 Good evening everybody. Good evening. All right. My name is Alicia Boone John Noelle and I am the manager of adult programs here at the Brooklyn Museum. On behalf of our institution I'd like to thank you for joining us in person and via live stream for tonight's program. At this moment we are standing together in solidarity with Penn American Center, the International Literature Festival Berlin, and hundreds of individuals from around the world in a reading for Ashraf Faheed. We are grateful to Penn American Center for working with the Brooklyn Museum to co-percent such a timely and important program. I'd like to thank our director and Pasternak for her trailblazing leadership along with our vice director of education and programming, Radia Harper, and our adult programs team, Lauren Zelaya, Catherine Fine, Claire Kissinger, Lena Sawyer and Omalov Abitunde, as well as our audiovisual technology and public information team for making tonight's program a reality. Clarice and I, sorry, I'm a little bit emotional because tonight's, this is a program but it's very very emotional. I just feel totally moved and I've expressed this a lot before I got up here. It's just a lot. This isn't, this is not just another run-of-the-mill program so thank you very much for standing in solidarity with us. Art has the power to bring people together and create cross-cultural connections and understandings. As displayed in our AgitProp exhibition on the fourth floor of this museum, we can see that there are countless key moments in history where artists have reached beyond museums and galleries to use their work as an opportunity to call action and create political and social change. Tonight the Brooklyn Museum is joining individuals from all across the world like I said that care about justice and freedom of expression in support of Ashraf. For those of you that don't know, he's a Palestinian poet who has been sentenced to death in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in November of last year. Clarice and I met each other at the AgitProp exhibition opening in the middle of December and saw this as an opportunity for our institutions to collaborate with one another so I'm very grateful and honored to introduce her to you so she can give you a little bit more information about our collaboration tonight as well as what we're facing here in Saudi Arabia. So I hope that you will continue to use your voice and your art as a tool for social change and expression. So without further ado, I'm happy to introduce Clarice Sharif. Good evening. Thank you for being here tonight and I think that I'm equally thankful to Alicia to say yes. So I thought this program should be take place in Brooklyn. I'm biased. I live in Brooklyn, okay? But it should take place in a suited place and I think the Brooklyn Museum is the right place for this time to, you know, stand together with these writers who face great danger and so to reach out to the Brooklyn Museum and to get a resounding yes, please come, let's collaborate was fantastic. So as Alicia said, I'm Clarice. I'm the Deputy Director of Public Programs for Penn American Center. And tonight's reading is for a multi-talented artist, a poet and artist, a curator, Ashra Fayad. I wanted to point out, before I talk about Penn, that the images that you saw while we were waiting for the program to start are photographs that were taken by Ashraf and posted on his Instagram account. And I think it gives us a window in terms of, into his sensibility maybe as an artist, as a photographer. And I thought that was important to kind of paint a whole picture of who we are celebrating tonight. A couple of months ago, the International Literature Festival Berlin called on all individuals and institutions that care about justice and freedom to participate in a worldwide reading. So as we stand here tonight, there are more than 120 readings in 43 countries drawing attention to the ongoing risk of execution faced by Ashraf Fayad. He is not the only one, unfortunately, facing such dire threats as proves the recent troubling news about the killings of 47 Saudi prisoners and yesterday's arrest and release of human rights lawyers, Samar Badawi. I will let my colleague Karen tell you more about Ashraf's case and similar cases. And so quickly, I wanted to, for those of you who do not know Penn American Center, I wanted to let you know about who we are. We are the largest branch of the world's leading international literary and human rights organization. Penn is also a membership organization of over 4,300 writers, editors, translators, and publishers. If you're already a member, thank you for your support. If you're interested in our work, please talk to me, talk to my colleagues here tonight and we'll tell you more about how you can help support our work and get engaged. We offer a wide range of programs, such as public programs, the literary awards program, the prison writing program, the world voices festival of international literature that happens every spring in New York City, and many advocacy and anti-censorship campaigns. So tonight, we celebrate and take a stand for free expression, creative freedom, and human rights. And we're so happy that you came out and stand and are standing with us. The format of the event is simple. We'll hear about a little bit more about Ashraf Ayad's case and our co-host will introduce our wonderful cast of readers and this will be followed by the readings. At the end of the program, don't forget to stick around and see the exhibition upstairs, Agit Prop. Also, take a moment to tell your friends and tweet about this event to keep the case alive. Use free Ashraf as a hashtag. So I want to thank quickly our readers, Natalie Diaz, Doreenia Freeman, Dred Scott, Lawrence Joseph, Tina Moore, Daniel Sconebeck and Ruth Freeman. They all also said yes when we reached out to them, and they were all so honored to be able to participate tonight, and I'm thankful to them. We have our co-host tonight for the evening, Elisa Chapelle and Rob Spillman. Elisa is a short story writer, editor and essayist. She's the co-founder of a literary magazine, Tin House, and editor-at- large. She's also a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. And Rob Spillman is editor of Tin House Magazine and editorial advisor of Tin House books. He's a contributor of book reviews and essays to Salon and Book Forum. So now we'll get started. Please welcome my colleague, Karin Kolkar, director of Free Expression. Thank you very much for coming again. Hello, everybody. Thank you for being with us tonight. I'm so honored to be here tonight to help set the stage for this evening of readings and solidarity with Ashraf Fayad, a poet, artist and curator of Palestinian origin, who, as you've heard, is currently facing a death sentence in Saudi Arabia. As the director of PEN America's Free Expression program, I wanted to set the stage a bit by discussing current restrictions on expression in Saudi Arabia, talking about Ashraf's case, and highlighting the types of work PEN does to help writers at risk. PEN regularly engages in advocacy on cases like Ashraf's. Publicly, we issue press statements, disseminate information via social media channels, organize joint sign-on letters to pressure governments or other powerful actors, or meet with officials to express our concerns. Privately, we assist individuals who are facing the risk of imprisonment or attack as a result of their creative expression, both in the U.S. around the world, offering practical assistance when we can, or even simply connections to others who can help them and their families. PEN's case list at the moment is comprised of more than 900 writers worldwide, so we're kept very busy. We became involved in Fayyad's case in mid-November, shortly after we learned of his death sentence, when we joined with PEN centers and writers worldwide to send joint letters to the Saudi government to protest this harsh sentence. PEN also enlisted prominent American writers to send a joint letter to President Obama, asking the U.S. government to speak out about his case with their Saudi counterparts. And as you've heard, following an appeal by the International Literature Festival in Berlin, we have joined the call to hold this series of worldwide readings to join attention to his case and to highlight the solidarity felt by writers around the world for Ashraf. Fayyad's case originally began in 2013, and after a series of arrests, detentions, charges, and drawn out judicial proceedings, he was sentenced to death by beheading for apostasy in November 2015, in part because of supposedly blasphemous themes contained in a 2008 poetry collection called Instructions Within. He appealed the sentence in mid-December, and the petition is currently being considered by the Saudi court, so we could be hearing any day about the final verdict. Unfortunately, Ashraf's case is not unique. Conditions for a free speech are particularly restrictive in Saudi Arabia, and authorities have tightened their control over expression in the past few years by clamping down on dissent and non-conformist religious beliefs in the country. In February 2013, a sweeping anti-terrorism law took effect that allowed the authorities to press for terrorism charges for anyone who demanded political reform, exposed corruption and unjust practices, or simply exercise the right to freedom of expression. A new law in April 2014 decreed atheism to be a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Apostasy remains on the books as an offense punishable by death, and that's the sentence that Ashraf has been given. Print and broadcast media content is tightly controlled by the authorities and royal family and digital media. For example, internet websites and blogs are also heavily regulated, with more than 400,000 websites blocked if they have content that the authorities deemed to be either immoral or politically sensitive. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, as of the end of 2015, there were seven writers in prison in Saudi Arabia, most on anti-state charges. In addition to hearing Ashraf's work tonight, we'll also be hearing the works of several other poets and writers facing lengthy jail sentences or serving prison terms in the region, including Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger, activist, and creator of the website Free Saudi Liberals, sentenced to 10 years in prison, 1,000 lashes, and a fine in addition to a 10-year travel ban after his sentence expires. Luckily, he has only received 50 lashes out of that 1,000 lash sentence. Muhammad al-Jami, a Qatari poet serving 15 years in prison after a secret trial in 2012 on charges of criticizing the Amir in a poem. And Fatima Ektasari, an Iranian poet sentenced in October 2015 to 11 and a half years in prison in 99 lashes for her poetry, which was interpreted as insulting the sacred and even for shaking hands with Merrill Writers and the International Literary Events. Penn has been involved in advocacy on behalf of these individuals, and we hope that this reading will help shine the spotlight on their cases as well as to showcase their literary work. Please visit our website at www.penn.org, follow us on Facebook and Twitter, sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay informed, or even donate to our emergency funds that help writers like Ashraf who are facing very severe threats. Thank you very much. And now I'd like to introduce our literary co-host for the evening, Rob Spillman and Alisa Chappelle. Thank you. Good evening. It is so nice to see so many of you here this evening. Robby and I both feel extremely honored to be a part of this evening's event. As writers and literary citizens of a country that counts Saudi Arabia as a friend and long-time ally, we have the power and the obligation to call upon our government to use their considerable influence to stop the execution of Ashraf Fayad. Ashraf, artist, curator, and poet for years has been considered the unofficial ambassador for Saudi Arabia's burgeoning contemporary art world. Instrumental in introducing Saudi artists to Western audiences around the end of the, I'm sorry, I'm a little upset too, and look at this for Clem. He has been instrumental in introducing Saudi artists to Western audiences. There's a sick irony in Fayad, a poet who seeks to map the very essence of the human experience and the shared territories being persecuted in this way and being a victim of his country's most barbaric practices, and we as citizens and artists cannot look away. Living in the United States, it's very easy for us to tell ourselves that we don't have to do anything to get involved because we reason we live in a modern civilized world and writers and artists and public figures are not jailed or beheaded for expressing their opinion. This is what we tell ourselves perhaps so that we can sleep at night, perhaps so that some of us can make art and write about it. I don't know about you, but today when I was thinking about coming here, I was thinking about how I feel that an artist has a moral obligation to write about the truth and to write about their, to write about their personal experiences in the most honest way possible. And I couldn't imagine what it was like for Ashraf right now, not only to be in prison counting days, but also what it must be like to be deprived of that ability to process your emotions and write down what you're feeling most passionately. That's a terrifying place to be in. So I want to say tonight that speaking for Robby and myself, it's an honor to be a part of this evening and in doing so to expect, accept the responsibility and take up the mantle to protect freedom of speech all over the country and particularly tonight for Fayette. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. So it is my pleasure to give brief introductions to the readers tonight and I'm going to introduce all of them in a row so that Ashraf's work can be heard and other writer's work can be heard, so uninterrupted. So I'm going to introduce in order. So first up is Natalie Diaz, who is a member of the Mahadeh and Pima Indian tribes, who is a poet, language activist, and educator. She will be followed by Duranya Freeman, who is worked as a journalist for Sri Lanka's The Nation, and is a staff writer for two of Colorado College's student publications where she is a freshman. She will be followed by Dred Scott, who is a photographer, performance artist, and provocateur, who makes revolutionary art to propel history forward and is part of the amazing Agit Prop exhibition here, which is open after this. He will be followed by Lawrence Joseph, who is the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants, and is a poet and professor of law, who holds both a B.A. and J.D. from the University of Michigan and a second B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University, making us all feel like slackers. He will be followed by Dina Omar, who is a writer and graduate student in medical anthropology at Yale University. She's a founding member of the National Students for Justice in Palestine and served as the National Executive Board for the Palestinian Youth Movement. She will be followed by Daniel Schunabach, who is a American poet and his first book of poems, American Barricade, was published by Yes, Yes Books in 2014. He will, and lastly, will, is Rue Freeman, who is a Sri Lankan-born writer and activist. She's the author of the novel, The Disabunit Girl and Anselm Malayan, as well as the amazing anthology and the editor of the amazing anthology, Extraordinary Rendition, American Writers on Palestine, which came out this year from O.R. Books. So please welcome our first reader, Natalie Diaz. Thank you. Tonight, we will all return to our homes. I will walk down a street lined with lights. Take from my pocket a key that fits a door I will open. Onto a room with a table of fruit and wine. A desk to build my altar of books. A basin, soap, clean water to wash my face. And in a mirror above those, my face will be reflected back to me. And I will know life. You have not left me. We, I, am still here. Later, my lover will draw the blinds and lift my shirt, undress me. Will hold my sad head in her hands. And tell me a story of what this body is for. To live. To pray only desire and joy. To call one another by name. What is more tender than to be called by a lover? I do not know what it is to die for something. In poetry, a man, a woman, should live. To Ashraf, I say, Kimamaram, Kithpertahanim, Chukwar Mermeram. I'm reading a poem translated by Fadi Juda, Ashraf's Frida Kahlo's Moustache. I will ignore the smell of clay, the reproach of rain, and the choke that has long settled in my chest. And I will search for an appropriate condolence of my situation that doesn't permit me to explain your lips in the manner I'd hoped for. Or to shake dew drops off your reddish petals. Or to lessen the intensity of the obsession that overwhelms me when I realize you're not next to me now and won't be. I'm forced to justify my position to the silence that night punishes me with. Pretend that the earth is silent just as we see it from afar. And that all what happened between us was no more than a poor prank that shouldn't have gone this far. What's your idea about the days I usually spend with you? About my words that used to rapidly evaporate, about my heavy pain, and the knots that had sedimented inside my thorax like dried up algae? I forgot to tell you that in the practical sense of the word I've grown use to your absence and that my wishes have lost their way to your desires and my memory has begun to corrode and that I still chase light not because I want to see. The dark always frightens even when we are used to it. Is my apology for everything that happened while I was trying to make up excuses enough for you? Is it enough for the times jealousy raged in some place inside me or when disappointment ruined yet another of my dark days? And for my repetition that justice will always suffer the disturbances of menstruation and that love is a backward impotent man at the end of his days? I will be forced to trick my memory and pretend that I have no problem sleeping and rip all the remaining questions the questions that now search for persuasive answers after all punctuation has been dropped for purely personal reasons. Let the mirror explain to you how beautiful you are. Remove my pile of dust my words breathe deeply remember how much I loved you and how the whole thing turned into a brief electrocution that almost caused a great fire and an empty warehouse. The sun is extremely polite when it comes to covering her mouth while yawning. The sun doesn't know how to impose its total control over the earth. The same fate the sun has with darkness. The sun has no choice but to resist the dark even if Pluto has lost its qualifications to remain among the vertiginous planets. The moon has a different take on imposing its will over the sea and the sea can swallow whatever creatures it desires and lay claim to more land on account of global warming. The punctured ozone a woman's right to wear a bikini and the temptation of birds with the riches of fish. I will no longer be pain pills for your monthly period and won't enjoy your exceptional conversation while you prepare for a long nap or when you want to offload your anger or while you spend some lovely time in a bar packed with lovers of jazz. I won't be able to sleep enough or explain Nietzsche's mustache or persuade you that Imad's work is a unique experiment in art. I will busy myself with normalizing relations between earth and water in order to obstruct fire on its way to becoming an ambassador of goodwill. Only then will the air cease to appear presentable as it dries out your underwear on the laundry line. I walk in the street of the inexpressible and question the indifferent raindrops. I try to remove the rust that stuck in my throat. How many times should I refer to the wind's guidebook to decipher your moods? How many words have I silenced to spare you the smell of disappointment that my American cigarette blows? I won't be the piggy bank you break whenever you run out of funds and I won't include as poetic chore an amorous description of your eyes because your eyes in the final analysis are more fatal than those that ruin Jereer's mind or more poetic than Syab's palm tree groves. Your eyes are precisely the way angels prostrated to Adam and I exclude Satan naturally for rhetorical reasons. The world this morning resembles my stomach with its ulcers, resembles the ache that it spends its weekends in my head, resembles the heaps of broken glass that fill my memory. The world is no longer all right since I've stopped worrying about glass or the reply letter to my letter or Mrs. Clinton's failure to lead the democratic party. Don't look for me I will be there with every sip of coffee and you relax and when you relax at a spa or want to laugh or cry or if you desire to toss yourself into someone's arms or when you can't resist your insomnia or your mobile phone that didn't ring during your sleep or when in the unconsciousness of writing or when you want to talk or while watching a movie regardless of its quality and when you tickle the ground as you walk exercise and when you hear our song the one we have yet to agree on. Good evening. So standing up here as a college sophomore is difficult not to feel very overwhelmed by all the other writers here who obviously have a lot more experience than I do but my piece and my mother's anthology I wrote about speaking out and the importance of that no matter how young you are which is why I'm so grateful to be a part of this important event today. I'm honored to be reading the poem Run by Iranian poet Fatima Ektasari who has recently received a very harsh prison sentence for his own artistic expression a few short months ago and like Fayad's case Penn has been following this case and circulating a petition calling for nullification of his sentence. Run a voice passed by me and someone just ran inside my confused mind run the streets were crowded and crowded run the cars were honking in an endless night honking after many years of forgetfulness entering my ear and confusing my mind I heard them honking and I kept a torn up picture in my hands I heard the sound being lost in all the dead end streets I heard the sound of tears slipping down the rocked eyes I heard the sound of tear gas and cigarettes all stinging I heard the sound of batons meeting backs and heads and I heard the shadows running behind me run two silences made a voice the voice of our hands separated from each other the voice of yours passing by me the voice of yours becoming the voice of the people and the voice of mine lost in all those bad days I was sticking to a post turn sticking to my office to my job sticking to my pills and all those nights of insomnia and sticking to all those duplicated mornings I used to wake up and practice my laughs and practice my cries with a duplicated mirror I used to put my impatient signature in the bottom official papers I used to look for one thing in all the newspapers impatiently and I used to come back from the office and all the afternoons of impatience coming back to the silence that welcomes you in every room coming back to the cold hands that keep up the hot cup of tea coming back to the bad days followed by worse and coming back to me waiting to welcome my husband like a happy wife who waits to welcome her husband waiting for him to throw his socks in the living room run my house is filled with the thrown away sounds run someone touched my shoulder you should run to the streets of madding crowd and to a woman in arabian veil you should run to those two shadows behind you and to the fear of keeping a green wristband in your hand you should run to yourself stung by a hot bullet and to your fingers of the v sign you should run to the clotting blood in the corner of our lips and to the night which is our sad resumption to the incomplete night of liberty and to yourself dying in my arms to yourself being alive among the dead's and to our hands meeting each other again call me i am you i am as cold as your hands call me i want to come back to the streets call me to whisper in your ears with love call me to lose myself in your arms and in my dreams come back and resurrect the memories call me and rescue me from myself thank you good evening um standing here and seeing so many people out here is very it's wonderful that we're here and it's horrible that we have to be here i do want to say that it is who you know who wants to live in a world where people are sentenced to death supposedly because they don't believe in a god or the right god and who wants to live in a country that supports regimes like egypt or israel or saudi arabia that militarily and politically backs people regimes where they sentenced people to death for not believing in the right god we need revolution so um i will be reading the the a poem by rave badawi um the poem is entitled a thousand lashes because i say what i think um and proceeding this uh well it's not a poem it's an essay um and proceeding this the translator of it said in 2012 saudi blogger rave badawi was arrested for insulting islam through electronic channels in his blog post badawi had called for the separation of church and state advocated for the equality of all religions and condemned religious extremism as a consequence he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and a thousand lashes his controversial blog post included that introduced by this essay have been published by gravestone books proceeds from a thousand lashes because i say what i think will go but to badawi's family and their efforts to procure his release i was engrossed in my attempts to re-examine liberalism in saudi arabia which i was contributing to the prevalence of the enlightenment in my community i wanted to break the walls of ignorance to shatter the sacredness of religious clerics i wanted to advocate for change and respect for freedom of speech to call for women and minorities rights and the rights of the indigent in saudi arabia that was before i was jailed in 2012 imagine living your daily life enacting all of its day details in a small 215 square foot room accompanied by more than 30 people accused of a variety of criminal activities in prison i socialized with people confined for criminal offenses killers thieves drug lords and pedophiles my interactions with them altered many of my fault faulty understandings in regard to this world of criminals before my imprisonment like any other person i would go to bed after i checked all the windows and doors in my home for fear of criminals now i lived amongst them i slept ate showered changed my clothes celebrated and cried got angry laughed out loud and screamed my lungs out all while surrounded by their leering eyes after colossal efforts and countless attempts to acclimate myself to them i focused on changing my way of seeing them i pulled the curtain from the other side and started to explore the depths of their world it took me a while but i came to the conclusion that criminals laugh too yes they fall in love feel pain and are capable of deep soft human emotions it is agonizing for me to compare those genuine feelings i witnessed with the negative perceptions of people i considered close to me in the past in the prison lavatory i took a look around me only to find some filthy tissues and excrement everywhere it was a staggering situation the walls were soiled the doors were rusty and rotten here i was trying to adapt to this new chaos my eyes scanned the walls around me reading the hundreds of sentences written on the sticky walls my eyes caught an unexpected sentence secularism is the solution i rubbed my eyes with both palms for a second i didn't believe what i was seeing i wanted to be sure that i was indeed reading with my eyes we're looking about locked upon i escaped my reality for a second i felt like i was standing in the middle of a dirty old nightclub in a poor neighborhood by the wee hours of the night a beautiful mesmerizing woman walks in she fills the nightclub with a stunning joy and life energy i hardly knew what made me think of that why i was pulled into this fantasy it seems that the change of toilet seat played a major role in the way i made sense of this new strange life i was living i smiled i wondered who the person was anyway i wondered who the person might be who wrote such a sentence in a prison filled to the walls with thousands of prisoners all jailed because of criminal activities my astonishment was equal only to my happiness at reading such a short beautiful and different sentence the sentence stood alone among dozens of obscenities that were written in so many different arabic dialects this discovery could only mean one thing there was at least one other person here who understood me who understood the reason i was jailed and the goals i was hoping to accomplish in the following days i started to see a whole different reality that turned this world of criminals into my own personal paradise i built the heaven according to my own standards i detailed it according to a new set of beliefs that departed from all my previous life experiences before my imprisonment yes lavatory cell number five really touched me when my dear wife in saff told me a large publishing house in germany was interested in collecting my articles in a book translated into german i hesitated i will be completely honest with you when i wrote my first article i couldn't imagine it would be gathered in a book of arabic let alone translated into a different language well if you picked up this book managed to read this far and you're still going i can safely assume that you my dear reader are interested in reading what i have to say some think that i have something to say others think that i am ordinary man with nothing to share a man who doesn't deserve his writings to be collected in books or translated for the world to share however when i look within i only see that thin man who miraculously withstood 50 lashes while a group of people celebrated his pain repeatedly chanting aloo akbar all for the articles you are about to read yes i was accused of apostasy the conscious abandonment of islam and sentenced to death the sentence was then reduced to 10 years of imprisonment as well as 1000 lashes i was also required to pay a million saudi riles in financial punishment i spent three years writing these articles for you i was tortured my wife and our three children had to emigrate from our country because of the many pressures placed upon them my family and i endured all those hard struggles simply because i spoke my mind we went through these hardships for the sake of every letter written in this book on november 29th 2012 the criminal court in doha convicted mohammed al ajami for inciting the overthrow of the ruling regime and criticizing the amir for two of his poems and sentenced him to life in prison and a two-line judgment poet was not present for the decision his sentence was later reduced to 15 years on appeal on february 25 2013 that sentence was confirmed by katar supreme court on october 21 2013 despite arguments that the charges and trial were deeply flawed he has no further legal recourse in the courts al ajami has been held in solitary confinement in doha central prison since his arrest with extremely limited visitation rights and violation of united nations principles on october 23 2013 representatives from pen american center were prevented from visiting him despite having been told their visit had been approved this is mohammed al ajami's poem poem from a prison cell from a prison cell is that my mind or my heart that i've lost to you arab lands home of enemies if you held our minds with law and reason if you respected our opinions then you'd hold my heart as well who am i don't ask the days about me and nothing but a prisoner in an isolation cell here in my country oppression is what takes our rights away here ignorance determines our convictions here the people no longer have a voice cannot spell out the language of reproach my country if inside required an apology i'd never stop apologizing tell your children east and west and keep telling them until the birds sing it in the branches and the people without opinions is nothing but a herd that's thirsty yet blind to the nearby oasis fight for your convictions this is how you ride your steeds and bury your arms against a ruler who seeks to oppress and who molds your silence into a pretext for injustice tell them that i stubborn persistent was unmatched in my victory and my defeat time may have disgraced me but i haven't been easy for time to shackle lord of rabble what of yours compares to the thrones of imid odd's people and around the city of pillars which god spoke of in his revelation you've been in sincere a false prophet on earth though you like jesus spoke in the crib you've wounded truth and my proud allegiance is lifeless now and clad in black how can you expect obedience when you call for injustice if we obeyed you then what would become of our principles when we pray who do we pray to to god or to god's servants there's no room for virtue under oppression there's no room for vice on the road of justice whoever wrongs and deceives his people will never be able to guide them if history were objective it would tell how you've sought glory in my so-called enmity go ahead and be miserable though you and I are not enemies I avoid enmity and make enemies only of those who are truly worthy if you ask after my finest day on an occasion when words of pride are called for I'd call history a mind and say it was when I was a prisoner in my own country from when you shackled my wrists history gave me strength and confidence in victory these distraceful chains are power in my hands not power for those who lord it over me doors and guards wake me up gently whenever I sleep too long isn't a desire but fear that makes me ask this fear that the enemies will see my weakness when I sleep though I no longer know if my eyes are closed or if I've been awake all this time kai tahfala a la kasra til watan al wakuf seitun seitun kana yafala jadduka duna madhaba al ma'arafa al sabab wal kasra and al watan bit'aqtadun tadun fi ma'fadah al nakood wal nakood awrakun torsumu alayha surah al zamaa al surah tanhabud duqa raidama ta'aud wal'auda kana ha al surah wal raddaha fi hakayata al jaddah an taha al dars al awal asylum to stand at the end of a queue to be given a morsel of bread to stand something your grandfather used to do without knowing the reason why the morsel you the homeland a card you put in your wallet money papers that carry the images of leaders the photo your substitution pending your return and the return a mythological creature from your grandmother's tales end of the first lesson sorry I'm really nervous so that was a poem by Ashraf Fayyad in both Arabic and English it's the first time I read a poem in Arabic in Fussha out loud in a crowd so I hope I didn't mess it up too bad so I was going to read a poem that they asked me to read but now I want to read a different poem and I'm nervous because reading Ashraf Fayyad's poems over the last few weeks has been incredibly illuminating because it's so clear there are so many premonitions in them and it's like he knew or he was very aware of all of the different sort of countervailing gazes that put him in the line of fire events like this are always really unnerving because you know that representation matters right and you think about what it means to be asked to do something like this on behalf of or in celebration of somebody like Ashraf Fayyad and so I know for example who I am and what I look like and what I wear and how I speak and my national origins and all of these things can easily be appropriated by anybody in order to sort of achieve particular agendas and it's terrifying because you know we're in America and okay so this poem is called Code Switching in the Crosshair's Untied Fragments of an Unfinished Thought. To be young gifted in Arab means hunters are looking for you to show others how to pray and you've had to learn this predatorial relationship quickly. The medieval Islamic philosopher, physician and poet Ibn Sina called this inner faculty of estimation he explained that a sheep knows that the wolf will eat it and devour it in moments without hesitation and now look I'm not one to be defending enlightenment values and I know that it is nothing called that there's nothing called pure reason that exists in some transcendental sphere outside of this earth and nothing can really be about the universality of mankind because every man and every detail is particular and there is an infinite possibilities in that one detail but last week a cascade of half-dead fish eyes were blinking towards me from the floor of a wooden canoe and the relationship between me and whatever stands between me and whatever was staring back at me were things and reasons that Descartes and Kant never thought of including in their version of the world and for whatever reason divine thoughts or otherwise were behind their gills opening and closing like struggling shutters it was also not included in Ibn Taymiyah or Iman Al Ghazali's version of the world either and all the while these fishes were staring at me and I'm wondering why is it that all these men around the world today and back then were so uncomfortable with difference or they pretended or apprehended that it was not even there and the fishes fighting for oxygen became my substance because there is no there is no denying that living the living quite literally feed off of the dead but I touched them with my fingers and I sense the slime under my nails and I accidentally swallowed their bones and that is why the sheep does not need to to be taught that the wolf is dim-wittingly carnivorous and the body knows what to be afraid of and that knowing and that fear is part of the soul and those fishes so have souls too and they became a part of me and that is still in the world and they are still in the world and that is why when Ashraf Fayyad said you too should never forget that you too are a piece of bread that it means something to to be young Arab and gifted means that you got to stand in dark corners like a ninja but at the same time you got to be afraid that people are going to think about ninja and say oh look these people are lying and this means having to change hats like shuffling a deck of cards and this means that taking a lot of taking a lot of time just to say that you become quite literally wait sorry to be young gifted in Arab is to know that you that that word can very easily be changed to Palestinian and can very easily be changed to Muslim and can very easily be changed to the origin which was black and to be young gifted in Arab means knowing that you should not ask the most obvious common sense questions like what is it to you how I pray and what I wear on my head and who I love and what it is and who and what it is that I'm accountable to and today to be young gifted and Palestinian or to be young gifted and Muslim or Arab or black means that even if you don't ask these questions even if you do answer all of the all of the questions correctly that still the wolves will look for every reason and means to remind you that you are nothing of that primordial fear that you are nothing but a piece of breath three to be young gifted in Arab means that they are positioning you in the crosshairs and staring you down just above the barrel of their guns and you can't and they can't humor you with enough time to try to apprehend the truth of what it is that they're asking so you learn for shorthand you learn shorthands for questions that they ask you for example at the Israeli border patrol at Israeli border security you answer yes um yes uh Walter Benjamin okay so at border at the border at the Israeli border security you do say yes I was in Ramallah for a Walter Benjamin conference and yes Walter Benjamin was a Jewish philosopher but then you can't really explain whether or not he was Jewish or not Jewish and what they're doing in Ramallah asking about a Jewish philosopher for you is really the Israeli border security means when they ask you whether or not you're Muslim you say well yes but then you can't really go into whether or not what that means and and yes you do explain that you don't believe in ISIS or in Boko Haram and that you don't know why you don't wear the hijab because it's a complicated question and but but at the end of the day you will you'll tell them whatever the hell they want to hear in order for you to pass the stupid threshold and so sometimes you just start making up stories like I don't wear the hijab because my father has not yet forced me into submission into becoming a piece of property and sometimes I make up stuff like actually I don't wear the hijab because I escaped this awful divorce of an evil ex-husband who had three wives and who would beat me and so I so at night I would devise secret plans on how to escape him and and then and and then one day I just walked out and I escaped his Muslim terrorist patriarchal gaze and I mean after a million times of being searched and surveilled and interrogated and after a million hours you got to find a way to find it to get to entertain yourself and sometimes it means creating mythologies that not just entertain you but you know achieve your ends and so in class four months before you're interrogated by Israeli border security you discuss Heidegger's question concerning technology and the chalice that is undisclosed into the world and you sound super smart and then what happens is you and okay then you then you hit up your girl from Ginny and on the phone trying to talk to her about Heidegger she says girl I don't care I don't know she tells you about the trip that she just took in the hooded batted after not seeing her family for a decade and her father not seeing his family for 25 years she sends you she sends you pictures of him crying in the airport hugging his sisters then so these are certain so I guess what I'm trying to say is these code switching like I'm I'm what I'm trying to do is say that when you're young Arab and gifted you need to learn how to code switch and you do it at the drop of a dime sometimes not when you're in a audience full of people who are staring at you and thinking that you could just sort of like make it up as you go along but the point is is that you have to sort of learn these things and if you don't it quite literally could cost you your life and so five is if all of these wolves want to devour us they need to know that all that will be left in the world is that the hell they claim to be saving us from and they'll all they will have left to eat will be each other. Hi my name is Daniel Skonevec I'm going to be reading four poems by the radical Iranian poet Mehdi Musavi translated very beautifully I think by Amir Kedem Musavi was sentenced to nine years in prison and 99 lashings for what was deemed propaganda against the state which is something I personally think is very important and I'm going to epigraph each of the four untitled poems with a fragment written by the poet CD Wright who died just two days ago and who was a sort of lifelong advocate for literary freedom of expression herself I'm going to sort of introduce the reason why I'm doing that via a quick thing that the poet Peter Richards wrote about CD earlier today if you were someone milking goats in the winter CD Wright would send you long john's not one pair but two if you were someone whose writing was being suppressed censored neglected or disparaged by whichever power that be CD Wright would not only reach out to you in a letter but also work to change the different infrastructures so your voice could be heard both here in the United States and throughout the world the weirdening never lets up she said ergo poets shouldn't either one will you allow me to call your name to slough off the previous passions of a man allow me will you to love to lift my soul and fold it inside your sweaty palms to be a child again crying with no excuse again to throw stones at a flock of birds to become a poet again in my room sad corner or no to give you a call over the phone sitting there with your wedding gown all wet still waiting for me to make that call for you in the first chapters of your life how shall I speak of the end of this tale you have returned again for me to love you and I my dear have no right to chicken out the world is not ineluctably finished she said though the watch fires have been doused to by the window a man watched his life fade away pride was showing me his dominion eclipse was it no the midday sun desolate was sending her condolences to the sky I would have pitied myself a bit only if the absurdity of your world gave me a chance time has always crushed me under his boots always has forfeited my turn to others and the boy picked up the blade his wrist and the father was still feeding the imaginary child then came the earthquake my eyes opened to see someone shaking me amidst the sleep the piano stands there in the dark she said like a boy with an orchid someone putting their tongue where their tooth had been three to defy shattering I petrified like a rock now the cranes lift me away to a god that we are not being all the reasons are proving what is not deploring a wasted bygone we wait for a future modeled after the fossils my honor trashes me my friends and my land too even they trash me now my own lines of verse a forsaken file in an archive am I come read me out of this layered text it was not rain if my face looks wet not a burden of ordain but a dagger is in my back stop asking for names this futile word play came to my friend bore the name of brother from infancy onwards pain by your side your one and only friend pain by your side you turned into a poet for a herd of dogs you turned into a poet for a herd of dogs you turned into a poet for a herd of dogs turned into a poet but poetry was just pain poetry will not go quietly she said you would have to starve it out and poetry can live on very little and hunger and love move the world for flew away my muse from the face of this verse the girl grew wings and flew from my house sparrows flew your birds flew and crows flew flew all the frozen fingers when my name was called the sparrows flew away and the monster of sorrows invaded the nest of my dreams like a vulture this melody is the melody of missing you that popped out from my pack of valium since the mailman the white dove was long dead words turned into wings and my messages flew away thank you every bit of liquid that i drank since i left home at two thirty this morning afternoon has gathered in an inopportune way and as i sat there listening to everybody i was so moved that i feel like all the blood has rushed to my heart and so if anybody wants ice for their drinks i have 10 cubes here in my hands listening to it was obviously it's an honor to be here and like red said it is also sad that we have to gather in this way listening to what he said i thought about about about revolution in places that have terrible things happening like Saudi Arabia and in Palestine i was it made me think about this country and how it is a country which has the largest number of incarcerated children in the world and where we have 12 year old boy who can't play with his toy gun in a park in Ohio but we have 40 year old white man occupying public lands and being allowed to receive snacks that they forgot to bring and i i bring that up because a lot of the things that we become comfortable with in this country are what we allow to make it okay for us to permit similar things to happen in other countries including in Palestine where a great many children are in jail and we are a young girl who is walking through a checkpoint with a box of crayons is shot and killed but settlers walk around with machine guns and a lot of the writers in the anthology that i put together talk about these connections they make that leap which is actually could be considered complex but it's actually not that complex and if we took the trouble to think about it a little four of the writers from that anthology are spoke here today including Dina and Laurence and and Duranya and i think about how many of those writers struggled with how to articulate what they felt many of them felt they didn't have the information or they didn't have the right words they didn't feel competent or felt they did not have the authority to speak but they found a way through that as we are doing here you know i was listening to the way we forget our words we our voices falter and but when you think about the fact that we are gathered because of life and death situation for someone in this case Ashraf or in the case of these writers in the anthology for Palestine our awkwardness and our tremulousness is insignificant because what is really important is the sound of our voices um David Bowie died last week and both Rob Spillman and I talked about how his music affected us and i am sure nobody forgets him singing over a wall that we thought was going to stand forever in Berlin similarly the Palestine festival of literature brings poets and writers several of whom also appear in the book to Palestine so they can speak about the things of life and their voices reverberate over walls that seem similarly like they will stand forever and we hope will not um and those voices reach people Palestinians inside Palestine as well as those in exile all over the world including someone like Ashraf um the poem that I chose to two poems that I'm reading from today are from Fadwa Tukan who's a Palestinian early Palestinian poet who lived through the Nakba and whose work informed influenced the young Muhammad Darish and the interesting connection here is that her her work is published in the United States by Grey Wolf Press which also publishes me and it has been translated from the Arabic by Naomi Shehab Nye whose work also appears in extraordinary rendition American writers on Palestine the first of these is called enough for me enough for me to die on her earth be buried in her to melt and vanish into her soil then sprout forth as a flower played with by a child from my country enough for me to remain in my country's embrace to be in her close as a handful of dust a sprig of grass a flower this second poem is was written it's called to the imprisoned singer and it was written for Kamal Nasir who was a famous Palestinian journalist and poet and writer who was exiled from Palestine and was killed in Beirut in 1973 in an attack that is said to have been perpetrated with the participation of Ehud Barak who was dressed up as a woman at the time as a soldier for the Israeli occupation forces then to the imprisoned singer to Kamal Nasir your singing soars to us despite the narrowness of the sky imprisoned bird sing forth from behind the walls of suffering and night the iron bars that shape the sky before your face will not keep your singing from our ears sing bird sing the road of hope still stretches brilliantly lit despite the darkness around us your singing bird returned me to the past when your feet and wings were free when the jasmine bower embraced us and you sang the poetry of hope and pride and strength even the stars leaned low to hear your song and we felt as green and fresh as our pastures as our mountain slopes filled with roaring wind and pride of our mountain peaks sing bird sing despite the chains and darkness the horizon still offers its rich line of hope awaiting the sun from behind the smoke glory to sunlight never despair and freedom will find victory tomorrow in the homeland of our dreams never say our dreams are lost i like that poem because it speaks to the fact that we are writers gifted with imagination we are not required to take the world as it is presented to us and imagine that that's how it has to be we are allowed to dream and hope that it will become a different place thank you thanks so much thank you to all the readers for the those wonderful powerful words i just want to echo what rue said a little bit i grew up in berlin and and i also just came back from two weeks in palestine and it is so incredibly important that all of you raise your voices for those that cannot raise voices i am also the chair of the pen membership committee so if you are not a member or if you have any questions about um how you can help how you can be involved please do so and uh please stick around see the agit prop uh amazing agit prop um show here and thanks once more to all of our wonderful readers there's also a bar right over there thank you so much on behalf of the brooklyn museum i want to thank you all for coming and joining us tonight to honor and stand in solidarity with ashraf fayad thank you