Exhibit G
Description
From National Book Award Finalist Fady Joudah, a collection of poems, essays, and photographs that offers a Palestinian representation of not only the staggering grief, but the unwavering resilience and prevailing life force of a people and place enduring genocide.
Fady Joudah writes from the split perspective of a Palestinian American physician caring for the sick while watching the destruction of Gaza from the United States, a nation complicit in that destruction. He locates the paradox of his position everywhere: in the seed a sparrow eats from his proffered hand; in his writing in English, the oppressor's language; in the faces of Palestinian children receiving meals from aid kitchens--a glimpse into what his life could have been, and what is being lost in a war disproportionately impacting children and their families. Throughout the book, beauty insists on its survival not only through the Palestinian people, but also through the nonhuman world in which he takes occasional refuge from the devastation that humanity brings upon itself.
By placing before readers a series of carefully chosen images from Gaza, Joudah presses his reader to comprehend that the experience of both the individual and the whole are integral to an explicitly Palestinian understanding of genocide, even if that rendering is a nearly impossible endeavor. Exhibit G insists on the immensity of Palestinian interiority, and finds in this collective act of creation a hyper-present awareness. "By claiming what is being actively erased," Joudah writes, "I become presence."
At once an indictment of genocide, a rendering of catastrophic loss, and "an affirmation of life instead of a staging of death" (Katherine Larson), Exhibit G insists that love exists in all its variousness, and that it is the only defense against a totalizing, destructive force.
More details
Person
Fady Joudah is the author of [...], a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Exhibit G. His other poetic works include: The Earth in the Attic; Alight; Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance; and Tethered to Stars. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.