Letters from a Living Utopia: Reclaiming Liberation from Palestine to the World

In this meditative collection, Palestinian activist and poet Yaffa (Blood Orange) showcases personal letters written throughout their lifetime reflecting on oppression, freedom, and a more just future. The 15 letters are addressed to family members, friends, lovers, abstract concepts like home and language, and the author themself in past and future forms. Born into a displaced family, Yaffa moved between 10 different countries as a refugee before the age of 30, and was only able to return to Palestine as an adult. Their letters reveal an unceasing search for home, community, and liberation. Utopia, for Yaffa, is not a version of paradise always out of reach, but something “meant to be lived every day, even as war, genocide, and starvation engulfed our people.” Yaffa embraces rage as a tool for building a better world in a letter to their mother, expresses gratitude and forgiveness in a letter to “everyone who has harmed me,” and celebrates the resistance and eroticism of the living body in a letter to death. Themes of spirituality, astrology, Islam, the Arabic language, and common understanding across cultures are consistent threads in Yaffa’s lyrical musings on the universal promise of freedom. It’s a galvanizing and hopeful vision of a world in which liberation is within everyone’s reach. (Oct.)