Intifada Incantations: An evening of art and literature for Gaza
Event description
LONDON: Join Sine Theta Magazine and QueerAsians4Gaza for a night of art and literature at The People’s Letters, with all proceeds going to Gaza fundraisers.
Tickets start with a minimum £5 donation. All proceeds will be split evenly between Khalel's family and Students for Palestine's tuition fees campaign for university students in Gaza. If you can’t make it, please consider donating to these campaigns.
Featuring readings from Abu Leila, TC Mangan, Lola Olufemi, Laila Obeidat, tezeta, and Yan Ge.
Schedule:
6:30pm: Venue doors opeen
7:00—7:45pm: First readings
8:30—9pm: Second readings
We will also host stalls selling crafts, prints, jewellery, press-on nails, and books all night long. Our market features books donated by Julia Armfield, press-on nails by green moss, clay jewelry and prints by Yaya and @auto__muse, prints by Kezia Mbonye and Jiaqi Kang, and crochet by local artists in Oxford.
Our event takes its name from June Jordan’s 1996 poem ‘Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.’. Inspired by Jordan’s poem, this evening is to show material support towards the people of Palestine in their resistance and resilience. However, while donations are still hugely important for immediate survival during this zionist-imposed famine, support does not end with this evening and with fundraising alone. We urge everyone, ourselves included, as people living in the imperial core—to continue showing up in solidarity with Palestinians: to continue donating without question, to continue amplifying Palestinian voices on the ground, to continue questioning our self-narratives, and to continue disrupting our own complicit countries and their stocks in the genocidal war machine.
The People’s Letters are a cooperative of workers forming a bookshop as a result of extreme union busting. TPL’s upstairs space is wheelchair accessible and there are accessible toilets in the Pelican House building. Seating at the event is limited. Nearest stations: Bethnal Green and Whitechapel.
Artist info:
Abu Leila is a Barbican Young Poet, and one of the winners of the 2019 Spread the Word London Writers Awards. They are currently writing their first novel, an extract from which won the Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2022. They hope to see the fall of capitalism and imperialism in their lifetime.
TC Mangan lives in north London. She is working on a novel.
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and researcher based in London. Her work focuses on the utility of the political imagination in the textual and visual cultures of radical social movements, examining the role cultural production plays in materialist resistance and collective conceptualisations of futurity. She is author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (Pluto Press, 2020), Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (Hajar Press, 2021), the forthcoming Against Literature (2026)
Laila Obeidat is a Jordanian-Palestinian writer and poet based in London. She is a recipient of the 2025 London Writers Awards and is currently working on her first novel. Her writing is preoccupied with questions of identity and voices in the saturated world of social media. Perpetually frustrated with the limitations of narrative, she seeks to address its insufficiency by exploring hybridity in language, playing with form, and finding humour in the not-funny-at-all.
tezeta is here and always learning to love, tell the truth, be present and dream.
Yan Ge is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English. The English translation of her novel Strange Beasts of China was a New York Times Notable Book of 2021. Her English language debut short story collection Elsewhere came out via Faber (UK) and Scribner (US) in 2023. She lives in Norwich with her husband and son.
Art market info:
Julia Armfield has donated a set of her 3 books—salt slow, Our Wives Under the Sea, and Private Rites—to be purchased separately or together
green moss @greenmossloveisreal1998iloveu is an Oxford-based nail artist selling press-on nails with unique designs.
Yaya (Hai) @yayhaiii @broclettes selling handmade clay jewelries & trinkets, prints and original artworks!
babyuglies are natural-unnaturalised charms and prints for those with strange dispositions by @auto__muse
Kezia Mbonye @cassiasdaughter is an artist and tattoo artist selling prints of original tattoo illustration works
Jiaqi Kang will be selling some risograph prints designed by them and their friends.
Local artists in Oxford will be selling watermelon-themed crochet crafts.
Tickets for good, not greed Humanitix dedicates 100% of profits from booking fees to charity