banah el ghadbanah

  1. about
  2. my book
  3. poetry
  4. black/palestine solidarity timeline
  5. articles
  6. CV
  7. film
  8. podcast

 email me

banah.ghadbian@gmail.com

about





dr. banah el ghadbanah is the author of the award-winning poetry book La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space (Dzanc Books, 2022).  dr. el ghadbanah served as a tenure-track professor of Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College for three years. Zhe is the author of the award-winning poetry book dr. el ghadbanah holds a PhD in Ethnic Studies and a Masters in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego where they wrote a dissertation entitled “Ululating from the Underground: Syrian Women’s Protests, Poetics, Performances, and Pedagogies under Siege.” You can view a film version of zir dissertation here. It is now a book under contract with SUNY Press, forthcoming in 2026.

they created the Black-Palestinian feminist solidarity timeline, an interactive timeline that archives solidarity among and between African American and Arab communities.

dr. el ghadbanah received their Bachelor of Arts from Spelman College in Comparative Women’s Studies and Sociology where they graduated as Valedictorian. At Spelman, they founded the Students for Justice in Palestine and were part of the Toni Cade Bambara Scholar-Writers-Activists Collective. 

dr. el ghadbanah helped found Arab Youth Collective, a weekly arts space for Palestinian and Syrian youth in San Diego that later became the Majdal Center. dr. el ghadbanah taught English at the Syrian Women’s Association in Amman, Jordan, a refugee social services center, and has translated in refugee camps in Greece with Palestinian Youth Movement. dr. el ghadbanah is the recipient of the Women of Excellence Award from the Faculty Women of Color Association. Zhe is a member of Palestinian Feminist Collective, the Syrian Women’s Political Movement, and is published in Mizna, Afghan Punk Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and over forty journals. 













my poetry book




La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space (2022) won the Diverse Voices Prize from Dzanc Books, a leading indie publisher. 

In this collection, each poem flows like water on the page. The author weaves in stories و mantras و revolutionary messages و the movement of Arabic letters و the memory of Sumerian cuneiform. This book is a hybrid creature between poem-story-form that crosses genres like it crosses dimensions. In this work, you are the mermaid. You are the forever migrant, a traveler between the oceanic and the extraterrestrial, across continents and planets. You are a time traveler, and you speak many languages. You are LA SYRENA, conjuring your own space to feel free.

Praise for La Syrena:

“Banah el Ghadbanah has written a collection that is bold and elegant, formally daring, and on every page poetic. La Syrena is a true work of art by an ambitious and captivating artist.” 
—Robert Lopez, author of A Better Class of People


“In this stunning collection of text and image, sprawling across the page in pulsating English, Arabic, and visual gesture, Banah Ghadbanah, a virtuoso of interlinguistic, interspatial, intertemporal, interstellar travel, brings us the voice of “A Syrian mermaid from space, miles from her original home, [who] returned to the shore with her voice and was rebirthed under the stars,” where “she gave birth to herself.” In poems that are meant to “be read out loud and tasted on your tongue” as well as “poems to be left alone on the page to rest quietly in your eyes and hands,” Ghadbanah traverses galaxies of outer and inner space, history, geography, war, migration, language, sexuality, and the dense interweave of personal and political. Moving with dizzying dexterity from pre-Islamic goddesses to political revolution to diaspora displacements to colonial violence to gender queerness to linguistic interplays that unlock worlds, her words and images insist on the multilayered realities of grief, resistance and love, the necessity of transformation, and the incandescence of life. “Our liberation is a current that cannot be stopped,” she writes.  “We/the lunar in betweeners/the people they call crazy. We shake the ground open.” The currents unloosed in this book will shake the reader open as well—an opening from which many things can follow.”
—Lisa Suhair Majaj, authors of Geographies of Light


La Syrena is an ambitious work. In their breadth and scope—formally, aesthetically, conceptually, linguistically, and in so many respects—Banah el Ghadbanah’s poems will dazzle you, as they have me. They aim to impress the innermost depths of our hearts and the outermost reaches of our imaginations, and they deliver on the promise of these journeys. I have no doubt that once you go where these poems take you, you cannot return the same. And you will want others to go there with you.” 
—Hayan Charara, author of These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit










published poems





“cousins” and “fruit” in My Kali Mag
“atlanta ii” in Hajar Book of Rage (forthcoming) 

“calligraphic relaxation: the rain that feeds the soil, or journey to نشوة“ in Warak el Zaytoun zine (forthcoming)

“banat ishreh” and “Sacred” in Mizna Online 

“Love in the Times of Khibbezeh,” Arrow Journal 

"moonlit," "de dea syria," and "where the goddess lives" in Allium

“the kesra poem” in Mizna: The Cinema Issue

"Ninkarrak" and "ishtar remembers" on Shade Literary Arts



"Goddess Triptych: Three Poems," on Mizna’s collaboration with the Asian American Writer's Workshop

“Before I forget" in the Women's Review of Books

“The Moreover,” “Midnight: Zenobia dreams of Amara’s hair on her pillow,” “de dea syria, the goddesses venture into the galaxy of desire” in Bahr Mag

“Anahita” in Poetry Northwest

Poem for the outsiders needing in and the insiders needing out," and "enceladus," in dream of the river (Jacar Press)


“aya” and “Your ghost is a white butterfly, the tender rain” in Her Words by Black Mountain Press

“Chicken Scratch/ Risum al Dajaj”  in Pinch Journal


“Sally Hansen and the Motherfucking Lavendar Scented Tribe,” The A Project: Politics of Body Hair

“kahinah” in 3asal Mag for Southwest Asian and Northwest African Women

“Azadi” and “in the revolution” in Afghan Punk Magazine

Reflections from the Halal Store in Palestine, Texas and Damascus, Arkansas in Voice & Verse Magazine

“An inevitably queer reading of Fairuz” in the Remnant Archive  
“These Bombs broke my Back”  “homegirls, mishmish, and the moon,” “Letter to Um Yusuf” under the pen-name Aziza Quzeiz  in Sukoon Literary Magazine

“I dream of the same place every night” in Passage & Place

“fr muslim girls who considered suicide when the ummah wasn’t enuf” under the pen name zanzooba magdoos, top five winner of The Feminist Wire’s poetry contest

“poem for the outsiders looking in and the insiders needing out” under the pen name Aziza Zenobia in





articles


“Ululating from the Underground” in Herizons, Canada’s leading feminist magazine

“Speaking through the Cracks: Syrian Women’s Prophetic Love under Siege,” in Herizons, Canada’s leading feminist magazine 

“Give us our Land Back: the Golan Heights, Greenwashing, and Syria & Palestine’s Intertwined Revolutions,” Spectre Journal

“Colorism in Syrian Communities is Tied to Centuries Old Endemic Anti-Blackness and Internalized Colonialism,” The Markaz Review


“Bellydancing, Activism, and the Politics of Pleasure,” Mangal Media

“Hypervisibility and Middle Eastern Women’s Studies” with Mohja Kahf,  Journal of Middle Eastern Women’s Studies

“Children are the Heart of Syria’s Revolution,” Medium

“The Revolution Must Center the Most Disabled of Us,” Medium

“We Still Need to Talk about the Murder of Halla and Orouba Barakat,” Medium

“Parable of the Syrian in Diaspora,” Medium

“What the People of Idlib Teach us About Resilience During Times of Apocalypse,” Medium

“The Battle Against Misogny at Spelman College,” The Feminist Wire







for resume focused on content writing, here.

for a detailed cv, click here.


film




  • You were a cloud (I was a the gold on the horizon)

  • In this choreopoem video, I layer my original poem “Rage in nine parts” over Lena Chamamyan’s “Love in Damascus,” with contemporary dance I perform while on my aunt’s rooftop in Amman, Jordan. It was created while my aunts and grandmother were in the process of laying out kishik for drying on a rooftop. I slipped into my favorite dishdasha and decided to weave myself a realm of many colors and ephemeral layers under the guise of unsuspecting feminine daily work. I wanted to show the multitudes of timelines present in one moment—how we are walking in many parallel realities at once, and how we can interact with our many split selves in between.



This dance performance was inspired by Mahmoud Darwish’s words in The Presence of Absence, “They forced you from the field. As for your shadow, it neither followed you nor deceived you. It froze there and became a stone. Then it grew green like a sesame plant, green during the day and blue at night. Then it grew and soared like a willow, green by day and blue by night.” In this video performance, I walk into time travel, into a space where my family was not forced to flee Syria in the 1980’s. I am the alternate universe version of myself, a farmer’s daughter. I rewind at to return where I am, under the eerie reversed voice of Fairuz undoing the time travel sequence. It is less about nostalgia and more a rumination on the possibility of nostalgia as a speculative fiction exercise.




This a short film set to the song “We and the Moon are Neighbors,” by Fairuz. It is about the quotidienne, seemingly mundane feminized tasks that are sites where identity is practiced. As Fairuz narrates a story about a collective love affair with the moon, I perform these mundane tasks on camera, and take the viewer through my grandmother’s neighborhood in the streets of Amman and then through layers of clouds in the sky. I explore the romantic essence of everyday life, and enact a subversive but brief moment of dreaming, where possibility lives.



Spoken word as an art form is often devalued because it is more colloquial and comes from oral traditions of resistance in the African diaspora. In SWANA cultures the oral tradition of the hakawati and of storytelling at large reflects what Sylvia Wynter in "Ethno or Socio Poetics?" calls the illegible oral cultures of indigenous civilizations, understood as a non-culture, a negation of modernity ("uncivilized") and that could thus serve as a weapon against European colonial domination because they could relay insurgent messages that were illegible within colonial epistemologies. This is a spoken word poem. In the revolution, in diasporic spaces, I witnessed countless men dismiss feminized voices as too idealistic, too nostalgic, too dramatic. What if those affects are secret keys to sensual experiences of freedom? My voice is set to footage from my camera roll, footage of Syrian women protesting, and Syrian children walking around destroyed areas in Eastern Ghouta. It is meant to circulate a brief, accessible, sensual, and temporary moment of freedom. Because freedom is not an idea, but a feeling and an embodiment. How can we, as a Syrian people, time travel to a time/space dimension where freedom lives when in the present we are structurally and materially unfree? In what ways can we move beyond intellectualizing our ideas of what the future looks like? Can we envision, in a few minutes, in the brief still of a protest, a space and time when all confines dissolve? Can we imagine a revolution that moves beyond patriarchal hierarchies of what “activism” looks like? Can we include visions of activism beyond militarized fantasies of dominance? This was written for Ghaith Mattar, for Raed Fares, for Fadwa Suleiman, for Razan Zeitouneh and the millions of unknown artist activists of the Syrian struggle.


  • Rima’s Red Raincoat

  • Codirected and produced with Janine Thiong as part of Dr. Ayoka Chenzira’s Digital Moving Image Salon. 
  • On a busy April afternoon Rima Dali, a 34 year old lawyer, stood on a Damascene street corner in a bright red raincoat holding a bright red sign. "Stop the Killing," it read. Days later she was arrested and an international flash protest movement began. The iconic Stop the Killing We Want to Build a Country for All Syrians slogan spread to surrounding cities and the rest of the world, invoking the possibility of a nonviolent strategy toppling a brutal regime—one where the voices of women, the voices of the youth, and the voices of religious and ethnic minorities could thrive. As Rima overcame imprisonment, ridicule by both the regime and the revolution, her evolving story reveals the importance of showing the world the transformative journeys of women who resist.This story not only highlights Rima's activism but also honors the countless Syrian women who stay fighting for peace.



  • Ishtar Awakens 

  • This piece is about sensuality and sexuality, a story of transformation and rebirth from the liminal spaces of revolution and larger society. In a time of great distress, a time when my home country was falling apart into pieces, at a point when I was losing many loved ones to revolution, genocide, and war, I became the goddess I needed. I decided to make myself into a human altar, adorned with all of the things I embody, the things that I as a Syrian socialized to be a woman am not supposed to be. I set up a mirror in front of me and positioned my camera between my legs, as an affirmation of my own subjectivity, that I exist, I am real, I am a sensory delight and inundation of details and color. With a portrait of Etel Adnan in the background, a picture of Ishtar on the wall, my jewelry making supplies and beads, and my favorite books around me, it was an act of adornment on the edge.