely invented world. Not the same, bruh!

I’ve had a hard time writing anything about this, because everything I start with is upended a week later. At this moment: thank God for the ceasefire, which at this moment is in a very tenuous state.

One constant, though, started last spring, around May, when I was just incredibly overwhelmed with the horrible stuff I’d been seeing. And I realized that part of what was adding to the overwhelm was a sense that it wasn’t being acknowledged much elsewhere, and so then it felt like my weird duty to be a person who knew, who remembered. So that created stress that I’d forget, and I’d just wind up spluttering vaguely at people, “Then that thing happened with the one hospital, and that thing with the babies in the NICU in the other hospital, and, and…”

So as I always do when I find myself overwhelmed, I made a list. Specifically, a spreadsheet. On the first pass, I sat for about 20 minutes, and very quickly filled up more than 70 lines with specific incidents—not all horrible things, but also turning points such as the first ICJ order, and the hostages returned in the November 2023 ceasefire. Later, I went back and added dates and sources.

I was surprised by how many of the incidents had actually been covered in mainstream US media. But Palestine, like everywhere else in the Middle East, is subject to the same flattening-by-headlines that provoked me to write All Strangers Are Kin: Even though each headline independently is a terrible aberration, together they make up most Western media consumers’ idea of “normal,” and after a little while, no one pays attention.

And ironically, even in making this mega-list of tragedies, I had managed to replicate that flattening effect. And by writing short, headline-ish summaries, I’d stripped away the context of what made these events so affecting to me personally.

So where it says “Mido Halimy killed,” it should really say, “Young guy on Instagram whose videos appeared in my feed, showing him excitedly reporting on the plants he was growing outside his tent — he was killed in an airstrike on the beach.”

Where it says “Refaat al-Areer killed,” it should really say, “The death I’d been dreading, even if I didn’t know the specifics—I’d been following so many Gazan accounts that there was a decent chance one of them would wind up dead. And here was the first one, a famous poet, someone I had followed for years, and occasionally winced at his harsh words toward Israel, but who, in recent weeks, I’d come to understand why he spoke the way he did.”

Where it says “Audio file lie about Al-Ahli”—well, I’m not a journalist, so I can use the word lie. For once, being a not-good Arabic student was a form of expertise: I knew that the “phone call” that the IDF produced as evidence the rocket had come from Gaza was not made by native speakers because I could understand each and every word of it. Ordinarily, I cannot understand any native speaker word for word, unless they are speaking directly to me, as if I’m five years old, and it’s about food, and it’s in Egyptian dialect. So this was clearly some recording cooked up in the IDF propaganda labs (and experts agreed).

Seeing with my own eyes (hearing with my own ears) how blatantly the Israeli government was willing to lie—that was a radicalizing moment, and I admit that everything since than has been colored by this. Just as shocking as the lie was the fact that there have been no consequences. Daniel Hagari should not have a job! No journalist should consider the IDF a reputable source! (And it would serve them right if they did finally tell the truth and no one believed them; can you tell I absorbed Aesop’s “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” at a young age?) But here we are, still with most media outlets taking the IDF’s version of events at face value.

Later in 2024, in late fall, I did another big brain dump into the spreadsheet. Some of it was getting repetitive (“another flour massacre”). I added to it off and on, and then the real tragic repetition: Khaled Nabhan being killed. The ceasefire came about a month later—again, thank God.

Writing all these events down was more therapeutic than I expected. I was aiming to clear my head of the low-grade “don’t forget” anxiety, but it also helped clear at least a little bit of the imagery. It was similar to what I experienced when I was writing All Strangers Are Kin, when the process of drafting and revising a scene “wrote over” my actual memory, so that now I can only remember certain moments with people exactly as I wrote them.

It made me sad to lose some of those visceral memories from my ASAK travel, but with Gaza imagery, it was a relief. Looking up news stories and copy-pasting links overwrote the experience of first seeing these events on Twitter—often in video from Gaza journalists on the scene, or worse, from anguished family members—with a more dispassionate feeling. This Happened. That Happened. Just as It Has Been Happening. And even if the list represents some of the worst things I’ve known humans to do in my lifetime, I’m glad I wrote it all down.

What I keep returning to is two things: First, I’m shocked at how every structure set up to stop this mass killing failed. I wrote my reps, I went to protests (the whole world went to protests!), the UN put forward resolutions, the ICC issued warrants, the ICJ took the genocide case—and none of it helped. It took a president-elect with dumb vanity and no morals just to force a pause, only so he could look like a hero and put himself in a position to profit from the situation.

Second, I’m utterly dismayed at how many Americans and Europeans have fully written off Arabs and Arab culture. I shouldn’t be surprised—this dehumanization is what made me write ASAK, after all—but it’s just. so. much. deeper than I realized. And even harder for me to comprehend, as my experiences and relationships with Arabs and Muslims have been perhaps the longest and most consistent joy of my life. (Fortunately I now see people discovering the joy of Arabic language and music and food and people on TikTok and Instagram, and it truly warms my heart.)

My flimsy little list also made me intensely grateful for all the lawyers and other experts who are thoroughly documenting this. Thank you, Francesca Albanese. Thank you, Human Rights Watch. Thank you, South African lawyers at the ICJ. I’m grateful to all the people who’ve seen what I’ve seen and acknowledge it.

And speaking of seeing and acknowledging, one last but important note: When I wrote a newsletter back in late October 2023, it was with a plea for empathy for Palestinians. A friend replied with a long and caring email, asking why I hadn’t mentioned Hamas’s brutality on October 7. If this had not come from a friend, I might have brushed it off as the both-sidesing common in the media at the time. But my friend took the time to explain how this lack of acknowledgment had made them feel, and also to mention some of the terrifying videos they had seen of October 7 (which I had not!) and antisemitic responses. This reminder that others were seeing a different facet of what had happened helped me see why the discourse was happening the way it was, and how devastating it could be on a deeply personal level. Of course. But sometimes it still takes a nudge to do the work of looking from another perspective. To quote my friend (happy to give you credit if you want; let me know ♥), “yes, the problem is the occupation, and yes, we should all be sickened by what was done on October 7.” No but, just and.

So I’m deeply grateful for everyone who’s reading and who stays in conversation with me and helps me expand the way I see the world.

Thank you and much love!

Zora