"With Gaza, we are beyond the breaking point." - Huda Fakhreddine
Arabic literature scholar Huda Fakhreddine on being vilified at a US congressional hearing, UPenn's cowardice, and the racism of literature departments even as Palestinians are being massacred.
I sat down for a long conversation with Huda Fakhreddine, a brilliant scholar and fierce agitator whose voice has been a source of enlightenment as the war on Palestinians and the simultaneous war on narrative about Palestine is being waged with savage intensity.
I first encountered Huda when her father, the poet Jawdet Fakhreddine recited two poems about the Covid-19 pandemic while Huda translated them simultaneously for Warscapes magazine’s Corona Notebooks series.1 We met again, five years later, this time in person, and were brought together by a crisis of even more devastating proportions: the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
At a New York City event commemorating Nakba Day in 2024, Huda read her translation of the poem “Palestinian” by Ibrahim Nasrallah.2 It was a powerful, furious and soaring recitation,3 and came at a moment, 8 months into a genocide, where the over two hundred people present could barely believe the levels of brutality that we were all witnessing.
Today, we are 21 months in, and Huda admits that “we are beyond the breaking point.” Israel’s weaponization of hunger, the concerted attacks on hospitals and on children, and the sick factoid that over 100 kilotons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza, an equivalent of 7 Hiroshima-sized bombs shows that the carnage being carried out has reached shocking proportions.
“We are witnessing it and literally witnessing it like nothing has ever been witnessed in history before. It's on our pillows, in our car, all the screens are massacres and bloodshed.”
It is a genocide that Huda has paid the price for at the hands of the US government and her employer, UPenn. She stops when me when I say she was mistreated: “I'm well, I'm healthy. I'm at home. My child is safe. I have a job. I'm furious and angry, but I don't like to think that I've been mistreated because this is a system that's corrupt and has been mistreating us, people who might identify with my position, both students and professors, since the beginning of these fields in this country.”
The field she is referring to is Arabic literature and indeed, she has endured absurd levels of harassment for the simple reason that she writes about, teaches and translates Palestinian poetry.
The witch hunt for academics associated with Palestine is not new, but has ramped up since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza in the autumn of 2023. The stage has been set over the years and the villains were pre-decided. In December 2023, Harvard, Columbia and UPenn were questioned at congressional hearings supposedly investigating rising antisemitism on American campuses. In a cartoonish portrait presented to Congress, Huda was held up as an example because of her involvement in the Palestine Writes Festival held some months before at the UPenn campus, where she has worked for several years in the department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures.4
Slurs and death threats followed, and the danger to Huda’s life was palpable. Over the ensuing months, any semblance of a normal working environment fell away, and there was a “dropping of masks,” as she called it. Everything one had suspected about the violence and racism embedded in American university structures had become so transparent that Huda found it “unfathomable that we had navigated these systems” for so long.
Huda says that “Gaza has offered us so much that we don't deserve,” and one of these offerings “is the courage to just not accept this anymore.” And so her voice only got louder as she refused to back down, even as the situation at her university got worse.
UPenn, like several other universities, received a letter from the congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce demanding they hand over records and all emails of UPenn staff to aid in their “antisemitism” inquisition. There was no subpoena, nor was this a legally binding order, but UPenn had decided to capitulate to these demands. Refusing to let this McCarthyism go unchecked, Huda and a colleague filed a lawsuit against UPenn in January 2024 to stop the university from sharing private information with Congress, saying such disclosures endangered them.
A year later, their case was dismissed with prejudice, but Huda explains that there was no expectation of winning.5 “The win here is that you're not silenced,” and the goal was “to use the lawsuit to say things around it - in the media, on social media, in the school paper.”
“You make use of every platform to make the statement. And our statement was Gaza.”
What does it feel like to be a problem? I ask her. “It feels like a responsibility,” she replies. “Nothing should be smooth. I'm going to be a pain and it’s fine. I'm paying the price. If every moment can become a return, a refocusing on Gaza, because we are so easily distracted, and if this is resisting that distraction, then I'm glad to be that problem.”
Whether in the media, in the courtroom or in academia, Huda is particularly conscious of the way in which language itself is being twisted to justify a genocide. But as a scholar, translator and professor of Arabic literature, a field of study with a history of virulent institutional detractors in the West, language becomes Huda’s domain, her battlefield, and her primary site of resistance.
Not only is she translating and writing more than ever, her teaching has also become a mode of resistance.6
Huda has always been alert to the ways that fields of literary study insist on keeping literature separate from politics, how they disconnect one historical period from another in service of academic specializations, and how institutions ghettoize Arabic literature into area studies units so it can be kept far from a mainstream Western humanities. Supposedly concerned colleagues advised her just teach medieval Arabic poetry while all this was unfolding and thus protect herself by sticking to something they viewed as sanitized and historically distant.
But Huda only saw these racist suggestions as a way for colleagues to only unburden themselves.7 Her retort came in the form of a new class called “Resistance Literature from Pre-Islamic Arabia to Palestine,” where the syllabus became a testament to the wholesomeness of the Arabic poetic tradition. It shows that “Palestine belonged to a long, long tradition of resistance and defiance in language and in metaphor and in practice and in daily life decisions.”
She cannot justify teaching anything that does not start from the fact that all of us including students are currently witnessing a genocide. Huda recently wrote that “Gaza is no longer just a place; Gaza is a locus and ethos; it is a signpost in place that has also become a source point of time.” This is her most urgent insight and message: “Everything has to launch from Gaza, whether it's in literature and politics and climate studies and gender studies, anything.”
Huda knows that the many forms of resistance she articulates certainly do not assure success and the situation is agonizing. “But there have been breakthroughs. I think being a problem, and we're placing “problem” in quotation marks, is not making it easy for the system.”
Here’s the full podcast:
What Does It Feel Like To Be A Problem? Featuring Huda Fakhreddine
For the last two years, Huda Fakhreddine has endured a barrage of harassment by the US government and her employer, the University of Pennsylvania, for the simple reason that she writes about, teaches and translates Palestinian poetry.
Love and solidarity❤️🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure
Lebanese poet Jawdat Fakhreddine reflects on the crisis with two new works, "A Street in the Pandemic" and "Microscope." His daughter, Huda, follows his reading with her translation in English. https://www.warscapes.com/corona-notebooks/jawdet-and-huda-fakhreddine-lebanon-usa
“Palestinian” by Ibrahim Nasrallah. Translated by Huda Fakhreddine https://proteanmag.com/2024/03/24/palestinian/
Clip of Huda Fakhreddine reading, May 2024 (New York).
University Presidents Testify Before House on Anti-Semitism and Violent Protests Transcript https://www.rev.com/transcripts/university-presidents-testify-before-house-on-anti-semitism-and-violent-protests-transcript
Judge dismisses Penn faculty group’s amended ‘McCarthyism’ lawsuit with prejudice. By Ayana Chari https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/02/penn-faculty-palestine-lawsuit-dismissed-prejudice
Huda Fakhreddine on ArabLit https://arablit.org/tag/huda-fakhreddine/“
Pull Yourself Together” and “Seven Skies for the Homeland” By Hiba Abu Nada. Translated by Huda Fakhreddine https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2024-01/pull-yourself-together-and-seven-skies-of-homeland-hiba-abu-nada-huda-fakhreddine/
Intifada: On Being an Arabic Literature Professor in a Time of Genocide by Huda Fakhreddine https://lithub.com/intifada-on-being-an-arabic-literature-professor-in-a-time-of-genocide/
I'm beginning to wish I'd read less philosophy and more Arabic poetry.
Thank you for writing this. It’s important to be reminded just how much academics can still do