Raven, (1831) | Robert Havell Jr. / National Gallery of Art / Public Domain
For poet and essayist Yahia Lababidi, the crisis in Gaza has become a crisis of form. Lababidi has spent much of his career writing across questions of exile, belonging, memory, and political violence. But as the devastation in Gaza continues, he has found himself unable to write poetry as he had before. What began as a disruption in his writing became an attempt to find another way to give form to what he was witnessing. In his new book, If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE (New Village Press, 2026), which brings together essays written between 2023 and 2026, Lababidi asks: What happens when the words we rely on to make sense of suffering become sites of conflict? And what responsibility does a writer have when the language used to name violence is itself contested?
Recently, Lababidi sat down with Elizabeth Mirabelle to discuss what happens when political catastrophe alters the way a writer can work and how language shapes what can be witnessed and understood. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Elizabeth Mirabelle: One thing I kept coming back to while reading If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE is that the title isn’t really asking whether someone knows the word genocide, but what becomes possible—or impossible—once that word itself becomes unsayable. Was the book always about language as much as Gaza?
Yahia Lababidi: Titles usually come to me after a book is assembled. Nietzsche describes himself as a subterranean man, working in the dark—you don’t have a final shape. You just have this inner imperative or urgency to speak, to witness. And then you begin to see the shape of things.
The title of the book comes from a poem in my previous poetry collection, Palestine Wail. Funny enough, it was the exact poem that a previous publisher quoted when he let me know he couldn’t publish the book. He explained he couldn’t publish it because I used the words “genocide” and “murder,” yet he deeply identified with this specific poem because it wasn’t making any demands on him to say genocide—it was just appealing to someone’s mercy. He kept telling me, “Legally, we can’t say this.” I said, “Then at least recognize the great pity, the great enormity of the sin against the human family; recognize that what’s happening is a stain on our collective soul; don’t get hung up on the word.”
Having said that, I’m obsessed with language. I know words determine realities; whoever has the narrative is the one who is heard. I don’t want to get so hung up on language and terminology that it prevents feeling compassion for what is happening.
Mirabelle: You’ve long written about exile, moral imagination, silence, and the search for language that can hold difficult truths. Did writing this book feel like entering new territory?
Lababidi: I felt a bit of imposter syndrome in the sense that I don’t identify myself as a political writer. I realize we live in a political world, and whether or not you want to participate in that, crimes are committed in your name, wars are funded in your name. So, I felt a little uneasy because I am not someone on the ground in Palestine. I am not someone who has to suffer the way people are suffering the deprivation, the fear, the terror of it all.
I would rather not have written this book entirely. But I felt it would be irresponsible to turn my back and not acknowledge something on this scale.
Mirabelle: There are moments when it feels as though poetry doesn’t fail because it is weak but because reality has become almost impossible to metabolize.
Lababidi: I don’t want to sound tragic about this, but poetry, even at its darkest, has something idealistic; it believes in our better angels.
Something broke in me after Palestine Wail, witnessing the extent of what was being called Israel’s retaliation to October 7. When I saw the extent of it, it almost seemed self-indulgent to write poetry, but it wasn’t even a matter of choice. I couldn’t write poetry, and I still can’t. It’s been nearly three years. But I thought to myself, just because you can’t write poetry, does not mean you are excused from bearing witness. I mean, I’m writing this stuff, sleepless nights; I’m bewildered.
Mirabelle: I appreciated that your voice retained the uncertainty of someone authentically thinking through these events in real time. Was it important to preserve that uncertainty rather than smooth it into something more definitive?
Lababidi: Well, I’m an aphorist at heart. I have an aphorism: “Rigidity is the need to conclude. The last sentence of your soul stands open-ended.” I think people unquestioningly take on their tribal allegiances, their cultural baggage, their religious baggage. I thought, maybe I should always leave room for, “If they knew differently, they would do differently.”
If you believe in God, God pardons all sins. If someone thought one way and has now come around to a different way, embrace them. You can be gentle with that person. They probably feel bad about themselves. I would like to be someone who doesn’t have closed doors but opens windows within the book.
Mirabelle: You’ve moved freely between poetry, essays, aphorisms, interviews, even notebooks. Did this project change the way you think about genre?
Lababidi: I didn’t have to choose, which I’m grateful for. It wasn’t formally experimental either. They’re all just voices that say the same thing. Sometimes we need a poetic register. There’s a saying: “If you want to know what the moon is like, send a poet.” So, all I can bring to this book is my strange toolkit as a thinker, as a spiritual seeker.
Mirabelle: This book isn’t only asking what governments or institutions should do. It’s also asking something of writers.
Lababidi: Literature can do more than it thinks it can do. It can get to those hard-to-reach places that you wouldn’t ordinarily get from watching the news, or something factual, or purporting to be factual. That reach tells you, as you’re going about your day, to remember others. As you have this [comfort], remember those who don’t.
This book is not aimed at people who are students of literature, or who read poetry on weekends; this is aimed at everybody, even people who are suspicious of literature or the official narrative. A good portion of this book is dedicated to reviewing the works of others more knowledgeable than myself, people like Mohammed El-Kurd, or Peter Beinart, or people before me; thinkers, philosophers, and prophets who in their way are saying the same thing. When truth agrees with itself, across time and disciplines, it’s worth paying attention to.
Mirabelle: I admired that the book resists easy resolution. Even by the final pages, questions remain unsettled. Is there a question you’re still carrying—one that writing the book didn’t answer but perhaps made impossible to ignore?
Lababidi: I’ll unbutton my lip a little bit. There is a side of me, an idealistic side of me, which may be condemned by my Palestinian family and even advocates of the cause, which wonders: What are we? How are we to blame in this? This is why I imagine, for example, in Palestine Wail, I have a poem called “Alternative Scenario,” where I imagine after October 7, Palestinians rushing to the aid of the Israeli wounded, and tending to them, feeding them, caring for them, and saying, “This was not in our name.” In my idealized version of events, if we had responded differently, not just on October 7, to ask ourselves, always: are we, the oppressed, the victims, utterly blameless in our actions, in our words, in our hearts?
In the book, I feel like I’m not entitled to ask this of people in Palestine, in addition to all their great suffering. But on a spiritual level, on a moral level, the stronger party is not the one with the greater arms; it is the one with the greater cause, the greater moral standing.
