ZSS: Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. Perhaps we can begin with your current status within the Scholars at Risk program. What is your position at Harvard as a Scholar at Risk?

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MAT: I came to Harvard to attend a 10-month fellowship as a visiting poet at the Department of Comparative Literature and a visiting librarian at Houghton Library. I was also a fellow at Harvard Divinity School’s Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative, which was a wonderful experience for me to meet with and hear others' voices.

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ZSS: What guides your thinking when you write poetry?

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MAT: I first wrote poetry in English, a language that is tied with, to us at least, technology but also colonialism. Remember that the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which was catastrophic to the Palestinian people (it promised the Jews Palestine as their homeland), was in English.

 

When I write poetry, I’m talking both to myself as an oppressed person and to the outside world, who seems to turn blind eyes to our suffering. I thought poetry could be more effective than rhetoric and crying.

 

In poetry, I’m voicing my experiences and that of more than two million people in Gaza, who not only suffer from the occupation and its killing machine, but also a siege with the electricity outages, closed crossing borders, non-potable water, limited fishing zone in our sea, high rate of unemployment, and lack of airport and seaport.

 

Sometimes, I try to create with my words things I don’t have. A country, for example.

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ZSS: I suspect that having, here, can take multiple meanings. Can you speak more to your personal experience in Gaza as a refugee?

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MAT: I began to feel in exile while in Gaza. When you feel you don’t belong to where you happen to live or where you were born, that is exile, even on the homeland that you are trying to reclaim from those who stole it and what defines it.

 

Gaza has been not only occupied and besieged by Israel and external powers, but also damaged beyond repair as a result of the domestic political rift between authorities in the West Bank (Fatah or the Palestinian Authority) and Gaza (Hamas).

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Most Gazans, especially the young, lost their faith in the current leadership, which contributed to, rather than mitigated, the hardships and hurdles thrown in the face of them for a long time.

 

People my age, 27, never boarded a plane, never worked, never sailed a vast sea, never met internationals, etc. To put it bluntly, they only lived one life, the life of suffering and frustration.

 

As for being a refugee, a descendant of one, it is really hard to tell how painful it feels to be unable to not even visit, not to say live in, what used to be my grandparents’ house, lie on their orange and olive orchards. My grandparents on both sides were from Yaffa.

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Therefore, the sense of exile for us is multidimensional: it is an exile from our taken away property in Yaffa, an exile from the place we were displaced to, and an exile from the current Palestinian leadership and the international community.

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ZSS: This tragedy of displacement holds a unique place in society: it is hard to truly understand the emotional burden without experiencing it. In 2020, of course, perhaps no experience is more universal than the threat of COVID-19. How has this been felt in Gaza?

 

MAT: Even before COVID-19 broke out in Gaza, Gaza has been under severe circumstances, especially after 2006 when Hamas won the elections. Things that I have just mentioned.

 

For COVID-19 to break out in Gaza, it means not only adding insult to injury. No. It means cutting the wound more and more.

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As for Gaza hospitals, the new situation has exacerbated the strain on an already struggling health care system. Many medications are lacking. Not enough fuel.

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ZSS: Where do you find inspiration in these difficult times? Are there any other poets you recommend?

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MAT: Mahmoud Darwish is a great inspiration. Also Naomi Shihab Nye, Adonis, Mary Karr, Ahmad Matar, Audre Lodre, Ibrahim Tuqan, Samih Al-Qasim, Philip Metres, Robert Frost, Shelley, and Wordsworth among others.

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ZSS: What are you currently working on?

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MAT: I’m working right now on my first books of poetry. I’m also writing some articles about Arabic poetry and also life in Gaza. Some of my poems appeared in Banipal magazine last spring. Some other poems will appear in other magazines.

 

These days, I’m also participating in a roundtable discussion about diaspora and poetry. The discussion involves Jewish and Arab poets.

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ZSS: Thank you so much for your time!​

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