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“I first found myself in a confluence of light: when the sun broke itself into a continuum through a bus window – when the glitter of my cheek caught my eye in a passing reflection, I found myself: There,” writes Florida-born poet George Abraham in their poem, “Beyond Forgiveness.” Born and raised in Jacksonville to Palestinian parents, Abraham writes poems that reveal who we are beneath the stories that have been thrust upon us. They prompt us to ask: What if there is no hierarchy to experiences of queerness and self-discovery? What if a glance on a bus ride could be as meaningful as coming out?
I was first introduced to Abraham’s work by a high school poetry friend. We used to write odes to each other’s deep purple lipstick and talk about how much we “loved each other’s brains.” The fact that I learned about Abraham in this context felt right. Moments of gentle adoration are laced throughout their work — a testimony to the fact that our identities are quietly co-created with those we love.
Abraham is best known for their 2020 book Birthright, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in bisexual poetry. In a series of three parts, the book explores their coming-of-age in Jacksonville, a college visit to Palestine, and their eventual return to the United States. Their stunning and grief-filled poems reveal the ongoing violence of Palestinian dispossession, the long tail of trauma, and the familial memories that give form to our lives.
They are also the editor of the journal Mizna, a hub of contemporary Arab American literature where Abraham first published their own poems and now shepherds an emergent generation of voices, many of whom are queer and trans. “My writing life has been made possible by a series of generosities,” they tell me, quoting the poet Solmaz Sharif. In 2024, along with the poet Noor Hindi, they will release an anthology that features more than 100 Palestinian poets from around the world.
With a focus on Palestinian futurity, queer poetics, and communal networks of care, the book is ongoing evidence of Abraham’s belief that language can help illuminate — and ultimately create —new conditions for life to flourish. Below, we discuss Birthright, cultivating expansive definitions of familial love, and coming out in a Walmart parking lot.
Can you tell me a little bit about growing up in Jacksonville, and how that experience impacts how you see the world?
Jacksonville contains multitudes. I have a million feelings all at once. Especially when I lived in Boston and would tell people I’m from the South, there would always be this form of condescension or dismissiveness. In my head I’m like, “No, it’s a source of a lot of community and who I am and how I move through the world and how I think about love.”
I grew up in a very Palestinian pocket in Jacksonville. There’s a lot of random diasporic communities: Syrians, Filipino people, Iranians. My Jacksonville growing up was predominantly brown and Black and Latinx. Yes, there was a lot of very visible white nonsense, but my Jacksonville was really not that. My Jacksonville was vibrant and dynamic.
One of the things that draws me to your work is this constant breaking down of binaries that we don’t even always realize we’re living inside of. I’m curious why you think poetry is particularly able to open up that space.
When I am thinking about poetry, it begins in my body, in spoken word, feeling, sound, music. It makes a lot of sense that the poetry would try to find forms to break binaries. We’re all searching for ways to say the unsayable. It’s interesting, the poems I have returned to the most are the ones that have taken me off guard and have articulated something that I have been trying to say but haven’t had the words for. Danez Smith is one of the people I look to as a big spoken word influence, especially their poem, “Waiting On Some of You to Die So I Can Be Myself.” I remember being in the room hearing that poem for the first time, and there was something beyond my body that happened. Something shifted in me in the way that they so bluntly and so compassionately articulated that difficult truth of being queer in a family that may not quite understand. That image at the end of the speaker at their mother’s funeral as a woman, and their mother not recognizing the daughter wailing in the front seat. That image stays with me to this day.
I wanted to ask you about that. I heard in an interview you did with Danez and Franny Choi that you’re not out to your family. I got to know your work through my dear friend Sarah O’Neal, who wrote about this eloquently for Teen Vogue. Where does that pressure to come out come from and what would you say to your younger self navigating it?
For many folks, coming out is very much a privilege. I’ve long thought about how my upbringing did not allow me to safely come out. In a lot of places right now, you cannot exist [easily] as a queer and especially trans person because of the legislation from the right. But I also think about Mejdulene Shomali, a really incredible Palestinian queer academic and poet, who wrote this book called Between Banat. Banat is the Arabic plural for the word girl. She theorizes a space of ambivalence. Sometimes queerness is a gesture. Sometimes it’s a moment of encounter and not some “coming out.” There’s a discretion to queerness in these spaces that I’m interested in. It’s not about exposing, but exploring. How can we expand our imagination of what queerness looks like in one’s own right to privacy, one’s own right to opacity?
Can you tell me a little bit more about how that opacity has emerged for you, whether in your writing or your personal life?
One of the most empowering acts of my life when it comes to my own queerness is thinking about my father. I never came out to my father in his life. He passed away a few years ago, and there was a moment where my mom and brother left me at his bedside for an hour to have time with him. He was going through a neurodegenerative disease that took away his ability to speak, but he was still there. He would cry. He would move and shift about, especially in reaction to us being there. He just couldn’t speak back.
And there was a part of me that’s like, Oh, is this a moment? Do I want to do the whole “coming out to him on his deathbed” thing? And then I thought, I can’t think of a worse position to put my father in than a conversation in which he cannot speak back. So, I decided I didn’t need this closure with my father. It’s not my moment, it’s his moment. He is on his deathbed and I am here to support him.
For me, the queer tender thing to do was to let him die unknowing. That was the most generous thing I could do, and it is because of who I am as a very tender, loving person who is loved by many within my queer community that I made that decision. Instead, the talk that I had with him was like, Hey, you’ve lived an impossible life for me and for my brother and for our mother, and it’s okay to rest now.
You write about a friend, “She left in my car the night i came out to her in a walmart parking lot; she, the first friend i came out to, hence family.” Can you tell me a little bit about that night and your experiences with chosen family?
Emily was my high school best friend, and she actually passed away in a car accident during my freshman year of college. She was one of the first people I ever came out to. We would do the Florida thing, which was as losers on Thursday or Friday night, we would just walk around a Walmart and hang out in the parking lot or go get McDonald’s, go to the beach at obscene hours of the night. I was like, “Wait, I need to tell you something.” I got nervous and then I wrote it on my phone and it was nothing but love.
In addition to being a poet, you also spent several years studying science. Is there a conversation you wish those two disciplines were having more publicly in the world?
I really loved studying memory specifically. I was doing research on the computational side of neuroscience, which is basically using a mathematical model to assign a language [to what’s happening in the brain.] Biological systems are infinitely complex, and we honestly don’t know anything about how the brain works. Using math as a language in biology, especially when it comes to memory, was so beautiful.
It’s something that I do in poems, too. Poems are vessels for memory. Just like math in the biological world, poems are [giving language] to the infinite unknown and unsayable. Language is all we have, and it is not enough, but it’s the best we can do. It’s limited, but it’s beautiful because of how limited it is and how we can only ever attempt and never actually get there.
I’d like to end with a question of imagination, which emerges again and again in your work. In the latest issue of Mizna, you write, “The works in this issue ask us to imagine liberated forms of relation, memory, and myth.” What has that liberated form of queer and trans relation looked and felt like to you lately?
We live inside of myth. Myth structures our living a lot more than we think, and it’s through the imagination that myth structures what we’re able to conceive of and imagine for ourselves.
I think that poetry, literature and art allow us to act on the imaginary. That is the realm that we talk with and work through. There’s a part of me that has faith that acting on the imaginary can help in some small way actually create the concrete, tangible building of better worlds. And again, that’s very idealistic, perhaps naïve, but I don’t think I’d be doing this work if there wasn’t some fragment of me that believed in it. If we don’t believe that a new world is possible, then we’re doomed. I’m a pess-optimist. I’m so pessimistic that sometimes it turns into optimism. I’m like, We’re so incredibly messed up that now we have potential to really change shit. I’ve been thinking about how the floor of pessimism caves in eventually and becomes optimism. That’s my place right now.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.