post archive

Blue-Naped Chlorophonia, photo by Caren Jahre

Last month I went on a two-week journey to Colombia, the highlight of which was a nine-day birding trip that departed from Barranquilla and went through the Sierra Madre Mountains and to the Guajira Peninsula. In the cloud forest and on the Caribbean coast we got up before dawn to go in search of rare and endemic birds, including the Sapphire-bellied Hummingbird and the critically endangered Blue-Billed Curassow. In addition to hundreds of species of birds, we also saw Howler Monkeys, Cotton-Topped Tamarins, a vast array of wildflowers, and dozens of butterflies. I knew that Colombia was one of the most biodiverse places on earth, but to see the variety of flora and fauna was an absolute delight and a welcome distraction.

When I arrived home on February 3, a sense of dread overtook me. Now each time that I look at the headlines about the rampage of the horsemen of the apocalypse, I think of all the suffering they are unleashing, and my heart is torn to shreds. I feel like a tiny piece of flotsam in a raging sea and want to sink to the ocean floor. Then I take a deep, slow breath and think, I can’t let them paralyze me with grief and rage. That’s what they want. They want us to feel powerless in the face of their cruel, venal wrecking machine. But we have an obligation to ourselves and to each other to take meaningful action.

Daily I repeat the mottos that help me keep me afloat in these turbulent times.

The only recognizable feature of hope is action.

~ Grace Paley

Choose your lane, find your people.

~ Mariam Kaba

Freedom is a constant struggle.

~ Angela Davis

The voice of the people is louder than the roar of the cannon.

~ Armenian proverb

I have been volunteering with The Ark Immigration Clinic at CBST, and continuing my mentoring of young writers in and from Palestine via We Are Not Numbers and the Gaza Scholarship Initiative. I’m also trying to figure out what else to do locally to mitigate the worst effects of the horsemen, and have been feeling inspired by the organizing of the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement and For The Many in the Hudson Valley. The Working Families Party is also doing great work.

On a recent Substack post entitled You’re Not a Superhero, Joshua P. Hill of New Means put it beautifully:

You don’t need to save the world, you can’t save the world, but together we can move in that direction. It takes thousands and millions of us doing what we can taking the steps in front of us, reaching out to connect with others and to expand the actions we can collectively take and the power we can collectively wield.

In recent podcast interview (see below for link), the ACLU’s Chase Strangio said in a similar vein, If I could have listeners remember one thing, it is that our power grows when we are in solidarity with each other. Right now, there is a sense of collective exhaustion, fear, and not knowing where to turn. But the single thing we can do is build power with one another. And then my action item is to go take a risk for somebody who has less power than you do.

My literary mentee and friend Sahar in Gaza, who has been struggling with despair herself, reacted to my angst about the sociopaths at the helm of the U.S. government by sending me this message:

They won’t be able to steal our hope and our strength. We will weaken and grieve at times, but we will always get back up, right?

Yes, my dear wise Sahar. We will always get back up.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy Kricorian

RECOMMENDED READING

I received a lovely prepublication review of THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD by Eleanor Bader on New Pages. The official publication date is April 1, and you can preorder the book here.

Great piece by M. Gessen in the New York Times entitled The Barrage of Trump’s Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It is Supposed to Do.

Check out this investigative piece from The Intercept about a WhatsApp group started by some members of Columbia Alumni for Israel and their efforts to get students who protested against the genocide in Gaza arrested and/or deported.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

This Makdisi Street podcast interview with Aslı Bâli, Professor of Law at Yale Law School and President of the Middle East Studies Association, is absolutely brilliant.

Listen to the ACLU’s Chase Strangio in conversation with W. Kamau Bell discussing the current state of LGBTQIA+ rights across the country.

Listen to a beautiful new song from Lebanese singer-songwriter Yasmine Hamdan.

~

After the dismal, if predictable, election results, I am trying not to get sucked into the vortex of constant doom scrolling. The incoming administration’s motto seems to be “A fox in every henhouse,” and they want us shocked and incapacitated. The fascist clown car is coming for us all, with immigrants at the top of the list for unspeakable cruelty. We’re going to be running around putting out fires on every corner, and it really has an end of empire vibe. Perhaps the scariest prospect is their plan for an extractavist carnival when we have such a short time to turn climate catastrophe around. Everyone I know is thinking about how best to organize for resistance—I keep hearing Mariam Kaba’s advice: “Choose your lane, find your people.” I will continue working on Palestine and immigrant justice, lanes where I have connections, some knowledge, and a few skills.

I am still mentoring three young writers in and from Gaza—two are still in Gaza (one in the north where starvation is rampant and ethnic cleansing is underway, and one in central Gaza where regular missile attacks and food scarcity hold sway) and the third escaped to Malaysia. Each morning, I check my messages to make sure they and their families have survived the night. Their suffering is immense, but the bravery and ingenuity with which they face each day are remarkable. My mentee Nadera Mushtha wrote an eloquent piece about giving English lessons in her home to  young students whose schools had been destroyed.

The situation in Lebanon is also heartbreaking where my friends in Beirut are being terrorized by drones, planes, and missiles. Israel continues using its Gaza playbook—targeting hospitals, medics, and civilian apartment buildings, while pulverizing entire villages in the south. There is talk of a ceasefire deal, something that is being reported as a planned gift from one depraved authoritarian to another.

While immediate and medium-term prospects are bleak, we must find ways to keep ourselves sane and ready for action. I have shifted away from spending time on Musk’s increasingly hostile X/Twitter, which has been losing prominent users, to more hospitable Bluesky, which now has over 20 million users and has seen traffic increase by 500% since the election. You can find me on Bluesky here. You will also find me walking in Central Park and on country roads, looking for birds and mushrooms.

We need to gather in the real world with like-minded people and build the power of our groups and institutions to protect ourselves and others. We will need to defend public libraries, public schools, universities, Social Security, immigrants, LGBTQ rights, abortion rights, Palestine, and the planet. Choose your lane, find your people. Friends and comrades are and will be our refuge.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

RECOMMENDED READING

In response to thirteen months of genocide in Gaza, over 7,000 writers, myself among them, have now pledged to boycott complicit Israeli cultural institutions.

Mosab Abu Toha’s new poetry collection, FOREST OF NOISE was published last month. You can listen to an excellent and moving interview with Mosab on the LARB Radio Hour.

Swedish climate organizer Greta Thunberg penned a powerful op-ed in The Guardian decrying the hypocrisy of the petro-dictatorship of Azerbaijan’s hosting COP29. She went to Armenia, where she visited the genocide memorial and later learned how to make Jingalov Hatz.

Wasafiri 120, an issue of the UK literary journal devoted to Armenia and Armenians, is now available for pre-order. My new essay about my father, entitled “His Driving Life,” is included.

AGBU’s ARARAT Magazine has been digitized, including the special CHILDHOOD supplement that I edited in 1999.

I was happy to see that my upcoming novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD is included in The International Armenian Literary Alliance’s Holiday Book Guide. You can preorder it here.

Greetings, dear friends. In this most horrific of times as we continue to watch a livestreamed genocide in Gaza, I’m sending you a quick note about two upcoming events. Both are benefits for organizations providing medical care and psychosocial support to Palestinian children.

On Saturday, November 9^th from 3-5 p.m. on Zoom, I will be offering a workshop entitled Life Stories that is part of Workshops for Gaza, which organizes online classes and workshops on a variety of topics to raise money for Palestinians who are trying to survive the ongoing genocide of their people and the destruction of their homeland.

LIFE STORIES: In this workshop with novelist Nancy Kricorian, participants will use family stories and oral history as a point of departure for writing fiction and narrative nonfiction. Participants will read short prose pieces by authors such as Grace Paley, Jayne Anne Phillips, and William Saroyan, then work on a series of in-class writing exercises to be shared and discussed.

I have selected the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund as the recipient of monies from my workshop. In 2017 when I was on a research trip to Beirut, I met Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who is a close friend of a friend. As I listened to his stories at a café in Hamrah, I was impressed by the work he did with children who had been injured in war zones. When the genocide started in Gaza I was amazed and awed to see him in news reports from the besieged hospitals in the Strip.

You can sign up for the workshop here. You may donate to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund here.

Also on November 9th, I will be participating in a reading entitled Translators Against Genocide from 6-8 p.m. at The People’s Forum in Manhattan. I’m a bit of a cuckoo’s egg as a novelist in this lineup of literary translators, including my friends Susan Bernofsky, Nick Glastonbury, and Kira Joseffson. The event is part of the Writers for Palestine series and will be a benefit for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund.

I’ll write a longer message soon. In the meantime, please read Arundhati Roy’s brilliant PEN Pinter Prize acceptance speech. And as poet Eileen Myles tells us, do everything you can to stop the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza and mass murder in Lebanon.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

On the first day of classes at Columbia yesterday, some students poured red paint over the Alma Mater statue in the Quad as an opening salvo. My photo of the bloodied statue, a symbol that there would be no business as usual on the campus as the U.S. sponsored assault on Gaza continued, went viral on X.

I am in touch almost daily with my mentees in and from Gaza, so I hear their firsthand accounts of what they and their families are living. You can read their work: Sahar Rabah has two poems in The Markaz Review, and We Are Not Numbers posted Nadera Mushtha’s essay about the destruction of her family’s olive grove.

As this genocide grinds into its twelfth month, my young friends sound increasingly despairing. The driving rain over the weekend flooded tents, destroying people’s belongings and raising the specter of waterborne diseases. Every week someone loses another family friend, a cousin, or a former professor to an Israeli bombing attack in a civilian area. As another young person I know put it, “There are no humanitarian areas in Gaza; every corner is soaked in blood.”

In addition to my work with We Are Not Numbers, I have been volunteering with the Gaza Scholarship Initiative for Displaced Students, which is helping to find spots in U.S. and European institution of higher learning for undergraduate and graduate students whose universities have been destroyed. Some of these students, the ones who managed to exit Gaza before the Rafah crossing was wrecked and sealed, are already on U.S. campuses. Some of them are still trapped in Gaza, their universities having deferred their admissions to the Spring semester. Sahar is one of these students; she should be at Rutgers in the MFA Program in Creative Writing right now, and the hope is that she will be able to get to Cairo as soon as the border opens so she can fly to the U.S. in December for a January start in Newark.

When will the genocide stop? When will the border open? And how can we speak of Gaza without mentioning the horrors  currently going on in the West Bank, as Israeli politicians threaten to turn it into a “mini-Gaza”?

I heard a former Israeli hostage negotiator named Gershon Baskin on Democracy Now this morning talking about how to come to a deal to end the carnage in Gaza, and he said, “…it will take extreme American pressure on Netanyahu to make a deal. And the Americans have the pressure, if they were to choose to use it.”

Vice-President and presidential contender Kamala Harris claimed that she was heartbroken over the scale of the suffering in Gaza; she claimed that the Biden Administration has been working around the clock for months to get a ceasefire deal. As Palestinian-American poet, novelist, and psychologist Hala Alyan put it in her recent New York Times Op-Ed,

I appreciate Ms. Harris’s broken heart. What I’d appreciate more is a direct naming of who is killing and starving Palestinians, acts that are neither inevitable nor without a perpetrator. I’d appreciate the upholding of international law through sanctions and an arms embargo. 

Tell the Biden Administration and Congress to Stop Arming Israel.

Yours in struggle,

Nancy K

P.S.

Red Hen Press, which is celebrating its 30^th Anniversary this year and will be publishing my new novel in April 2025, received a great writeup in Publishers Weekly.

I wanted to share this brilliant and moving piece, entitled “Gloves On,” by Anne Carson about “the black doorway” and living with Parkinson’s Disease.

It’s unsettling to carry on with daily rituals and activities while Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza rages on. Each morning, I check to see what horror unfolded while I was asleep, looking for mentions of the areas where my mentees and their families are sheltering. Each day I communicate with Haya, Sahar, and Nadera about their various writing and educational projects. I continue my involvement with Writers Against the War on Gaza, and use my social media platforms to amplify the reports coming out of Gaza and the West Bank. None of it feels like enough. To keep myself from an unending cycle of despair, anxiety, and rage, I have been spending time in the woods and the meadow as a kind of walking meditation.

The other morning after a night of pouring rain, I went for a walk on the trails behind our house. There were so many Red Efts on the path, that I had to watch my feet so I wouldn’t step on them. I started counting them as I walked, and quickly reached two dozen. I have been fascinated with these creatures since I was in sixth grade and a boy in our class brought in a terrarium with three that he was keeping as pets.

I think of the Red Eft as the teenager form of the Eastern Newt, which is a type of salamander that lives in this region. When they first hatch in the vernal pond, they are aquatic larvae or tadpoles that breathe underwater. In their next phase, they become Red Efts, which are orange with two rows of red dots circled in black down their backs. At this point, they are terrestrial and breathe air. After two to three years, they change again to their final adult aquatic form, when their coloration shifts to a dull olive green back with a yellow belly. But they still have the black-rimmed spots. An Eastern Newt can live in the wild for up to eight or ten years but have been recorded to live to fifteen.

I’ve also been watching the Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds at the feeder outside my study window. They fly circuits around the yard, sipping nectar from flowers and the feeder.

The only hummingbirds found in the northeastern United States, they are very territorial, and there are lots of buzzy altercations. The adult male has the eponymous iridescent red throat, and its tail feathers are pointed and dark. The adult female and juvenile male and female have white throats and white tips on the outer tail feathers.

Recently, I have also seen twin White-Tailed Deer fawns grazing in the meadow behind the house, their mother always within a few yards. Several years ago, Djuna and I were walking in the woods when we wandered off the trail and discovered a days-old fawn sleeping in a hollow under a fallen tree. Luckily, I had learned that it was fine for a fawn to be left alone for up to twelve hours at a time while its mother foraged for food. In fact, it was safer for a newborn like this to stay on its own because it blended into the forest and hadn’t yet developed an odor that would attract predators. When White-Tailed Deer fawns are born, they have white spots on their sides. These spots disappear when they are between three to six months old and grow in their winter coats. In our area, the spots are generally gone by October.

It’s been raining all week, and the other day during a blustery downpour, I looked out the bedroom window to see two dozen House Finches perched under the eaves of our front porch. That made me wonder what all the other birds were doing in the foul weather brought to our region by Hurricane Debbie. Birds that nest in cavities, such as Chickadees, can take shelter there. Birds that roost on branches, such as Blue Jays, perch on a thick branch next to the tree’s trunk during a storm.

What’s the difference between a frog and a toad? Frogs have smooth, damp skin and toads have dry, bumpy skin. Frogs have longer legs made for jumping and swimming. Toads tend to have shorter legs. Frogs tend to live near a body of water because they need to keep their skin moist, but toads can be found in the forest. Tree frogs need to be near water, but they aren’t great swimmers.

How can you tell the difference between a butterfly and a moth? Butterflies have smooth, club-like antennae and moths have feathered or branched antennae with no rounded club shape at the end. We generally think of butterflies as having large, brightly colored wings, but Skippers are a group of small, chunky butterflies, and several species are drab gray or brown.

And now on a few other topics…

My friends at the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA) posted about the upcoming publication of my novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD. If you pre-order the book through this link, IALA receives a small portion of the proceeds.

For Tempest Magazine, our daughter Djuna wrote a clear-eyed and disturbing piece about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to generate “kill lists” in Gaza.

My new We Are Not Numbers Mentee (WANN) Nadera wrote a poem called “The Child and the Olive Tree.”  My former WANN mentee Hossam managed to evacuate to Cairo a few months ago, but he and his siblings are now in need of financial support because they can’t get work permits in Egypt.

Thanks for reading. Ceasefire now.

Nancy Kricorian

Everything feels rather dire right now, from the awful clown show of American politics, to the terror of a burning planet, so I’ve again been finding solace in the natural world. I saw a Scarlet Tanager flitting through the tree canopy the other day, and after hearing its eerie, echoing song at the top of the ridge, I finally caught a glimpse of a Hermit Thrush. We have been eating oyster mushrooms and chanterelles that I foraged in the woods, as well as copious greens from our garden. And sunsets by the pond have been spectacular.

I just handed in the copy edited manuscript of my novel, The Burning Heart of the World, which will be published on April 1, 2025 by Red Hen Press, and can now be pre-ordered from Bookshop.org. A publisher decides how many copies to print in part based on the number of preorders, so ordering the book ahead is a good way to support an author, including yours truly. I have started scheduling events for April in Los Angeles, New York, and Detroit. If you want me to come to a bookstore (or a community center) near you, let me know. I will also be available for in-person and virtual reading group visits.

Also on the literary front, I was disappointed to read a terrible story about much admired and lauded fiction writer Alice Munro, but I loved this interview in Mizna with poet Chase Berggrun.

Last month my elder child Noah’s debut feature film, Summer Solstice, opened for limited runs in New York and Los Angeles. It received a rave review and was a Critic’s Pick in the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times review was also excellent. Noah did a number of interviews, among them one in Variety, one in Filmmaker, and another in Film Stage.

As Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza grinds into its tenth month, a small bright spot was the fact that Armenia recognized the Palestinian state. Mary Turfah’s piece Running Amok, about the horrific images Israeli soldiers are posting from Gaza and what they mean about Zionism past and present, was a tough read in the Baffler. Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote a bracing piece about The Collapse of Zionism in the New Left Review. Some of my new organizer friends were involved in a Gaza protest during New York City’s Pride parade. I have started working with a new mentee in Gaza through We Are Not Numbers—a collaboration made difficult by the intermittent and poor Internet access Nadera has in Shujaya. I hope to be able to share one of her essays soon.

Thanks for reading. I hope you’re keeping cool.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.

~ Vasily Grossman, LIFE AND FATE

In this bleak time, I find hope in the organizing I have been doing with Jewish Voice for Peace, We Are Not Numbers, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and like-minded friends and comrades. Last week I went to Albany for the Not on Our Dime campaign rally and press conference organized by State Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani. I count myself lucky that our family is united in opposition to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and that our circle of friends is filled with people who have been speaking out against the atrocities we are witnessing daily on our smart phones.

I have been so focused on the horror in Gaza that I can only tolerate a few minutes a day of contemplating the dire situation in Armenia, as the Armenian government’s tense negotiations over demarcating “disputed” areas of the border with Azerbaijan have resulted in the handover of some villages, which is causing much internal strife. In the meantime, in ethnically cleansed Artsakh, Azerbaijan’s destruction of Armenian cultural heritage proceeds apace. And then there is the dubious land deal threatening the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem, which occurs at the intersection of things Armenian and Palestinian. 

In March, I wrote a talk for a beleaguered group of dissident grad students at an unnamed university, which according to the students’ accounts has turned into a quasi-totalitarian state.  This essay, in which I avoided certain terms at the request of my hosts who feared repercussions of stating things too baldly in that context, was recently published by The Markaz Review: “A Small Kernel of Human Kindness: Some Notes on Solidarity and Resistance.” 

PalFest posted video of my introduction to the Freedom To Write for Palestine event at Judson Church on May 7. My friend and Armenian tutor Sosy Mishoyan and I did a Western Armenian translation of Mosab Abu Toha’s poem, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.” Two of my mentee Haya Abu Nasser’s powerful poems appeared in The Massachusetts Review at the end of last week. And my spouse James wrote an open letter to Columbia’s Task Force on Antisemitism in response to said task force’s dangerous conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

Beloved Armenian illustrator, artist, and writer Nonny Hogrogian passed away recently, and her obituary in the New York Times gives a sense of her long and storied life, most of it spent with her devoted husband and collaborator David Kherdian, to whom I sent my profound condolences. Nonny’s Caldecott Award picture book One Fine Day is a perennial favorite, and it is my custom to send a copy of that book to friends upon the birth of their first child.

On a brighter note, James and I recently celebrated our 35^th wedding anniversary. The week before that milestone, our daughter Djuna graduated from New York University Law School. The commencement ceremony was interrupted twice by the unfurling Palestinian flags in front of the podium and approximately 100 of the 500 graduates, including Djuna, were wearing keffiyehs. In September she will be starting a fellowship at the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU. And next week our elder child Noah’s debut feature film Summer Solstice will be playing at the IFC Center in Manhattan.

Last week I gave the opening remarks at Freedom to Write for Palestine at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. This memorable gathering of writers was brilliantly curated and produced by Omar Hamilton and Sharif Kouddous of the Palestine Festival of Literature, and it was recorded for posterity. Writers Against the War on Gaza and Amplify Palestinerounded out the organizing team, and everyone’s efforts came together beautifully. Publishers Weekly and New York Magazine did great coverage of the event, placing it in the context of the controversy surrounding PEN America’s terrible response to the genocide in Gaza and the efforts of writers to hold the organization to account.

Here is an excerpt from my introduction:

While PEN America has organized a street rally in support of Ukrainian writers imprisoned and killed by Russia and taken a delegation of Ukrainian writers to meet with Congress, it has yet to organize any public event on behalf of Palestinian writers who have been imprisoned and killed by Israel. PEN International, English PEN, and PEN South Africa called for a ceasefire in Gaza five full months before PEN America did, and PEN America’s call came only after over a thousand writers had signed a letter denouncing the organization for its inaction. PEN America’s priorities so often align with the U.S. government’s own foreign policy goals that one writer quipped, ‘PEN America has been turned into an outpost of the U.S. State Department.’

While the leadership at PEN America is being roundly denounced for its double standards on Israel and Palestine, many of its staff members’ work in this area and on other issues is being stymied and undermined. We would like to give a shout out to PEN America United, the union representing PEN America’s staff, which has been trying to get a fair contract for over eighteen months. PEN’s Chief Executive Officer’s salary was disclosed to be $465,000 in 2022, and in recent contract negotiations management proposed a $48,500 minimum starting salary for staff, well below industry standards and hardly a living wage in New York City. In addition to her annual salary, which has likely increased over the past two years, PEN’s CEO earns an additional undisclosed six-figure yearly sum for serving on Meta’s Oversight Board. As one sign at a PEN America United rally phrased it, “Are fair wages banned too?”

The evening raised over $8,000 for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led organization in Gaza that trains a new generation of Palestinian writers. At the top of the program, Michelle Alexander read a poem by my friend and WANN mentee Haya Abu Nasser. When WANN alumni Mahmoud Alyazji read a remembrance with an accompanying film about his best friend Mohammed Zaher Hammo, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike with his family, there were audible sounds of weeping in the audience, and I venture to say there was not a dry eye in the house. After musician Huda Asfourplayed a final song to close out the evening, which was by turns inspiring, moving, and galvanizing, we all headed out into the world with firm resolve to continue fighting for Palestinian freedom.

In the meantime, the situation in Gaza has grown increasingly catastrophic as Israel drops bombs on displaced, starving people living in tents, and gives confusing, impossible evacuation orders to families with no place to go. Repression at home continues to be brutal as riot police are summoned to break up peaceful student Gaza solidarity encampments. I have made a chant by the Columbia students a new motto, “Disclose, Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest.”

Nancy Kricorian

I have been meaning to write about Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment since last week, and if I had written this last weekend, the tenor would be very different. Two nights ago, the encampment was destroyed by the New York Police Department, and the students barricaded in Hamilton Hall were arrested along with others in the encampment and outside the university gates. At the same time, hundreds of students were also brutalized and arrested at City College twenty blocks north. But for almost two weeks, the encampment on the Columbia Quad was a beautiful space of community and learning where Palestinian freedom was the focus. And students at Columbia started a movement that has to date spread to over 150 campuses around the country, and their principled actions were seen and appreciated by Palestinians in Gaza and around the globe. My Palestinian friend Haya, who escaped Gaza and is now in exile in Malaysia, wrote: These students are so strong and so great; I swear they’re teaching a generation how to fight for freedom. They are talking about Columbia University’s protests everywhere on Arabic website and my friends’ Facebook pages.

When the students took over Hamilton Hall in the early hours on Tuesday and renamed it Hind’s Hall, after a six-year old Palestinian girl whose desperate and doomed calls for help were heard round the world, I could only think back to the 1985 blockade of Hamilton that I was part of (and my post on X/Twitter about this went viral). I wasn’t one of the organizers, but when my friends and I heard what had happened we immediately ran to the newly named Mandela Hall and were there in shifts for the next three weeks. In 1968 the students had barricaded themselves IN the same building, but we were outside with the exterior doors padlocked. In the daytime there was a festival atmosphere, and at night it was mostly calm, although I remember at least one night when we were afraid the NYPD was going to come in to clear us—it turned out to be mostly a scare tactic. There was a lot of surveillance by Columbia security–which seems quaint now. Back then it was men with cameras. Now they have surveillance drones buzzing overhead and have deployed new—not always reliable—facial recognition technology. And Columbia’s president in 1985, Michael Sovern, came out to speak with us, unlike the current president, Baroness (yes, she is a literal Baroness) Manouche Shafik. I remember singing a version of a freedom song, “Sovern can you hear us, we shall not be moved, like a tree that’s planted by the water, we shall not be moved.” And we all despised him because he represented everything oppressive about the institution. But in retrospect, compared to the Baroness, he seems downright cuddly.

My spouse teaches at Columbia, and we live near the campus. James has been speaking out repeatedly and strongly about the misuse of accusations of antisemitism to smear and undermine the student movement, hurling all his Jewishness against the conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. It was so awful two nights ago when hundreds and hundreds of cops streamed into the Quad and the surrounding blocks. Our entire neighborhood was a closed military zone. And I heard they were using tear gas, but apparently not. “No tear gas was used, but flash-bang devices designed to distract were used as police moved in, the NYPD spokesperson said.” Flash bang devices. So sad that the beautiful encampment was cleared, and all those students were arrested and that there will be cops on the campus until May 17, at the request of Manouche Shafik.

What transpired on Tuesday night was much scarier and uglier than what we faced in 1985. The current students are principled and brave in the face of this unconscionable level of violence and repression. On the night of April 24, I went to the encampment for a teach-in on the Armenian Genocide led by the students of Columbia Armenians for Palestine. They talked beautifully and movingly about the 1915 Genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Artsakh, and the connections between those tragedies and what is unfolding in Gaza right now, as a trapped civilian population is being bombed, starved, and immiserated. While they spoke in turn, they held up three flags—Armenia, Artsakh, and Assyria. Their solidarity was authentic, intelligent, and inspiring.

These students are watching a genocide stream in real time on their smart phones, and they are seeing the bankruptcy of all our institutions: political, academic, and cultural. They keep insisting that all eyes should be on Gaza, not on them. Gaza is their Vietnam. And the Baroness who runs Columbia—along with billionaire trustees and cartoon villain politicians egging her on—has radicalized a generation. 

Nancy Kricorian

P.S. If you are in NYC, please join us next Tuesday, May 7 at 7 p.m. for FREEDOM TO WRITE FOR PALESTINE at Judson Church. Roster of writers and tickets available here. I’ll soon send an update on the Authors for Change at PEN America Campaign.

Our kids are watching a genocide in real time on social media, and they see the moral bankruptcy of our institutions—government, media, academy, cultural organizations—and they are enraged. Gaza is their Vietnam. Last weekend hundreds of protesters took over the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in mid-town Manhattan, dropping banners that said FREE PALESTINE and LONG LIVE GAZA. They filled that large hall with chants for freedom and against the corruption of the museum’s trustees. It was a bold, beautiful action and a feat of brilliant organizing. But the U.S.-made and subsidized bombs continue to rain down on Gaza, children are dying, people are starving, and nothing we have done these past months seems to be having an impact on the depraved and cruel slaughter.

On social media, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha wrote, “I don’t know what democracy means for the Western world! Every time we hear Westerners making fun of the Arabs that ‘they don’t have democracy like us!’ That we in the Arab world cannot protest against dictators, etc. Well, I don’t think you in the West have democracy at all. How many times have people taken to the street demanding a ceasefire in Gaza!? What did your western governments do to listen to your democratic action? On the contrary, they never stopped supporting our slaughter with bombs and cash, they hurried to cut funds that attempt to help us in our tents.”

Through We Are Not Numbers, for the past month I have been mentoring Haya Abu Nasser, an extraordinarily talented young Palestinian writer who is internally displaced in Gaza and living in a tent after having been displaced four times. Haya has only intermittent access to the Internet and to electricity, and is under constant threat of bombardment. All of our communication is via WhatsApp messaging, and every morning I check to see if she has answered me, to make sure that she has survived another night. She wrote a beautiful and devastating essay entitled “Surviving Beneath Gaza’s Tempest Skies” about her daily life. I have recently begun submitting her poems to literary magazines. The first fruit of that effort was placing “Remember Our Names” with Scoundrel Time, and this poem was featured in LitHub Daily on 6 February. Since then we have placed two poems with Evergreen Review and one with Guernica for upcoming publication.

As the heart breaks and breaks again watching a horrific genocidal campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza, a campaign that has the full-throated support of the Biden Administration (ignore the bleating complaints and look at the weapons and cash being sent to keep the murder machine running), my best hope is our solidarity and witness. Read this nuanced and melancholy piece by my friend Mashinka Firunts Hakopian about Armenian-Palestinian solidarities. Don’t look away from Gaza. Don’t stop speaking out for Palestine. As Vasily Grossman put it in his magisterial World War II novel Life and Fate, “Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is humane in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

Nancy Kricorian