Priscilla Wathington with Colette Ghunim and Sara Maamouri: April 14, 2024

Mazza Writer in Residence Priscilla Wathington opens the evening by reading the poem "[(...)]" (beginning "You have entered the tunnel...") by Fady Joudah. She then reads a selection of poems from her chapbook Paper and Stick (Tram Editions, 2021), pointing at times to that works origins, e.g., in the testimony of an imprisoned Palestinian and of a repentant Israeli soldier (published by Breaking the Silence). She reads from her book the poems "Terms," "Silicone Wadi," "Deadline Extended," "The House: A Draft Made of String," "Three Birthdays," and "White Kia." She comments on the strangeness of living between "the world as we think it is and the world as it keeps happening." 

Wathington discusses her work with Defense for Children International — Palestine, providing legal aid to Palestinian children and its influence on her writing. She closes out her reading with new poems: "Grant Proposal For Your Emergency," "This Poem Is Not About the Genocide," and "This Document Has No Legal Status And Is Not Bound By Its Content." 

Colette Ghunim and Sara Maamouri give a brief introduction then show a trailer of excerpts from their work-in-progress film, Traces of Home, which documents Ghunim's Mexican-American mother and Palestinian-American father's return to the ancestral homes they left as children. This brief part of the program includes the audio portion of the excerpted trailer for Traces of Home. 

Following the screening of excerpts from Traces of Home, Priscilla Wathington opens the conversation by asking Colette Ghunim and Sara Maamouri about the origins of the film and its incorporation of the family archive of video shot by Ghunim's father. They address intergenerational trauma and the process of making creative work that addresses exile, due to violence, from Palestine and Mexico, and, in Wathington's instance, drawing on her human rights work documenting violence against Palestinian children under Israeli occupation. They speak to finding agency and power in working with "traumatic things that happen," and how the art becomes a kind of "third space" and "tool for healing." 

Audience members bring questions drawing, e.g., from their own family experiences of exile due to violence (from Iraq owing to the US war on that country and people). Ghunim is asked how she motivated her reluctant father to return to his hometown, Safad, and how Ghunim's parents responded to their experiences of return. Ghunim speaks to her and Maamouri's belief in this work as a "healing journey" and work in therapy that led to this conviction. 

They speak of silence and silencing, and "the willingness to speak and to look," and to uses of humor as a strategy for carrying one's experience, among other questions,  including aspects of bearing a "mixed" parentage, and the practicality of a Palestinian American entering Palestinian territories under Israeli occupation.

Wathington shares word of the "Palestinian Perspectives" issue of Adi Magazine, and urges that we too continue to find ways to "move against erasure...against disappearance."