Refusing to Look Away

If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witness

by Yahia Lababidi

New Village Press, 2026

reviewed by Seana Graham

In 2025, a copy of Yahia Lababidi’s book of poetry Palestine Wail came my way and I reviewed it here at Escape Into Life (link below).  As he wrote then,

In times of violence, the poet speaks out of necessity and testifies. Amid abuses of power and moral obscenity, they serve as our conscience, helping us find our way back to each other…

 Now, a year later, with Gaza still very much under attack, Lababidi finds that what is happening in Gaza now does not permit him to write poetry.

When I began Palestine Wail, I still believed that poems might steady the soul, that words carefully offered could hold the fragments of prayer. But devastation grows faster than language can heal. The cries from Gaza multiply until speech trembles. What remains to a writer is testimony: prose born of the hour, a way of keeping faith with what survives when song is taken from us.

Thus, his new book is made up of a collection of essays written and published over the last few years. The book is divided into three sections: Personal Witness, Literary Witness and Political Witness.

I write as a poet of Palestinian descent, as a Muslim, and as a man in sorrow. Silence at such an hour feels like betrayal. To bear wit­ness, however brokenly, remains a form of prayer.

But a witness needs those who will hear his testimony. Who will take the time required to hear what he has to say about his experience, his reflections on that experience and the experience of others.

I cannot do justice to this wise and beautiful book in a short review (though it is doubtful I could in a longer one either). The poet shines through Lababidi’s essays, his protestations notwithstanding. It is as though he is looking at the tragic destruction of Gaza through as many lenses as he can find, hoping that maybe this next one will reveal the truth to those of us outside the warzone, knowing that

As Omar El Akkad writes, those who live on the “launching side of the missiles” must choose between comfort and conscience. To look away is to assist the crime. To name genocide, erasure, the systematic destruction of a people, is an act of love.

To this end, Lababidi draws on allies wherever he finds them. In these pages you will find thoughts from Jewish and Muslim writers, writers as diverse as Mahmoud Darwish and Simone Weil, Peter Beinart and Edward Said.

Many aphorisms could be drawn from the author’s own words. A random sampling:

…elimination does not always arrive with thunder. It may take the gentler form of omission, reinterpreta­tion, or strategic silence. A land is read according to a new design, its past reassembled, its inhabitants placed at a distance, until their erasure appears as natural development, not rupture.

–“Hebrew Orientalism”, page 116

[Nadav Lapid speaks of] Paris as negation, an anti–Tel Aviv whose streets would never lean close enough to tell him their secrets. That estrangement belongs to exile. Intimacy has been left elsewhere, and the exile goes on liv­ing beyond the life he once imagined as his own.

–“The Mirror That Will Not Lie”, page 139

Humiliation is a word that wounds even before it is fully spoken. The body feels it before thought gathers around it. Posture shifts and breath tightens as memory receives the mark. To speak of humiliation is to speak of a human being brought lower than the ground beneath his feet, pressed toward the soil from which the very word takes its name.

–“Humiliation and the Human Form”, page 151

And perhaps it is fitting to let the last one be the book’s final lines,

The instruction is the same: plant. That is what these essays are, saplings offered to the earth in the darkest hour, with no guarantee of har­vest. The task is unfinished; perhaps it must remain so. Yet incom­pleteness is no excuse for silence. We speak with what remains, a poem, a tremor of conscience, and trust that somewhere, someone will hear, and, hearing, refuse to look away.

–Afterword, page 235

Now we have heard the task. I hope you will fulfill it and read this book, which arrives, not as a wail this time, but as a plea. I add mine to the author’s. 

Seana Graham is the book review editor at Escape Into Life. She has also reviewed for the biography website Simply Charly. She attempts to keep up with her various blogs, including Confessions of Ignorance, where she tries to learn a little bit more about the many things she does not know. She has published stories in a variety of literary journals. Her latest story appears in the new Substack Voices of Santa Cruz. The recent anthology Annihilation Radiation  from Storgy Press, includes another. Santa Cruz Noir, a title from Akashic Press, features a story of hers about the city in which she currently resides. 

Get If You Cannot Say Genocide at New Village Press

Watch the book trailer for If You Cannot Say Genocide

Interview with Yahia Lababidi at Public Seminar

Book review of If You Cannot Say Genocide at ArabLit

Yahia Lababidi’s poetry featured at Escape Into Life

Yahia Lababidi’s poem in Poems About Poetry at Escape Into Life

My review of Palestine Wail (with links) at Escape Into Life