Why I’m Using My PEN Nomination to Protest for Palestine

When the PEN award nominations went live earlier this week, several writers immediately withdrew from the longlists over the organization’s response to the unfolding genocide in Gaza. These writers stand alongside the 1,300 who signed an open letter to PEN America in February, the high-profile authors who are boycotting this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and the translators who have declined prizes.

The writers who turned down their nominations—Camonghne Felix, Christina Sharpe, Eugenia Leigh, Ghassan Zeineddine, Márcia Barbieri and translator Adrian Minckley, Esther Allen, Nick Mandernach, Kelly X. Hui, and those who will follow—act in powerful solidarity with Palestine. They do so with courage, and at their own expense. Their books deserve to be celebrated by an organization that has been clear and unequivocal in its condemnation of Israel’s targeted killings of journalists, writers, and scholars.

Nothing good has come from PEN America’s leaders’ five-month delay in uttering the word ceasefire. I am sick with seeing my most marginalized peers do more than their share of the work while many of them grieve family and friends in Gaza. I’ve admired PEN America since I was a young writer, but in the past decade the organization has consistently echoed our country’s dismissive stance on Israel’s violence toward Palestinians, at increasing cost to its reputation and in staggering contrast to PEN International’s response to the same issue. Neither the US nor PEN America was willing to say ceasefire before mid-March.

I agree with and support my peers who have withdrawn, and have also made the morally fraught decision to remain on the PEN/Hemingway list, for now, precisely because, with Ghassan Zeineddine’s Dearborn gone, I am the remaining Arab American with a Palestine-focused book on the slate of awards. Right now, keeping Palestine in view on an anti-Palestinian platform feels slightly less terrible than removing it. My Palestinian peers have already turned themselves inside out, working tirelessly to make this genocide seen for what it is. I am using this PEN award nomination to reinforce their activism and to align with the protesting longlistees in calling on PEN America to engage with an independent assessment of its bias, and to take on new leadership.

I am grateful to judges Cleyvis Natera, Elizabeth Crane, and Charlie Vázquez for connecting with and uplifting The Skin and Its Girl. The novel took 15 years to write: it was an act of personal reckoning that began in the years after 9/11, when I saw my rural, assimilated Syrian-Lebanese community line up behind the Iraq invasion. As a queer Arab, I was already on the outs, and witnessing the policing of friends and loved ones in other diasporic SWANA communities sent me toward a project that led into the heart of America’s self-damning, self-serving silences. I wanted readers to feel—with their guard down, which is that particular gift of literary speculative fiction—the cost of exile and the way that homes might be destroyed on the map but live on in our bodies. I wanted non-Arab people to care, because for most of its writing, people didn’t. For Americans without connections to Israel or Palestine, the topic vanishes behind a fog of being “too complicated” to discuss.

I have spent six months protesting, donating, fundraising, speaking at events, and enduring the homophobia of being questioned why I, as a queer person, would defend Palestine. During this time, PEN America issued about 30 statements responding to specific violations of Palestinian writers’ rights, but no one in leadership has seemed willing to name the pattern. For months, its board, president, and CEO sat on staff concerns, resignations, and a cascade of lower-profile refusals to participate in the award process. They also undertook what was politely phrased as an “ill-timed” visit to Palestinian and Israeli counterparts in Israel. Reviewing public photos of that trip, I have to conclude that they didn’t witness the same barriers that were plain to me on my trip in relatively calm 2019.

Perhaps they didn’t get asked for their father’s name at the border, maybe they didn’t have to play license-plate musical cars to get across a checkpoint to speak with everyday Palestinians in the West Bank, and maybe they didn’t repeatedly miss the Palestine Festival of Literature events, whose locations are kept secret until the last minute to prevent Israeli interference. Somehow, they didn’t come home wondering publicly about how to disrupt the particularly American silence and indifference that makes the word Palestinian so risky and conditional in our mainstream. The silence provides cover for political inaction. It’s what we writers try to tackle—to produce cultural change by trusting readers to empathize and explore different ways of thinking and feeling, because why else do we write? Should I remain in this process, I will continue to use that platform to say, “Free Palestine,” and continue to donate any prize money to Palestinian causes.

Personally, I feel betrayed by PEN, and the writers who have protested the awards are right to do so. We should be celebrating our nominations, not feeling manipulated and tarnished by them. Yet it feels counterproductive to bury something that was written as an invitation to care and to keep Palestine visible—particularly while Israel is killing and imprisoning Palestinian writers, and PEN America has not recognized these reprisals as a systemic problem. I am rejecting my own deep-seated instinct to hide from controversy, the wish of the once-bullied kid to just be left alone. I have chosen to leave The Skin and Its Girl on the longlist, where I hope it will continue to normalize Palestinian solidarity. I choose to use my very limited access and privilege (as a white-passing queer Arab with an Anglo name) to ask PEN America to make bigger changes.

Shame on the institutions that make writers choose between their principles and their safety from backlash. What will rebuild our trust? We are witnessing a deadly silence around Palestinians, the pinkwashing of Israel’s double standards, and the refusal to name Israel as a party to the killing of at least 95 journalists, 33,000 civilians, 484 medical workers, 203 aid workers, and over 13,000 children since October 7.

The silence of our institutions stands on 75 years of inertia, and it enables the indifference toward extrajudicial arrests, toward writers imprisoned in Israel on sham charges, toward Israel’s defense of settlers who shoot at West Bank civilians, and toward our own country’s moral amnesia in supplying the weapons for this horror. Large Israeli protests highlight how little this war has done to rescue hostages who are still alive, and they underscore that this objection is in no way directed toward the Jewish identity, but at a brutal, unchecked assault on everyone in Gaza. So much of the regional politics is complex, but this part isn’t.

When bias is organization-sized, it amplifies what’s worst about our field and undermines PEN’s mission to remain separate from national politics, to act on behalf of us, and to have our backs as we write against or despite a stultifying political climate. At the same time, I don’t want to lean in to a version of the world where people and institutions can’t change, and where PEN America’s late measures cannot be recognized as a beginning. The organization, as a whole, does not deserve to be canceled.

So what will you do next, PEN? A lot of us have been out here, mostly on our own, doing what you’ve done at scale for so many other groups but have done only under pressure for Palestinians. While you’ve delayed acknowledging the grotesque power differential at the heart of the Palestinian genocide, the delay continues to force marginalized writers to make agonizing, isolating professional sacrifices.

You can do more. You must do more to make this right.