Night of culture, art, food, and poetry.

Hosted by the Party for Socialism and Liberation – Milwaukee, Milwaukee4Palestine, and Students for Justice in Palestine – UWM

Friday, February 9th
7-9 PM
1029 W Historic Mitchell St

Come together for a family-friendly night celebrating Palestinian culture, art, food, and poetry.

Ounadikom اناديكم — I Call Out To You is a popular song by the artist Ahmad Kaabour, based off of the poem by Palestinian poet Tawfiq Ziad.

“I am never lost in my homeland
nor did my shoulders ever diminish
I stood in the face of my oppressors,
orphaned, unclothed, barefooted.”

We are thrilled to announce a special reading of “What the World’s Silence Says” with Gazan Poet Yahya Ashour. Yahya Ashour is a touring poet and an award-winning author with two books published in Arabic:

• 2021, “That’s Why Ryan Walks This Way,” a children’s book.
• 2018, “You’re A Window, They’re Clouds,” a poetry collection.

Yahya is an accomplished artist and we are glad to welcome him to our community to share in a night of art, camaraderie, and community building. His writings have been translated into five languages – English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Finnish – and have been featured in several online and printed, local and international journals based in the US, the UK, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and Finland, and anthologies published in Palestine, France, Italy, and Sweden. 

Yahya was the youngest poet to be featured in the anthology of Palestinian Poetry Today, which featured poets born between the 1970s and the 1990s, edited and translated by the renowned French-Morrocan poet Abdellatif Laabi. His children’s book won the Arab Children’s Books Publishers Forum award in 2022. The book was also shortlisted by the International Board on Books for Young People (iBBY) chapter in Palestine for the iBBY International Honor List 2022-2024. 

Of Ashour’s work, George Abraham says: “It is a deep honor to be supporting a brilliant, rising talent like Yahya. When Noor Hindi and I read his work for our upcoming Haymarket Palestinian poetry anthology, we fell in love with the philosophical, epigrammatic wisdom of his verses. Here is a lyricism that manages to find love poems in the smallest details—‘not merely rain, but a shredded sky, not merely roses but seedlings.’”

Yahya has survived six military aggression on Gaza, in 2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, and May of 2023, and has lived through the siege on Gaza. He has been in the US since September 2023 on a B1 visa, unable to return home.

During the current aggression, both his family’s five story home and his family’s business were destroyed. He lost one cousin and seven friends. His family of 19 (his mother, his siblings, and their spouses and children) was forced to flee to the south of Gaza and has been surviving under severe circumstances since the beginning of the war. 

Suggested donations of $10-20 (though no one will be turned away for lack of funds) will be collected at the door of the event to support the artists performing, including Yahya.