Yahia Lababidi – författare

Yahia Labibidi wrote the 47 essays for If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE between 2023 and 2026 in response to the ongoing devastation in Gaza, placing this urgent question at its center. These essays are acts of witness shaped by grief, memory, and a refusal to turn away from human suffering.This is a book of conscience under pressure, written from an Arab American perspective shaped by exile and moral inquiry. It is the work of a poet who could no longer write poems and who feared for his soul if he remained silent. Urgent, searching, and unflinching, If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE asks what fidelity to truth demands when language itself is under siege.Moving between personal narrative, literary reflection, and cultural critique, the essays consider what it means to speak honestly when the language needed to name violence is contested or constrained. Lababidi reflects on how storytelling can hold experience against erasure, and how public discourse shapes what is seen, acknowledged, or denied. The book remains grounded in the ethical stakes of witnessing and the responsibility of language in moments of collective crisis.

The flashy poets and the poets with a schtick get the big audience, but it is the quiet poets whose individual poems more often linger with me. I''d trade all of Ginsberg, say, for William Bronk''s six-line poem "After Bach," which derives from the cello suites the lesson that sadness "can be in part /to accept the absence of One to say it to." And it is Bronk whose work is called to mind for me by Yahia Lababidi''s Barely There, in which "in embracing, we let go."''-- H. L. Hix, Author of First Fire, Then Birds

Revolutions of the Heart is a genre-bending book where literature, social activism, and mysticism intersect. In this follow-up to Lababidi's first essay collection, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (2010), the author is undergoing an inner change, as is the world around him. The multifaceted meditations in Revolutions--essays, poems, aphorisms, conversations, and even fiction--explore the edifying power of art, Islamophobia and its antidotes, the Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath, American popular culture, and much else in our complex modern world. A series of rich conversations with Lababidi, and his various provocative interlocutors, shed more intimate light on the subjects under discussion. At times serious, playful, and seriously playful, these exuberant exchanges chart the personal evolution of Lababidi from angst-ridden existentialist thinker, besotted with the life of the mind, to someone chastened, drawn to Sufism and seeking to surrender before the primacy of spiritual life. On a political level, as the work of an immigrant and Muslim (living in Trump's divided America and our wounded world), Revolutions is a book of hope and healing, arguing for nuance and compassion, as it attempts to present art as a form of cultural diplomacy and tool for transformation.

In this three-decade-long collection of aphorisms, Yahia Lababidi combines Eastern mysticism, Western philosophy and his Arab heritage to explore life's fundamental questions. Drawing from diverse traditions, he crafts concise observations about love, spirituality, suffering and self-discovery. Lababidi's aphorisms are at once philosophical and poetic, serving as beacons of truth in our fast-paced, digital age. In the words of Naomi Shihab Nye, beloved Palestinian-American poet: ‘If Yahia Samir Lababidi were in charge of a country, I would want to live there.’In a time of genocide and world conflict, soundbites, and social media noise, What Remains To Be Said provides a much-needed space for contemplation, offering both wisdom and solace to all who seek them.Lababidi is an aphorist of the spirit. His aphorisms could form a new gnostic religion, and I could dwell a long while inside them. Yahia Lababidi may be our greatest living aphorist.— Sharon Dolin, poet

Wherever You Are: Essays from East to West gathers the meditations of a writer caught between worlds—Palestinian by blood, American by circumstance, and by temperament a stranger to easy belonging. In these essays, Yahia Lababidi moves between high and low, sacred and mundane, resisting the comfort of choosing. He writes of Oscar Wilde and belly dancers, of Rumi and Ramadan television, of raising pigeons on a Florida balcony while the world burns in Gaza—composing a spiritual autobiography disguised as cultural criticism, in which attention becomes a kind of devotion and prayer. Through it all runs a single question: how to remain fully alive and human in a wounded world?These are essays in the truest sense, explorations that circle and return, admitting uncertainty while insisting on witness. Lababidi writes with the care of a poet and the conscience of a dissident. He does not offer answers so much as company: of thinkers, artists, and ordinary people who have refused to be diminished by their circumstances. A life of letters, he suggests, is a form of resistance. And in a time of noise and simplification, the whisper—tender and precise, scandalous with truth—may be the only honest response.This title will be released under Ayin’s sibling imprint Aora Books.