In a Brooklyn backyard, rows of people sat in silence one recent Friday evening in the midst of a New York summer heatwave, leaning in to listen to the spoken words of anxious poets, each taking their turn to perform.
Some spoke on transitioning, others on Allah, and one writer on the Jordanian bedouin tradition of wearing eyeliner.
Titled “Kan Yama Kan,” which means “once upon a time” in Arabic, the event welcomes aspiring and established writers and poets to share their work openly in front of others. Though not exclusive, the crowd typically attracts Palestinian, Arab and Muslim writers who have found a community of words and a shared struggle of identity.
The host that Friday night was Amina Iro. She said, “there’s nowhere else she would rather be right now.” After the end of every poet's recitation, when the audience cheered, Iro urged them to “keep going” so they could feel the love.
Some poets were there for the first time, others have published poetry collections and have been participating in open mics for years.
Many are new to the genre and are overcoming fears about sharing their work in public — especially in a city with a complicated relationship toward Israel and Palestine
Being an open advocate for Palestinian rights in New York can be a difficult pursuit. In May, CUNY law student Fatima Mohammed faced severe backlash for a commencement speech where she condemned “Israeli settler colonialism.” CUNY labeled the address as “hate speech” and Mohammed was berated online by both Republicans and Democrats.
“In the U.S., to criticize Israel and to support Palestinains is extremely problematic … you will face a lot of repercussions,” said Zaina Arafat, a Palestinian-American writer who frequents the “Kan Yama Kan” events. “We’ve seen that at the level of academics and journalists and creative writers.”
The organizers of “Kan Yama Kan”, Hala Alyan who is Palestinian and Sara Deniz Akant who is Turkish, use the events to raise money for causes they care deeply for but are too far away for them to be directly involved.
The proceeds from the last event will go to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, they said. The non-profit was created by “concerned humanitarians in the USA” in the 90s, with the goal of providing medical care for children in Palestine in their local hospitals, according to the website.
Other causes they’ve crowdfunded for include earthquake relief in Turkey, Iranian rights advocacy, aid in Afghanistan and initiatives for change in Lebanon.
“The arts can often be people’s entryway into different discourse and activism and simply knowledge about parts of the world,” Alyan told Gothamist. “While all that is true, they’re not sufficient and they’re not a replacement for actionable change.”
Alya touched on the theme in her poem ‘Half-Life in Exile,’ published in The New Yorker in 2021.
In the hot mist of sleep. Dream after dream.
Instead, I obsess. I draw stars on receipts.
Everybody loves the poem.
It’s embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee.
It’s done nothing for Palestine.
Alyan was born to Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian immigrants. The blend of nations is common for people in Alyan’s ancestry, who are ethnically Palestinian but fled in the exodus of 1948 and of 1967 to new countries, adopting their new cultures and later identifying with their hosts for succeeding generations.
She lived in Kuwait in her early years, and at four years old, Alyan and her family sought political asylum in the U.S. after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded the country, prompting the Gulf War in 1990.
She would go on to live back and forth between many different cities in the Middle East and the U.S., a period where she was “ripped from everything [she] understood of the world.”
Alyan’s early writing stemmed from these experiences. Her recollections of the first stories she ever wrote in the first grade involved a main character who would come to have direct dialogue with Hussein himself.
“It probably began as sort of a form of escapism,” Alyan said. “I wrote these characters who I think had a lot of autonomy and a lot of agency in their life … which is probably symptomatic of a little girl who did not feel like she had any control.”
Years later in her early 20s in the U.S., Alyan found an open mic scene in Greenwich Village’s now-closed Cornelia Street Cafe that introduced her to the world of “bearing witness” to other people's written vulnerabilities.
It's what got her her first publishing deal of a poetry collection. Years later, after publishing more poetry collections and two novels, the Cornelia open-mics became the inspiration to start one of her own.
She first invited friends in 2020 after the COVID-19 quarantines, those whose identities intersected with Arabness in some way, which she said happened naturally. As it grew to become a more public event, more people of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian descent started to attend.
For New Yorkers, Israel and Palestine is personal
The timing of the most recent “Kan Yama Kan” gathering was especially pertinent.
Between July 2nd and 3rd, the Israeli Defense Forces raided parts of the city of Jenin in the West Bank, including a refugee camp, killing 10 Palestinians and injuring 120, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The large military operation, including ground troops and drone strikes, was intended to stop “counterterrorism” efforts according to the IDF, while displacing hundreds of Palestinian families from their homes.
The operation was the latest deadly incursion by an increasingly right-leaning Israeli government.
Back in New York, both Jews and Palestinians protested in response to the deadly raids in Jenin. On July 4th, groups representing a coalition of Jewish people for anti-zionism condemned the Israeli government for their actions, as they stood alongside Palestinian New Yorkers chanting “Free Palestine'' and “Judaism yes, Zionism no.” A few days later, similar protests amassed in front of the United Nations headquarters.
While there has been an increasingly open organizing of Jewish groups fighting for the Palestinian cause in the city, there remains a strong base of New York’s 1.6 million Jews that feel connected to Israel and its politics — a connection that for many comes amid a rise in anti-semitic hate crimes, largely stemming from a rise in white supremacist ideologies in the U.S.
Meanwhile, areas like Bay Ridge in Brooklyn and Paterson, New Jersey are the home to tens of thousands of Palestinians and Arabs, many of whom fled from expulsion in Palestine and represent the “largest stateless community worldwide” according to the Migration Policy Institute.
‘Soft power currency’
Zaina Arafat was one of the featured writers at the last “Kan Yama Kan”, and her 2020 debut novel “You Exist Too Much” was declared Roxane Gay’s favorite book of that year.
She first wrote on conflict in the Middle East in 2006, when a war broke out between Israel and the Lebanese political party and militant group Hezbollah. After ruminating for a while, she pitched and published her analysis on the conflict with the Christian Science Monitor.
Much of her early writing centered around growing up in a diaspora: an alienation of being in between, an outsider in both Palestine and the U.S. As her writing developed, her focus became clearer.
“One of my goals was to slay the misperceptions around Arabs and Muslims and Palestinians in particular that were in the news,” Arafat said. “A lot of the writing fuel came from a place of hurt and pain and a desire to mitigate that hurt and pain.”
The difficulty in writing, Arafat said, is that it’s simultaneously a public and private space but has a value unlike other mediums. Her belief is that writing can act as a “form of resistance” and a “soft power currency.”
What stood to be more pervasive was grappling with her Palestinian identity and what that meant as someone so far away from Palestine.
“The foremost identity has been being Palestinian because it’s one that I have spent the most time with and has been the most threatened throughout my life,” Arafat said. “No matter how many lives we may or may not get, this is the one life where I get to be Palestinian. I love that identity so much that I don’t want to waste a minute of it.”
Arafat says she draws comfort knowing there are others like here “on the outside” of the conflict. In fact, there are more Palestinians outside of Palestine than in it.
With “Kan Yama Kan”, the ability to share and speak on the Palestinian cause, among other topics of her Arab identity, is empowering for Arafat, who went to her first event in September of 2022. She believes that writing and words have power beyond any other form of strength.
At the Friday event, attendees said they recognized the value of a communal space.
“Art can save us,” said Ankur Thakkar, who shared a work of fiction that evening. “Places like this make it feel like it can be a daily, weekly, monthly practice.”
