“I Don’t Think You Could Have A Resistance Movement Without Poetry”
Download This Episode
We spoke with Yaffa, a Palestinian poet, author and activist living in the diaspora about two recent collections published by the Trans and Queer Muslim publishing house she founded called Meraj. One of the two books is entitled Inara: Light to Queer And Trans Palestinian Utopia and the second a collection of her own poems written during the last lunar eclipse visible on Turtle Island, Blood Orange. We spoke about the importance of poetry and world building, the importance of community care and mutual aid, as well as supporting queer and trans Palestinians escaping genocide at the hands of the Israeli military. You can find more from Meraj publishing as well as how to obtain these titles at https://merajpublishing.com/
. … . ..
Transcription:
Transcript #2 Yaffa
Yaffa: First off, thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here. My name is Yaffa. I use they/them or they/she pronouns. I’m the current Executive Director of the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, which is one of the largest queer and trans Muslim orgs. I’m also a queer and trans Palestinian. A lot of my work over the last seven and a half months has revolved around supporting queer and trans Palestinians and other queer and trans folks who are most impacted by genocide. I’m also a writer and a poet. My collection Blood Orange was published in November talking about the events of October 7th, specifically. And then I just finished editing an anthology called the Inara: Light to a Queer & Trans Palestinian Utopia which encompasses 18 queer and trans Palestinians from around the world, some in Palestine, some elsewhere specifically to envision a free Palestine.
TFSR: That’s awesome. That’s so beautiful. How are you doing right now?
Yaffa: I’m doing all right. It was a busy night, which happens sometimes with time difference. But I am glad that I got to sleep in and that was really wonderful. I haven’t slept in this late in months. It was really nice.
TFSR: That’s wonderful. Yeah, sleep is important and such a precious resource sometimes. So you mentioned a few of your projects. Among other things, you founded the Meraj Publishing House, which earlier this month launched its second book Inara: Light to a Queer & Trans Palestinian Utopia. Congratulations, first and foremost. Can you talk a little bit about your publishing house and about this most recent work? Who contributed and what readers will find?
Yaffa: Yeah, absolutely. Meraj publishing is something I’ve had on my mind for the last couple of years. There’s so many gaps that currently exist within queer and trans Muslim organizing, in particular, and when I say Muslim, whether it’s for the nonprofit, whether it’s for any publishing things, we’re talking about people who are racialized as Muslim. We’re not talking about the belief system, per se, we’re talking about the racialization of that identity. Over the last several years, there’s been a few different pockets that I really wanted to try to address within queer and trans Muslim organizing, again, because there’s very little resources that go to individuals who are racialized as Muslim, and are queer and trans, for various reasons. For listeners, probably most of them are going to be really obvious, right? We’re kind of an invisible population. We have to build out our own infrastructure. Otherwise, no one’s going to build it for us.
Over the last couple of years, one thing I’ve been really reflecting on is how literature is world-building. Everything that we’re currently experiencing in the world has already been written about. And same with like the concept of Zionism. For example, it was written about in literature for 100 years before it became a political philosophy. I’ve been thinking of that over the last several years in terms of whose stories get to be shared and who gets to make the decisions about which stories get to be shared. I often will give an example of if I went to a traditional publisher and said that my Muslim family are transphobic and that my Palestinian family is queerphobic, and I want to write about that, they will give me a six-figure deal instantaneously. But if I go to them, and I’m like, “Actually, yeah, like, I pray five times a day, and my dad goes to the mosque five times a day, and my mom knows the whole Quran and like, and we’re really cute, and my parents don’t understand why the rest of you are a mess.” Nothing, right? They will definitely not give me anything. And not because it won’t sell but because they know that that’s the world that we’ll be building. And so I’ve been thinking about that over the last couple of years. My plan was actually to, once I leave MASGD (Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity) organization I currently run, really launch Meraj publishing and give that the time and attention that it needs.
But when October 7 happened, you know, especially that first week of realizing there wasn’t a single queer, trans-Palestinian that I could think about who was writing about the genocide. And where my experiences would be shared, and where the experiences of other queer and trans-Palestinians could be shared and centered in the ways that they need to. It was just one of those things where it was like, alright, I guess now is the time, we’re doing this this week.
It ended up launching very quickly. The short-term vision for Meraj is to be publishing more anthologies. We have a new anthology that we’re actually going to be announcing in the next couple of weeks. And that will be released later in the year. We just launched Inara, which has 17 other queer and trans-Palestinians who are a part of it. And these queer and trans-Palestinians are across various age groups, various countries, various parts of the diaspora, some still in Palestine, some in the surrounding region, and some in what’s known as the United States and Canada. And it was really just a space for people to explore what a free Palestine looks and feels like. And one thing that we were really, really critical about with the process is we wanted it to feel utopic for everyone involved. It wasn’t a matter of, let’s stress you out in trying to envision a free Palestine, and to me, that defeats the purpose. In terms of equitable pay in terms of access to resources, in terms of access to support, the process looked incredibly different from one person to the other. And because of that, it allowed us to really allow people to do what they wanted.
Inara is a collection of some poetry, some short stories, some essays, some photographs of digital art, in a way that usually you wouldn’t see anthologies done. For example, every single piece has a digital art piece associated with it that people are able to access through a QR code. One of the pieces, which was written by this incredible, queer Palestinian who is also dyslexic, you know, as they were working through it, it was like “well why don’t we just re-envision what it would look like for someone dyslexic to be writing something?” And I will say, probably half the contributors are dyslexic. Reimagining what that process needs to look like. Instead of being like, this is the only way you need to write it. In one case, a person sent me voice notes. And then those voice notes were the things that were transcribed. And then that was edited. Instead of being like, you have to do it in this way, or writers are only this or that. It was really beautiful.
For the short term, we’ll be doing a little bit more of anthologies, as well as releasing my own work. I have another collection that comes out June 19, called Desecrated Poppies that I haven’t announced yet. Mostly just because I haven’t had time to announce things. It’s less of like, “Oh, we’re waiting until this date.” No, no, I just haven’t had time to announce it. But I’m really excited for that book as well. I wasn’t intending on publishing a new poetry and essay collection. But this collection is specifically around anti-transness, anti-Palestine, and the rise of fascism, which couldn’t wait until October. Initially, the plan was to release something in October. But you know, with us going into pride in a week and a half, and with the right. And we know they’re going to hit us really hard in the coming week with a ton of antitrust legislation as they usually do towards the end of the May legislative session in what’s known as the United States. And so, really wanted to have a book that goes into that a little bit in a way that unfortunately, I haven’t necessarily seen a lot of people go into.
TFSR: That sounds like such a beautiful anthology. I’m really, really excited to read it and to delve into it a little bit more, especially since it seems like a multimedia kind of like re-envisioning of the form. Are you yourself a poet?
Yaffa: Yes.
TFSR: Can you talk about how you came to poetry as an art form as a form of self expression and as a form of resistance?
Yaffa: Yeah, absolutely. Its kind of interesting because I actually used to write novels for a really long time. Since I was 13 I’ve been writing one novel a year. It started just being really, really bored in math class, and then wanting to run away and make money that way. And, you know, here we are. Now I’m 31. But for years I would write young adult fantasy and sci-fi, and it was kind of my way of just escaping from different realities. I’ve lived in like nine different countries, I’ve lived in a dozen states in what’s known as the United States. I’ve lived in a lot of places and as you can probably imagine, as a queer, a trans Palestinian Muslim person who’s also disabled and is a global South citizen instead of a global North citizen. You know, very few communities can hold even half of what I am, let alone the entire thing. Writing has always been my way moving through processing things.
Poetry was really interesting because it was actually just the last couple of years since I got back to the US after living in Ireland for a couple of years during COVID. I was the caretaker for one of the people I grew up with, one of my really good friends at the time, who had stage four cancer. And so her cancer metastasized that summer and so I moved to the Bay Area to kind of take care of her. And I started writing poetry for the first time. The thing with poetry and Audrey Lorde kind of talks about this is that it’s, it’s the most accessible form of writing because you can do it anywhere. And so literally just be on my phone as we’re at like different appointments, right? As we’re in transit, as I’m waiting for different things. And it was just a lot easier to, to kind of like to be able to grasp instead of writing like a full novel and trying to have continuity and plot and things like that. Poetry is just whatever you want it to be. Poetry is literal chaos and I love it. And in my opinion, all poetry is always perfect, which also helps.
That was how I started more of the of the poetry journey. And there were many times in spaces that I would just be writing poetry. So much so that in the year prior to October 7, I had written like seven poetry collections. Just because there was so much happening. So much happening in the world, so much happening in general, but also I finally had time. This was after I was no longer the caretaker, maybe like eight months prior to October 7. When October 7 happened, wanting a pathway to center queer and trans Palestinians, poetry just made a lot of sense. And it was really interesting, because whether poetry or novels, I actually have rarely been able to write about Palestine. Palestine has kind of been the one area where it’s like, whoa. There will be a little bit like here and there. But it would be almost like excruciating to bring it out. But after October 7, I think, especially with visioning of Blood Orange and being like, Okay, this is now needed, it was one of the easiest things to write. And it was written over Eclipse weekend in October. Between October 13th to the 15th. 28 out of those 32 poems were written that weekend. And they just flowed. They just needed to be out there.
I’m really grateful that, you know, I discovered poetry a couple of years ago and it became one of my accessible formats. I wholeheartedly enjoy it. I still write other things. I have other works. But poetry to me is still the most accessible. And I will say that especially right now we’re also activated because of everything happening in the world. For me, I haven’t actually been able to read any books except for poetry books. That’s the only thing I could try to process. I do think that there is a lot of power in having multiple modalities and formats to make it as accessible as possible to people in different ways.
TFSR: Absolutely. That’s really beautiful. There’s so much there. We learned that the proceeds from the book sales are going to Palestinian families escaping Rafah into Egypt. Can you talk about this in the groups that you’re hooked up with on the ground doing this work?
Yaffa: Yeah, absolutely. Its actually specifically queer and trans Palestinians and their families from Rafah, which is a very, very, very specific type of work. When I decided to do Blood Orange I decided to do Blood Orange for two different reasons. The first one was to center queer and trans Palestinian experience as we’re going through this, knowing that that’s not something that’s going to be centered easily within mainstream society. And then the second reason was knowing that unfortunately, no one was going to be providing resources and assistance for queer and trans Palestinians specifically on the ground. I always ask people if people have heard of a single person who’s queer in Gaza. I always ask them if they’ve talked about pinkwashing. And the vast majority of places, especially queer and trans spaces, they’ve talked about pinkwashing. But they’re so removed from the situation on the ground that they actually don’t know a single name. They don’t know a single person who has been killed.
So knowing that, basically all of the profits from Blood Orange go to queer and trans Palestinians on the ground in Gaza. That was partially for evacuations, partially for food, partially for tents, whatever was really needed for the queer and trans Palestinians I work with. And from there, it kind of shifted into creating a second mutual aid group as well. And then a third and then the fourth. The queer and trans-Palestinian support work is usually a lot of the events that I go around and the different talks that I do, the fundraising, all of that goes to queer and trans-Palestinians on the ground. But realizing that queer and trans-Palestinians and other folks impacted by genocide in the diaspora are just as vulnerable in different ways. They’re getting fired, they’re getting evicted, they’re losing their children, they’re getting doxed. All of these things are happening. I then created a second fund and fund is a separate fundraiser, and I actually work with various funders to move money through that. And that’s kind of become the larger one.
We’ve probably moved close to $70,000 on the ground in Gaza to over 124 people in the diaspora. And I have another fund that’s for psychosocial support. So if someone is in need of therapy, I will go and pay a therapist to be working with them. And then the last one is for frontline organizers, which is also a very niche need. But in terms of where the fundraising for these events goes for the money on the ground, from the very beginning, I tried to be really, really, really specific with people because I think people hear mutual aid to a space and they already imagined an existing structure of how that looks like and that I can go and give you a name of a person that that money is going to go to. When I wouldn’t give names, right, because it’s queer and trans people. Thats a very vulnerable population in different ways. But the other thing that I think most people don’t understand about, not even just genocide, but it was the same for working with different war zones. But within genocide, I can go and fundraise for somebody. I can go in some fundraising for this very, very specific person to get them out of Rafah. I would need $5,000 at least to be able to get them into Egypt; I’ll be really honest: the amount of times that by the time I have that money, that person is already killed.
And that’s a reality that I think a lot of times, people don’t think about when it comes to genocide. “I’m fundraising for this family, so the money is definitely going into this family.” And it’s like, we don’t, we don’t know that. I really want this to no longer be the case at some point. But I think I probably know the most names of queer and trans-Palestinians who have killed in Gaza out of anybody on this planet potentially. I know over three dozen. I don’t know many people who know more than a couple, even within this work, unfortunately. The money goes to where it’s needed most for queer and trans-Palestinians on the ground. I will say that the needs are so so so large, that even unfortunately, with people being killed that its not like we’re running out of queer and trans Palestinians. The vast majority of that $70,000 that has been raised and most of that is through Blood Orange and Inara, mostly Blood Orange. Blood Orange has sold over 3,500 copies which is amazing for a poetry book like that doesn’t normally happen. Even with more established traditional publishers poetry is kind of the place where no one makes money. Most of the $70,000 has been through that.
Most of that has been through evacuating different individuals. We’ve been able to able to evacuate a decent amount of people, which is really, really wonderful. But as listeners might know, it’s one thing to evacuate a single person, it’s another to evacuate an entire family. I will support with coordination and things like that for the like the rest of the families, but to try to get money for a queer person and their entire family, we’re looking at, like $100,000 to $200,000. Unfortunately, seven and a half months later, I’m still basically the main person fundraising for queer and trans Palestinians. I have been able to raise over $200,000 total between the different funds. And also we know that’s like a drop in a bucket when it comes to evacuations.
This money will go towards that. Right now, though, I will also say that Rafah has fully closed. The border is fully occupied. I’m still supporting the people who have been able to leave, still supporting people on the ground for their more urgent needs. But there’s a big question mark in terms of when evacuations will restart again, what do those look like? So when that happens, we will pivot again and again and again, and just support whoever we’re able to and the most marginalized in that moment and try to get aid to them.
TFSR: Thank you for your point about the concept of mutual aid, not being a static, organization-based thing sometimes. The point is very, very well made. Is there any more that you want to say about that? Mutual aid is a concept that’s been bandied about quite a lot, and like maybe in certain circles has somewhat lost its teeth, but in this context, maybe has not yet.
Yaffa: One thing I share with communities when I go and visit communities and have these conversations is for individuals living in what’s known as the United States, or what’s known as Canada or any part of the settler colonial world, is that this year, in particular, in what’s known as the United States, is going to be a really vicious year. And we’ve known that for a really long time. We know that the elections are coming up in November. But beyond that, we know that the far right and white Christian nationalists are weaponizing trans identity in particular, to really move us towards fascism. And there’s debates about, like, how deep into fascism are we? And, in my opinion, we’re not fully there yet, which is why I talk about these things. And if we do get to a place where we are fully ingrained in fascism, then there’s a very, very different way of moving. But whether we’re there or not, things like community care are essential across the board. And so I’ve been telling communities of, you know, we need funds in Palestine. In my work, right, I need to be able to get queer and trans-Palestinians out. I need to get some resources on the ground. I need to do a lot of different things. And also, for me, none of that means anything if the communities here who are trying to do that work, are fully struggling, disposed of, and potentially dying in the process.
I encourage communities to really reflect on what does community care look like within their communities? I have the different funds, but you know, if someone is calling in from is, wants to message me from Asheville, a queer and trans person who’s impacted by the genocides, from Asheville, you know, I normally live in Oakland. And so to me, I’m like, it doesn’t make sense for someone from Asheville to have to reach out to someone in Oakland for support. I will provide that support, I will make it happen, but I want community care and mutual aid built out in Asheville. I want it built out in Durham, I want it built out in New York, I want it built out in DC, I want it built out in every single city. Because we’re going to need it everywhere.
And mutual aid is interesting in in what’s known as the US because it’s always existed, very invisibly within the most marginalized of marginalized communities. Then it rose to prominence during COVID. There’s a lot that we can learn from 2020, as we’re in 2024, because 2020 was also an election year. And the thing that fully fully, fully, fully destroyed mutual aid was actually the election. There were a lot of things that were creating fractures that were allowing it to begin to crumble in different ways. But the end of it was Biden. Because Biden winning allowed the predominantly white liberal majority to be like, “Oh, we’re saved, we’re good to go.” And they pulled out all resources. So, foundations stopped funding it, individuals stopped funding it, and it just disappeared. And that was really sad to witness in a lot of ways. But also, again, I think there’s a lot that we can learn from it, of what’s going to happen this year or what’s possible this year.
This year, we are a lot closer to fascism than we were in 2020. There’s a lot that is way worse than where we were in 2020. I invite communities to do this now. This is the time to do that. And by when I say to go and do it, I don’t mean if you have no idea what you’re doing to go and start from step one and figure it out. We don’t have time for a step-by-step process to figure this out. There are people in every single community who have been doing community care forever. It’s existed within different communities forever. Go and learn from those communities. Ask individuals outside of your community for support. We need to be able to mobilize this as quickly as possible. But this is going to just be rising. And if folks have been paying attention to the last seven and a half months of the people who are most engaged in the beginning are no longer engaged. Right? Burnout is very real. Disposability is very real within communities and movement spaces. And state violence is very real. Which is why we’re seeing that the state is starting to charge more people with felonies. Instead of just regular misdemeanors and things like that and thats because once you have a felony, you’re out of organizing space. Your risk is so much higher. The resources that we need to utilize to support you are so much higher and they know that. And so, again, this is why community care is needed. Literally not even today, like decades ago. Its needed today. It’s needed tomorrow. Its needed next week. Whenever you get to this, build your own community care platforms and foundations within your communities because it will be needed.
And what happens if fascism fully fully fully rises and we end up in a fully, fully authoritarian state is that the community care just becomes invisible, but it still exists; you actually don’t have to shift that much of it. But it definitely would have to become more invisible. Even today with like this, in between state that we’re in, the vast majority of my community care work isn’t visible. There’s a lot that I will like share about, but I will also do work in very, very, very specific ways to the point that existing structures would, would think that I’m doing it wrong, right, because like, I will never name anyone, I am the only person who will know names. And if something happens to me, I have a process in place of how people are going to be taken care of. But most of it is invisible. There’s the visible piece of like, we need money. But everything else is incredibly invisible in terms of who I work with, how I work with them, all of those different things. And that’s necessary within a society that’s really close to fascism. You can’t just go “here’s a list of everyone I work with!” I’m not here to make it that easier for the state.
I want to invite communities to be at the forefront of doing that work for themselves as they think about doing it for elsewhere. Because if every community went and did that, then I can go and amplify my work for everybody else. And then we’ll have people taken care of. But right now nothing is taken care of. No one else is really supporting queer and trans Palestinians on the ground. No one else is really supporting queer and trans-Palestinians and other identities most impacted by genocide in what’s known as the US or what’s known as Canada or other places, let alone anyone supporting queer and trans Sudanese people in Sudan or queer and trans Congolese people in the Congo. And that’s where capacity does not reach. Every once in a while, I’m able to support some mutual aid efforts in those places. You know, but I’m still one person, for the most part, and I receive a lot of support which communities are absolutely beautiful and wonderful, and we love them. And it’s still a lot on one person with just support versus all the communities kind of taking it upon themselves.
TFSR: Indeed yeah, I thank you for saying that. I have seen renewed interest in mutual aid and community care organizing coupled with uncertainty about where to start, or uncertainty about how to go about it. And the thing that I found most useful in talking to folks about that is to try and like combat perfectionism. Because if you’re doing it, and you’re doing it with the intention of having it build and having it be more complex, then it doesn’t have to be perfect from the get go. You know?
Yaffa: Yeah, absolutely. And I will just add that some mutual aid and community care in particular have been something that the most marginalized of communities have always relied on. Not because, you know, it was a Tuesday, and we thought it was nice to have, but because it was a Tuesday and we needed it to survive. And so there is a difference when it’s the communities who have always known it are basically just given resources and given platforms within the communities to be able to do this on a larger scale. Versus individuals whose survival is not tied to community care work. Everyone can be a part of community care work but when your survival is not reliant on it, it’s never going to be the same because it’s always going to be this nice thing to have. It always means it’s optional. It always means that on a Tuesday, I can actually step back and not tell anyone, I never talked about this ever again, and it won’t negatively impact my life. But when it’s individuals who, if you take a step back on a Tuesday, you know that immense harm is going to happen to your community, you’re not going to take a step back on a Tuesday without being really intentional about it. And this isn’t saying let’s never take steps back. Steps back are beautiful. But like, for example, if today I decide I’m going to take a day off, I have a network of people that I will be reaching out to be like, Hey, I’m taking today off, this is what needs to be done. And I’ve cultivated that network to be able to be able to respond to that, where I could be like, I need to raise $1,000 today, and they will go and raise $1,000 That day. Versus me just being like, okay, peace yall I’m tired. I am tired. I have been tired for a long time. But me just dropping everything means my community dies. And to me that’s avoidable. There are ways to build this out.
And again, the people who have been doing this, we know how to do that. We have had to do it. I learned community care because like I was born a few months after my parents were displaced after the Gulf War. They literally packed up a sedan with eight people, little clothes that they could carry, and started immediately over. Then I was born a few months later. So, I was born into a community where if people didn’t do meal trains, and babysitting, and housing support, and just every single type of support, none of us would survive. To me, it’s always been the norm. There are a lot of people with those same experiences where community care has always been our practice. It’s always been our foundation. My advice to communities is, especially if they’re more privileged communities, is: support the individuals already doing this. Be a part of that. Don’t necessarily start up your own thing as privileged folks because it’s never going to be what we need it to be. It’s going to be an additional nice thing to have. Ultimately, it won’t know how to navigate fascism. It won’t know how to navigate state violence and state systems in the way that we know how.
I have 31 years of experience doing this work. And I’m 31. This isn’t something that October 7th happened now is like, let me learn how to do this. It was, oh okay, we’re doing this again. And again, and again and again. Just putting that out there for folks who are interested in doing this work of also just letting go of like, maybe it’s not you who has to do this work. But maybe your power is that you have access to resources, you have access to space, you have access to money, you have access to different things; we need those things, right? Those are the things that slow everything down and you shouldn’t necessarily be the decision maker of like, here’s exactly how this is built out. Because you wouldn’t necessarily know that. And that’s okay. Like we love not knowing things. None of us need to know everything. It’s actually really nice when I don’t know things because then I don’t have to do it. But that’s just me.
TFSR: I resonate with that so much! [laughs] I have one question about poetry and one question about logistics, how can people find more about you. Does that sound okay?
Yaffa: That’s perfect.
TFSR: So, our understanding is that poetry has been deeply intertwined with resistance in Palestinian culture, in the homeland and in the diaspora. I was just learning about the Tarweedeh, the songs that are sung by women to their families through the windows and prisons during the pre-Nakba period of the British mandate to deliver messages. Would you speak about the power you find in poetry in sort of like a resistance or like, continuity context?
Yaffa: Yeah, poetry as a form of resistance has always been a part of Palestinian resistance. And I will say if like, it was always just a part of Palestinian life before there was resisting states was necessary in the way that it is. One really cool thing with poetry that I find really, really fascinating is that the continuity of poetry is that, like, you can take something that I’ve written, and translate it into Arabic, and just remove me as the author, and take something else that was written in Arabic 60 years ago, and also remove the author or translate that into English. And unless you know, very, very, very specific poet styles, you wouldn’t necessarily know which timeframe it’s from. And so it’s a way that allows us to really bridge gaps between different generations, and to me, allows us to really better understand these systems, right? A lot of these systems have not necessarily changed, the tools themselves are the same. The visibility that we have to them is what’s changed, but the tools themselves are very much the same. You can take things written tomorrow and compare it with 50 years ago. You can’t tell which one is which. And to me, that shows how simple and basic systems of oppression are.
Like I always tell people of like settler colonialism is actually basic, like white supremacy is basic. All these different systems are basic, because it’s always the exact same tools in the exact same ways. They have basically told us their exact blueprint, and they usually do. So when we take a step back, and we can just, like, reflect on that, I feel like, we have everything that we need to really show up against the systems. And I feel like poetry is such a beautiful way to do that. It’s a it’s a pretty accessible form of writing. There’s different types of forms of poetry. That would be less accessible in the sense of like, you know, you have to follow certain formats, right? And it has to be like different things and different that and all that, and that’s beautiful, but poetry is also just anything. I always tell people have like, “have you texted before? You’re a poet.” I don’t care that you’re not claiming that it’s, you’ve written things, you’re a poet. Because poetry defies any logic, it defies any structure; it just is.
I think that’s absolutely necessary in any resistance movement is to find modalities that are fully accessible for everyone. Like, not every, not everyone could create a giant mural. I love that people can do that not everyone can can make music, I love that some people can do that. Not everyone can write novels. I love that people can do that. Poetry, though, for the most part, whether it’s poetry, as in like written or even like in storytelling and verbal exchanges. Poetry is almost accessible by everybody. Not 100% of people obviously. But it’s one of the most accessible forms of communication, of archiving work, of story sharing, of all of these different things. I don’t think that you could have a resistance movement without poetry. And maybe that poetry becomes into music, or it becomes into songs. I think of songs by Aretha Franklin became enormous during the civil rights movement. Lyrics are just poetry. And just different forms of it. I view poetry as such a beautiful tool that I view as essential for our movements.
This is where we also need to have conversations around how many attacks are happening within the education system to prevent people from being able to access those types of things. One thing that is very different about Palestinians, compared to a lot of other marginalized populations, is that the literacy rate is about 99%. We’re talking about an accessible form of resistance that’s accessible to 99% of people of a population. That’s obviously not the case for every marginalized group, so we are able to kind of dig deeper and figure out what is it within other marginalized groups is going to be that form. But with Palestinians, in particular, because literacy is so high, because the written form and storytelling, both written and verbal, have been such a huge part of our practice for hundreds of years, poetry is just integral and has been for that entire time.
TFSR: Thank you for talking about that. What are your some upcoming tour dates that you have?
Yaffa: I’m starting to go into my less-tour period. I have a couple of events out in the Bay Area— one on the 22nd, one on the 30th. I am also partnering with a national art festival gallery where we are doing a giant memorial for Palestinians. We’re going to write 1,000 names of family members of queer and trans Palestinians. I’ve lost over 200 family members, I know others have lost similar or even more family members. We are writing down 1,000 of those names. And then I will actually have a giant installation for a trans-Palestinian memorial. It will be representative of the 13 trans Palestinians that I know that have been killed in the last seven and a half months. And it represents all the other unnamed trans Palestinians that potentially nobody on the planet knows. Well, someone knows, but you know, in an accessible ways. The launch of that is going to be June 7th, and that’s going to be a gallery that’s available throughout the rest of the month of June in San Francisco. If anyone’s randomly there, they can come to the opening on the 7th, or they can just come and see it. It’s at SoMa Arts, and they’re doing a full day of workshops on June 16, also in that same space to really dig deeper.
I’ll also be in Salt Lake City on June 8th and 9th. I will be ending the month with a week in Norway for Oslo Pride, doing a few events there. Oslo pride has been intentional about how to center queer and trans Palestinians throughout the process. How do they make sure that the work that they are doing is supporting queer and trans Palestinians? They are fundraising for queer and trans-Palestinians organizations and for this work that we’ve talked about throughout Pride. They’ve integrated the two instead of the separation, and I haven’t really seen that anywhere else, which hopefully other places get it together and move towards that with their prides. And then I’ll be in Ireland, both in Northern Ireland and in the Republic for a few different events there as well.
Then I will be taking a little bit of time off from touring. Specifically because I expect to need to tour more during the fall. We’ll have the anniversary of October 7th in October, we’ll have the elections in November, we’ll have inauguration in January. It’s going to be a lot. There will be a lot of needs for conversation to really try to figure out what happens next, where do we go, whatever ends up happening with any of those. So I will be taking a little bit slower. But I will be having more virtual events throughout those months. If people follow me on Instagram or Tiktok, it’s @yaffasutopia. You’ll receive all the updates over there. I will say social media is shadow banning a lot of us and so just make sure any queer trans-Palestinians that you follow, just make sure that you’re fully subscribed to them, that you’re interacting with the things that that we say, just because otherwise you will miss it, because of how shadow banning is working. Those are some of the things that I have coming up.
TFSR: Lovely. Does Meraj Publishing House have a website or a presence on social media?
Yaffa: So Meraj publishing is also is on social media, and it’s just Meraj Publishing, we also have a website and you can sign up for our newsletter, where you will receive some updates. So it’s just merajpublishing.com.
TFSR: Do you have anything that you’d like to add in closing or anything that we didn’t get to touch on?
Yaffa: I think we covered mostly everything.
I will say of just want to encourage people to go and follow queer and trans Palestinians who are specifically talking about queerness and transness as part of their foundation for the organizing work that we do. Trans people in general, especially global majority of trans folks are going to be severely impacted over these next several months and years as we’re in this fight. I think sometimes people forget that, as we’re fighting, real people are being harmed in different ways. And so regardless of what happens months from now, regardless of what we’re building out, people are still being harmed. So getting as close to that as possible and making sure that we’re listening to the people who are going to be the most impacted is really, really critical.
The other thing I would mention is just about pride this year. The FBI last week released a memo that basically said that Pride this year is going to be targeted by foreign terrorist organizations more so than in previous years, which basically is just keywords for saying that pro-Palestinian organizations are going to be targeting Pride. Because, let’s be honest, Pride has not been showing up for people impacted by genocide. It hasn’t shown up for Black folks, it hasn’t shown up for trans folks, it hasn’t shown up for a lot of people. So I want to really highlight that as something to be paying attention to. We should be organizing against pride, we should be organizing protests, we should be having conversations with pride councils, we should be saying that the bare minimum has not been met across almost all most Prides even there are some Prides that are started there are either acknowledging the genocide, but not divesting and then others who are divesting but not acknowledging the genocide. And it’s like, you can’t not build a world of fascism if you’re not even willing to acknowledge genocide and divest from genocide. Let alone begin redistributing resources and things like that. And so just something for people to keep in mind. It’s something that I’ll be talking about a little bit more over social media in the coming weeks, just out of necessity, and, but just something for people to pay attention to. Because we’re already seeing police brutality increasing, which also means that people need to be checking in on the queer and trans Black community more so because, ultimately, we know who ends up killed by the police when that happens. So it’s just a lot for people to reflect on. But just inviting people to be a part of any and all of it and to really move beyond that bare minimum.
TFSR: Yeah, absolutely. Pride is such a sticky subject.
Anecdotally, our corporate pride here in Asheville recently divested from Pratt and Whitney, which is a subsidiary of Raytheon. But it was like pulling teeth, it was not easy. It doesn’t mean that they’re like divesting from the police. It doesn’t mean that they’re supporting like Black and Brown and trans communities. That does not mean that it just means that this very, very crucial but also like we shouldn’t stop there win happened. I think that’s a really good provocation moving into pride season. And as people who are queer and trans and as people who are like in and of those communities, we should be like focusing on that. There are so many, grassroots non-Pride, queer, trans organizations that are doing stuff all around the world.
Yaffa thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to get to sit down with you. Please let us know if we can be like of use amplifying any endeavors or amplifying any voices that you’d like to put us in touch with like we’re available for that and very eagerly available for that.
Yaffa: Amazing. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.