70,000 - Poems

A powerful act of remembrance and resistance, 70,000 transforms cultural erasure into a living, breathing archive of grief, memory, and hope. 70,000 is a visceral and inventive collection of poetry rooted in the theft of 70,000 books from Palestinian homes and private libraries by Zionist forces before and during the Nakba of 1948. Of those books, most have vanished; just 6,000 remain, locked in the Israeli National Archives—unreachable by Palestinians. In response to this loss of knowledge and memory, Lenna Jawdat began handwriting the numbers one to 70,000, willing herself to think of every number as a book. Trained as a trauma therapist, she documented the emotional and physical experience of this ritual, giving shape to the grief, rage, and reverence that emerged. This full color book unfolds in three interwoven threads: the numbers themselves, reflections on the writing process, and a personal and familial poetic narrative captured in both images and verse. Together, they form a fragmented but powerful archive—one that blends poetry, memoir, maps, documents, and collage. 70,000 is a deeply embodied meditation on cultural erasure and the resilience of memory. What begins as a personal act of reckoning becomes a collective gesture of hope, resistance, and the radical possibility of healing.

Listed under Biographies & Memoirs · Community & Culture · Arab & Middle Eastern · Memoirs