A review by letsgolesbians
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze

adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring sad tense medium-paced

5.0

spent most of the last day of 2023 reading this wonderful book. i loved the format and layout of this book, a collection of prose, poetry, personal essays, and informational essays with a photo between each piece; my brain often feels like a pinball machine, fast and noisy and chaotic, and jumping from a poem to a photo to an essay to a photo to learning about architecture to a photo really worked for me. 

any adjectives i try to use will fail to capture how i felt about this book—interesting, enraging, sad, empowering. all the words i think when i watch videos by bissan and motaz and hind every day. there are three pieces in particular i want to mention:

❤️ lost identity: the tale of peasantry and nature by asmaa abu mezied, about agrarian practices and place attachment. recommend for anyone who enjoyed braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer
🖤 exporting oranges and short stories: cultural struggle in the gaza strip, by mosab sbu toha, looking at books and literature, libraries, art, cinema, and other cultural works of palestine. recommend for readers, book fans, and people angry about book banning in the us
🤍 in the haze of fifty-one days by dorgham abusalim, a personal essay by a gay gazan man during the massacre summer of 2014 
💚 and of course, i cannot write about this book without mentioning refaat alareer’s gaza asks: when shall this pass, may he rest in power
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