10/02/2025
What people are saying about Mira Mattar’s Yes, I Am A Destroyer:
“An astonishing, contrary, visionary rush – insightful, poignant and ecstatic.”
—China Miéville
“[A] dazzling hybrid of experimental prose, autofiction, and poetry that resists the stricturing confines of embodiment, selfhood and identity at every turn.”
—Odhran O’Donoghue
“What if the self were necessary to its own undoing? As in: the only one capable of dismantling the first-person’s tightly wound ideological conglomerate—on which literature so heavily depends—is the self itself...This is an extraordinary book. Everyone who is someone should read it—to become no one.”
—Mirene Arsanios
“...[M]y words fail. This is the kind of book that pulls me in at ungodly hours, holds me transfixed in its questionings: ‘what can I recall without memory?’ asks Mattar’s speaker of family objects, or ‘why may they have their eyes when we may not have our own?’ .... A work of ineffable brilliance from one of my favorite Palestinian poets alive.
—George Abraham, author of Birthright
“[Yes, I Am A Destroyer] leaps beyond the cloying contract of capital with the feminine, of intimacy with violence, to animate a lush document of the refusal of subjection.... This glorious tract ends with a call for the anarchical vigour of the animal body we share. Read it and flourish. You will perhaps be invoiced.”
—Lisa Robertson
Yes, I Am A Destroyer is available via the link in bio.
First published in 2020 by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE in the UK and Europe, we are honored to make *Yes, I Am A Destroyer* available to a North American audience.
As always, you can support Palestinian liberation and an end to the genocide in Gaza. You can materially support Palestinian life in Gaza by donating to a green resistance movement working towards reviving Gaza’s farmland by building food sovereignty. Protest, boycott, donate NOW.
