Palestine Writes literary festival at Penn to celebrate Palestinian culture

When Susan Abulhawa thinks about what it means to be Palestinian, her mind goes to two places.

Being Palestinian is appreciating the beauty of her rich, historic culture: the songs, the art, the clothes, the food, the memories of her ancestors. And being Palestinian is living with collective pain.

“The erasure of Palestine off the map is slowly now being accompanied by an erasure of us as a people,” said Abulhawa, an award-winning novelist based in Philadelphia. “We instinctively want to cling to our heritage, and we want to celebrate it.”

Abulhawa is the executive director of the Palestine Writes Literary Festival, which will be held at the University of Pennsylvania this weekend. The festival has been the subject of increasing controversy, with several Jewish organizations calling on Penn to exclude certain speakers from the event. The festival will feature more than 100 speakers from around the world, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, Peabody Award-winning journalist Dena Takruri, and Maytha Alhassen, co-executive producer of the Hulu show Ramy.

The festival was first held virtually in 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic — and the organizers were shocked by the sheer volume of interest, with more than 120,000 logins from more than 80 countries.

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“It was a really wonderful experience that signaled the thirst for something like this,” Abulhawa recalled.

This year, the festival will be taking place at Penn throughout the weekend, with guest speakers of various backgrounds flying in from all over the world.

The sold-out event will feature an array of programming, including oral, folkloric storytelling sessions hosted by the Philadelphia organization Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture, workshops on creating young adult graphic novels and getting published as a BIPOC writer, and a kids’ story time session with Philly-based children’s author Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow. In addition, some sessions about indigenous culture and farming will feature members of local indigenous tribes.

“Palestinians are very diverse.”

The festival will also feature acclaimed writers, such as Elias Jahshan, who will be speaking about his recently published anthology This Arab Is Queer.

The book, Jahshan said, was an attempt to explore and celebrate the diverse queer identities and experiences that exist across the Arab world and diaspora, including Palestinian communities.

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“One of the biggest stereotypes that’s weaponized against me as a gay Palestinian is that my community apparently doesn’t support me,” Jahshan said. “It’s so reductive — Palestinians are very diverse. So being part of this festival was such a big deal for me … [because] it turns that propaganda on its head — Palestinians are welcoming.”

Jahshan said he hopes his session will help provide a space for queer Arabs to see themselves in stories of romance, heartbreak, and culture. And he hopes that queer people who are not Arab will see the immense racial and ethnic diversity in the queer community — in which queer Arabs can sometimes be marginalized or unseen.

Another session will feature the language and history of Palestinian dress.

The traditional Palestinian dress for women is called a thobe, and is embroidered with a unique Palestinian art technique called tatreez, which has been preserved for centuries. The embroidery is its own language that tells the stories of Palestinian cultures and histories across regions, according to Wafa Ghnaim, founder of the Tatreez Institute and senior researcher for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“When we’re talking about dress and textiles made for the body, we’re talking about this larger idea of embodiment — how we not only communicate our identity through what’s on the dress, but how our dress performs our identity, too,” Ghnaim said.

Her session will explore how tatreez evolved from a symbol of regional pride to one of universal resistance after the creation of Israel in 1948 — which Palestinians refer to as the Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic — and what can be surmised about the future of Palestinian resistance communicated through tatreez.

The festival has received criticism from various organizations, who said some of the speakers that will be featured have a history of making antisemitic remarks. Those organizations cited concerns for the safety of Jewish students on Penn’s campus throughout the festival.

In response, Penn acknowledged concerns and said it stands with the Jewish community, but affirmed its commitment to free speech. The university is not a sponsor of the event. A number of the university’s faculty have signed a letter supporting the event. Jewish students, staff, and Penn alumni, as well as members of the community around Penn, have also written a letter in support of the festival.

Many organizations, including Jewish ones, have also spoken out in support of the festival, and warned against conflating criticism of Israeli policies toward Palestinians and the Palestinian territories with antisemitism.

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While the festival has come under fire, for many Palestinians, this weekend’s event represents a critical moment of visibility and representation.

To have a gathering of this scale for the community to collectively celebrate and share their culture with others is unique, as the festival appears to be the largest Palestinian literature event on the continent.

“We instinctively want to cling to our heritage, and we want to celebrate it.”

“It is a rare opportunity for attendees to learn and appreciate the richness and diversity of Palestinian life and art in a forum that spotlights Palestinian experiences,” Penn student groups Penn Against the Occupation, Almaydan — the Forum of Penn Arab Graduate Students, and Penn Arab Students society, said in a joint statement.

“On a campus where Palestinian and Arab students must invest a significant amount of time and energy to create opportunities for their communities to be celebrated, an event like Palestine Writes is a long-awaited affirmation of their belonging and worth.”