Please join us on February 7, 2025 at 3:00 PM in Royce Hall 306 for “Our Oracle-Ruin: The Arabic Poetic Tradition in Light of Gaza” with Huda J. Fakhreddine.

Register to attend here: https://tinyurl.com/our-oracle-ruin

This talk is presented by the UCLA Departments of English, Comparative Literature, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, and the Edward Said Chair in Comparative Literature.

In the moment of genocide, Gaza becomes a language, a lens, an interrogation, a refutation of all that came before, and a compass for all that comes after. This talk launches from the murdered Gazan poet Hiba Abu Nada’s poem, “O How Alone We Are!” to present a reading of the Arabic poetic tradition through the lens of Gaza, highlighting a long Arabic legacy of confronting time and its calamities with defiant “alone-ness.”

The talk will be followed by a Q & A moderated by Saree Makdisi, Professor of English & Comparative Literature at UCLA.

Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023).

Questions about the event? Email: [email protected]