If You Cannot Say Genocide: Essays on Conscience and Witness

“What task is left to art when words are turned into weapons?” Yahia Lababidi’s If you Cannot Say Genocide: Essays of Conscience and Witness explores the depth of this question impressed upon the reader in the preface. For the author, who is a Muslim of Palestinian descent, the question is pondered from a position of distance as an “inheritor of family dispossession”.  Written between 2023 and 2026, this collection of essays leans upon memory, literature, experiences, observation and reflection, through which disillusion exposes reality. While there is no chronology in Lababidi’s reflections, the preoccupation with words and meaning is persistent. For example, Lababidi writes of his posting as a speechwriter for the UN office in Cairo, where he encounters the […]