Love Letters to Baba - N Mo’alla

Love Letters to Baba is a deeply personal and politically resonant collection of poetry by N Mo’alla, the grandchild of Nakba survivors. What began as a private act of mourning — for her late father and in response to the ongoing occupation of Palestine — evolved into a powerful tapestry of memory, resistance, and ancestral love.

Through intimate, unflinching verse, Mo’alla explores themes of exile, inherited grief, language loss, and the enduring spirit of Palestinian sumud (steadfastness). These letters to Baba are as much about personal loss as they are about collective survival — asserting Palestinian existence in the face of attempted erasure.

Blending poetic lyricism with historical weight, Love Letters to Baba refuses nostalgia and instead embraces a radical, grounded hope: not the passive promise of return, but the vow of it.

“They have the guns, sir, but we have the poets.”

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Advance Praise for Love Letters to Baba:

“In her beautiful debut collection, Love Letters to Baba, N Mo'alla gives us vignettes from the life of a Palestinian grappling with exile and ancestral trauma. Mo'alla's poems are arresting in their directness and simplicity, yet contain multitudes of feeling.”

Saeed Teebi, acclaimed writer of Her First Palestinian and You Will Not Kill Our Imagination

“N Mo'alla's Love Letters to Baba is a powerful and striking collection of poems about exile, love, loss, and home. Expertly weaving these themes through each piece, Mo'alla lyrically recalls and invokes the works of Palestinian poetry. You feel her deep sense of longing — for home, for her father, for Palestine.”

Najla Said, actress and author of Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family