Queens Public Library Gala

Last June I was awarded the Queens Public Library Award (a golden library card!). I was beyond overjoyed to receive this honor along with Victor Lavalle. Just moments after I found out, I also learned that the two other honorees, men who owned a bookstore in NYC. One of the men was known in the community to ban books at his store by Palestinian writers and fire clerks who wanted to display these books during the current anti-occupation movement…

And yet, this man was receiving this Library award alongside me! I wanted to share with you the speech I ended up sharing addressing this hypocrise… Luckily my friend Tara Sarath got some shaky video of the moment.

Hello everybody! Wow, can I use this golden library card to pay my overdue fines?

Thank you Queens Public Library and all the librarians in our system!

Thank you Ayesha Pande for always believing in my writing and my friends, who are here and make everything a million times more fun…

The library is a miraculous place. It’s a place I can go to for some peace and quiet which in NYC is a miracle!

It’s such a revolutionary concept to give all people access to books, to community programs and services. It continues to be a deeply revolutionary concept.

If you’ve ever been helped by a librarian please clap, if a librarian has helped you… find a book, put one on hold, dive into research, find some new music, join a community event, or just give you a quiet space to study…

 (Ok… we probably couldn’t make this much noise in a library…. )

It’s for this reason and so many more that I’m honored to receive this award from the Queens Public Library. Not just any library but the Queens public library. …

You already know this, but I grew up in Queens.

One of the most important life lessons I learned, is that there is power, beauty, strength in living together, side by side with those of many religions, cultures, life experiences. That’s what Queens teaches us.

Growing up in Queens, I fell in love every day with people who seemed on the surface to be nothing like me…

At the Queens Public Library, I continued to fall in love with characters in memoirs, novels, not only from different cultures, but different centuries. I saw myself in Francie Nolan from a Tree Grows in Brooklyn who decided as a child she would read every book in her local library starting with the letter A.

My branch was the Corona public library on 104th street. It was a small branch like Francie Nolan’s and as a child reading every book felt like a completely doable task to me.

I’m still trying.

In Roses, my last novel,  I wrote about the librarians I knew, those who were kind and quietly revolutionary. Librarians who made sure they provided books that represented the diversity of our incredibly diverse Queens community…

Again, What an incredible concept. : ) To share books that represent the wholeness of human experience, and yet a concept that terrifies some …

I’ve been so grateful for the Queens Public libraries support for Banned Books, highlighting these books during Banned Book week and throughout the year. I’ve been so proud to be a New Yorker when NYC libraries provided virtual access to censored books to readers all over the country.

As we all know, we are seeing an intense rise of book bans, of censorship of Queer, Trans, BIPOC narratives …

In our own city, NYC, in universities, in bookstores, in community organizations, we’re witnessing the censorship of those who are calling for the end of the genocide in Palestine … We are seeing writers, university students and faculty being silenced, punished and harmed for calling for an end to the genocide. In Palestine, libraries are being destroyed, books are being burned by IOF soldiers…

Censorship the misguided concept that if you repress access to literature you can somehow repress the ideas themselves. This doesn’t work …. Especially when the ideas are for freedom, liberation, justice and love, yes, love

This story … of those who ban books, burn books… and the story of those who choose to resist oppression. I know this story. I’ve read this book…. I read it in a public library….

Kundiman Gala: October 14, 2023

Days before the Kundiman Gala, where I was also an honoree, there was an assertion of unexpected Zionist ideology and at this event the community was reeling, deeply upset, I still have not fully processed it all… but you can read this piece in LitHub. This was the speech I gave at the Gala, yet again, thanks to a friend Gein Wong for the video…

I don’t think I can say anything more eloquently than the incredible Kundiman fellows who spoke up online and behind the scenes and tonight, the only words I can say are : Free Palestine  The only way to peace is with a free Palestine Free Palestine  Free Palestine

Like many of the speakers I was re-writing my talk and I will be sharing it soon , but I decided to have grace with myself and share what I posted earlier this week, something I wrote 11 years ago, and that I am horrified is more relevant than ever…  

Love is not a pass, it’s an invitation

The Endless Baptism -(Originally published in the Feminist Wire 2012)

For Palestine

For the last few months, I’ve been working on a series of essays on Palestine. I’ve now written and erased my words until there is nothing left but the original title of the series. It could fit on a button: “Islamophobia is not the answer to Anti-Semitism.” —-Eventually, the title too had to be scratched. Because although anti-Muslim sentiment is fueled by and benefits US imperialism and Israel’s apartheid practices, Palestinian Christians suffer as well.]]

When we share what we know and feel about Palestine and the ways in which we in the United States are complicit in Israel’s crimes, we hear cries of “Anti-Semite” thrown like dirt in our eyes. This is what is done when someone tries to tell the truth of Palestine, even though Zionism in current practice has been included in the African Union’s Charter on Human and People’s Rights on par with apartheid and neocolonialism. This Charter has been ratified by 53 African countries.

Before they were bullied into changing the definition, the UN General Assembly also defined Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination” and added that “any doctrine of racial differentiation of superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous.” This was in 1975. Due to pressure from the United States and Israel, the UN changed their tune.  At the UN Conference on Racism in 2001, the United States and Israel threatened to walk away from the conference if Zionism continued to be associated with racism. However, an independent Human Rights Forum at the same conference did connect Zionism with racism and cited Israel’s racially inspired brutality, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as obvious forms of racism.

Each day as I write and share on Palestine. I feel myself covered with dust.  I read of the erasure of Palestinian names from Israeli maps and how each erasure was attended by a massacre of innocents. I feel myself consumed in darkness while reading stories of Al-Dawayima where an entire village of Palestinian citizens was murdered, beaten, some raped, their bodies thrown down into the town well by Israeli soldiers. [i] I try to write of the massacre of the people of Nasir al-din, Tantura, Eilabun, but the ghosts silence me with their hunger.  If you don’t believe me, all of these massacres are on record for decades from human rights organizations throughout the world.

These massacres are the seeds of Israel’s creation.  The occupation of Palestinian land and apartheid conditions for Palestinians continues and we are now in the midst of a full-fledged genocide. There is forced ignorance of the history of Israel and its crimes. As a Muslim-raised New Yorker, I am baffled and horrified almost every day by how little people know about Palestine. I cannot read the New York Times and today the New Yorker without gagging. There is a creation of a fake history right before our eyes, the kind of history that kills and kills and kills…

I now know I am not alone, but still the words become all jangled in me whenever I sit down to write. I could only begin writing this piece (published 11 years ago) after John Murillo, a poet, teacher, and friend of friends, shared during a Cave Canem workshop (the inspiration for Kundima), Lorca’s Theory and Play of the Duende.  Lorca spoke of the darkness.  The beauty of his words were branches I could grasp to see me to the other side.  In the end, my first response, before I could write any of what I wrote above, was a poem, a loose cento created from a patchwork of Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s words:

I mention Theodor Hertzl, the founder of Zionism who wrote: “The process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly.” Based on how little most US citizens know of the brutal treatment of Palestinians, and how the US shuts down this information… his last line has come to pass.

The Endless Baptism

Covered in fine ash

With peppery sneezes Racking his body

my father diminutive as a green almond,

tired of lines and circles,

went down to the docks by himself

he came upon a drunken soldier

who laughed and broke roses

in his arms. A weeping prophet

my father grasped

the verses of Jeremiah[iv],

and broke them under his tender rosy foot

broke the razor, the wheel of the cart,

the hut. The soldier

sobered up, shook wormy

pages of Testament in his fist,

dusted dried blood from their buds

his profile cut like the edge of a barber’s razor, but

my father with the prickly beard of shepherd

prophets, with the heads of his children

threaded with barbed wire, sleeping in dust,

with the minds of his children made ill

with limitation, hurled a pot of ink

at the talking monkey soldier

it missed, wounded the eaves and balconies

of the soldier’s ill-begotten city,

released the fragrance of bees

The soldier fearing the scent of violets

repeated in a voice of beaten tin, Hertzl[v]

warned, people will say we are butchers, but

let the blood of the poor, the Arab flow

with the fragrant cypress of a barren butter moon,

with nothing left to lose,

but a voice of scorched centuries,

my father spoke:  A country of death, 

the vast night will press its waist against you 

until your children, too, will sleep in the weeds 

with the eyes of dead fish at dawn.

God forbid, all of this.

Bushra Rehman

[i] The movie “Salt of the Sea” (written/directed by Annemarie Jacir) contains a poignant and necessary response to the Al-Dawayima massacre.

[iv] The verses of Jeremiah from the Hebrew Bible are used to justify the creation of the State of Israel.

[v] The drunken soldier quotes and misquotes the Hebrew Bible and Theodor Hertzl, one of the founders of Zionism.  Hertzl’s thoughts on the methods of creating the state of Israel are contradictory.  He wrote both about living peacefully with the original residents of the Jewish State (whether it was in Uganda or Palestine) and “spiriting” these same residents away across the border and not allowing them back in.  Hertzl wrote: “The process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly.” Based on how little most US citizens know of the brutal treatment of Palestinians, how even Israelis are fed a false history, this last line has come to pass.

Politics & Prose