N Mo'alla - Love Letters to Baba

N Mo'alla - Love Letters to BabaIn her own words: "Love Letters to Baba is an ode to my Baba the proud Palestinian who taught me everything I know about what it means to be of this land and people. He knew how to carry the immensity of loss in one hand, and the spark of defiance in the other gifting both to his firstborn, gently, fiercely, as only a Palestinian father could. My writing is an assertion of our existence as Palestinians, in the face of the deliberate and ongoing

In her own words:

"Love Letters to Baba is an ode to my Baba — the proud Palestinian who taught me everything I know about what it means to be of this land and people. He knew how to carry the immensity of loss in one hand, and the spark of defiance in the other — gifting both to his firstborn, gently, fiercely, as only a Palestinian father could.

My writing is an assertion of our existence as Palestinians, in the face of the deliberate and ongoing destruction of our land, culture, and people. It is the spark of Palestinian defiance my Baba gifted me — the embodiment of our sumud, our steadfastness, and our refusal to disappear. In these letters to Baba, I sought to assert our collective identity — as a people so often defined by displacement, I wanted to offer the dialectics of return. We are not our displacement and suffering; we are our persistence and defiance."

– N Mo’alla

N Mo’alla is a Palestinian writer and the grandchild of Nakba survivors, whose poetry began as letters to her late father and now serves as a defiant act of remembrance, sumud, and refusal to disappear.