“Exit Wounds”: Discussing the Trajectory of Mandy Shunnarah’s Poetry in We Had Mansions

Words fail us in the most pivotal moments. For the past two years, writers have tried to capture the horror of Israel’s occupation in Palestine, but no sentence could communicate this level of loss. In a similar vein, no words I could write in this introduction would accurately reveal the honor I felt in speaking to Mandy Shunnarah this summer, a week before the publication of their first poetry collection, We Had Mansions.

An Alabama-born Palestinian American, Mandy Shunnarah (they/them) is a writer of many minds— their first book, Midwest Shreds: Skating Through America’s Heartland (Arcadia Publishing, 2024) celebrates “one of the Midwest’s most vibrant subcultures” through personal travels across the region. Now living in Columbus, Ohio, Shunnarah wraps up the most daunting exploration yet: the trek between themselves and their lineage left in the West Bank. Though words are second to sight and nowhere close to living, Shunnarah brings us one step closer to this global experience of loss by telling their story, one that bursts through the exit wound of the 1948 Nakba.

RR: As your first poetry collection, what motivated you to embark on this vast and wide breadth of poems?

MS: Yeah, I had to think really hard about this question, which it seems like it should be an easy thing, right? I wanted to be a writer from the time I was 5 years old, but I had, up until 2021, thought of myself almost exclusively as a prose writer. I am very fortunate that Columbus, Ohio, where I moved to a decade ago, is a poet’s town. I mean, we’re so lucky: we have Hanif Abdurraqib, Ruth Awad, Joy Sullivan, Scott Woods, Darren C. Demaree. We have so many truly excellent poets, and there’s a culture of poetry in the city where, honest to God, you could if you wanted to, every single night of the week, find either a poetry book event, a curated reading, or an open mic…Once I got bit by the “poetry bug”,  I couldn’t stop. I was nonstop writing poems. It’s really thanks to the community in Columbus. They say it takes a village, and it’s absolutely true.

RR: Which poem was the oldest from this collection, and which one did you write last?

MS: I love that you asked this because the oldest one and the newest one are actually right next to each other in the collection, because they’re deeply, thematically related. It was totally unintentional! So the first one that I wrote, and I still to this day say is the first good poem I wrote, is “if jesus was fat.”

RR: That’s amazing!

MS: Oh, I wrote a ton of shitty poems before that. What’s that saying about you’ve got to do your 10,000 hours?

It was so wild, the way it came to me. I was starting to lay down for a nap, and was thinking about how my body had changed over the years, and I was like  “Oh, I gained like 70 pounds in college.” Not in a judgmental way, just thinking about how I have literally and figuratively grown as a person, and I was like, “Huh! You know Buddha’s the only deity I can think of that’s fat. Where are the other fat deities?” I wondered what it would be like if Jesus was fat. Then, in a half-asleep state, I typed some notes into my phone, fell asleep, woke up, and totally forgot that I had even done that because I was so exhausted. It was a really busy time at work. I woke up, opened my phone, and that was the last thing I looked at, and I was like, “Well, maybe I can do something with that.” I practice ancestor worship, and I truly credit my ancestors, both Appalachian and Palestinian, with 99 percent of my insights.

Then the most recent poem was “jesus was trans.” I had submitted the manuscript to Diode, and it had been accepted, but then I got into some poetry workshops to where I was like, “Hey, can we actually delay the publication? I feel like if I’m going to be writing these new poems, and some of the more recent ones I’ve written since I initially sent the manuscript to y’all are being so thoughtfully edited by these incredible poets who I really respect and admire, then I don’t want to put that off in a future, maybe second collection. Can we just delay it for a couple of months?” and they were really great about it. One of the poems that came out of that was “jesus was trans.”

RR: I really love how you credit your poetry to the literary tradition of docupoetics… because it creates a whole new world of journalism and inventive imaginary futures that we can look to— in Palestine right now, that feels really important. How did you go about balancing that personal narrative that runs as a throughline throughout this collection with the actual ongoing experiences of people in the midst of this genocide?

MS: It was something I struggled with for a while. For the longest time, I didn’t think that I could or should publish the Palestine poems because my family is from the West Bank. Obviously, West Bank Palestinians suffer and are murdered every day by the occupation, but it still does not compare to what Ghazawi are experiencing. I wanted to be really careful about not appropriating a struggle just because we’re all Palestinians. And the only reason I’m in the US and my family is in the US is because of exile. I have never personally experienced genocide. I didn’t want to write from this voice where I was appropriating my own people. That didn’t feel right.

I wanted to be very specific. Journalism and docupoetics gave me a way to do that because it was like, “Okay, I can write poems about this,” but journalism is inherently from an observational standpoint. Not to say that journalists are not personally affected by what they cover…but in the act of documenting, there is often this bit of removal. You go into journalism to write about people other than yourself or situations outside of yourself, and then sometimes, shitty things happen that force you to become personally involved.

I think in some of the early poems I was writing about the genocide, I was very intentionally trying to be like, “I am watching this live-streamed on my phone. I’m not experiencing it personally, or viscerally in my body.” Because I’m in diaspora, I have a responsibility to help share those stories and help uplift those voices… If it were not for the direction my Sedo and Teta ran after the Nakba, it could so easily be me and my cousins being murdered, us being shot. Again, even though we were in the West Bank, Palestinians are still murdered every day, and if not for an accident of birth, it could absolutely be me. That was when I realized that I can have some more journalistic remove poems, but I also don’t need to be shy about the ways that this is deeply personal to me. So I started letting myself put more of my feelings on the page, and that was very cathartic and needed.

RR: You start this collection with your grandparents, whom you affectionately refer to as Sedo and Teta. What was your approach when including their narratives, and what effect did the retelling of their history have on your perception of your own personal history, and history generally, the way that we know it as it’s told today?

MS:  I think about a thing that I was taught very early in my journalism career, and I keep coming back to that because it is very influential on all of my writing practice. There’s a saying that goes, “Facts get recorded, stories get remembered.” You have to attach that emotional component, or I hate to say, people aren’t going to care. But if you have a story that illustrates what those facts and statistics and numbers are already saying, then people are going to remember that story. When I was a little kid, it was just like, “Oh, this is just family history.” I wasn’t attaching it to a larger, global narrative, but as you get older and you learn more, it’s like, “Oh, shit, my grandparents coming to the US was a part of the Nakba!” The way they live their lives—you can’t divorce that from where they grew up, how they grew up, and the conditions of the violent military occupation that they grew up under.

Even before the Nakba, there were still British mandates; they had armed guards on the streets all the time. It put so much of the way they live their lives into context. Even being their grandchild and removed from their personal experience, the way they live their lives and the things they taught me gave me that connection to our homeland. I couldn’t imagine trying to write this book without them on the page, or without consulting their spirits. I don’t think I would just be coming up with this stuff on my own. Like when I think about things they taught me, stories they told me, and how they told me their childhood memories… When I read about Palestine now, I see those threads of connection. They are so much a part of me, and I feel it’s my job to honor their memory and their sacrifice.

Though they ended up being “successful” (makes air quotes) in the US, their lives were not easy. I jokingly say I put the “palest” in Palestinian, because I come from brown immigrants who lived in Alabama in the 1950s as the Civil Rights movement is picking up—- they were certainly not immune from racism and xenophobia, and they were so maligned for their accents that they didn’t teach us Arabic. I just think about everything that they were forced to give up, as well as what they voluntarily gave up to give their kids and grandkids a better life. Their spirit and memory are on every single page, even the ones that aren’t specifically about Palestine: they’re still there.

RR: As you’ve grown up Orthodox Christian, do you feel yourself infusing faith, if not Christian, then just faith in humanity, within your poems? How do you see it working as a force in your poetry, especially in showing kinship to fellow Palestinians?

MS: I’m very secular. I identify as atheist these days. Fun story: I was actually raised in 4 different sects of Christianity, with Orthodox being just one of them. The Palestinian side of my family is obviously Orthodox, but then, I was sent to a fundamentalist Baptist Christian school until I was twelve. When you see these rabid evangelical Christians—the toxic Christianity—that’s the kind of school I went to. Then, the Appalachian side of my family was split between Southern Free Will Baptists and Catholics, so I was going to some form of church every damn day of the week, sometimes two different churches on the same day.

RR: Wow, yeah, every flavor of Christianity!

MS: Yeah. So it was really shoved down my throat… I do believe that people deep down are inherently good, even when there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary. I have to say, it’s really hard for me to look at a Zionist or an IOF person and be like, “Wow! I see the humanity there,” because they’re not showing it. Whatever humanity they got, they’re pushing it down real deep, but I have to believe that people are capable of change. Having faith in humanity is a survival instinct, a coping mechanism, but it also, incidentally, is good for my poetry. Outside of terrible -isms of Zionism, racism, homophobia, things that act as part of those big, overarching asshole markers, I think the worst thing a person can be is world weary; to look at everything in the world, and just feel like, “Is this all there is?”

RR: This next question is a little hard, and you can answer at your own discretion, but it would be impossible for us to talk about this poetry, or for any poet to document a genocide, without traveling to those really dark or violent images coming from Palestine. How did you personally preserve your mental well-being and your own ability to work and continue writing throughout this collection? Did you have any ethical questions you considered when writing about these images coming from Palestine?

MS: I had so many ethical considerations that I, at many times, was like, “Okay, I can write these poems, but maybe they should just live on my hard drive.” Ethical questions like, if I read a story about an individual, and that individual is named, should I name them in the poem they inspired? Say I see a video of someone being hit by an airstrike, or an entire family whose tent has been bombed and they’ve been vaporized, or a Palestinian who has been burned or severely injured; I remind myself when I see those pictures and videos, that person did not consent to that being shared all over the world.

It is the worst moment of their life.

Sometimes, the last moment of their life.

     Nobody wants to be remembered for being genocided, but because of the nature of genocide, there are so many of these people, and even if we know their names, we may never know their hopes and dreams. I don’t want to misrepresent a person that I didn’t personally know, especially at a moment that they do not want to be remembered. I did name Wadea al-Fayoume, the 6-year-old boy who was murdered in Chicago. I did name him, but with few exceptions, I really didn’t name individuals and talked about the genocide more broadly. Even when I talk about the ways in which people were murdered, I might have been thinking of a specific image or person in my head, but I didn’t want to write one specific individual’s story.

Another ethical consideration was: Should I even try to publish this book, and is that not profiting off the genocide? I ultimately decided to move forward with the book because of a couple of reasons, one being that even if I stopped writing right now and never published another word in my life, it’s not going to stop the genocide. It’s not my words that are causing the genocide. All I’m doing is documenting and trying to win hearts and minds to the side of justice and humanity. Also, I think about how non-marginalized authors, for a long time, have been appropriating anti-colonial or anti-imperialist struggles, and profiting very handsomely off of it, without investing that massive wealth into decolonial, anti-colonial, or anti-imperial causes in real life. I think about the Hunger Games and Star Wars. George Lucas and Suzanne Collins got massively wealthy off those franchises, and I don’t know what charities, if any, they donate to, but I feel if they were donating to Palestinian causes—or anything: the Congo, Sudan, New Caledonia, Kashmir—it’d be a different story. To be clear, Palestine is not the only genocide happening right now. It’s the only one I’m even remotely qualified to write about, but I want to be very clear that there are so many happening right now. And you don’t see these massively wealthy people who understand anti-imperial struggles and anti-colonial struggles in theory donating their massive wealth to these struggles in practice. And frankly, nobody’s getting rich off poetry.

I’ve done so many Palestine fundraisers over the years, and I’ll continue to do them. One of my mental health hobbies is I weave these handmade Palestine flags and donate a hundred percent of the money to the Sameer Project.

RR: You’re not only multi genre, you’re multimedia!

MS: I have to keep busy, it’s the ADHD and autism, but yes, I sell those Palestine flags to raise money for my people. The Sameer Project is on the ground because they have networks of people.

Getting back to the point, I considered: Is it even ethical for me to write a poetry book that I then sell? Then I thought about how much time I spend fundraising for my people and making monthly donations to 3 different Palestinian organizations, and I thought, “I’m not profiting off the genocide. I’m coming up with ways to sustainably continue the work.”… I’m trying to survive in a capitalist society in a way that is affirming to me and my people, that doesn’t make me hate myself, and allows me to do some good while I’m at it.

RR: All of these things speak to your creation of an “exit wound.” When I got to those poems, my jaw was on the floor! What a beautiful motif that you’ve carried throughout this work. I was kind of jealous of the fact that someone got to this trajectory of generational trauma and ancestry. How did you arrive at the “exit wound” as a strategy of communicating this long line of loss and grief?

MS: When I first got the news that my [Palestinian] father had died, I initially did not know what killed him. I made some guesses based on the fact that he had been addicted to opioids for a very long time, basically my entire life; that stuff is really hard on your body. It is very hard to live a long life while addicted to such hard drugs, so when I found out that he had died, I assumed it must be the drugs. Then, two years later, when I actually pulled his death certificate and found out that he had shot himself in the head, I was both shocked and not, because addiction, especially decades of addiction, makes you a shell of who you once were. It robs you of everything but the drive to go get your next fix and that’s part of why it’s so difficult to recover from; he struggled with it for years and years, and he would have periods of being off drugs, and then what it does to your brain chemistry would drive him to get back on them. Something about seeing it so bluntly in a coroner’s report, where there’s the outline of the person— it’s like, “Here’s where the entry wound is, here’s where the exit wound is…”

Something about seeing it in such clinical terms— I was thinking about all of the people who have been affected by gun violence, whether self-inflicted or otherwise, and how when a person dies, that is a form of exit. It is an exit from this mortal plane, and then the survivors carry that wound. I kept coming back to this idea of exit wounds, both as a literal trajectory through my father’s skull and metaphorically as in what it means for the people who are left behind. I started thinking about this concept called transgenerational trauma and three books…

(Mandy pulls from their desk The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk and It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn)

MS: Probably the one that gets cited the most, The Body Keeps The Score, and the idea that memories of trauma live on in your body. This is more about the individual. (It Didn’t Start With Us) is talking about inherited trauma, and they’ve actually done scientific studies that show this is, in part, how evolution works. One of the studies they did was with mice, and every time they would go to eat this particular food, they would get an electrical shock— to the point that even their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would avoid that food because they were afraid of the pain. Funnily enough, this…

(They show Granddaughters of the Holocaust by Nirit Gradwohl Pisano)

MS: …is about the Jewish Holocaust, and how trauma gets inherited, and I’m thinking, “Well, if they can inherit their trauma, so can we.” Inherited trauma is not limited to one religion, race, ethnicity, etcetera. I’ve had depression and anxiety my entire life. I don’t think there’s anything that “made me this way”; I absolutely think it was inherited, just like everything else that makes me myself on a cellular level. So, all these things are swirling in my head, and the more I thought about it, the more an exit wound felt like the only thing that made sense. I started to realize how Sedo and Teta came to the U.S.— yes, because they were exiled, but frankly, they could have gone anywhere. There are Palestinians all over the world because of systemic exile on the part of Zionists, but they specifically chose the U.S. because of the American dream. It is so common throughout Palestine for parents to have to bury their children before them, and they came to the U.S. because they thought that would never happen here. And they still had to bury my father, their oldest son, their pride and joy, because of all the things that America does to a person, especially from an immigrant family fleeing persecution, especially addicted to opioids in a time when that’s not well understood.

RR: To bring us closer to something that you say is “the most Palestinian thing” about you, these love poems at the end reinvigorate the sense of connection between other people, so much more than grief and anger and loss. How did this rediscovery of love after everything in this collection, whether it’s a divorce or the loss of your father and grandparents, allow you to grow closer to both your identity as a Palestinian American and your positioning as a human being in this moment?

MS: I love this question so much. Love ultimately drives every good thing; it’s what keeps my people going. Palestinians, being indigenous, we’re a very collectivist culture. We’re very concerned with the well-being of others, and not just others like us—at least the ones who don’t try to murder us.

Separating from my spouse, which we knew was coming before December 2023, that was the nail in the coffin. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be open to experiencing love again, because I was burned out, fed up, and very hurt. I’m totally wrecked post-October 7th, and then two months later, I’m getting a separation that I initiated— that seems like bad timing. The thing is, obviously, it wasn’t my ex’s fault that the genocide was ramping up, but he also didn’t make it better… I told him multiple times that I wanted a divorce leading up to when we actually separated, and he would say, “Are you sure you’re not just depressed about what’s going on in Palestine?” He didn’t seem to understand that I could hold multitudes and that I could hold concurrent grief. That was one of the things that really did it for me…

My partner and I had actually been friends for several years before we started dating, and I realized, “Wow! This is an entirely different relationship.” I think it helps that he’s Native American, specifically Blackfoot, and not living near his ancestral land, so he has an indigenous diasporic existence. He just gets it in a way that the average person just doesn’t. I have felt nothing but seen and held and affirmed in all the wildly varying emotions I’ve had.

RR: That’s wonderful. Coming back to love is so important, and showing that you know you can do that under any circumstances, even the worst ones presented to you, feels really inspiring and hopeful and might inspire love in other people, too.

MS: It was a choice. I could have kept closed off. I could have said like “No more, I’m never doing this again, I’ll just be alone until the day I die,” and I don’t think that would have been a wrong choice, but I don’t think it would have been, at least for me, the most fulfilling choice. I’m certainly not out here trying to invalidate the aro/ace community. I’m just talking about me, and I feel more loved than I have ever felt, not just from my partner, but also from my community.

RR: Is there anything you want readers to keep in mind while jumping into this book?

MS: Please don’t stop with me. If mine happens to be the first Palestinian poetry collection you’re reading, awesome, but please keep going. There are so many more voices that folks need to hear, especially folks who grew up in the homeland— folks who are directly impacted by the genocide. There is such a rich tradition of Palestinian poetry, and there are several Palestinian poets who have collections coming out this year. Fargo Tbakhi’s Terror Counter is waiting on my porch right now. George Abraham’s going to have another collection out next year, When the Arab Apocalypse Comes to America. We’re out here. We’re persisting.

RR: You include even recommendations within the collection itself, like for Susan Abulhawa and Mahmoud Darwish. How did you select these quotes, and in what ways did they influence your own work?

MS: I read over a hundred books a year, and I have for at least the past decade. I read very broadly across genres, so I end up reading a lot of Palestinians, and I write in my books. I’m highlighting, underlining, and writing in the margins constantly. Even if I just hear something that I think sounds interesting, I’ll put the quote in my phone and cite the person who said it so I can dig more into it or think more deeply on it later. I have these collections of quotes in all my notebooks and on my notes app, and highlighted in the hundreds of books I have in this house. Some stand out more than others, and I was thinking about how so many Palestinians, whether intentionally or not, are in conversation with each other just by the nature of a shared exit wound trauma. Exile is a form of exit wound, and not being able to go to or live on your ancestral land is a form of trauma, so I wanted to bring other voices in out of respect to the people who have gone before me. I’ve got Mahmoud Darwish, who has been dead for around 20 years. Susan Abulhawa and Mona Gazala are still alive and working today. Dr. Alareer was murdered by Israel in 2023, so I wanted to bring in voices, living and dead, from the past and present, whose work I really admire and respect.

Like I said, Palestinians are so collectivist. I truly feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of giants, especially with Mahmoud Darwish, one of the best poets of the 20th century, who is Palestinian and wrote a ton about love. I mean, wow! It’s such an incredible lineage, and I feel so fortunate to be a part of it. I’d be remiss if I didn’t give credit where credit was due.

RR: Onto our last question, what are you looking forward to after this publication? Do you have an idea of your next project, or are you taking some time to rest and enjoy this wave of good feelings?

MS: All of the above. I’m very much looking forward to my “official” book launch on July 22nd.

(After this interview, Shunnarah shared that poets Sara Abou Rashed, Nathan McDowell, and Travis Chi Wing Law opened the book launch with their poetry, and the event raised over $750 for The Sameer Project.)

Longer term, I’m really looking forward to a free Palestine, because I absolutely believe it’s just a matter of time. In terms of things I’m working on now, it’s a book about growing up Palestinian in Appalachia. I see so many parallels between the two cultures.

Linguistically, in colloquial phrasing, things like “Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” and “Inshallah” are the same thing. Obviously, that’s a small thing, but I want to start with the small, fun connections and then build upon that to talk about some of the bigger connections. For example, both regions suffer greatly from parachute journalism— people coming in who don’t know anything about the region, don’t know anything about the people, and passing these sweeping judgments about the way these people live their lives. Those narratives get uplifted above our own voices until you have entire parts of the country or region that malign these people because they don’t understand them.

With Midwest Shreds, I went on a five-week road trip around the Midwest interviewing people. I want to do something similar, where I start in Pittsburgh and end in Birmingham, because my family is in the Birmingham area. Pittsburgh and Birmingham are both big cities on either end of Appalachia, and they both happen to be steel cities. That gives me a way to talk about just one of the reasons why Palestinians and other immigrant communities went to Appalachia many decades ago.

RR: That’s a book I would love my family to read, even being from the South, and having people from Kentucky to Alabama to Texas; that’s what they need to read, and that would create such a crazy connection to link these two seemingly disparate communities. I’m so excited to see that!

MS: I could go on. That’s why I have to write the book about it, because this is my special interest right now: the crossover of these two cultures. I’ve got a long way to go.

Thank you again to Mandy Shunnarah for sharing your light and insight with myself and the Porter House Review. If you are interested in purchasing We Had Mansions or learning more about the many publications under Shunnarah’s pen, please visit their website linked here.

As well, if you would like to contribute to the Sameer Project, a donation-based initiative on the ground in Palestine, visit their Linktree linked here.