READING THE GARDEN
The following reading list extends the questions of عزیزم، دنیا گلستون میشه یک روز / ‘My Dear, One Day the World Will Bloom into a Garden’ through different voices and disciplines. Together, the texts here reflect on care, collective life, memory, resistance, and the ways hope continues to emerge through cycles of loss, renewal, and our relationships with one another and the natural world.
Gardens Speak by Tania El Khoury
Across Syria, many gardens conceal the dead bodies of activists and protestors who adorned the streets during the early periods of the uprising. Gardens Speak is an interactive sound installation that toured around the world. It contains the oral histories of ten ordinary people who were buried in Syrian gardens. This book contains the narrative text of those ten oral histories in both English and spoken Arabic.
Take Care of Your Self: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation by Sundus Abdul Hadi
In Take Care of Your Self, Iraqi artist and curator Sundus Abdul Hadi turns a critical and inventive eye on the notion of self-care, rejecting the idea that self-care means buying stuff and recasting it as a collective practice rooted in the liberation struggles of the oppressed. Throughout, Abdul Hadi explores the role of art in fostering healing for those affected by racism, war, and displacement, weaving in the artwork of twenty-seven artists of color from diverse backgrounds to identify the points where these struggles intersect.
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. Learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more livable futures.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world..
If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer
The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. “If I Must Die” is included here, alongside Refaat’s other poetry.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza by Mosab Abu Toha
In this poetry debut Mosab Abu Toha writes about his life under siege in Gaza, first as a child, and then as a young father. A survivor of four brutal military attacks, he bears witness to a grinding cycle of destruction and assault, and yet, his poetry is inspired by a profound humanity.
Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd
Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. El-Kurd’s poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba.
The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, visionary author Ursula K. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.
Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر by Noor Abed
Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر is a personal diary in which the artist and filmmaker Noor Abed compiles visual and poetic notes from the production phase of her film A Night We Held Between, filmed in Palestine in 2023 with family and friends. Like the film, the book interweaves narrative fragments, song and diaristic observations, creating a fusion of natural and composed sequences of movement, of documentary and fictional elements. Through a choreography of bodies, sites, stories, and temporalities, Abed’s work prompts contemplation on the manifestations of social action and resistance in everyday life.
The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed
In developing a theory of the cultural politics of emotion, Sara Ahmed focuses on the relationship between emotions, language and bodies. She shows how emotions are named in speech acts, as well as how they involve sensations that are felt by the skin. The Cultural Politics of Emotion develops a new methodology for reading ‘the emotionality of texts’ and offers analyses of the role of emotions in debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, and reconciliation and reparation.
This research is part of عزیزم، دنیا گلستون میشه یک روز / ‘My dear, one day the world will bloom into a garden’, conceived by Yalda Bidshahri for the ROSVÂ Summer 2026 Guest Curator Residency.
