In Love and War: Collective Memory and the Self is our fifth conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Samina Najmi, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah, Beverly Parayno and Veruska Cantelli.

Writing about war is often synonymous with writing about memory. Erasing narratives, stories and collective memory is the explicit agenda and the inevitable outcome of any war. And thus, writers counter, resist and seize back memory and along the way, shape the historical accounts of places and people that have experienced violence and trauma. The discussion explores the task of writers retrieving memories from war but through the double focus on gender and colonial pasts. They ask: what is the role of the imagination in writing against forgetfulness? How does form, style and aesthetics enter into the writing of trauma and violence? Where does imagination take you within the memory frame of your stories? How can imagination be a place to resist annihilation, how can imagination be a tool for liberation?

Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic U.S. literatures at California State University, Fresno. A scholar of race, gender, and war in U.S. literature, she has edited or coedited four volumes and authored critical essays on works by Naomi Shihab Nye, Brian Turner, and Nora Okja Keller that consider their engagement with war from a feminist perspective. Her article, “Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics,” appears in the Cambridge History of Asian American Literature (2016). Samina has also published over thirty creative nonfiction essays, which often meld memoir with political commentary. These essays appear in Warscapes, The Margins, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her memoir “One Summer in Gaza” was reprinted recently in Doubleback Review, and her essay on Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation is forthcoming in The Markaz Review. Samina spent her childhood in England and grew up in Pakistan.

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah was born in Verona to a Somali father and an Italian mother. She grew up in Mogadishu but fled to Europe at the outbreak of the civil war. She is a writer, an oral historian and performer, and a teacher. She has published stories and poems in several anthologies, and in 2006 she won the Lingua Madre National Literary Prize. Her novel Madre piccola (2007) was awarded a Vittorini Prize and has been translated into English as Little Mother (Indiana University Press, 2011). Il Comandante del fiume was published by 66thand2nd in 2014.

Beverly Parayno is a second-generation Filipina raised in San Jose, California. She is the author of the short story collection WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press, 2023), a 2023 Foreword INDIES Finalist and winner of a 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal. Parayno is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts. She serves on the board of the San Francisco-based literary arts nonprofit Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA) and the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland. Parayno lives in Cameron Park, California, where she co-facilitates the Cameron Park Library Writers Workshop.

Veruska Cantelli is Associate Professor in the Core Division at Champlain College. Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Global Communication Strategies at the University of Tokyo and also taught Comparative Literature at Queens College, CUNY with a focus on literature of war and women's autobiographies, particularly on non-western narratives of the self. She is the translator of Lettere Rivoluzionarie by Diane di Prima (2021), and the author of "The Dance of Bones: Tomioka Taeko's Stage of Reprobates" in Otherness: Essays and Studies (2021), "The Maternal Lineage: Orality and Language in Natalia Ginzburg's Family Sayings" for the Journal of International Women's Studies (2017) as well as several articles and interviews for Warscapes magazine. She is the...

Poetry of Witness is our fourth conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Otoniya J. Okot Bitek, Jehan Bseiso and Meg Arenberg.

What is the poet’s role in the event of the erasure of an entire people? Even as we deem certain acts of violence as “unspeakable” and “indescribable”? As the refrain “no words left” rings in our ears, many of us find ourselves seeking solace or sense from poetic language. Poetry and poets have long been understood (and also wilfully misunderstood) for the ability to deploy resistance to silence and to complicity. More than ever, words matter and words provide witness. Meg Arenberg will speak with poets Jehan Bseiso and Otonya J. Okot Bitek about their respective writing practice, their sense of poetry’s role in a violent world, the value of poetry in the face of numbing horrors, and their specific work putting words to the unspeakable in Palestine and Rwanda.

Otoniya Juliane Okot Bitek is an Acholi poet. Her 100 Days (University of Alberta 2016) a book of poetry that reflects on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide, was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya’s poem “Migration: Salt Stories” was shortlisted for the 2017 National Magazine Awards for Poetry in Canada. Her poem “Gauntlet” was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and is the title of her most recent work, a chapbook with the same title from Nomados Press (2019). She is an assistant professor of Black Creativity at Queen’s University in Kingston, which occupies the lands of the Anishinaabe and the Haudenosaunee people. Otoniya’s work has been published widely online, in print and in literary magazines.

Jehan Bseiso is a poet, researcher, and aid worker. Her poetry has been published on several online platforms. Her co-authored book I Remember My Name is the Palestine Book Awards winner in the creative category (2016). She is the co-editor of Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees (2019). Jehan has been working with Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders since 2008.

Meg Arenberg is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department of Humanities and the African Languages and Translation Program at the Africa Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University Bloomington in 2016. Prior to joining the Africa Institute, she completed postdoctoral research positions in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures (AMESALL) at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the African Humanities Colloquium at Princeton University. Arenberg is a scholar of 20th and 21st-century African literatures with particular research interests in intertextuality, Kiswahili poetics, translation studies, and digital media.

Buy the book: https://darajapress.com/publication/insurgent-feminism-writing-war

Wounds of War: Narrating Health and Healing is the third conversation in a series centering the Warscapes anthology Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (Daraja Press). Featuring Zahra Moloo, Valerie Gruhn and Danielle Villasana.

War brings the experiences and stories of health, health workers and emergency medicine into sharp focus. When one speaks about the horrors of war, it is primarily a reference to the vulnerability of bodies that are being deliberately targeted for harm irrespective of whether these are civilians or military personnel. Legal frameworks exist to protect health workers and hospitals, and to prioritize the rights of the wounded and sick no matter what side of the hostilities they may be on. Yet, attacks on health workers and the destruction of hospitals make the practice of care incredibly difficult and only exacerbate precarity. Even outside of the space of the war zone, the practice of health and healing can be a fraught and embattled world where marginalized populations navigate hostile and unjust societal structures that are not designed to provide them with equitable care. This discussion explore the complex ways in which these experiences can be written about by addressing their own positionality as women and as insiders/outsiders, the challenges of bearing witness, and the traumas that arise from doing this work.

Zahra Moloo is a Kenyan investigative journalist, researcher, and documentary filmmaker. Her work focuses on biodiversity, the extractive industries and neoliberalism in Africa. She has published in Al Jazeera, BBC Focus on Africa, Jacobin, Africa is a Country, Project Syndicate, Warscapes magazine, IRIN News, and in the collection Against Colonization and Rural Dispossession (Zed Books, 2017). She currently works for the ETC Group and is directing a documentary on conservation in Central Africa. She holds a BA in History and Development Studies from McGill University and an MA in Broadcast Journalism from City University in London.

Valérie Gruhn is a clinician, humanitarian, public health specialist, and author with over a decade of experience in global health and humanitarian response. She began her career as a registered nurse. Valérie's humanitarian work spans continents, with significant contributions in the Middle East, East and Central Africa, and beyond. She has worked with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Iraq during the Mosul Battle, in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during the Ebola Outbreak, and in Chad, addressing nutrition and refugee emergencies, as well as in projects in Kenya and Yemen. Additionally, Valérie has contributed as an assistant researcher on projects investigating human rights violations during the Syrian War. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she played a pivotal role in the response in New York City. Her writings have been featured in various online magazines, and her piece "Mosul Journal" was notably selected for inclusion in the book compilation Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War. Her expertise and insights have been shared on platforms such as the Council on Foreign Relations and France-Atlanta. Valérie is dedicated to amplifying the voices of vulnerable populations through her advocacy and firsthand experiences.

Danielle Villasana is an independent photojournalist whose documentary work focuses on human rights, women, identity, displacement, and health around the world. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibits and has been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, and The Washington Post, among others. She contributes to Redux and is a member of the groups Women Photograph and Diversify Photo. Her first photo book, A Light Inside, was published in 2018 by FotoEvidence. In 2019 she co-founded We, Women, an ongoing platform exploring crucial issues across the U.S. through photo-based community engagement projects by women, transgender, and