His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at her feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet. In complete silence she stood there, grasping her paint brush.
~ Lily Briscoe’s response to Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse
I’ve been thinking of this scene from To The Lighthouse, a novel that I have read at least a half dozen times, as the horsemen of the apocalypse continue their erratic assaults on all our systems and institutions. Of course, their doings are more depraved and destructive than Mr. Ramsay’s patriarchal self-pity and narcissism, but there is much to learn from Lily Briscoe’s refusal, her drawing her skirts closer to her ankles, and holding onto her paint brush as a tool and a weapon.
What is pooling at our feet is not water, but shit, because as Steve Bannon had recommended, they are spreading the stuff with great abandon. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told writer Michael Lewis in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
Journalists are kept busy writing about the latest outrage, and the rest of us are barely able to react to one horrible news item before the next one appears. As AOC put it in a February Instagram live: “It’s important for you to understand that the paralysis and shock that you feel right now is the point,” she continued. “They are trying to induce a state of passivity among the general public.”
We must pay attention to what they are doing, but we can’t afford to let them overwhelm us with their crap to the point that we are paralyzed. I glance at the headlines, read various newsletters on topics that concern me, and check out the social media feeds of trusted sources who cover Palestine, the academy, immigration, climate catastrophe, abortion, and policing. During the horsemen’s last reign, a friend recommended a daily roundup curated by Matt Kiser called WTF Just Happened Today, and I find it particularly helpful—Kiser reads the day’s political news and starts with “what happened today in one sentence.” Below that are paragraphs with links going into more depth for those who are interested.
In addition to keeping abreast of the news (without being inundated), I try to push back against their cruelty in the way that I can each day. It’s up to each of us to decide what we care most about and to find the best people working on that issue and then to act. When people ask my spouse James what they should do in the face of the genocide in Gaza or any of the other depredations we are witnessing, he replies, “Do something.”
Yours in struggle,
Nancy K
READ & LISTEN
A long, thoughtful, and essential piece by Taner Akcam about the crisis in Holocaust and Genocide Studies brought about by the genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Publisher’s Weekly finally ran a review of THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD, saying, “…the lyrical latest from Nancy Kricorian…is an impactful story of trauma.”
A piece that I wrote about the Armenian genocide, Gaza, and Columbia that was published on April 24 by YES Magazine.
James’s speech at the 25-hour Columbia Speak Out (his is the second one).
I recorded a Podcast interview with Meat for Tea, and did a print interview with LibraryThing in which I discuss my research process, the female bildungsroman, and things Armenian.
We have gone from a war on an abstract noun (terror) to a war on immigrants and asylum seekers. The southern border has been declared a military zone and crossing any border has left tourists, students, green card holders, and citizens prey to arbitrary questioning and possible detention. Another Columbia student was kidnapped, and in Gaza the genocide continues unabated. No humanitarian aid has entered Gaza since March 2nd of this year, and this week Israeli defense minister Israel Katz announced that none will enter. His brazen remarks about the weaponization of food are basically the trumpeting of a war crime, but who will hold Israel to account?
Yesterday 25-year-old Fatma Hassona, a writer and photographer, was killed in Gaza. In January 2024, she was the sole survivor of an Israeli airstrike that killed most of her. On April 16, she and the remaining members of her family were killed in another airstrike in Gaza City. She was mourned in Gaza by young people who knew her or knew of her work.
Nadera wrote on Facebook, I could not sleep, Fatma, after you were killed. I saw all your photos as if they were glued to my eyelids, and I saw your words and texts that I read over and over in front of me in lines like a fence. Your departure killed me, Fatma, but it also killed our whole generation.
Sahar wrote to me, I’m thinking about Fatma, I think about her fiancé. She had only been engaged for two months, and she dreamed of a good life like any other girl in Gaza. I carry something like a rock on my heart and tonight it feels heavier than that.Fatma is gone. Mahasen, the painter, is gone. Dina, the painter is gone. Dhargham is gone (he was working on presenting small plays for children in tents). Muhammad Sami is gone. He was playing with children in the Baptist Hospital building when it was bombed last year. The friends I know are disappearing one by one. I swear to you that yesterday I felt that Gaza was extinguished, completely extinguished when Fatima left. You don’t know how much Fatima inspired girls like me and Nadera and all of us with her strength and her love for everything. By photographing the beautiful Gaza, which is still beautiful. What do we have left now?
I wrote back to Sahar:
I know that it is so hard because of the suffering of your people, of the destruction of Gaza, and because of the sense of powerlessness in the face of this unrelenting violence and cruelty. I am far from Gaza and in a basically safe place with plenty of food and water, but I struggle here to not give into despair because of this sense of impotence in the face of their depravity (all these horsemen of the apocalypse). I repeat this motto over and again, “The only recognizable feature of hope is action.” And I try to do something every day. Being in touch with you, helping you edit poems, sending your poems out to magazines…working on your graduate school applications, following up on them. These are things that give me hope. I want you to try to keep your eyes and your heart pinned on your bright future. Mourn your losses, suffer for your people, but don’t give up hope.
Repeat after me: The only recognizable feature of hope is action (Grace Paley). Choose your lane, find your people (Mariame Kaba). Freedom is a constant struggle (Angela Davis). The voice of the people is louder than the roar of the cannon (Armenian proverb).
Yours in struggle,
Nancy K
READ
My mentee Nadera Mushtha’s piece on the destruction of Gaza’s cemeteries: This genocide must be stopped, so that our city that was once a calm place for both the living and the dead will stop being a rubble-strewn necropolis.
Ben Ehrenreich’s beautifully written and wrenching piece about the West Bank in Harper’s: The camp’s young men had seen enough to believe that they would be killed whether they fought or not. “So, they started asking themselves, ‘Why wait for them to kill us?’
The following are all pieces related to the launch of my novel earlier this month. An essay I wrote for LitHub about my grandmother, a 1940 Shirley Temple movie, the Armenian Genocide, and my writing life. An interview I did with photojournalist and photo editor Aline Manoukian on the 50th Anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War via Hyperallergic. Kate Tuttle wrote about the new novel for The Boston Globe (sorry it’s behind a paywall). An interview I did with Eleanor Bader for In These Times. Coverage of our The Politics and Poetics of Memory panel on April 1 at OxyArts. A snappy Q & A I did for the Armenian International Women’s Association (AIWA). Coverage of a visit I made to talk with 8th grade students at St. Gregory’s Armenian School in Pasadena.
WATCH & LISTEN
Also related to my book launch. Super dynamic Author2Author Podcast interview I did with Bill Kenower. Video recording of my conversation with Nanore Barsoumian as part of the Literary Lights series on April 15. A Twitter live interview about The Burning Heart of the World with NPR’s Scott Simon for his Open Book series.
SUPPORT
If you would like to support The Burning Heart of the World and you’re a member of Goodreads, you can review and rate the new book here. You can ask your local public library or your neighborhood independent bookstore to order it. Or you can purchase a copy directly from Red Hen Press via IndiePubs.
Part of the job of being a writer is promoting one’s books, and while I love to praise and promote the work of my friends and mentees, I generally feel uncomfortable trumpeting my own. The current political climate creates an added emotional dissonance—in the face of increasing daily violence and moral shocks, how to hustle to sell a book?
These are scary times. Again, in any direction you look people, their rights, and their well-being are under attack. We are reading about the roundup and imprisonment of dissident foreign graduate students, and witnessing the crushing of our institutions (including a front row seat for the capitulation at Columbia). Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha canceled a 16-event national tour because he is subject to a doxxing and smear campaign by far-right organization Betar USA, that has been handing over lists of people it wants deported. The situation in Gaza is truly heinous, with food aid rotting at the border while hunger is rampant and bombings continuous. The announced “voluntary migration plan” for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is truly sickening.
But we somehow need to keep going, to live our lives, to do our work, take care of our families, and gather with organizations and groups that are fighting the worst of these harms. Palestinian poet and writer Mohammed El Kurd posted some words on Twitter that resonated strongly for me:
the basics: fascism thrives on fear. they want you to be silent, to self-censor, to do less. you will not recover whatever ground you concede. the moment calls for caution, not hysteria. courage, not cowardice. if the objective is fear, be unafraid. dissent.
April 2025 is the 50th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War and the 110th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. My novel reverberates with both of these cataclysms, and it appears at a time when Lebanon and Armenia have just experienced more paroxysms of violence, suffering under existential threats to their sovereignty and territorial integrity. My novel is a journey through these histories and into this burning heart of the world. The title evokes both illumination and conflagration. The world is on fire, and while there is much darkness in the book, there is also humor, empathy and a commitment to amplifying that which is humane in the human. This last is central to my literary project.
The official publication date of my novel is April 1, and I am in Los Angeles for its launch. I have four evening events this week—in conversation at Diesel Books with Talar Chahinian on Monday, a panel discussion with my friends Joanne Nucho, Mashinka Hakopian, and Ara Oshagan on Tuesday at OxyArts, in conversation on Wednesday at the Glendale Central Library with my friend Shahe Mankerian, and a Thursday literary salon featuring poets Lory Bedikian, Arthur Kayzakian, and me hosted by Red Hen Press in Pasadena. The following week in New York, I will be in conversation with Marianne Hirsch at Knox Hall in Morningside Heights on April 7th, and with Raffi Khatchadourian at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn on April 9. On April 15th I will be in conversation with Nanore Barsoumian at NAASR in Belmont, MA, and on April 17th with Lisa Gulesserian at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. For people who are not in these localities, the April 15th event at NAASR will be hybrid with viewing options via Zoom and YouTube. More events are being scheduled for May and June.
May we find the courage to keep speaking out. May we find the strength to protect each other.
Yours in struggle,
Nancy K
RECOMMENDED READING
Variety: Mark Ruffalo, Penélope Cruz and 500 Oscar Voters Sign Hamdan Ballal Letter
As many of you know, my spouse James teaches at Columbia University, which has again been much in the news. Things have been moving so fast that it’s hard to keep up with a situation that grows ever more dire. On Friday, March 7 when the Horsemen of the Apocalypse announced that Columbia would be losing $400 million in federal research funding, with much of this loss hitting the medical school, James wrote a letter to his fellow Jewish faculty that was subsequently published on LitHub. The ostensible reason for the government’s ire was rampant antisemitism on the Columbia campus. Let us be clear, an administration whose members have been giving Nazi salutes and empowering known white nationalists does not care about actual antisemitism. They are using these charges as a sort of Trojan horse to muscle their way onto campuses to quash dissent and to stage a hostile takeover. They want to do to higher education in America, starting with Columbia, what DeSantis did to New College in Florida. The Education Department sent warning letters to 60 colleges and universities that they are being investigated for antisemitism, using a definition of the term that conflates antizionism with antisemitism and characterizes protest against genocide as illegal support for a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. And at the end of last week they sent a letter to Columbia that was a hodgepodge of wild demands. Meanwhile, the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association and far-right Betar U.S., the latter of which created and shared with the horsemen a list of students they want targeted for deportation, are at the very least cheering from the sidelines.
The day after James penned his letter, Department of Homeland Security plainclothes officers followed a recently graduated Columbia grad student named Mahmoud Khalil into his university housing, effectively kidnapping him in front of his pregnant and horrified wife, who filmed the proceedings on her phone. By Sunday evening, he had been, without due process, whisked to an ICE detention facility in Louisiana and stripped of his residency status. He is not accused of any crime—he is being targeted because of his role as a mediator in the anti-genocide protests on the campus and statements he has made against the carnage in Gaza. The Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, and CUNY Clear attorneys are representing Mahmoud Khalil in his fight against his incarceration and possible deportation. A federal judge issued a stay preventing his removal while the case is adjudicated.
Last Monday afternoon Columbia faculty held a press conference in support of Mahmoud and denouncing the university administration’s draconian punishments against student protesters. Professor Marianne Hirsch, who is a Holocaust scholar and the child of survivors, gave a moving and impassioned speech about growing up in a totalitarian dictatorship in Romania and the echoes of that experience in Mahmoud’s mistreatment. Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj spoke about the twisted notion of campus “safety” that has been employed by people who don’t want students protesting what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, and about the fact that it is Mahmoud Khalil who is not safe.
On Thursday, the phenomenal organizers of Jewish Voice for Peace and JVP NYC staged a mass civil disobedience action in Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan calling for the release of Mahmoud Khalil. Among their banners were ones saying: FIGHT NAZIS, NOT STUDENTS; JEWS FOR PALESTINIAN FREEDOM; and NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE. I was unable to join them because I was home sick with COVID (another story), but James was there, and was quoted in the New York Times coverage:
James Schamus, a Columbia professor who participated in the protest and is Jewish, said he thought the notion that the campus was “somehow a hotbed of antisemitic intolerance” was ridiculous.
“We all know that if anything, Columbia is a hotbed of students raising their voice and conscience, and in protest against the inhumane policies that this regime is imposing,” he said.
Since the start of the genocide in Gaza, this has been a fight with two fronts—one struggle is to stop the mass violence against civilians being carried out with our tax dollars and with the full participation of our government, and the second is to resist the repression of political dissent in this country. To be clear, the Biden Administration’s full throttle support for Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza, coupled with its demonization of the student protests, set the stage for what we are seeing now.
It’s a scary time—they are doxxing, harassing, and targeting individuals to cow the rest of us into submission. One of our neighbors, a brilliant Columbia research scientist named Jennifer Manly, was just denounced on the front page of the New York Post. As another of our neighbors put it in a group email, “Their attack on her shows how little any of this has to do with antisemitism or even with Gaza. This one is just a straight up attack on Jen’s work on race and the social determinants of health.” They are out to destroy livelihoods and lives, as was done during the McCarthy era. Keeping in mind relative risk and relative privilege, we must all do what we can to protect each other and to stand for what we know is right.
Nancy Kricorian
*
LISTEN
An excellent episode of The Dig podcast, featuring Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Mike McCarthy on the MAGA and DOGE war on woke. It’s LONG, but the first hour is particularly good, and I found Keeanga’s trenchant analysis to be helpful.
Interview with the ever-brilliant Palestinian novelist Adana Shibli.
Muskism and McCarthyism: Fascinating discussion with political science professor Corey Robin about fear in the workplace. “Fear is an amplification method. Governments only have a certain level of coercive power; they can’t map, let along control, all of society. What they can do is use fear to extend the coercive power they do have further than it might otherwise god. Fear, then, is a way of getting people to do what you want them to do, without having to exercise the coercive power that might otherwise be necessary to get them to do it.”
The official publication date of my new novel THE BURNING HEART OF THE WORLD is April 1, but friends have told me they are already receiving their preordered copies. Nanore Barsoumian wrote a beautiful and thoughtful review in The Armenian Weekly. Library Journal said, This is a fast-moving, relatable story that would be a good addition to a historical fiction section or fiction of special interest to women. Fans of Lisa Wingate and Chris Bohjalian will also enjoy it.
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.
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.
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.
