Yahia Lababidi 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.
