Rebecca Ruth Gould
Bio
I am author of the award-winning book Writers and Rebels: The Literature of Insurgency in the Caucasus (Yale University Press, 2016). My Wikipedia page.
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Poetry & Protest. ⬆️
Stories (18/0)
Listening to the Snow
“My country cannot be found” the narrator announces in “Dancing in Odessa,” the title poem of a collection by the Russian-born American poet Ilya Kaminsky, published in 2004. For Kaminsky, language conjures memory, and memory creates a country for the exiled and otherwise displaced.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould2 years ago in Wander
Nafs, a Short Story
When she was awarded a year-long fellowship in Budapest, Sarah Wallace was given the opportunity to invite anyone she wanted, anywhere in the world, to visit her during her stay in Hungary. She invited a famous scholar whose book she adored, and he declined. And then she remembered Yasin, the Uzbek scholar with whom she had crossed paths a decade earlier, in Amman. True, he might have no interest in Budapest, but what was the harm in asking? They shared a passion for manuscripts.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould2 years ago in Fiction
Free Speech and Double Standards
On 1 October 2021, Professor David Miller was fired by the University of Bristol for his controversial statements about Israel. The reason for terminating his employment, the university said, was that 'Professor Miller did not meet the standards of behaviour we expect from our staff.' The behaviour in question consisted of words: contentious words with which many would disagree, but words nonetheless, words not directed against any specific individual and not conforming to any conventional definition of harassment, though respected colleagues have argued otherwise.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in The Swamp
Introducing Mohammed El-Kurd
Born in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd rose to international fame amid this year's Israeli assault on Gaza and East Jerusalem. Although his credentials as a writer and activist have long been known to followers of Palestinian politics, his debut collection, Rifqa, introduces us for the first time to a poet of global stature.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in Poets
How to be a Migrant (short story)
Ever since Hossein Malekzadeh turned in his visa application, any knock at the door, any phone call, and any time he heard his name yelled in public made him jump. Were the police after him again? When the IRGC inevitably arrested him, would he be so lucky to get released a second time?
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in Fiction
Jim Crow in the USSR
We are all colonized.— marginalia in a library copy of Dominance Without Hegemony by Ranajit Guha, Indian historian The reader of Langston Hughes’s writings on the Soviet experiment is bound to be confused. In the 1930s, during the peak of Stalinist repression, Hughes produced volumes praising the Soviet Union, particularly the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan where, as he writes in the second volume of his autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (1956), “the majority of the [Soviet Union’s] colored citizens lived” (123).
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in FYI
How Chekhov Shaped my Love Life
Chekhov was not my first love. More obviously delectable to a college freshman just returned from her first visit to St. Petersburg and discovering Russian literature for the first time were the thick novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Those “great, baggy monsters” (as Henry James called them) buoyed me up through my first marriage, my frantic conversion to Christianity, and my equally hasty divorce. I imbibed Dostoevsky’s entire oeuvre on a reading binge, hoping to drown my tumultuous marriage in his tales of white nights, conniving detectives, and holy fools. Dostoevsky’s tortured heroines perfectly matched my overstrung mind. His philosophical dialogues about the existence (or not) of God were the perfect object of reflection for my theologically conflicted soul. “I return my ticket,” Ivan Karamazov said directly to God (in the person of Alyosha). I won’t pause to consider it, but D.H. Lawrence’s interpretation of this scene (in a new translation of the “Grand Inquisitor” chapter published by the Hogarth Press in 1929) struck me as the silliest piece of literary criticism I had ever read. I was certain I could do better.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in Humans
Why a Muslim-American dissident read Thoreau
Often associated with nonviolent civil disobedience, Thoreau isn’t the first name that springs to mind when one thinks of violent resistance. Yet Thoreau was among the first names I came across when I began to research Muslim-Americans’ responses to the crackdown on their civil liberties following 9/11. The Egyptian-American Muslim Tarek Mehanna, who since 2012 has been incarcerated in a US Supermax for downloading and translating content deemed by the US government to constitute “material support” for al-Qaeda, cites Thoreau prolifically in his prison writings and drawings. (I have discussed Mehanna’s case in more detail here.)
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in The Swamp
White Terrorism and Islamophobia
Almost immediately after it emerged that a white supremacist had stabbed three men who were trying to prevent him from attacking Muslim women in a Portland train on 26 May 2017, killing two of them, the police force began to mitigate the brutality of what had happened.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in The Swamp
Hands
What struck her most about him were his hands. They were long and lanky, like his body. Even more remarkable than their shape was the way he used them. When they first met, he shook her hands boldly and directly, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to do and not a violation of the law in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Taken aback, she forgot to respond. Her hand hung limply in his palm, until he dislodged it.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in Fiction
Palestine is a Litmus Test of Our Capacity to Change the World
The world’s attention has been transfixed by Israel’s most recent attack on Gaza. Palestinian voices and narratives have begun to filter through the mainstream American media channels that have suppressed their voices for decades. When the Israeli military bombed al-Jalaa Tower, which housed the Associated Press and Al Jazeera offices in Gaza on 15 May 2021, it seemed to mark a turning point in wider public opinion. On the day of that bombing, which followed the destruction of two other large residential buildings in Gaza, US Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Cori Bush tweeted a simple yet powerful message: “apartheid states aren’t democracies.”
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in The Swamp
The Caucasus Beyond the Mythical White Person
High in the mountains running along the border between Azerbaijan and Georgia, in the garrison town of Zaqatala, former outpost of the famed Imam Shamil who in the mid-nineteenth century led the longest resistance to Russian rule, I meet an elderly woman crossing the street.
By Rebecca Ruth Gould3 years ago in Wander