“Writing is a testimony,” I told them, “a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, of survival, and of hope”: Refaat Alareer remembers saying this to his friend shortly after the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead which killed more than one thousand Gazans in 2008-2009, most of whom were civilians.
At that time, and for many years to follow, Refaat Alareer taught at the English Department of the Islamic University of Gaza and quickly understood the power of narration and the role stories hold in Palestinian resistance to occupation.
These two guiding ideas never left him, until his murder in December last year during Israel’s latest and most brutal assault yet against Gaza.
“To me, storytelling is one of the ingredients of Palestinian sumud — steadfastness,” Alareer recalls. “For Palestinians, stories whet the much-needed talent for life.”
Yousef M. Aljamal, friend, journalist, author, and Gaza Coordinator at the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), compiled some of Alareer’s poetry and prose into a posthumous book, If I Must Die, named after Alareer’s most famous and beloved poem If I Must Die, Let it Be a Tale published in 2011.
This collection includes entries and excerpts of blogs, lectures, and interviews that honour the late poet, educator, and activist’s legacy.
More than an expansive obituary, it is a reminder and celebration of what Israel has not been able to destroy: a Palestinian voice that remains independent, defiant, and human.
“If storytelling is significant to us Palestinians, then writing these stories is of paramount importance. It was high time to break the intellectual embargo Israel has been enforcing for decades, and similarly, it was high time to break with psychological shackles and talk to non-Arabs in the language and discourse they understand.”
Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, a book Alareer edited of 23 short stories (matching the 23 days of Operation Cast Lead), was born from this resolve in 2014. It upheld the recognition of Palestinian creativity as well as its political agency. “Palestine is a martyr away, a tear away, a missile away, or a whimper away. Palestine is a story away.” Gaza Unsilenced, another anthology jointly edited with Laila El-Haddad, followed in 2015.
Alareer retraces the journey and ethos behind Gaza Writes Back, which comes across as a turning point in articulating his life’s purpose.
If I Must Die also includes more intimate essays and interviews in which he reflects upon the personal toll of war, such as the devastating loss of his brother Mohamed (“Hamada”) in the 2014 war.
Alareer shares many stories of individual Gazans. For example, the story of his cousin, Awad, who died of cancer a year after his diagnosis at age 18 — likely aggravated by Israel’s cruel and Kafkaian practice of delaying permit issuance required to get medical treatment outside Gaza.
Awad wanted to be a farmer just like his grandfather whom he was named after. His untimely passing, like countless others, is one steeped in forced displacement and continued injustice.
Alareer consigns oral histories from his family, a near-sacred guardianship in the face of erasure and constant dehumanisation. With an intergenerational embrace, he remembers a young father and academic during Cast Lead:
“My stories were both an end and a means. As I told stories to my children to distract, soothe, and educate them, I felt very close to my mother and to my grandparents. The stories were the window to my mother’s past, to my past, as I started reliving every minute she had spent in a homemade panic room her grandfather had prepared for them before Israel first invaded Gaza decades ago.”
Birthdays are celebrated despite aerial attacks and children are aged according to how many wars they’ve survived. Of his daughter in 2022, Alareer writes: “Amal is now two wars old.” She was six years old at the time, she would be four wars old post-October 2023.
Pages devoted to family life and Alareer’s caring responsibilities and impossible choices (to sleep and die together in the same room or not, to have his possible last words to his children be about eating less and rationing food) are among the most poignant, especially for those who deny Palestinian men from their human rights, limiting civilians to comprising of women and children exclusively.
Together with his wife’s extended family, he had lost 50 relatives as of last year, which he soberly notes as an ordinary experience for Gazans (“We are an average family”).
Alareer reacts to notable events — arbitrary killings, assaults, petty harassment – that involve Palestinians living in Gaza as well as in the West Bank. The aggressor is named; these are not passive-voiced stories in which unnamed ills from unnamed perpetrators suddenly befall Palestinians without context.
And in addition to Israel’s historical (and legal) responsibility, Alareer is clear-eyed on the failings of Palestinian politicians, Arab neighbours, and the West.
The love and admiration he feels for his people – what ultimately remains beyond politics and atrocities are the people (The People Immortal, as Ukrainian writer Vasily Grossman might have written elsewhere) – is unbreakable. And to numbers and faceless statistics, he responds by weaving stories centring human feats of generosity and resilience.
In a condensed timeline, If I Must Die retraces key moments of Gaza’s recent years and those that directly influenced Alareer, including the intifadas, Cast Lead, the 2014 war, the Great March of Return in 2018 (a popular march as opposed to a political one for Alareer), 2021, and 2023.
But here Alareer’s focus is on chronicling daily life under occupation and siege stripping Gazan existence to its bare nakedness of dignified survival, political consciousness, and unwavering resistance.
His concern is the present and the possibility of a future. Shujaiya, where he was born, and Gaza more generally are a fecund world despite the unabated devastation Israel has inflicted on its people and their lives.
Yet after so many years of impunity, one may wonder about writing at all. “But can a story or a poem change the mind or the heart of the occupiers? Can a book make a difference?”
His poem If I May Die, Let it Be a Tale was spontaneously translated into dozens of languages immediately after his death. White Kites (mentioned in the poem) are regularly flown during protests against the genocide around the world. Alareer’s words, and the spirit they embody, have touched countless people – the many who knew him in life and all the strangers for whom Palestine is not and will not be an abstraction.
Reaffirming the power of poetry in a lecture given in 2021 (Israel jailed women poets Fawda Tuqan and Dareen Tatour), Alareer underscores how Palestinian prose and verse also directly contribute to dismantling Zionist propaganda wrongfully claiming that Palestine was a land without a people.
Ghassan Kanafani reviewed and analysed these Zionist myths and the destructive political project that this kind of literary production served to accomplish (On Zionist Literature, translated into English in 2022).
For Alareer, writing in English to champion and amplify Palestinian voices is about expanding narrative spaces and contesting dominant doxas. He famously wrote that his weapon is that of a teacher: an Expo marker. (A modest object that can inflict much damage to an oppressor and their fabricated image when thrown appropriately, much like a stick might.)
“Reader, as you peruse these chapters, what can or will you do, knowing that what you do can save lives and can change the course of history? Reader, will you make this matter?”
I’ve ruminated about these two questions for more than a year now, with additional acuity reading Alareer’s exhortation.
What can we do that’s more genuine than surrounding performativity? To daily reject self-censorship that ultimately serves as a dystopian crackdown on the media, human rights defenders, and individual freedom of expression alike?
Maybe it’s simply this: speaking, writing, showing up alone and in numbers in solidarity to conjure silence so that Palestine lives – lives freely.
Farah Abdessamad is a New York City-based essayist/critic, from France and Tunisia
Follow her on Twitter: @farahstlouis
