this landscape has an alliance with language; they exist together and actually can haunt you, despite any attempt at their erasure. - Adania Shibli

I’m not striving for abstraction, but precision—where the words that want to be in the text can find their place in it.

Once my engagement with any text as a writer finishes, and it's finally published or appears in book form, I never return to it as a reader. I do not know why the idea of reading my own published texts repulses me, but I know that reading books written by others is a lifeline.

Linguistic erasure on maps is where you first experience the betrayal of language; the erasure of Palestine from the map continues today. Your linguistic consciousness from an early age is built on reading these omissions. This is something I think I’ve been concerned with since the first text I wrote.