Today it is a true honor to welcome Feisal G. Mohamed to Speaking Out of Place to discuss his new poem, Nowhere is safe in Gaza.  This book is “an erasure poem using as source text South Africa’s Application Instituting Proceedings against Israel for Violations of the Genocide Convention,” presented to the International Court of Justice in December 2023.  We talk about both the distance and also the bridge between the legal filing and this poetic creation, which re-distributes the language of the filing in different spatial manners, both allowing, and forcing the reader to confront the genocide from multiple viewpoints and with different emphases.

We speak of the programmatic and historically deep instantiations of Israel’s genocide, and bring forth the voices Israel has attempted to silence forever. In particular, we recall the words left behind by martyred physician Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, “We did what we could. When the guns fall silent and the true scale of devastation is revealed will the [UN] Council and its members be able to say the same?”  We take that as a call to all of us, and talk about how “Nowhere is safe in Gaza” compels us to expand our imaginative and political capacities.

Feisal G. Mohamed is professor of English at Yale University. His most recent books are Nowhere is safe in Gaza (Brick, 2026) and Resistance: Claiming the Arts of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

See the blog attached to this episode for example pages from poem.