“Yes, 

to hold, the streetlights guiding your path.”

A stunning collection. I think it brought me closer to Asghar, seeing a lot of the themes from their book When We Were Sisters brought home in new ways. 
My absolute favorite was “Haram.” Having also struggled with my body hair when I was young, reading the ties between the culture of hair removal and the Surah about not altering any part of your body, the conclusion, “Maybe we were outside Allah’s creations... We speculated the Qur’an hadn’t ever imagined hairiness like ours, so vast, it was its own sin” broke something in me open 

A moving book showing the connection between ancestors and history and our current life, and how all things on Earth are tied together. The call to action is clear and motivating. I spent so much time admiring the paintings as well. All around beautiful!

Cute and heartwarming! I love K. O'Neill's style. This is definitely a book I would gift to a middle grade reader, I only wish it was longer and more developed for myself. However, the world building was exciting, and the plot left just enough for my imagination to fill ✨

Resilient is a word I'm tired of being demanded of those struggling to survive in the "East," but it is the most fitting to describe these characters. It was heartbreaking and infuriating to see each woman hope that after these bombs, peace will finally come, knowing the horrors that befell Afghanistan next. 

The middle of this novel almost had me giving up. Every violence that the Soviet Union, the civil war, the USA was made so real and clear, and then to have such beautiful, complex, wounded women abused by their husband made me want to stop reading. I'm so glad I didn't, the end of this book was everything I'd hoped for, though it still destroyed me.

I received this book as a gift, and despite loving Springsteen's music, didn't expect to enjoy the telling of Nebraska as much as I did. I knew it was an album recorded in Springsteen's bedroom, without the band, and released without much production. It was so much more than that. Zanes goes on tangents describing every influence, from his childhood to a random movie caught on TV, that went into making Nebraska. Though I'll probably never watch these films, read those books, or visit that New Jersey home, I was never bored during these tangents. I especially loved the look into the music scene at the time, how the album was received as a punk album to some in the DIY scene, and how Nebraska influenced some of my teenage favorite albums from Bon Iver and The National. I wish the book, or Springsteen himself, had more details on his mental health struggle coinciding with Nebraska, but I think I'll have to read The Boss' autobiography for that. 

As much as I'm disappointed in the E Street's Band silence on political and social issues important to me, especially with how Springsteen was so vocal on issues in the past, and how Little Steven takes credit for bringing apartheid in South Africa to an end but is silent on the Palestinian genocide wile South Africa takes Israel to the ICJ... I could go on and on, I thoroughly enjoyed this read. It was interesting to hear how Springsteen flew commercial and rejected valet service (now partying with Obama, hosting super-spreader events from 2021 on, seeing no problem with Ticketmaster charing $1,000 for tickets on his last tour, I'm getting off-track again...) this escape to the 1980s, though dark and challenging, was welcome. It added so many layers to an already deep album I'll continue to hear with new ears. 

I found this the most difficult of Shehadeh's books I've read so far. His writing is still moving and beautiful, and his descriptions of life in Palestine ever eye-opening. However, many of his conclusions in his questions on how to stay friends with Israelis were frustrating.

In one argument, he explores how even memory is politicized in Israel and Palestine. The Israeli example: "The Israeli Knesset passed the Nakba Law, depriving any state-funded body that commemorated the Nakba of its budget. In this way, Israel is attempting to erase the memory of the most traumatic event in Palestinian history."  What do Palestinians - a people forced from their land, separated by illegal settlements and walls, abused at border crossings, without an equal voice in the Knesset or an equal government - have held as an equal example to this law?  “The Palestinians have to accept that after the Holocaust, many countries failed to take in European Jews. For many, Palestine was their last refuge." Palestinians are not to blame for the Holocaust. No country is wrong for welcoming refugees, but it is the modern state of Israel that carried out the Nakba, and it is the very same state that denies it (while it continues it!) This forcing of Holocaust guilt onto Palestinians is perhaps even clearer today,  as Germany weaponizes Holocaust remembrance to arm Israel and silence any protest, even going so far as to accuse Jewish protestors of anti-Semitism, arrest them, beat them, and otherwise cancel their events and silence them. [Please see: Iris Hefets, Adam Broomberg, Deborah Feldman, Udi Raz, Yuval Carasso, Shir Hever, the group Jüdische Stimme, Strike Germany, and so many more.]

Another example: Shehadeh’s friend has a daughter the friend describes as the "most Israeli" of his family. He talks of how she is excited to join the army. Shehadeh is at first angry that this "friend," who was purportedly at least liberal and allegedly opposed to the occupation, could raise a child to have no concept of the horrors Palestinians struggle against and the violence the Israeli state enacts on innocent Palestinians. Instead of asking his "friend" how this could be, Shehadeh blames himself. If only he had gone through the pains to visit this "friend" more often, the daughter might have known a Palestinian and had learned about Palestinian history from him! But WHY should this guilt be felt by Shehadeh? Shouldn't this "friend" have known more than just one Palestinian? If he was truly against the occupation, shouldn't he have worked harder to disabuse his daughter of Israeli propaganda? 

 
In the end, my frustrations are less with Shehadeh and more with the occupation. I would still recommend the book, as like his other works, it has given me more to think about and opened my heart to many emotions.

“It had become increasingly harder to leave the house. This was another feature of our imprisoned state. We had become too attached to life behind bars, we were afraid that if we left we would not be allowed back. I was becoming like a dear relative for whom every farewell was an ordeal. Whenever he came to visit, he had to be forced to leave. Ever since, I heard of how my father had left the office that evening before he was murdered. How he had lingered, spoken individually to everyone. Started to leave, then returned. I had begun to pay attention to farewells, as though it was necessary to memorize every detail and gesture, lest it be the last.” 

[Please forgive any errors in the quotes: I read to this as an audiobook and transcribed the quotes as best I could.]

After hearing so much about this book, I’m glad I finally read it, but I’m disappointed I didn’t connect with the characters as much as I had hoped. I expected a multigenerational saga through especially difficult years of war and exiles to contain dark elements, but every relationship was so twisted. The book does an incredible job exploring the fetishization that can emerge in a relationships when one partner is a minority in some way or another, and while some of these cases were clearly done and heartbreaking, it would have been nice to see at least one couple on equal footing, or at least have less rape and grooming. While the struggles were realistic, I wish there had been more solidarity between the characters. The developments that were the best were the relationships between women: working side by side, lending support, looking out for each other. But even those relationships fell apart in the end. The events that happened between the time jumps also bothered me. So much page space was given to the minute details of the inside of a factory, the way pachinko works, the history of other minor details. While some of that was interesting, it took away from time I would have rather spent with the characters. How did a younger brother cope with the loss of his older brother? What about that older brothers wife and children? How did a widow feel when her husband, who had been very ill for a long time, passed? These major events impacted some of the characters greatly, but the reader spent time getting to know the other characters only for them to drift into the background. The way Christianity was promoted by certain characters often left me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I think this would be a great book to read with a bookclub, and I’ll definitely be reflecting on these elements that bothered me specifically and what artistic meaning they may have. 

What an inspiring life. I’ve been reading a lot from Angela Davis the past years, and I’m so glad to have received such an in-depth telling of her early years and earlier activism. We have so much work to do still, and it took my breath away what she accomplished and had to go through at such young ages. Her persistence in the movements for freedom is amazing.
From the stories of her childhood in Jim Crow USA to her time in different jails, courtrooms, and protests, to her studies across the world - every piece fit into a flowing narrative that I never wanted to put down. It took me so long to read only because my library loan was due and the holds list was long! I’m glad others are just as interested. I can’t wait to read her new collection. 

“It doesn't matter

Run.” from Running Orders

The first third especially tore my heart out and the last third especially made me ache with longing, recognition, grief, and love. A stunning collection.

Favorites: Running Orders, Eating The Earth, Middle Village, Tu’burni, Immigrant, Instructions For Making Arabic Coffee, Translation, Time Management 

 “In short, any attempt to theorize violence directed at women and gender nonbinary people must go beyond addressing interpersonal violence to ending forms of violence from the state. Thus, projects undertaken by many feminist-of-color organizations have involved arguing that gender oppression is central to an understanding of racist violence and that conversely, white supremacy is central to an understanding of gender violence. Capitulating to a carceral feminism that calls upon the state to "protect" women from gender violence would replicate the very conditions that needed to be challenged… The harm that is produced and reproduced through endless cycles of reform continues as mainstream anti-violence leaders stubbornly address gender violence in isolation, disconnect it from other forms of injustice, and reject attention to racist and other forms of state violence."

While some of the more academic passages were daunting, the core of this book was impactful. It has a great balance of theory, history of these movements, and more recent examples of actions and organizations. In the end, this is a motivating call to action.