I have known Zohran Mamdani and his parents since he was eight years old and in the same third grade classroom with our elder child at the Bank Street School. We have been friends of the family since that time. My spouse James and Zohran’s dad Mahmoud were founding faculty members of Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies. James was the studio executive at Focus Features who greenlit his mother Mira Nair’s film adaptation of Vanity Fair. It’s almost surreal to have witnessed Zohran’s meteoric rise in the past six months. Last night as our family watched the elections returns—Noah and I were in Morningside Heights, James was on a trip to Los Angeles, and Djuna joined a thousand DSAMembers at the Masonic Temple in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—we were texting each other photos, memes, and updates and then sharing our jubilation when the election was called on his behalf.
James said to me this morning, Now they know the only way to stay in power is a fascist putsch, so it’s going to be dangerous. But, as my friend Rebecca put it, at least the fight is on. And we won’t only be fighting the horsemen of the apocalypse (as I call the current administration) but the Democratic “centrists” who seem to be more afraid of the left wing of their party and anti-genocide protesters than they are of the authoritarian, grifting racists they are putatively in opposition to.
Let’s take a moment to celebrate Zohran’s inspiring and historic win. And then let’s get back to work.
Last month I traveled to Ireland to meet university students who had been evacuated from Gaza in August and September. I am part of a group that had helped them apply to Irish universities and to secure scholarships for both undergraduate and post-graduate programs. This effort has been among the most satisfying and meaningful experiences of my life. Over twenty members of our all-volunteer team, three of whom live in Ireland with others coming from the U.S., Canada, and Jordan, converged in Dublin for several days of meetings with the students and with each other.
Most of these students had been awarded scholarships to U.S. universities but had been trapped in Gaza for more than a year, unable to reach the campuses for which they were destined. The receiving country would have to negotiate with the Israeli government to enable their safe passage, and chances were nil that the Trump administration would do this. So, earlier this year, our team pivoted to Ireland, where we knew these brilliant young people would be welcomed with open hearts and open arms.
After months of communicating with them via WhatsApp and Signal chats while they were living amidst a genocide in Gaza, greeting these students in the real world was an almost unimaginable joy. I arrived a few days earlier than most of our group so I could spend time with my mentee and friend S, a poet who is enrolled in Trinity’s master’s program in creative writing. I thought it would be strange, finally being in the same physical space after our year and a half of almost daily communication on message platforms while she was in Gaza, but when I arrived at her student apartment, the only thing I learned that I didn’t already know was how tall she was. She gave me a tour of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, we walked along the river, dined at a Palestinian restaurant, and rode bicycles in Phoenix Park where we went in search of the fallow deer and found them at the far end of the park.
I also made an overnight trip to the University of Limerick with two other mentors to meet our cohort of students there and the administrators who had scrambled the resources to support them. As nineteen of us were seated in a Lebanese restaurant in Limerick, one of the students gestured at the platters arrayed on the long table and said to me, “I wish I could take this food to my family in Gaza.” All these students had left their families behind, and their emotional well-being is pegged to how their parents, siblings, and extended family are faring in Gaza. Each of them is also struggling with the trauma of what they had seen and survived, along with the guilt of having escaped. The young journalists among them carried the added burden of what they had witnessed and documented through their work.
Despite all this, our weekend together in Dublin overflowed with joy and love. On Saturday night, over a hundred students, mentors, and university administrators filled a local restaurant with conversation, laughter, and song. At an all-day workshop for the students on Sunday, during the lunch break, someone turned on music, and the students pulled us to join them in dance. Looking around the room at the beautiful faces of these students and my fellow mentors, I felt proud of these young people and of our work safeguarding their futures and the future of Palestine.
If anyone is interested in learning more our efforts, which will now shift in part to supporting the rebuilding of the educational sector in Gaza, please get in touch with me directly.
All best,
Nancy
Freedom for Palestine sticker in Dublin
WATCH AND READ
Public Instagram reel of Mohammed Hirez, one of our students in Ireland, as he says goodbye to his twin brother and widowed father on the morning of his evacuation from Gaza to Ireland. It is an unfathomably cruel world that forces this kind of separation on them without their knowing when they will meet again.
Ai Weiwei via Hyperallergic on Germany and the art world—never a mention of Gaza, but it underlies the whole piece. “Under most circumstances, society selects the most selfish, least idealistic among us to take on the work we call ‘art’ because that choice makes everyone feel safe.”
Mariam Kaba’s admonition to, “Choose your lane, find your people,” has brought me into familiar circles of organizing and activism on behalf of Palestine and has introduced me to new literary friends and political comrades. These relationships and the work we are doing together give me a sense of hope and purpose in this truly dismal moment.
As the deliberately engineered famine and relentless bombing continue in Gaza, as Israel flattens the last remaining buildings in Gaza City, and forces its residents to flee south into ever smaller areas, the U.S. is floating a plan to empty Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants so it can be turned into a casino on the Mediterranean. In the face of this fathomless cruelty and lawlessness, the majority of the world’s people stand with Palestine. The problem is that those in power are not holding Israel to account for its flagrant crimes, and the U.S., the U.K., and Germany are arming, covering for, and colluding in this horror. This genocide has ripped the mask off all our institutions in the west—it has shown the bankruptcy and venality of the government, the press, the academy, arts organizations, etc.
It’s grimly fascinating that images of intentionally starved children have prompted these leaders to at least SAY something about the crisis that has been created in Gaza. It seems that bombing, maiming, and killing tens of thousands of children are tolerable outcomes; but starving them is such a bad look that they have mumbled a few words of condemnation. Whether this turns into meaningful action like arms embargoes, boycotts, and sanctions remains to be seen.
A ray of light in all this has been the work I have done with a group of dedicated volunteers helping students in Gaza to find scholarships at Irish universities. Months of labor resulted in an evacuation of several dozen students to Ireland last week. After weeks of waiting, days of not being sure whether the evacuation would take place, and then a grueling 16-hour bus ride from Deir al Balah to Amman, these young people finally flew to Dublin. There was coverage in RTE of the arrival of the first group of students and this video at the Dublin airport features a young journalism student that I know. What a relief for them to have made their way to safety and to have found a way to continue their education after Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza. But what sadness they all feel about the families they left behind.
Getting to know these brilliant young people has been one of the privileges of my life. Our communications have been mainly through WhatsApp and Signal messages, voice memos, and occasional phone calls, and we have become friends without ever having been in a room together. As soon as they touched down in Ireland, I booked my plane ticket to Dublin. Inshallah—which is a word I have repeated so frequently lately that I’m thinking of having it tattooed on my arm in both Arabic and English—we will meet in the real world in October.
Nancy Kricorian
SUGGESTED READING
Sahar Rabah’s “Children of War” was translated into English by Ammiel Alcalay. Her Argentinian publisher shared an Instagram reel of this poem being read in Spanish. Sahar was part of last week’s evacuation to Ireland and starts in the master’s program in creative writing at Trinity College Dublin next week.
I highly recommend this important piece by Simone Zimmerman entitled Rhetoric Without Reckoning. In Jewish Currents, she argues that a new wave of liberal Zionist criticism of the Israeli government smacks of hypocrisy without an account of early support for what many people recognized from the beginning was a genocidal campaign. She says, “Only the logic that Jewish death is unacceptable and Palestinian death is a tragic necessity can explain the way these leaders remained ensconced in a story about Jewish victimhood as Gaza burned. In fact, even within that very first week after October 7th, there was no way to tell a story exclusively about Jewish victimhood unless you simply did not value Palestinian lives.”
The horsemen of the apocalypse continue their rampage against immigrants, trans people, women, abortion, history, the environment, and dissent. Their motto seems to be: A fire on every corner, a fox in every henhouse, a grifter and thief with a hand in every till. Meanwhile, and relatedly, the Israeli government launched a war against Iran that the U.S. government joined, and while that seems to be over for the moment, these vile collaborators continue apace with a genocide in Gaza. All of this is demoralizing, but we must keep our proverbial shoulders to the wheel, and we need to do it together.
On a brighter note, Columbia graduate and former student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil was released from detention and returned to his wife and infant son in New York City. I was at the rally held on the steps of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine on Sunday afternoon where Mahmoud spoke passionately about his personal ordeal and the suffering of the other men he met in the ICE detention facility in Louisiana. He said his imprisonment had only firmed his resolve to keep speaking out for Palestine. He then led a march to the gates of Columbia University to denounce the administration’s hypocrisy. His attorneys are still fighting the government’s attempts to have him deported because they claim that his speech is a “national security threat,” but at least now, he is home with his family.
Today is the mayoral primary election in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani is running neck-and-neck with bully and sexual harasser Andrew Cuomo. Because the city now uses ranked choice voting, the results will likely not be known until July 1st. On a side note, I have known Zohran since he was 8 years old and an elementary school classmate of our oldest child. And no matter what the result, I have felt like a proud auntie watching his excellent and practically flawless campaign.
My friend Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian’s inspiring book FOREST EUPHORIA, which was published on May 27, is already a national bestseller, and you can read an excerpt of it on LitHub. Patty and I will be in conversation about the book on Saturday, 28 June at 1 p.m. on Zoom as part of the International Armenian Literary Alliance’s Literary Light Series. You may register to join us here.
The Massachusetts Review published two poems by friend and mentee Sahar Rabah, who is still in Gaza where starvation and daily bombardment continue and are barely covered in U.S. mainstream media. The MassReview also published my young friend T.S.’s powerful piece Why Must We Be Heroes? My mentee Nadera Mushtha’s piece about higher education in Gaza during a genocide was published by The Guardian.
Leila Sansour wrote a clear-eyed if devastating analysis of why Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war against the entrapped and besieged Palestinians in Gaza. In the face of this depraved cruelty, her conclusion is that we must support the rebuilding of Palestinian society: “The strategy to confront it should therefore focus on unwavering commitment to rebuilding kinship, a sense of shared purpose, restoration of community, and civic dignity.”
Let’s follow the example of Ms. Rachel for Littles and do something every day that shows our commitment to creating a world where all children are cherished, where no children are bombed and starved, where families are not torn apart by masked thugs, and where all beings, human and non-human, are respected.
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.
