Lenna Jawdat: “70,000: POEMS”

A conversation about Lenna Jawdat’s 70,000 : an “embodied meditation on cultural displacement, memory, and resilience.” 70,000 is a visceral and inventive poetry collection inspired by the removal of approximately 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries before and during the events of 1948. Of those books, most have not been returned; about 6,000 remain housed in Israeli national collections, where they are largely inaccessible to Palestinians. A powerful act of remembrance and resistance, 70,000 transforms cultural erasure into an archive of grief, memory, and hope.