Seven Questions with Eoghan Walls

April 08

by Seven Stories Press

Last month, we published North Irish poet Eoghan Walls’ second novel, Field Notes from an Extinction, the diary of a fictional 19th-century ornithologist who has sequestered himself on a remote Irish island during the famine to study the endangered Great Auk, which has since gone extinct. One day, upon receiving his monthly deliver of supplies from the mainland, he finds an unexpected item among the provisions: an abandoned and clearly malnourished Irish child. Things go even further sideways, and up, and down — and perhaps even diagonally — from there.

We were delighted to have a chance to talk with Eoghan at Seven Stories HQ during his New York stop on the Field Notes book tour. That evening, he shared the stage with Claire Luchette for a lovely conversation at Brooklyn indie stalwart Books are Magic, before continuing onwards to Mystic, CT, and Boston, MA, for the final leg of his U.S. tour. During his office visit, we spoke with Eoghan about his background as a poet, the irony of anti-immigrant politics in Ireland, and the laying cycle of the Great Auks (RIP </3), among other things.

The interview has been very lightly edited for clarity.

Seven Stories Press: You’ve written one book prior to this, The Gospel of Orla, which we published three years ago. How was the process of writing Field Notes different compared to writing The Gospel of Orla? Did you have a different approach this time around?

Eoghan Walls: I have a really annoyingly clean process. For the Gospel of Orla, I mulled ideas around my head for years, and I didn’t put pen to paper. I just kept mulling the idea. I started off with a weird idea of a girl finding an un-dead cat, and her mother was dead, and that’s the idea that spawned the book. But I don’t write them until I’ve got time. I’ve got some privilege in my job now, which is that I’m paid a decent wage. I also sometimes get to take six or 10 weeks off work, and that gives me time to dedicate to properly writing it.

Instead of doing lots and lots of redrafts at the start, one day, I’ll sit down and spend an afternoon with a box of cigars and spend maybe three hours writing out the plot. I’ll plan out everything. It’s that easy. I think of five climactic scenes. I normally have those climactic scenes in my head, and then I build up to them. I link them together in a plot that has a crescendo, or that has a number of smaller crescendos that build up together. I’ll play around with that plot [in my head] for a few weeks, but then when I come to write it, I’ll take six weeks or eight weeks and just thrash it out. I’ll write one chapter in the morning and one in the afternoon, and after six weeks, I’ll have 50,000 to 70,000 words written. That’s how I write the book.

Now I can be editing that big, ugly first draft for years. But that big, ugly first draft is the only thing that makes the book happen. Without doing that, nothing gets done. Of course, I explore a bit during the writing process, but I need my plan set so I can write it out like I’m laying bricks. I find it’s as soon as you get the voice that the writing comes easy. Sometimes that takes some false starts, but when I get the voice and I know the plan, then I can write it programmatically in six weeks, beginning to end, and then edit that.

SSP: Well, speaking of voice, the protagonist in Field Notes, Ignatius Green, is such a distinct character that we come to know and see evolve through his journal entries. When did the idea for Ignatius come into your head, and what was it like inhabiting the mind of a nineteenth-century, English ornithologist?

EW: Ignatius Green was hard to find. I got the idea for his voice reading Darwin and other naturalists from the 1800s. I just saw the amount of privilege and arrogance in the way they talked about the people who were helping them, and it struck me as bizarre and blinkered. I really wanted Ignatius, who was one of these rich, reportedly brilliant men, to take responsibility for a child. In this book, the child’s mother is responsible for much of the action and high drama, and the man is doing the caring job. So there’s a bit of gender fuckery in the book. In some ways Ignatius was a hard voice to inhabit, because I consider myself more Irish than anything else, and Ignatius is English. So sometimes his opinions or his politics, or even the way he describes my city, Londonderry—I would always call it Derry—got stuck in me craw. But it became a voice I could inhabit.

SSP: Field Notes takes place during the Great Famine, which was the cause of a mass exodus of over one million Irish refugees from Ireland. When Ignatius first begins taking care of the child that was sent to him, he disparagingly comments that maybe she came from an Irish woman who couldn’t pay for her child’s passage to Boston. I’m wondering, how did you want ideas of emigration to come through in your writing? Were you thinking about particular discourses of exile when you were writing the book?

EW: Very much so. There were loads of threads of tributaries that went into the book. One of the things that has annoyed me most has been the rise of an anti-immigrant movement in Ireland. It has been slower to take place in Ireland than the rest of Europe, in fairness. Many countries like Britain or Italy had suffered strong anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout the 2000s. Later than some, Ireland got its own little body of jumped up men using their granny’s curtains to make swastikas, or whatever symbol that echoes the swastika for their own anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s embarrassing, and it’s awful.

All countries tell stories about themselves. We see ourselves through stories, and Irish stories have always, at least since the famine, if not before, been stories of immigration, emigration and oppression. These are stories we still tell ourselves today. I’ve been walking around America the last few days, and the Americans I’ve met with Irish heritage say yes, when we came here, we had nothing. Or they’ll talk about their own status as an oppressed immigrant.

I think for an Irish person to be anti-immigrant is bizarre. It lacks any sense of irony or history, and some of these things were what I wanted to address in the book. When doing historical research, I read a lot of Punch, which was a British satirical magazine of the 1800s. It continues to be published now, but it had a very anti-immigrant and an anti-Irish immigrant message during the famine. I wanted people to be aware of that language that we may use casually today, about countries being full, about not needing more immigrants, and show how it was applied to the Irish during the famine.

SSP: One aspect of Field Notes I was also really struck by was the sheer level of ornithological detail. You mentioned Darwin earlier, and I was wondering, what level of natural history or scientific research did you do while writing? Did you look at any ornithological archives?

EW: I read loads of ornithological texts. There’s an awful lot written about the Great Auk during that time. It’s great. There’s loads of books available, and thankfully, I’m attached to a university, so I could use our university library to read through them. But I wasn’t sure of all my materials, so I had them double checked by Professor Colin Beal from York University. He’s the most excellent scholar, and he was so generous in giving me his time. His knowledge was really useful in developing some of those texts. I may have diverged from some of his advice, where it became pertinent, so I hope he’s not chasing me with a scalpel. But I’ve got to thank him for the level of truth he gave the book.

SSP: The book is narrativized through Ignatius’s unfolding journal entries. What was the editing process like for that style of writing, where you’re writing in these dated journal entries? Did it come with any specific challenges or any special considerations?

EW: Well, you’re going to expose me now. Yes, it was really bloody tricky. I had to work out the dates, and I had to work out the journal entries by a number of things, such as the actual laying cycle of the Auks. I had to work out my timelines by British and Irish history, working out when the super kitchens were there, for example, or what was going on politically at the time. These were two of the big features. So I had a diary, and I worked out every day what happened. This was my plan for writing the book. I had something like a calendar page, and I would write it all out.

There was a third secret element that I’m hesitant to expose to your readers, which is, I wanted to work out the journal entries by the moon cycles as well. Just in case the moon cycles should be relevant for any potential mystical readings some may have of the book. Hint hint.

SSP: Do you see Field Notes in conversation with any other books in the Seven Stories backlist? Or, more generally, with other writers that have also explored the Great Famine and the effects of colonialism on Ireland, whether contemporary or historical?

EW: I do, though it may seem a slight reach. I know you don’t publish Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, but I kept thinking about it when I was writing the book. Not just because it takes place on an island where the last remnants of a civilization is trying to survive. I love the social consciousness that Vonnegut has, which, aye, all Seven Stories writers have as far as I can see. Vonnegut has an awareness of the absurd, held in tandem with political anger, that I wanted to carry through Field Notes.

There’s another book I want to mention that’s not on the Seven Stories list, which is Flan O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht, translated as The Poor Mouth from Irish. He writes absurdly and comically about the suffering of the Irish in the West of Ireland, and his level of absurdity is something I can only ever aspire to.

SSP: Do you feel like your background as a poet came through when you were writing Field Notes? Or do you think it influences the register in which you write in, on either a broader level or a sentence level?

EW: When I read through some reviews for my first book, The Gospel of Orla, sometimes people said “the language here is utterly unpoetic”, or, “there is nothing beautiful about the language at all.” I find that so interesting and so true.

I think being a poet gives me an ability to cut out anything that feels poetic, and to never sound like I’m trying to write anything arch or postured. Being a poet, I know that the first thing that will kill a poem is an archness of tone. A certain pretension. Maybe, as poets, we’re over-aware, and we want our speech to sound brutal and forthright and gripping and physical from the start.

And look, I don’t know this. I don’t want to try to say I’m doing something amazing. But if I’ve learned something from poetry, it is that there’s no time for beauty or metaphor. You have to make a world that is breathable and effective. That world may be beautiful, but the language itself should serve to transport you to that world and to that voice. I wouldn’t say, like some writers have, that they want the right reader to forget they’re reading a book. I don’t believe in that. I do want the reader to feel the weight of the book and to enjoy the book, but I don’t want them to spend time listening to my beautiful comparisons. I want them immersed in the language of my characters and my world.

SSP: Okay, one more bonus question. You’ve been on tour across the Northeast U.S. for the past three days. How has it gone? How has the reception been? Is there anything that’s surprised you since you’ve been on tour?

EW: Can I please say a warm thank you to the amazing women of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, who were so brazen and brilliant, who deeply cared about the book, and who, when they met me, were happy to tell me that I got the ending wrong. We had a strong debate for an hour, and the level of care I got from those readers was astounding. I came braced, in fairness, for a rockier road in America right now. But that’s because I lack context. It’s my first time being here. I’ve seen some racism, a bit. But I’ve seen mostly friendliness, warmth and kindness. Definitely, in Point Pleasant, that’s what I saw. I’m hoping for a good night tonight in New York as well.

Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien met Robinson Crusoe, here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction.

Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island — from the author of indie favorite The Gospel of Orla.

“A unique and richly imagined novel.“
—Graeme Macrae Burnet, The New York Times Book Review

Written in the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations, Field Notes from an Extinction follows the life and work of one Ignatius Green, a fictitious English scientist dispatched by the Royal Society to the remote island of Tor Mor off the northern Irish coast. Green, a widower, is single-minded and self-righteous, brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to set the scientific record straight on the mating rituals, feeding and care of hatchlings,
and other minutiae he can gather about the Great Auk (pinguinus impennis).

Green’s world is shattered when his monthly goods delivery arrives ravaged by the local Irish townsmen. His fury at their impertinence is matched only by his dismay at finding a small child amid the shipment—dirty, abandoned, mute, and utterly feral and unmanageable. Worse, the locals are growing restless and hungry. And there is talk sweeping the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power.

Green fights for his survival against brigands and hunger and, most fearsome, the resolve of a fierce and angry child. And, perhaps, for a wider understanding of family amidst roiling societal unrest.

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK:

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.

Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“‘You have looked evil in the eye,’ Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, ‘and now no one can look at you.’ First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser. . . . Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse.” —Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

“The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. . . . Sinno’s prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it’s enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature.This is brilliant.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

“When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic.” —Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian

“[An] extraordinary personal and literary examination of child sexual abuse and its aftermath. . . . What makes Sinno’s deeply personal book exceptional is that so many impersonal questions crop up again and again, ones that cannot be answered but all the same must be asked.” —Elias Altman, Bookforum

“In spite of her reservations about making art out of trauma, Sinno braids together personal narrative with cultural and literary criticism, analyzing the portrayal of victims and perpetrators across books and film. She toys with the nuances of genre and various storytelling forms, invoking fairy tales, poetry, and legal documents. . . . Sinno has compiled a precise and sweeping depiction of the harm wrought by childhood sexual abuse. . . . Sinno refuses to impose an artificial happy ending and invites the reader into the ambiguity of living with trauma. Sad Tiger extends to its reader the opportunity to witness, and to wrestle.” —McKenzie Watson-Fore, Full Stop

March 24

¡Viva Cuba libre!: A Reading List

Cuba has long occupied the imaginations of imperialists, beginning with the Spanish colonial invasion up through the present day. In its most recent assault on Cuba sovereignty, the United States, both emboldened by the 'success' of the Venezuelan coup and reeling from the highly disorganized (and likely doomed) illegal war on Iran, has erected a blockade against Cuba, preventing the import of oil, medicine, and other crucial supplies. This is just the latest example of the U.S. imperial force beseiging the island nation, solely due to Cuba's political affiliations and longstanding resistance to the U.S. interference.

For further reading on Cuba, the Cuban Revolution, and the Untied States' perpetual war on the country, we've compiled a reading list of books by authors such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Tom Hayden, José Martí, Fabián Escalante Font, Sonia Rivera-Valdéz, Aleida March, Iván de la Nuez, and more.

March 18

Explore the Seven Stories Press 2026 Catalog

Behold, the complete catalog for 2026 from Seven Stories Press, Two Dollar Radio, and Triangle Square Books for Young Readers. Below, we're proud to share dozens of titles from all over the world:

Of the books published by Seven Stories Press, you'll find literature and poetry from Kim Thúy, Artem Chapeye, Keletso Mopai, Clyo Mendoza, Cat Fitzpatrick, Eoghan Walls, Alex DiFrancesco, Roque Dalton, Alan Dugan, Barry Gifford, and more; memoir and biography from Annie Ernaux, Barbara Seaman, Ramzy Baroud, Su Friedrich, and Fidel Castro; graphic works from Liv Strömquist and Jesús Cossío Guevara, Judah Rubin, and Luis Rossell; political non-fiction from Che Guevara, Mike Davis, Jonathan Kozol, Roberto Saviano, and more.

From Two Dollar Radio, you will find new fiction from Nora Lange, Grace Krilanovich, Julian Zabalbeascoa, and Brenda Iijima, and reissues of iconic TDR books from Kathryn Bromwich and Sarah Gerard.

And from Triangle Square Books for Young Readers, you will find an extensively updated edition of A Different Mirror for Young People, along with the first adaptation for young readers of the iconic history book The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk. You'll also find a children's picture book by Sara Lundberg, a young adult novel by Jerome Charyn, Maryam Shojaei's young adult memoir of fighting for gender equality in Iranian soccer, Devra Lehmann's YA biography of Augustine of Hippo, and many more books for kids of all ages.

NEW RELEASES AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS FROM SEVEN STORIES PRESS

NEW RELEASES AND FORTHCOMING BOOKS FROM TRIANGLE SQUARE BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

March 17

It’s the 2026 Trans Rights Read-A-Thon!

Today, March 17th, begins this year's Trans Rights Read-a-thon! Started by journalist and speculative fiction author Sim Kern, Trans Rights Read-a-thon is an annual initiative for readers and book lovers to celebrate trans literature in the weeks leading up to Trans Day of Visibility on March 31st. It's a great initiative that's super easy to join: to participate, all you have to do is prioritize reading, reviewing, or otherwise uplifting books written by and/or featuring trans, non-binary, or otherwise gender non-conforming people. During this time, participants are also very much encouraged to donate to trans organizations to the best of their abilities.

Below, we've pulled together a selection of books written by trans and non-binary authors, books about trans politics and trans liberation, and books that otherwise seem just perfect for a Trans Rights Read-a-thon.

From the official Trans Rights Read-a-thon website:

How Does the Read-a-thon Work?
During the two weeks of the readathon (March 17-31), read trans* books and donate to trans* organizations. This is a decentralized fundraiser, so how you participate is up to you. You can read 1 book or 20 books. You can donate to a large organization or a personal GoFundMe.

For more information, including a list of suggested organizations for donations, visit the official website for Trans Rights Read-a-thon. You can also follow them on Instagram and TikTok at @transrightsreadathon, and at @trreadathon on Twitter, and use #transrightsreadathon and #TRR26 when you post.

March 03

Excerpt: “Field Notes from an Extinction” by Eoghan Walls

To celebrate the publication of Field Notes from an Extinction, the second novel by indie bookstore darling and acclaimed poet Eoghan Walls, we're proud to share an excerpt from the book, described by Graeme Macrae Burnet, in a new review in The New York Times, as "a unique and richly imagined novel." The extract, taken from the start of the book, begins the moment protatonist Ignatius Green realizes that a small child has stowed away on his boat and crashed his fieldwork mission to study the Auks on Tory Island, Ireland.

from
Field Notes on the Final Colony of Garefowl, vol. II

Monday, 31st May, 1847

The islandmen have smuggled a child onto Tor Mor Rock.

That I did not adequately register the basket in which the child was stowed is likely due to my state of perturbation at the obvious interference with my supplies. I was awaiting the delivery agreed already on October the 17th, 1846, with Hancock of Londonderry (formally of Staffordshire), in addition to supplemental grains to replace what was hitherto lost to rain, spillage & theft from the last delivery; to wit;

pease, one sack;
oatmeal, two sacks;
wheat flour, two sacks;
dried biscuit, one chest;
English cheese, one large wheel;
suet, a five pound slab;
butter, a five pound slab;
coal, five sacks;
whale oil, one bushel;
soured grog, one hogshead;
raisins, ten lbs;
dried apple, five lbs;
personal effects (ink, paper, etc), one chest;
replacement taxidermist’s tools, one chest;
brandy, two gallons;
lemon juice, one gallon;
fine tobacco (provenance immaterial), four lbs;
London gin, one gallon;
side of beef, one;
smoked Galician pig, one half-carcass.

Provisions enough for one man alone for one month entire on the rock with no need to journey inland. Missing this time was the beef; both sacks of wheat flour; one flask of brandy; the cheese. As further insult, much of the pig had been roughly cut away & but poorly wrapped thereafter, leaving only a ragged shoulder, the spine & bared ribs protruding from the torn bindings, left to rudely flap in the hail.

Even in the glum half-light of the late hail from Iceland, the theft was obvious, but the men were diffident, blank faced as poachers. Disputed with them at length on the shore. That thin pish Liam McGonigle is the only one of this batch admitting to passing competency in English.

MYSELF: The garefowl have laid, McGonigle. I cannot leave the island currently. It is an act of thievery that has been carried out here. Theft.

MCGONIGLE: I can only tell you again what I have told you already, sir, we bring you straightaways what we receive from Hancock. None of my men would dream of touching it, sure don’t we depend on the money you bring in.

His tone circumlocutory, his manner obsequious. His fellows scrawny, muttering their guttural tongue. He held the wet manifest to shield his face from the full force of the hail. I snatched it from him.

MYSELF: You are honestly trying to tell me you have not nabbed almost half of my provisions?

MCGONIGLE: I would be offended at the suggestion, sir.

MYSELF: Speak up, man.

MCGONIGLE: Offended, sir. I would be offended, sir. That is to say, no sir.

The ink wet on the page. The rest of the men, done unloading the goods, were already turning back to their vessel. Two thin boys—couldn’t be more than twelve—had already retired from manual labour, having fallen to coughing fits during disembarkation, & wailed loudly from the boat.

Skinny monkey youths, spluttering under a tarpaulin.

MYSELF: Do not turn from me, McGonigle. We are not done here. I must tally the rest of the shipment & keep an exact log of delivery.

MCGONIGLE: I must apologise but I am afraid further dalliance will not be possible tonight, sir. The tides as they are, we must get back before dark if we are to not come afoul of the Blind Rocks.

All his bluster & wheedling & still his uneven grin. He comes recommended by Sir Phillip. Worked with him on the tea ships for five years, supposedly one of the decent ones, & my reliance upon these islanders must extend another six to ten weeks yet. Sir Phillip will hang his head when he hears of his oversight in judgment! I shd have seized him, made him open each container before me. But his lank shipmen shook, coatless. It had taken three of them to carry a chest I could have easily managed on my own, & Connie’s lamentations of the starving Irish in her broadsheets must have addled my heart.

But not one of them would meet me in the eye, & one of them, I swear, was laughing into his sleeve.

MYSELF: What are they saying, Liam?

MCGONIGLE: What, sir?

MYSELF: That one there. What did he say?

MCGONIGLE: It is untranslatable, sir.

Half of them wading already into the choppy black sea, trousers still dark from disembarkation. McGonigle would only heed me when I held him.

MYSELF: Do not turn from me!

MCGONIGLE: (gesturing to youths on the boat) My nephews, sir. I have to get them out of the squall.

MYSELF: You think I am at your mercy, McGonigle. But it is you & your family who are dependent upon my good graces. Sir Phillip will hear of this.

MCGONIGLE: (utterly unabashed) I will inform him myself of the missing supplies, sir. Your unhappiness is my unhappiness. But I can only tell you again, I have delivered exactly what we received this morning.

He squinted into the wind. One of the youths wailed to him from the boat. But before he stepped into the tide, he touched his nose & leaned towards me.

MCGONIGLE: I advise you strongly to unbox the goods tonight.

MYSELF: What?

MCGONIGLE: Tonight, sir. Unpack the goods tonight. Before the gulls quite eat your pig away, sir.

I looked up the beach. The herring gulls were indeed tugging wildly where the meat hung loose.

MYSELF: In a month, I expect a full half-pig, Liam.

MCGONIGLE: I will make sure to pass on your words, sir. But unpack it tonight.

The islanders launched as I headed back up the rock, chasing gulls off the pork with the manifest. I believed I had the size of the matter, by which I mean the theft, but wanted to ensure my tools were intact, & then secure both the oats & the biscuits, as I have missed both sorely, & took my time getting around to the tarpaulins, my sight & hearing much reduced by hail. Odour I detected none; my nose is near bleached by the slant wind & constant exposure to fishy guano. Thus I failed to register the child or even the basket that bore it until the men had nigh passed the Organ Pipes.

But I could smell it indeed when I bent to examine the barrels. Even in the wind, sour as meat, the stench of human waste.

It made no discernible sound as I tugged off the tarpaulin. A wicker basket big enough for a live pig. At first, I thought I had found the side of beef gone rancid; but the weight of the basket shifted as it tilted; then I tugged the lid & knew not what I saw.

Two eyes met mine in the dark.

A face. A child.

A child blinking in the half-light.

Two wet eyes. A nest of hair.

MYSELF: Wait! Wait, you madmen! Wait.

MYSELF: Wait! It will die, you madmen! The child will die!

I ran towards the Organ Pipes, skidding, landing heavily off the lower ledge. Rose uninjured, shouting. The islander skiff was maybe three hundred yards out. Faces of the islandmen distant.

They made as if not to register me.

They saw me though. I know they did.

I was not done. Ran back to the basket, tugged it loose, heaved it to my chest & bore it on the rocks, tho it was heavy, & dropped it into my little rowboat, whereupon it toppled on its side & the lid slipped & the child rolled onto the shale screaming. Lifted it, tho it arched its back, into the darkening sky.

MYSELF: Take it back. I cannot take it. Take it back!

Waded in to my waist. Soaked my good green trousers, my boots wet thru, undergarments too. Shouted, at length, holding the child over the sea, a writhing thing, squealing, its apparel stinking.

The men had their backs to me now, & the boat disappeared behind the waves.

MYSELF: Take it back. It will die here. It will die!

My face & ears stung in the hail & the child’s most likely too, tho it gave up kicking & screaming to simply hang, until I stumbled back to the shore & dropped it to the shale.

The islanders were too far out.

In the waves & stormy dusk, with their sails up, I would not catch them in my little rowboat.

They have lumbered me with a thing that mewls on pebbles.

MYSELF: Get back in the basket. Get up. Into your basket.

MYSELF: Get in the basket! You are filthy.

No English in the child. It squealed on approach & on contact. All filth & frail wiriness. For humanity’s sake, I might have carried it in my arms, but the bloody thing seized like a board at my touch & writhed, & it proved altogether easier to just drop it back into its basket & carry it like goods.

Its basket now stands at my stove.

Must attend to deliveries. The gulls have picked thru my hasty rewrapping & are worrying my meat once again.

My supplies—or what I have of them—are secured.

The child has not moved.

Initially, it seemed entirely mute.

MYSELF: I must see to the deliveries. I must bind them before the gulls spoil them. (rattling the basket) If I do not go, I will lose the meat. You understand?

The child sobbed, mostly in silence, but yelped at the sight of my hands. So I unpacked my goods, first in hail, then in twilight by lamplight, as the sky cleared to a cosmic chill & Andromeda popped thru the clouds. First carried & hung the meat inside & the various perishables, then the pease & oatmeal, then two chests of tools behind my partition, then bound both dry goods & imperishables in sailcloth in the cabin’s lee. Could tell McGonigle had got back to Inishtrahull as his lighthouse began its repetitive scything across the shale & sea beyond Tor Mor. By the time all was secured, the wind had died & a fat full moon chipped the edge of a clear horizon.

The brandy—the single flask I have—is unwatered.

The biscuit coverings are unbroken.

Neither the butter nor the suet have spoiled.

All this time, the child lay silent in its box, by the stove, the fire on full blast, under the bubbling still. It—she, by the pinafore, she—must have been near roasted. The still gives a raging heat at full blast—I have coal enough for weeks, as it appears the Irish cannot eat coal—& the only shelter the child had was its rough & soiled wicker.

I heaved the basket to the door, naturally.

It—she, she—was silent the whole time & but for the heaviness & rapidity of breathing, I might have thought her dead.

MYSELF: You can come out here if you want to.

MYSELF: Come out. I will not hurt you. You can come out.

MYSELF: I am a good man. I am not unkind.

MYSELF: Are you not able to climb out? I will set the basket on its side.

Small yelps as I tilted the box, then nothing. At her continued silence, I peered into the depths, where she was coiled like a beast among her particulars, namely:

Clothing she wore;
a shitten, once white dress;
one blanket (utterly soiled);
one pair of wooden clogs;
one cracked chamber pot, once affixed to the base, now unmoored;
one rubber-bunged pewter flask.

The latter despite the age of the girl. Eight? Five? Twelve? I can age a puffin reliably to the season but with a human child could easily be off by four years, give or take. Malnourished, by the look of her, which makes the judgment harder. Just over my waist at full extension I would estimate, closer to four foot than three, skinny & dull of wit, lacking in vigour, filth-cauled & whimperish.

MYSELF: You can come out of the basket. I will not hurt you.

CHILD: Wishke.

This it croaked. Its first word: Wishke. Gaelic. Obviously there is opportunity for drollery—even Irish children clamour for whiskey etc—but from conversations with Frank, I know the word to mean water.

MYSELF: Water. You mean water, yes? Do you want a drink?

The child flinched as my hand neared. I took its—she, her—her bunged flask, a filthy receptacle possibly for use at sea or in prisons, & there was no strength in her hold on it. Filled it from the cooling tub by the still, returned it to the lip of her basket, & her little talons snatched it back.

Watched her drink. The matting of her hair almost total. Waste visible on the remains of what was clearly once a pretty outfit. What were once ribbons are now twisted & frayed.

MYSELF: Wishke. Wishke means water.

MYSELF: Do you want food?

MYSELF: Where is your mother, child?

Might as well have talked to a stone.

Dinner simple but wholesome. Boiled oats & sliced bacon shoulder. Have missed the bacon much. Must ration it carefully now. Oats too. Dregs of old lemon juice softened the meat & a tumbler of grog. Made a little extra. The child can eat with me one night. As I cooked, I tried to engage her. Box on its side. All I could make out from the shadows was greasy hair.

MYSELF: Grog? Do you want some grog?

MYSELF: Are you hungry? Do you want porridge?

CHILD: Wishke.

Refilled her bottle a second time, had it snatched again.

MYSELF: We will have dinner. We will eat. Food? I can feed you tonight.

MYSELF: Can you speak, child?

MYSELF: (chopping bacon finely) You can eat with me tonight. You are very welcome. Then, in the morning, I will take you back to the island. Do you understand? Back to your mother.

Not a flicker of comprehension, even at the word mother. But surely their Gaelic word must share some root with mater, mere, mutter? I have no idea.

She was entirely fixated on drinking.

Then I noted a puddle seeping from the basket over my boards.

MYSELF: No! No piss in here!

The child screamed as I dropped the knife & leapt to carry her & the dripping basket into the dark to the shale by the outhouse.

MYSELF: You do not piss in the cabin. Hear me? You do not piss in the cabin. Piss here. Piss out here. No piss in the cabin! Piss out here!

The child, distraught, keening. I thought of house-training hunting dogs, & rattled the basket, & shouted some more.

MYSELF: Do not piss in here. Children piss outside. We all piss outside. Everyone pisses outside! Not in the house.

Scrubbed the boards, & once her noise died down, carried the basket inside, dumped it by the stove. Set up table, added brandy to the oats, a sprinkle of sliced apple. Two bowls, two stools, & turned the basket so she would have to face me.

MYSELF: Come out of the basket now. It is time to eat.

MYSELF: Eat. Good food. The porridge is good.

MYSELF: Child! I will not bite you.

MYSELF: Child. Listen to me. I do not know if you can understand me, but it is only fair that I explain to you the situation. I will feed you & put you up for tonight & we will return you to your island in the morning. Whatever nonsense McGonigle is playing will be short-lived & I am sorry you are suffering but I am as much a victim in all of this as you. I do not know your full situation but I am here on vital scientific business & while I have all the sympathy in the world for the destitute, I cannot allow you or anyone else to interfere with my studies. I will take you home in the morning. So please, I ask you. Take my food. This is a strong & nourishing porridge. Eat it. It is good.

Not a word in her head. Perhaps she is dumb, or an idiot? When I proffered her a spoon, she sucked on her bottle instead.

MYSELF: Damn you so.

Am tired now from manual labour. Gin is a salve. This whole episode a pointless irritation. I must write to Sir Phillip immediately, outlining the loss of provisions as well as the islanders' tomfoolery, & seal it definitively so as to make sure McGonigle cannot doctor the contents.

The child spoke as I was writing, but merely to ask for wishke, wishke! Like a wretch in an alley, she had crawled to the edge of her hutch, blinking in lamplight. For the first time I saw the face under her dank fringe, tear-streaks in mud, a moustache of puckered scabs.

Then, as I handed her the bottle, noted once again a thick stream of piss along the boards.

MYSELF: No! I told you! I told you!

Snatched her up, this time my hands in her hot armpits, regretting the closeness instantly as I bore her high & streaming out the door. She had pissed on my overalls, & where I had touched her, there was grime on my hands.

Bellowed at her, somewhat immodestly.

Then had to touch her again as I carried her wailing & dripping back to her box.

I have scoured the piss now, twice.

I can still smell it. The piss, & the whole child, despite the application of lime.

The situation is ridiculous. I had heard of such things in Barrackpore. Mothers prepared to risk the life of their offspring on the chance generosity of civilised men. More normally a man is protected by the trappings of civil society, his boy or domestic help interceding before the destitute can encroach. But never have I heard of a scientific expedition so disrupted.

It will not be without repercussions. McGonigle’s men have not only taken my provisions but now threatened my peace of mind. If Sir Phillip cannot guarantee adequate sustenance & appropriate intellectual solitude, the entire venture is imperilled; if further funds are required for the security of the next delivery, he needs but ask the Royal Society.

Have written him as much.

March 03

Hands Off Iran: A Reading List and Free eBook

"A society dominated by militarists distorts its social, cultural, economic, and political institutions to serve the interests of the war industry," says Chris Hedges in The Greatest Evil is War. One can see evidence of this in every stage of the American imperial program, from the beginnings of empire through the so-called “War On Terror,” to today, with the U.S.’s funding of the Israeli war on Palestine and the newly launched illegal war on Iran.***

Below, we've compiled a timely selection of titles on the history of U.S. imperialism in Southwest Asia and beyond, ranging from classic texts by Howard Zinn and Arundhati Roy, to Bush-era pamphlets on Iraq and Afghanistan, to contemporary literature on Palestine and Iran by Marjane Satrapi, Omar Zahzah, Ramzy Baroud, and more.

We're also offering free downloads of Chris Hedges' new book A Genocide Foretold: Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine, an intimate and harrowing portrait of Israel and the United States's oppression, occupation, and perpetual violence in Palestine. While A Genocide Foretold specifically focuses on Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people, Hedges also explores the relationship between the US and Israel as "the center of escalating tensions with Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, and the genocide in Gaza." This perpetual war, facilitated and carried out by the U.S. and Israel, changes shape with the needs of the imperial project, moving from attacks on one country to another with the whims of the military class. It changes shape, but it remains the same goal: to dominate the region and eliminate resistance and dissent.

We hope these readings can provide some clarity and context in this time of (unfortunately, not unprecedented) humanitarian crisis.

*******According to Reuters, U.S. and Israeli air strikes have killed over 1,000 Iranian people since February 28th, when the two countries launched an illegal war against Iran. Along with the mass extrajudicial assassinations of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and many of Iran's military leaders, one of the first targets of the bombing campaign was a primary school for girls, where U.S. and Israeli missiles killed ~170 people, the majority of them children. This was later determined to have been a deliberate decision, despite initial statements by the U.S. and Israeli governments declaring otherwise.

March 01

Celebrate Women’s History: Highlights from Our Catalog

CELEBRATE WOMEN'S HISTORY
EXPLORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CATALOG

Women's History Month can trace its beginnings back to the first International Working Women's Day in 1909. Before it's revival by feminist activists in the 1970's — and the UN's subsequent ratification in 1977 — International Women's Day's first appeared in 1908, when 15,000 women working in the New York City garment industry went on strike to demand better working conditions. The following year, the Socialist Party of America declared the first International Working Women's Day.

To celebrate these radical roots, we're delighted to share the following works of literary fiction, memoir, political non-fiction, and other writings that we recommend for Women's History Month, and for the rest of the year, too.

February 27

“History teaches that empires always devour themselves”: Ralph Nader’s Unanswered Letters to the Presidents

This week marks Ralph Nader's 92th birthday. To celebrate, we're proud to publish some excerpts from his book Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2000-2015. Covering 15 years of Ralph's one-sided correspondences with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Return to Sender not only demonstrates the steadfast moral resolution that guides Ralph Nader's political endeavors, but also offers a damning portrait of a United States government that, almost 10 years after Nader sent his final letter to Barack Obama, repeatedly makes the same mistakes, and repeatedly commits the same egregious crimes against its citizens and against foreign nations alike.

The letters excerpted below primarily focus on America's foreign policy — specifically, the diasterous "War on Terror" (2003), the continued operation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp (2013), the United States’ bombing campaign in Syria (2013), and the United States' military and financial support for the Israeli army's invasion of Lebanon (2006) and continued assault on Palestine (2008).

We have also included a letter from Ralph Nader to President Obama written from the perspective of an E.coli bacteria in German Laboratory in Bavaria. While it can act as a sort of palate cleanser, ultimately Nader's repeated references to the United States' foreign policy failures and domestic torture programs offer another window into his consistent advocacy for human rights and against imperialism. He's a remarkably consistent man.

Happy Birthday, Ralph, and thank you for everything.

LETTERS TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

December 21, 2008

Protect Gaza

Dear President Bush,

Congressman Barney Frank said recently that Barack Obama’s declaration that “there is only one president at a time” overestimated the number. He was referring to the economic crisis. But where are you on the Gaza crisis where the civilian population of Gaza, its civil servants and public facilities are being massacred and destroyed respectively by U.S.-built F-16s and U.S.-built helicopter gunships?

The deliberate suspension of your power to stop this terrorizing of 1.5 million people, mostly refugees, blockaded for months by air, sea and land in their tiny slice of land, is in cowardly contrast to the position taken by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956. That year he single-handedly stopped the British, French, and Israeli aircraft attack against Egypt during the Suez Canal dispute.

Fatalities in Gaza are already over 400 and injuries close to 2,000 so far as is known. Total Palestinian civilian casualties are 400 times greater than the casualties incurred by Israelis.

But why should anyone be surprised at your blanket support for Israel’s attacks given what you have done to a far greater number of civilians in Iraq and now in Afghanistan?

Confirmed visual reports show that Israeli warplanes and warships have destroyed or severely damaged police stations, homes, hospitals, pharmacies, mosques, fishing boats, and a range of public facilities providing electricity and other necessities.

Why should this trouble you at all? It violates international law, including the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Charter. You too have repeatedly violated international law and committed serious constitutional transgressions.

Then there is the matter of the Israeli government blocking imports of critical medicines, equipment such as dialysis machines, fuel, food, water, spare parts, and electricity at varying intensities for almost two years. The depleted U.N. aid mission there has called this illegal blockade a humanitarian crisis especially devastating to children, the aged and the infirm. Chronic malnutrition among children is rising rapidly. U.N. rations support 80 percent of this impoverished population.

How do these incontrovertible facts affect you? Do you have any empathy or what you have called Christian charity?

What would a vastly shrunken Texas turned in an encircled Gulag do up against the 4th most powerful military in the world? Would these embattled Texans be spending their time chopping wood?

Gideon Levy, the veteran Israeli columnist for Haaretz, called the Israeli attack a “brutal and violent operation” far beyond what was needed for protecting the people in its south. He added:

“The diplomatic efforts were just in the beginning, and I believe we could have got to a new truce without this bloodshed—to send dozens of jets to bomb a total helpless civilian society with hundreds of bombs—just today, they were burying five sisters. I mean, this is unheard of. This cannot go on like this. And this has nothing to do with self-defense or with retaliation even. It went out of proportion, exactly like two-and-a-half years ago in Lebanon.”

Apparently, thousands of Israelis, including some army reservists, who have demonstrated against this destruction of Gaza agree with Mr. Levy. However, their courageous stands have not reached the mass media in the U.S., whose own reporters cannot even get into Gaza due to Israeli prohibitions on the international press.

Your spokespeople are making much ado about the breaking of the six-month truce. Who is the occupier? Who is the most powerful military force? Who controls and blocks the necessities of life? Who has sent raiding missions across the border most often? Who has sent artillery shells and missiles at close range into populated areas? Who has refused the repeated comprehensive peace offerings of the Arab countries issued in 2002 if Israel would agree to return to the 1967 borders and agree to the creation of a small independent Palestinian state possessing just 22 percent of the original Palestine?

The “wildly inaccurate rockets,” as reporters describe them, coming from Hamas and other groups cannot compare with the modern precision armaments and human damage generated from the Israeli side.

There are no rockets coming from the West Bank into Israel. Yet, the Israeli government is still sending raiders into that essentially occupied territory, further entrenching its colonial outposts that are still taking water and land and increasing the checkpoints. This is going on despite a most amenable West Bank leader, Mahmoud Abbas, whom you have met with at the White House and praised repeatedly. Is it all vague words and no real initiatives with you and your emissary Condoleezza Rice?

Peace was possible, but you provided no leadership, preferring instead to comply with all wishes and demands by the Israeli government—even resupplying it with the still-active cluster bombs in south Lebanon during the invasion of that country in 2006.

The arguments about who started the latest hostilities go on and on with Israel always blaming the Palestinians to justify all kinds of violence and harsh treatment against innocent civilians.

From the Palestinian standpoint, you would do well to remember the origins of this conflict, which was the dispossession of their lands. To afford you some empathy, recall the oft-quoted comment by the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who told the Zionist leader, Nahum Goldmann: “There has been anti-Semitism—the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz—but was that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?”

Alfred North Whitehead once said: “Duty arises out of the power to alter the course of events.” By that standard, you have shirked mightily your duty over the past eight years to bring peace to both Palestinians and Israelis and more security to a good part of the world.

The least you can do in your remaining days at the White House is adopt a modest profile in courage, and vigorously demand and secure a ceasefire and a solidly based truce. Then your successor, President-elect Obama, can inherit something more than the usual self-censoring Washington puppet show that eschews a proper focus on the national interests of the United States.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

Lebanon

Dear President Bush,

You have been a weak president, despite your strutting and barking, when it comes to doing the right things for the American people within the Constitution and its rule of law. This trait is now in bold relief over the Israeli government’s escalating war crimes pulverizing the defenseless people and country of Lebanon.

With systematic efficiency, the Israeli government has already destroyed innocent homes and basic public facilities— ports, airports, highways, bridges, power stations—which are critical to delivery of food, medicines, health care, ambulances, water, and other essentials for a civilian population. This bombardment, by U.S.-made bombers, military vehicles, ships, and missiles with American taxpayer subsidies, places an inescapable responsibility upon your shoulders, which does not mix with your usual vacuous messianic rigidity.

As the leading player in official Washington’s puppet show, it is time for you to assert the interests of the American people and those of the broad Israeli and Palestinian peace movements by standing up to the puppeteers. For without this conflict, Hezbollah would not be in today’s news.

The time has come for you to return to Texas for a private meeting with your father, his former national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, and his former secretary of state, James Baker. You need to say to them “I can’t trust my advisors anymore; there have been so many tragic blunders. What do you advise me to do about the destruction of a friendly nation by the world’s fifth most powerful military?”

Here is what I think they should say to you:

1. Take personal command of an immediate rescue effort for the tens of thousands of Americans trapped in Lebanon by Israel’s calculated blocking of air, land, and sea escape routes. You’ve said the safety of Americans is your top priority. Prove it by using the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy facilities to immediately evacuate all our people desperate to escape the terrorization of Lebanon.

2. You have been so docile and permissive to Israeli demands that any modest deviation from this posture will make your next move credible. Announce that you are sending two prominent negotiators—perhaps James Baker (Republican) and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (Democrat) to Israel and Lebanon to arrange for a cease fire between the combatants.

Announced at a televised White House news conference with your two envoys, you can punctuate your seriousness by raising the questions of violations of the Arms Export Control Act and the Foreign Assistance Act. Using U.S.-supplied weapons systems to commit civilian atrocities on homes and fleeing vehicles with children and to inflict collective punishment on mass civilian populations is not using these weapons for legitimate self-defense and internal policing, as our federal law requires. Israeli planes have even fire bombed wheat silos and gasoline stations in Lebanon. More mayhem is on the way.

3. Stop acting like an impulsive, out-of-control West Texas sheriff and start reading, thinking, and listening for a change. When Israel, Britain, and France violated international treaties against aggression in 1956 by invading the Suez Canal, President Dwight Eisenhower used his influence to make them withdraw from Egypt. In 1982, following a year without any PLO skirmishes over the Lebanese-Israeli border, Israeli armed forces invaded Lebanon anyway. They created a path of destruction all the way to Beirut and militarily occupied south Lebanon for 18 years before they withdrew, except for retaining Shebaa Farms. In 1982 the New York Times reported “indiscriminate bombing” of Beirut by Israeli planes. At least 20,000 Lebanese civilians lost their lives in that invasion and many more were injured. From that conflict Hezbollah was born, composed of many people whose relatives were casualties in that illegal invasion.

History, George, does not start two weeks or two months ago. You must read about past U.S. presidents who, at least, sent high-level emissaries to quell similar border fighting. It worked and prisoners were often exchanged.

You are doing and saying nothing about what the rest of the world believes is a hugely disproportionate attack against innocent adults and children in violation of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter and other treaties and federal statutes. You’ve sworn to uphold these laws. Do so. Because of the Israeli government’s overwhelming military power, the imbalance of terror against civilians and their property has always been to its advantage. As has its occupation of Palestine and confiscation of land and water sources.

4. You can’t take sides and be an honest broker. Just about all our knowledgeable retired military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials believe resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to deflating other agitations in the region.

Freedom and justice for the Palestinian state and security and stability for the Israeli state must both be achieved.

You have turned your back on the courageous and prominent Israeli peace movement which normally reflects the positions of half of the Israeli population. You’ve never met with any of its leaders—even those in the Knesset or former officials in the military, intelligence, and justice ministries.

Hundreds of reserve combat officers and soldiers of the IDF have refused, in their words, “to fight beyond the 1967 borders to dominate, expel, starve, and humiliate an entire people.” They pledged only to fight for Israel’s legitimate defense.*

5. Once in a while, ask your aides for a sample of Israeli opinion that rejects the notion that there can be a military solution to this conflict, despite the military imbalance. For example, reports and editorials in Haaretz, arguably the most respected newspaper in Israel, would educate your judgment. In a recent editorial, Haaretz argued that the present Israeli government has “lost its reason” through the brutal incarceration, devastation, and deprivation of innocent people in Gaza.

In another Haaretz commentary dated July 16th, Gideon Levy writes:

“In Gaza, a soldier is abducted from the army of a state that frequently abducts civilians from their homes and lock them up for years without a trial—but only we’re allowed to do that. And only we’re allowed to bomb civilian population centers.”

6. One final bit of advice could come from Papa Bush’s circle. If the Israeli army decides to invade Lebanon with troops, your support of the aggression can possibly unleash a domino of warring actions and reactions over there. As it is, Americans are increasingly fed up with the Iraq quagmire.

Moreover, we know they don’t like many of your domestic policies favoring the wealthy, the post-Katrina debacle, exporting jobs, and among our conservative base, your enormous deficits.

So, your Republican Party’s control of government is at stake in November. Don’t you have your hands full with Iraq, whose invasion we all urged you to avoid in 2003?

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

March 10, 2003

A Man Who Has Stopped Listening

Dear President Bush,

After the completion of your long overdue full-scale news conference on March 7th, Senator Robert Byrd remarked: “He talked last night like a man who is not willing to listen any further. He has stopped listening.” There are many engaged citizens who wonder whether you ever started listening or at least directly hearing views contrary to your determination to start a war, invasion, and lengthy occupation of Iraq. Indeed, it appears you have not met with a single domestic antiwar delegation, despite numerous requests from varied constituencies for a meeting.

Many commentators and reporters—having spoken with people inside your administration—have noted the isolation, the solitude, and the exclusionary characteristic of your office on this subject. Others such as Bob Woodward, who interviewed you, tell readers of your self-description as being a “black and white” type of person, of a man who makes decisions “from the gut” or from instinct. Combined with isolation from many informed contrary views, this attitude is made more disquieting by your continual invoking of God when it comes to Iraq. Viewed from abroad, this appears to millions of people as if you are embarking on a religious war. From stateside, you will forgive those Americans who instead view such allusions as indicative of a refusal to entertain empirical inputs and broader policy arguments from Americans, many of whom have been following, experiencing or studying the Iraqi situation longer than some in your very tight ideological circle of advisors.

In the past several weeks alone, a distinguished array of groups has written you about issues and has requested a personal meeting with you in the White House. Now is the time to spend a few hours listening to cogent presentations by these Americans of widely different backgrounds and insights, but mostly similar in their opposition to war/invasion/occupation. According to press reports, your travel schedule over the next two weeks has been sharply reduced to concentrate on the United Nations and other related situations which should include a decent respect for the opinions of those organizations who have asked for an audience with you.

The country is deeply and almost evenly divided according to numerous polls that ask more comprehensive questions.

Meeting with representatives of these groups, which oppose your proposed policies, would afford you an opportunity for a two- way exchange. There have been too many monologues, which serve their purpose of course, but a dialogue tends to probe and clarify the issues and test the strength of opposing views.

The benefits of these meetings, were you to allow them to occur, are more than what may be described as good public relations on your part. For example, leaders of veterans’ groups and former military leaders, whose letter is on its way, can convey the horrific toxic aftermath of the war/invasion to both Iraqis and U.S. troops. They know about the first Gulf War firsthand and have been closely associated with the treatment of over 200,000 soldiers who were disabled and have been receiving disability payments.

Even were you to take this country to war, you would benefit from their knowledge of how under-trained and inadequately equipped U.S. soldiers are to defend themselves against what you have said is the likely prospect of chemical warfare by Iraq’s brutal dictator.

From women’s groups, including those back from numerous trips to Afghanistan, you’ll learn about the terrible effect on the civilian population long after hostilities ended, due in part to the lack of promised follow-through assistance by the United States to the Kabul government. They can also convey the likely consequences on Iraqi families whose elderly, mothers, and children will especially suffer from lack of food, spreading disease, fires, score-settling, and fleeing refugee conditions of an awful nature.

From the perspective of working families, you will hear why this is the first time that major labor unions, with the encouragement of the AFL-CIO, have ever opposed a war by the United States, in part because it is an unprovoked war.

From the business executives, you will hear concerns about the further instability and decline of our economy with its effects on standards of living, employment and neglected domestic budgets.

From representatives of the clergy, including your own Bishop, as well as from many other Christian denominations and other major religions, you will learn the depth of their disagreement with you regarding the moral justification for this war and what they have learned from their visits to Iraq.

From leading physicians having serious experience with health conditions and capacity in Iraq, you will be informed of the scale of civilian mortality and morbidity from the looming devastation. Notwithstanding assurances to the contrary in 1991, there was severe destruction of the drinking water infrastructure leading to epidemics that most cruelly took the lives of many tens of thousands of Iraqi children.

In recent weeks, you took the time to travel to Pennsylvania and to a Washington hotel to meet with doctors complaining about their insurance premiums and malpractice lawsuits.

Surely you can meet in the White House with physicians whose compassion, insight and knowledge about the fate of millions reflect the highest obligation of the medical profession, which is prevention.

Consider how much more enriched your perspective will become after exchanging views and information with the other groups who have also asked to see you. These include: elected representatives of city councils representing tens of millions of Americans; environmental organizations knowledgeable about the environmental devastation to the region and the planet on a level even greater than 1991 that is likely from this proposed war; international intelligence specialists with past governmental experience who will tell you what many dissenters inside the Pentagon and the State Department cannot say to you about consequences and alternatives; prominent academics, historians, and civic leaders; and the next generation, from groups representing millions of college students.

More than a dozen of these letters were sent to you. Most of them have not received the courtesy of a response. None have been accorded an affirmative invitation.

The organizations requesting to meet with you represent a broad cross section of the American people. They seek a dialogue with you not out of political partisanship but because they have not been convinced that war with Iraq is necessary.

These attached requests ask for meetings of short duration but, in the retrospect of history, long significance for historians who will judge your decision-making process on the road to war-invasion-occupation.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

LETTERS TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

September 22, 2013

Barry O’Bomber and the Rush to War

Dear President Obama,

Little did your school boy chums in Hawaii know, watching you race up and down the basketball court, how prescient they were when they nicknamed you “Barry O’Bomber.”

Little did your fellow Harvard Law Review editors, who elected you to lead that venerable journal, ever imagine that you could be a president who chronically violates the Constitution, federal statutes, international treaties and the separation of power at depths equal to or beyond the George W. Bush regime.

Nor would many of the voters who elected you in 2008 have conceived that your foreign policy would rely so much on brute military force at the expense of systemically waging peace. Certainly, voters who knew your background as a child of Third World countries, a community organizer, a scholar of constitutional law and a critic of the Bush/Cheney years, never would have expected you to favor the giant warfare state so pleasing to the military-industrial complex.

Now, as if having learned nothing from the devastating and costly aftermaths of the military invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, you’re beating the combustible drums to attack Syria—a country that is no threat to the U.S. and is embroiled in complex civil wars under a brutal regime.

This time, however, you may have pushed for too many acts of war. Public opinion and sizable numbers of members of both parties in Congress are opposed. These lawmakers oppose bombing Syria in spite of your corralling the cowardly leaders of both parties in the Congress.

Thus far, your chief achievement on the Syrian front has been support for your position from al-Qaeda affiliates fighting in Syria, the pro-Israeli government lobby, AIPAC, your chief nemesis in Congress, House Speaker John Boehner, and Dick Cheney. This is quite a gathering and a telling commentary on your ecumenical talents. Assuming the veracity of your declarations regarding the regime’s resort to chemical warfare (first introduced into the Middle East by Winston Churchill’s Royal Air Force’s plastering of Iraqi tribesmen in the nineteen-twenties), your motley support group is oblivious to the uncontrollable consequences that might stem from bombing Syria. One domestic consequence may be that Speaker Boehner expects to exact concessions from you on domestic issues before Congress in return for giving you such high visibility bipartisan cover.

Your argument for shelling Syria is to maintain “international credibility” in drawing that “red line” regardless, it seems, of the loss of innocent Syrian civilian life, casualties to our foreign service and armed forces in that wider region, and retaliation against the fearful Christian population in Syria (one in seven Syrians are Christian). But the more fundamental credibilities are to our Constitution, to the neglected necessities of the American people, and to the red line of observing international law and the U.N. Charter (which prohibit unilateral bombing in this situation).

There is another burgeoning cost—that of the militarization of the State Department whose original charter invests it with the responsibility of diplomacy. Instead, Mr. Obama, you have shaped the State Department into a belligerent “force projector” first under Generalissima Clinton and now under Generalissimo Kerry. The sidelined foreign service officers, who have knowledge and conflict avoidance experience, are left with reinforced fortress-like embassies as befits our empire reputation abroad.

Secretary John Kerry descended to gibberish when, under questioning this week by a House Committee member, he asserted that your proposed attack was “not war” because there would be “no boots on the ground.” In Kerry’s view, bombing a country with missiles and air force bombers is not an act of war.

It is instructive to note how government autocracy feeds on itself. Start with unjustified government secrecy garnished by the words “national security.” That leads to secret laws, secret evidence, secret courts, secret prisons, secret prisoners, secret relationships with selected members of Congress, denial of standing for any citizen to file suit, secret drone strikes, secret incursions into other nations and all this directed by a president who alone decides when to be secret prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner. What a republic, what a democracy, what a passive people we have become!

Voices of reason and experience have urged the proper path away from the metastasizing war that is plaguing Syria. As General Ban Ki-moon, and other seasoned diplomats and retired military, vigorous leadership by you is needed for an international peace conference with all parties at the table, including the countries supplying weapons to the various adversaries in Syria.

Mr. Obama, you may benefit from reading the writings of Colman McCarthy, a leading advocate of peace studies in our schools and universities. He gives numerous examples of how waging peace avoided war and civil strife over the past 100 years.

Crowding out attention to America’s serious domestic problems by yet another military adventure (opposed by many military officials), yet another attack on another small, non- threatening Muslim country by a powerful Christian nation (as many Muslims see it) is aggression camouflaging sheer madness.

Please, before you recklessly flout Congress, absorb the wisdom of the World Peace Foundation’s Alex de Waal and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Writing in the New York Times, they strongly condemn the use of nerve gas in Syria, brand the perpetrators as war criminals to be tried by an international war crimes tribunal and then declare:

“But it is folly to think that airstrikes can be limited: they are ill-conceived as punishment, fail to protect civilians and, most important, hinder peacemaking . . . . Punishment, protectionand peace must be joined . . . An American assault on Syria would be an act of desperation with incalculable consequences. To borrow once more from Sir William Harcourt [the British parliamentarian who argued against British intervention in our Civil War (which cost 750,000 American lives)]: ‘We are asked to go we know not whither, in order to do we know not what.’”

If and when the people and Congress turn you down this month, there will be one silver lining. Only a Left-Right coalition can stop this warring. Such convergence is strengthening monthly in the House of Representatives to stop future war crimes and the injurious blowback against America of the wreckages from empire.

History teaches that empires always devour themselves.

Sincerely,

Ralph Nader

May 3, 2013

End the Guantanamo Blot on Our National Character

Dear President Obama,

Notwithstanding Section 1028 (a)(1) of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013, you are empowered to end Guantanamo Bay’s affront to due process by releasing from imprisonment the 86 inmates whom your administration or its predecessor have found to be neither enemy combatants nor war criminals; and permitting them to arrange for travel to any foreign nation of their choosing. Section 1028 (a)(1) only limits your authority to transfer them into the “custody or control of the individual’s country of origin, any other foreign country, or any other foreign entity . . .” But simple release, without more, is not prohibited. Of the remaining 80 prisoners, you should either charge and prosecute them for alleged war crimes or release them from Guantanamo Bay prison like the aforementioned 86.

No statute or other legal limitation blocks you from this enlightened course of action, which you have commended as who we are as a people. We are supposed to be willing to take risks that other countries shun because we find imprisoning, killing, or otherwise punishing the innocent to be morally reprehensible.

You cannot escape responsibility for the dubious legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay. You cannot simply blame Congress. President Harry S. Truman’s famous Oval Office desk sign acknowledged that “The Buck Stops Here.” Your oath of office compels you to honor the Constitution, not to evade it.

You must terminate forthwith Guantanamo Bay’s blot on the character of this nation that gratuitously provokes retaliation and enmity.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein

Ralph Nader

June 3, 2011

Letter from E.coli O104:H4

Dear President Obama,

My name is E.coli O104:H4. I am being detained in a German Laboratory in Bavaria, charged with being “a highly virulent strain of bacteria.” Together with many others like me, the police have accused us of causing about 20 deaths and nearly five hundred cases of kidney failure—so far. Massive publicity and panic all around. You can’t see me, but your scientists can. They are examining me and I know my days are numbered. I hear them calling me a “biological terrorist,” an unusual combination of two different E.coli bacteria cells. One even referred to me as a “conspiracy of mutants.”

It is not my fault, I want you to know. I cannot help but harm innocent humans, and I am very sad about this. I want to redeem myself, so I am sending this life-saving message straight from my petri dish to you.

This outbreak in Germany has been traced to food—location unknown. What is known to you is that invisible terrorism from bacterium and viruses takes massively greater lives than the terrorism you are spending billions of dollars and armaments to stop in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Malaria, caused by infection with one of four species of Plasmodium, is a parasite transmitted by Anopheles mosquitoes that destroys a million lives a year. Many of the victims are children and pregnant women. Mycobacterium tuberculosis takes over one million lives each year. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) causes over a million deaths each year. Many other microorganisms in the water, soil, air, and food are daily weapons of mass destruction. Very little in your defense budget goes for operational armed forces against this kind of violence. Your agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control, conduct some research but again nothing compared to the research for your missiles, drones, aircraft, and satellites.

Your associates are obsessed with possible bacteriological warfare by your human enemies. Yet you are hardly doing anything on the ongoing silent violence of my indiscriminate brethren.

You and your predecessor George W. Bush made many speeches about fighting terrorism by humans. Have you made a major speech about us?

You speak regularly about crushing the resistance of your enemies. But you splash around so many antibiotics (obviously I don’t like this word and consider it genocidal) in cows, bulls, chickens, pigs, and fish that your species is creating massive antibiotic resistance, provoking our mutations, so that we can breed even stronger progeny. You are regarded as the smartest beings on Earth, yet you seem to have too many neurons backfiring.

In the past two days of detention, scientists have subjected me to “enhanced interrogation,” as if I have any will to give up my secrets. It doesn’t work. What they will find out will be from their insights about me under their microscopes. I am lethal, I guess, but I’m not very complicated.

The United States, together with other countries, needs more laboratories where scientists can detain samples of us and subject us to extraordinary rendition to infectious disease research centers. Many infectious disease scientists need to be trained, especially in the southern hemispheres to staff these labs.

You are hung up on certain kinds of preventable violence without any risk/benefit analysis. This, you should agree, is utterly irrational. You should not care where the preventable violence comes from except to focus on its range of devastation and its susceptibility to prevention or cure!

Well, here they come to my petri dish for some more waterboarding. One last item: You may wonder how tiny bacterial me, probably not even harboring a virus, can send you such a letter. My oozing sense is that I’m just a carrier, being used by oodles of scientists taking advantage of a high-profile infectious outbreak in Europe to catch your attention.

Whatever the how does it really matter to the need to act now?

E-cologically yours,

E.coli O104:H4 (for the time being)

TAKE 30% OFF BOOKS BY RALPH NADER

February 17

The Long History of Resistance: Ramzy Baroud’s Introduction to “Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir Across Three Generations of Colonial Invasion, Occupation, and War in Palestine”

To mark the publication of Ramzy Baroud's Before the Flood: A Gaza Family Memoir, we're proud to share Baroud's introduction to the text, a history of Palestine told through a beautiful multigenerational narrative of the author's family. In sharing such an account, Baroud offers a personal antidote to the dehumanizing nature of numbers and attention-grabbing headlines released by the media. For the past three years, we've watched from abroad, culpable in our complicity, as Israel has executed a genocide of the Palestinian people that is widely regarded to be one of the most visible and most documented atrocities of modern history. But this kind of documentation, while extremely important for historical record, can only do so much. As acquiring editor Greg Ruggiero writes: "We at Seven Stories approached Ramzy Baroud and invited him to describe what has been happening in Palestine through the stories of his family—how his relatives were pushed off their land, how they came to live in Gaza, and how they joined the collective fight to preserve Palestinian land, culture, and collective memory. The stories Baroud weaves invite readers to move beyond slogans and abstractions toward empathy, solidarity, and recognition of our shared humanity—the best long-term strategies against authoritarianism and the violence of organized forgetting."

A profound exploration of Palestinian history and resilience through the personal stories of the author’s family—the al-Badrasawis. Beginning with intimate details of village life in Beit Daras prior to the Nakba, Ramzy Baroud vividly portrays the rich cultural heritage, deeply rooted traditions, and daily struggles faced by ordinary people whose lives were radically disrupted by the violent upheavals and ongoing conflicts driven by British colonialism and Zionist aggression.

Baroud weaves together past and present, illuminating how historical forces shaped the collective consciousness and steadfast resilience of the Palestinian people. His storytelling reveals not only the harsh realities of occupation, displacement, and loss but also the extraordinary courage, faith, and solidarity that underpin a powerful and enduring spirit of resistance, encapsulated in what the author refers to as the Palestinian “longue durée.” Ultimately, Baroud aims to humanize and reclaim Palestinian narratives from distorted portrayals, highlighting their perseverance and the universal quest for justice and liberation.

The Long History of Resistance

“One cannot give oneself courage if one does not have it.” This line comes from Alessandro Manzoni’s novel, The Betrothed. [1] It was uttered by Don Abbondio, a priest in the historical novel who courageously accepts his own cowardice.

Indeed, courage is not given. Like sacrifice, faith, camaraderie, community, resilience, even love itself, courage is an organic process that is innately formulated, often by circumstances beyond our reach. Collectively, such complex social structures could take many generations in the making, a process of which we are hardly cognizant.

Some traditional historians—who continue to subscribe to the methods of histoire événementielle, or event history—tend to ignore the remarkable effect of historical phenomena that often, over the course of many years or even centuries, impact our collective behavior. In his foreword to this book, Ilan Pappé references longue durée, the long-term consequences of history, a concept crafted by the founders and disciples of the French Annales School. [2]

Credible history can only be seen in its totality, not merely as the total events of history, recent or old, but as the sum of feelings; the culmination of ideas; the evolution of collective consciousness, identities, and relationships; and the subtle changes occurring in societies over the course of time. Palestinians are the perfect example of history being shaped by ideas, not guns; memories, not politics, collective hope, or international relations. The Palestinian people will eventually win their freedom because they have invested in a long-term trajectory of ideas, memories, and communal aspirations, which often translate to spirituality, a deep, immovable faith that grows stronger, even during times of genocide.

In my 2020 interview with the former United Nations Special Rapporteur, Professor Richard Falk, he summarized the struggle in Palestine as a war between those with arms against those with legitimacy. He said that in the context of national liberation movements, there are two kinds of war: the actual war, as in soldiers carrying guns, and the war for legitimacy. The one who wins the latter will ultimately prevail. [3]

Was it the knowledge of such an irreversible historical truth that led the Israeli historian Benny Morris to express his growing sense of pessimism about his country’s future? “The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Haaretz in 2019. “They see that at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win. In another thirty to fifty years, they will overcome us, come what may.” [4]

Morris is right: Palestinians will not give up. There can never be a situation where societies indefinitely survive and thrive based on a permanent system of racial apartheid, violence, and exclusion. The very history of Palestine — which I highlight in this book using people’s history and personalized narratives — is a testament to such a truth. If the oppressed, the Indigenous of the land, are not fully vanquished, they will rise, resist, fight, and win back their freedom, thus eventually winning the legitimacy war. Morris is right again when he indicates that Palestinian people collectively “look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective.” Agreeing with his argument may seem odd: societies are often fragmented by class struggles and competing socioeconomic agendas instead of unified by solidarity and a cohesive long-term collective vision. This is where longue durée becomes relevant in the Palestinian case. Even if Palestinians have not made a common agreement to wait for the invaders to leave, or for Palestine to once again become a place of social, racial, and religious coexistence, they are driven, even if subconsciously, by the same energy that compelled their ancestors to push back against the invaders. Characters in this book fulfill the historical role that was assigned to them by circumstances beyond their control. They are reanimating the past, just as their descendants will shape the future.

While many Western politicians today characterize Palestinian people as “terrorists,” blaming victims for resisting their own oppression, Palestinian society continues to evolve based on entirely independent dynamics. For example, the culture of Muqawama — Resistance — is deeply ingrained in Palestine. It is a culture as old as time. Innate. Intuitive. Intergenerational. It precedes the birth of Israel by thousands of years. Batis put it to the test when he led Gaza in legendary battles against the Macedonian invasion fomented by Alexander the Great in 332 BC. Batis may seem to be a footnote in this book, but, in fact, if read carefully, you will discover that he is the central character. He is the Zaher al-Umar al-Zaydani, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam, the Ghassan Kanafani, and Ehab al-Badrasawi, around whom this story is centered. The deep-rooted historical continuum between the Palestinian past, present, and future is the very essence of this book.

Before the Flood speaks of many things and many people, but ultimately it is about a branch of my family that has chosen to write — with their blood — a chapter in the unending Palestinian saga, demonstrating that history is not moved just by short-term events, but by countless factors. While in-the-moment events are important, longue durée provides a more profound understanding of our collective trajectory. Longue durée is concerned with historical shifts and changes that are situated within the realm of notions, ideas, collective perceptions, identities, and feelings, like courage and self-sacrifice for the sake of the group. These are the kinds of feelings that “one cannot give oneself . . . if one does not have.”

The anti-fascist intellectual Antonio Gramsci spoke about the importance of culture as a driver of history and meaning. “Culture isn’t having a well-stocked warehouse of news but is the ability that our mind has to understand life, the place we hold there, our relationship with other people. Those who are aware of themselves and of everything, who feel the relationship with all other beings.” [5] For a writer, these relationships fall under the concept of positionality, as in the relationship between the intellectual and their position, and how their position relates to the subject matter. This useful tool has given historians, especially those from the Global South, the power to navigate the painful terrain of our own victimization and long histories of oppression.

In this and all of my previous books, I have attempted to slowly liberate the Palestinian narrative from the convenient histories imposed on my people. It is not an easy task, but an unavoidable one. This book is my latest, and hopefully best, attempt at freeing Palestine from the confines of superimposed language, historical events, recurring dates, dehumanizing statistics, and outright deception. Here, I try to place the Palestinian narrative in entirely different intellectual and historical frameworks, where only truly representative Palestinian voices are centered. I try to prove that the seemingly weak and dispensable peasants, laborers, and workers — the fellahin — are the most influential actors in the story of Palestine, past and present, and that while AI, drones, fighter jets, and bunker-buster bombs may impact short-term events, courage, faith, and communal love will determine long-term history.

As you continue reading this, I hope that you will understand why Palestinians are not history’s passive victims, but, over the course of generations, its masters—the ones who shape it and the future as well.

Many characters began their relationship with this narrative as storytellers or researchers, but soon became victims of the Israelis’ genocide, thus becoming the story. When one of those storytellers was killed, another seamlessly continued where they left off — a wife telling the story of her husband, the son of his father, the sister of her brother. Without prior coordination, they shaped the narrative with no gaps or interruptions. This achievement is not my own. It is theirs.

As I continued to write, my position went beyond storyteller into something else entirely, at times gory and frightening, deeply emotional and raw. When the genocidal war started on October 7, 2023, whole branches of my family perished in large numbers. Scores of my cousins, their wives, husbands, and children, died under the rubble of their homes in the most horrific and unimaginable ways. Some were burned alive. Others were shot by snipers. A few were executed while taking refuge at hospitals or standing in line in UN feeding centers, hoping to fetch a loaf of bread.

The images on this book’s cover attempt to honor some of the faces of those lost in the genocide. But no single cover could ever contain all the innocent lives that were extinguished. Even if such a space existed, entire families have been obliterated — burned away with their photo albums. And yet, their beautiful faces, their warmth, and their stories remain etched in our hearts forever.

The photographs chosen here are intimately tied to the lives portrayed in this book — including Ehab, the central character, and members of his immediate al-Badrasawi family, who were killed in harrowing succession, one after the other, before his own death and continuing still. Among them is my sister Soma, the beloved doctor of Khan Younis. Her murder is not only a tragedy — it is a rupture that runs through the very center of my family’s story, marking even the chapters yet unwritten, for generations to come.

As I turned to my final task of writing the introduction, I wanted to situate the book in what I believe to be the proper historical context. I have always argued that it was not the Balfour Declaration of 1917 that injected my people into the world’s historical discourse; it was not Israel that made us relevant by ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in 1948. But I struggled to define the single most critical event in our history, if any existed, that could serve as the starting point of our historical trajectory. This is when my sister Soma, one of Gaza’s most beloved medical doctors, was assassinated by the Israeli army on October 9, 2024, while on her way back from Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis. I say assassinated because she was the 166th doctor and 987th medical worker to be deliberately killed by Israel up to that date, part of the Israeli plan to annex our land and dismantle all aspects of Palestinian life and societal continuity.

After days of mourning, it dawned on me that Soma, in her beauty, cleverness, wisdom, patience, and, yes, courage and sacrifice, had always represented the single moment that demarcated the history of our people. Soma, or the representation of all the Somas of our history — including the history yet to be written — gives us meaning, inspires us, and grants us hope and courage.

Benny Morris, a devout Zionist himself, is right to observe that “Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective.” Indeed, we do, even if, at times, we are not aware of it. Perhaps this lack of constant awareness allows us to continue for generations on the long collective journey to defend our historical home and freedom.

1. Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (London: R. Bentley, 1834). Digitized by Harvard University, April 27, 2006.

2. “Longue durée.” Oxford Reference. www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/ authority.20110803100114325.

3. Palestine Chronicle TV. “Speaking to Professor Richard Falk: On Palestine, Israel and International Law.” YouTube video. Posted September 22, 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMtVONP3_co.

4. Ofer Aderet, “‘Israel Will Decline, and Jews Will Be a Persecuted Minority. Those Who Can Will Flee to America’,” Haaretz, January 22, 2019, https://www.haaretz. com/us-news/2019-01-22/ty-article-magazine/.premium/israel-will-decline-and-jews-will-be-persecuted-those-who-can-will-flee/0000017f-e552-d9aa-afff-fd5a159f0000.

5. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

RAMZY BAROUD is a Palestinian author, historian, and academic whose work focuses on Palestinian history, liberation, and people's history. His books include Searching Jenin, The Second Palestinian Intifada, My Father Was a Freedom Fighter, The Last Earth, and These Chains Will Be Broken. His book, Our Vision for Liberation, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, brings together voices shaping the Palestinian struggle today. Baroud holds a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter and has taught mass communication at Curtin University. He is a Non-Resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA) at Istanbul Zaim University. His academic contributions extend to numerous books and journals, and he has lectured at leading universities worldwide. His work has been translated into multiple languages, solidifying his role as a key voice in documenting Palestinian history and resistance.

February 12

Abolitionist New York: an excerpt from “Black Legacy: A History of New York’s African Americans” by William Loren Katz

To celebrate the publication of Black Legacy by William Loren Katz, we're proud to share an excerpt of the book, a crucial history of Black New York, written for readers ages 12+, that begins with the 1609 arrival of the first enslaved Africans in New Amsterdam and takes us through the Civil War and Reconstruction, through the Harlem Renaissance, up through the present day. In this extract, Katz offers a history of Emancipation in New York, and some of the the ways in which the written word and other cultural outlets aided and shaped Black New Yorkers' struggle for freedom.

Emancipation Comes to New York / Abolition's Black Vanguard

In 1817, the New York legislature voted a complete end to bondage—with all enslaved people to be freed by 1827. (The law did not affect citizens of other states, who could still bring enslaved people to New York for nine months at a time. When the state rescinded this nine-month rule in 1841, New York was free of people in bondage.)

After twenty-eight years of slow and painful progress, Emancipation Day dawned on July 4, 1827. Reverend William Hamilton welcomed the day with a special sermon at the African Zion Church. James McCune Smith, by then a leading civil rights activist, also spoke. Some ten thousand human beings in New York State had been freed. [4]

Emancipation dramatically altered the lives of Black people in the city. Free people could move and live where they wished. The 7,470 free people of color in the city in 1810 became 14,083 in 1830 but comprised only 2–3 percent of the city population because of massive white migration. More than thirty thousand other Black people resided outside the city.

Many Black men worked as sailors, particularly on whaling ships. At sea they could rise from a deckhand job to become a harpooner or first or second mate. By 1839, so many Black men worked on ships that they established their own seaman’s boardinghouse in New York.

But freedom did not mean equality, and the change increased acts of hatred from whites in the city. A French visitor reported being rudely treated because he had a friendly conversation with a Black woman employee of a rooming house. A barber admitted that if he cut the hair of fellow Black men, he would lose his white customers. In 1833, a French traveler reported that whites had denied people of color entrance to skilled trades. Black people found that emancipation failed to open doors to economic advancement.

Four months before emancipation, the first Black newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal, was published in New York City. It appeared March 16, 1827, four years before William Lloyd Garrison issued his famous Liberator in Boston and six years before Garrison organized the American Anti-Slavery Society.

It would become the first organized voice of free people of color in the city and the nation. Its editors Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm were highly educated reformers. Russwurm, born into slavery, was an immigrant from Jamaica, and in 1826, when he graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, he became one of the first Black college graduates. Cornish, born free in Delaware, had trained for the ministry and served as a missionary among Black New Yorkers.

Freedom’s Journal’s first editorial stated its goals:

We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly . . .

Education being an object of the highest importance to the welfare of society, we shall endeavor to present just and adequate views of it, and to urge upon our brethren the necessity and expediency of training their children, while young, to habits of industry, and thus forming them for becoming useful members of society . . .

The civil rights of a people being of the greatest value, it shall ever be our duty to vindicate our brethren, when oppressed; and to lay the case before the publick. We shall also urge upon our brethren, (who are qualified by the laws of the different states) the expediency of using their elective franchise; and of making an independent use of the same . . .

Useful knowledge of every kind, and everything that relates to Africa, shall find a ready admission into our columns . . .

And . . . we would not be unmindful of our brethren who are in the iron fetters of bondage. They are our kindred by all the ties of nature . . .

Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed by unnoticed. [5]

In Freedom’s Journal, Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm called for an end to slavery and advocated equal rights for all. The Journal called for unity with white Americans who opposed slavery. The paper solidified New York’s Black intellectual class and attracted the attention of intellectuals from other cities. David Walker, who in two years would issue a fiery pamphlet calling for rebellions by enslaved people, wrote articles and became Freedom’s Journal's Boston agent. From Philadelphia, Bishop Richard Allen, a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal church, contributed articles to its pages.

The paper served as a platform for ideas that would be fully discussed in annual Black national conventions that began in 1830. During its first year, Freedom’s Journal published the earliest statement by an African American woman, “Matilda,” on women’s rights. Noting the paper had failed to advocate women’s education, she insisted that Black women “have minds that are capable and deserving of culture.” She wanted mothers to cram “their daughters’ minds with useful learning” and to see that they read books. Matilda continued:

There are difficulties, and great difficulties in the way of our advancement; but that should only stir us to greater efforts . . . Ignorant ourselves, how can we be expected to form the minds of our youth, and conduct them in the paths of knowledge? There is a great responsibility resting some-where, and it is time for us to be up and doing. [6]

The two editors soon took divergent paths in their drives to liberate their people. In Freedom’s Journal, Russwurm announced that African Americans should return to the African homeland. In 1829, he left for Liberia, an African nation founded by former US slaves, where he became an educator and a public official. Cornish edited the successor of Freedom’s Journal, The Rights of All, and then another New York paper, The Colored American. In 1833, he was a founding member of the New York Anti-Slavery Society and remained a potent city voice for antislavery and equal rights.

By 1863, the path pioneered by Freedom’s Journal had been taken up by twelve other Black papers in New York State, including eight in the city.

. . .

Solomon Northup of New York also made an unusual contribution to the antislavery struggle. In 1829, he was seized from a street in Washington, DC, while visiting there and enslaved in Louisiana. He could not escape until 1841, but safely back home in New York he wrote a book of his life in bondage that became a weapon in the antislavery arsenal. His Narrative of Solomon Northup was one of more than a hundred autobiographies by formerly enslaved people that exposed the system’s evils to white readers.

As they waged war against slavery, Black New Yorkers did not neglect their own struggle for equality. In the 1830s, few Black Americans could vote because of the property qualifications imposed on them. But those who did vote were still able to affect city politics. They defeated the Democrats in the Fifth Ward, and helped Federalists gain three seats in the neighboring Eighth Ward. In 1844, one Democrat warned of Black people: “Their number in the city of New York was very great, and parties were so evenly divided that it was often sufficient to hold the balance between them.”

In New York and other Northern states, “Black Laws” did more than deny people of color voting rights. Black citizens could not legally hold office, serve on juries or in the militia, or give testimony against white people in court. To fight slavery and win full citizenship privileges, beginning in 1830 Black people in the North began to hold annual national conventions, some in New York. Delegates discussed how to fight the Black Laws and how to reach political and economic equality.

The convention movement debated and gave voice to Black opposition to slavery and discrimination. It also served as a forum that unified an educated and growing intellectual and leadership class. In 1843, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet of Troy—at twenty-seven, recently ordained a Presbyterian minister and just married to Julia Williams—made his own unique contribution to the anti-slavery crusade. That year at a national Black convention in Buffalo, he called for massive rebellions of enslaved people, shouting, “resistance, resistance, RESISTANCE!”

Offered to delegates as a resolution and opposed by Frederick Douglass, Garnet’s call failed to carry by a single vote. But Garnet’s militant approach increasingly won acceptance among abolitionists. In 1848, John Brown reprinted Gar-net’s call for rebellions in a pamphlet that included David Walker’s fiery Appeal. By the next year Frederick Douglass announced he would be pleased to hear the news “that the slaves had risen in the South.” [8]

Drawing support from the convention movement, churches, and newspapers, Black New Yorkers sought to build better lives. By the 1840s, Black businesspeople operated two fashionable restaurants in the financial district, two dry goods stores, a hairdressing shop, three tailor stores, a candy store, a fruit store, and two coal yards.

However, most people of color were held to the lowest jobs. Abolitionist Gerrit Smith described discrimination in the state:

Even the noblest black is denied that which is free to the vilest white. The omnibus, the car, the ballot-box, the jury box, the halls of legislation, the army, the public lands, the school, the church, the lecture room, the social circle, the table, are all either absolutely or virtually denied to him.

Though slavery ended in the state, discrimination was an ever-present factor in Black lives. Religious services, once open to all, became segregated as white churches instituted “Negro pews” to separate people of color. Some Black parishioners called for direct action. In 1837, the Colored American urged its readers: “Stand in the aisles, and rather worship God upon your feet, than become a party to your own degradation. You must shame your oppressors, and wear out prejudice by this holy policy.” In 1845, the city boasted fifteen African American Methodist churches. Black teachers felt the need to organize, and in 1841, sixteen of them in the city formed an association, issued their own Journal of Education, and organized a convention on Long Island to petition for equal voting rights. The teachers, summoning others from Brooklyn and Queens, issued this call:

Hundreds of children that are now shut out from the blessings of Education, call loudly up to you to come. If there ever was a time that called for united action, it is now. If there ever was a time for colored freemen to show their love of liberty, their hatred of ignorance, and determination to be free and enlightened, it is now. We want union and action.

The Black effort to end voting restrictions at first moved few white citizens. Finally, in 1846, it won support from Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Greeley published a Black call for equal voting rights and listed it as the first among needed city reforms. But most white citizens remained opposed to equal suffrage.

Along northern boundaries of Manhattan, the community of Harlem had begun to grow. Many of the poor residents were Irish, but by 1832 Black New Yorkers had settled around the area of the Harlem Methodist Church. In 1843, members of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church had a new brick building on East 117th Street for its sixty-six members. Later that decade Harlem’s Bethel A.M.E. Church was started, and by the 1850s a public school had been built.

NEW YORK CITY’S BLACK POPULATION [9]

1830 — 14,083
1840 — 16,358
1850 — 13,815
1860 — 12,574

4. See also Nathaniel Paul, “An Address, Delivered on the Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery in the State of New York, July 5, 1827” (Albany: John B. Van Steenbergh, 1827).

5. Freedom’s Journal I (March 16, 1827), I; copy at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

6. “Matilda,” Freedom’s Journal I (August 10, 1827), cited in Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel, 1951), 1, 89.

8. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, and Henry Highland Garnet, An Address to the Slaves of the United States (New York: John Brown, 1848). Reprint (New York: Anno Press, 1968).

9. Census statistics cited in Rosenwaike, 44-45.

WILLIAM LOREN KATZ (1927-2019) was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Greenwich Village in a progressive family dedicated to social justice. After serving in WWII and attending college on the GI Bill, he became a teacher in New York for many years. The author of more than 40 books, many for younger readers, he documented the often overlooked contributions of Black and Indigenous people through history. Through his scholarship and educational outreach, he helped to refashion social studies curriculums across the country, encouraging the histories of minorities and women to be part of American history courses rather than siloed into their own fields of study. In one of his best-known books, Black Indians, he wrote, “I have been humbled by the awesome task of rejecting bias. I have never sought bland neutrality and have consoled myself that unbiased history has yet to be written.”

Seven Questions with Eoghan Walls

April 08

by Seven Stories Press

Recent posts

We’re thrilled to share the news that Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer, is the winner of this year’s National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Prize for Books in Translation!

Thank you to the National Book Critic Circle’s Translation Committee, helmed by committee chair Mandana Chaffa, and to everyone else who has championed this book. And a huge congratulations to Neige and Natasha for this powerful text and wonderful and very well-deserved achievement.

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK:

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

from
Field Notes on the Final Colony of Garefowl, vol. II

Monday, 31st May, 1847

We hope these readings can provide some clarity and context in this time of (unfortunately, not unprecedented) humanitarian crisis.

CELEBRATE WOMEN'S HISTORY
EXPLORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CATALOG

To celebrate these radical roots, we're delighted to share the following works of literary fiction, memoir, political non-fiction, and other writings that we recommend for Women's History Month, and for the rest of the year, too.

LETTERS TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

LETTERS TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

TAKE 30% OFF BOOKS BY RALPH NADER

The Long History of Resistance

Emancipation Comes to New York / Abolition's Black Vanguard

Seven Questions with Eoghan Walls

April 08

by Seven Stories Press

Field Notes from an Extinction

Recent posts

We’re thrilled to share the news that Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer, is the winner of this year’s National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Prize for Books in Translation!

Thank you to the National Book Critic Circle’s Translation Committee, helmed by committee chair Mandana Chaffa, and to everyone else who has championed this book. And a huge congratulations to Neige and Natasha for this powerful text and wonderful and very well-deserved achievement.

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK:

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE CATALOG

from Field Notes on the Final Colony of Garefowl, vol. II

Monday, 31st May, 1847

We hope these readings can provide some clarity and context in this time of (unfortunately, not unprecedented) humanitarian crisis.

CELEBRATE WOMEN'S HISTORY EXPLORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CATALOG

To celebrate these radical roots, we're delighted to share the following works of literary fiction, memoir, political non-fiction, and other writings that we recommend for Women's History Month, and for the rest of the year, too.

LETTERS TO PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH

LETTERS TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

TAKE 30% OFF BOOKS BY RALPH NADER

The Long History of Resistance

Emancipation Comes to New York / Abolition's Black Vanguard

from
Field Notes on the Final Colony of Garefowl, vol. II

CELEBRATE WOMEN'S HISTORY
EXPLORE HIGHLIGHTS FROM OUR CATALOG