People rally during the “National March on Washington: Free Palestine” while calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at Freedom Plaza November 4, 2023 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

People rally during the “National March on Washington: Free Palestine” while calling for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at Freedom Plaza November 4, 2023 in Washington, DC.

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

On this week’s Code Switch, we hear from two Palestinian American poets who talk about what it’s like to be Palestinian American in the U.S. Fady Joudah and Tariq Luthun say the way their stories are told — or aren’t told — has contributed to what they see as an erasure of their identities, and often of their humanity.

When Fady returned to the U.S. for college and medical school, for example, he says people would ask him where he was from, to which he would answer “Palestine.” He says he’d be told there was no such thing. “I learned that there was no recognition and hardly any room for receiving the Palestinian as a person with a right to a story,” he says.

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