Solidaritetsstipendet 2025 til Dalia Taha

Thank you very much for this award. I’m truly honored to receive it.

I accept it with a heavy heart, knowing that my people are enduring unimaginable suffering.

What Palestinians are enduring now is the continuation of a story, that of the Nakba. The destruction of Palestine, after 1948, and the exile of Palestinians.

For a century we watched our houses being demolished with the same look of regret, pain, and despair.

Over time we have learned to never trust ceilings and walls, knowing these can be torn down, knowing that one night we will be forced to snatch our kids and flee, before our home becomes our coffin.

For the same reason, however, we have also turned our homes into books.

If you look at the videos from Gaza, you see in the ruins of homes, the ruins of a city, also everywhere shards of text, slogans, graffiti.

Walking back home from school during the days of the first Intifada, which erupted in 1987, I read the political slogans written on the façade of houses in the village of Birzeit were I grew up. The writing was everywhere.

Our main work then was to smuggle words, sentences.

My father used to lament all the books in his library that his mother had to burn when the soldiers raided his village, searching our houses.

Political pamphlets were circulated in secrecy. You had to burn them or bury them in construction sites.

Imprisoned activists and leaders smuggled letters out of prison, written in small fonts, on small paper, small enough to roll them into small capsules. These capsules had to pass through so many hands before reaching us.

Graffiti writers used to take to the streets at night, under curfew and paint the walls with these utterances: political messages, statements, dates of strikes, actions to be undertaken.

The Israeli army would erase these writing, and arrest people caught doing it. Even carrying a bottle of paint spray would get you arrested.

This kind of writing makes a place unlike any other. It reminds you that we live in language, no less than in homes. That we live in stories, as much as we live in cities and towns.

It also tells you that writing is something dangerous.

Something dangerous precisely in so far as it wasn’t allowed to be said. In so far as it wasn’t supposed to reach us. It is this prohibition that makes of the encounter with a text a revelation, or disclosure.

I have always thought I’m fortunate that I live in place where I can be the reader of such revelations. A reader of forbidden, dangerous texts.

We can’t find the truth on the front pages of our newspapers. We will not find it in what is taught in our classrooms. Nor in what is discussed in celebrated literary events.

Truth lives in the margins—in the mouths of those silenced, feared, or ignored.

Those who ask us to suspect the innocence of the centre, The truth that for which you are imprisoned, tortured, and killed, for saying it.

These voices are the voices of people who did not cringe before the powerful. Did not betray the weak.

The voices of people who are trying to figure out what is right and resist what is wrong, who live by that knowledge. And who thereby demand that we respond. That we do something.

In that demand is their truth. Truth does not explain the world. It makes worlds.

Even if done in a dark room, in a lonely corner of the world, we are never alone when reading and writing.

**

For the past 20 months, a genocide has been broadcasted live to you. The genocide of my people.

2 million Palestinians are being starved right now. 80% of all acute starvation in the world, in this moment, is in Gaza.

Scores of us are dying every day.

Some 2 million of us, most of us still refugees driven from our homes after 1948, during the catastrophe that we call Nakba in Arabic, have yet again been driven from our homes.

The majority of these homes do not exist anymore. Nor do the streets they stood on. Or the trees that lined them.

80 percent of all houses in Gaza have been destroyed or demolished. 1 million square meters of asphalt ripped up, 55,000 trees uprooted.

This is the work of 70,000 tons of bombs dropped on an area as approximately as the same size as Oslo. The equivalent of two Hiroshima bombs.

Killing over 50,000, of which most are women and children, maiming over 100,000, orphaning around 39,000 children.

As many of our children have been slaughtered, in the past 20 months, as have died in all the world’s armed conflicts over the past five years.

Thousands of have been maimed, amputated, many without anasthesia, on dirty hospital floors; hundreds of thousands now starving will live stunted lives.

Each day brings testimonies more cruel. Fathers and mothers being executed in front of their children, children executed in front of their families.

Men detained, stripped naked, tortured, many never coming back, others returning broken, cut and burned and violated, with happy faces carved into their backs.

Slavery wasn’t a crime that happened in faraway countries, away from prying eyes. It happened in people’s house and kitchens.

The Holocaust didn’t happen away from eyes of German public. They knew, they believed it was necessary. They believed it was necessary because they had been taught to fear. They were taught to fear through lies, repetition and the refusal to say the truth.

Right now, a genocide is being carried out by Israel in front of the entire world. It is streamed live, and yet all the words in the world fail to make it stop. I want to end this speech with a question: What was the point of studying history? Why did we make films about historical atrocities? Why did we study philosophy and ethics? What was the purpose of learning to distinguish right from wrong, the ethical from the unethical? What was the significance of discussing truth and literature? Why did we read and seek knowledge? What was the point of lectures, films, classes, plays, and books—if children are still being killed every day in the most horrific manner?

Writers and artists have power and they should use it. Poet Yusuf al-Qedra, writing from under siege and bombs in Gaza, states: "The truth takes a long time to cover short distances; the lie moves on its own, but the truth only advances with our feet." Indeed, the truth only moves with our feet. Theater, then, must be one of those feet.

Let it carry the truth to the world.

Thank you