[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘HOW MANY DEAD PALESTINIANS ARE ENOUGH?’ THE UNBEARABLE
PRESCIENCE OF THE LATE POET REFAAT ALAREER  
[[link removed]]


 

Sarah Aziza
December 10, 2024
The Guardian
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ The author and academic was killed in an Israeli airstrike a year
ago. A posthumous collection of his work, If I Must Die, tells the
stories of Gaza in a plea for change _

Refaat Alareer wrote the poem If I Must Die in 2022 for his daughter,
who was killed a few months after her father., Photograph: Tony
Heriza/AFSC

 

In the face of siege and war in Gaza
[[link removed]], the writer and educator
Refaat Alareer fought for his people’s right to narrate their
experiences and history. “As a Palestinian, I have been brought up
on stories and storytelling,” writes Alareer. “It’s both selfish
and treacherous to keep a story to yourself.”

First written in 2022_, _these lines now sit at the heart of If I
Must Die,_ _a posthumous collection from Alareer’s eclectic and
compelling oeuvre. Published by OR Books
[[link removed]] to mark a year since the
writer’s death by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, If I Must Die
contains a selection of journalism, literary criticism, essays and
poems written between 2010 and 2023. Taken together, they provide a
glimpse into a restless political and literary mind, one that was
still rising to the height of its powers.

Many readers and students knew and loved Alareer while he lived, but
it was his death that brought his name into the global consciousness.
In the hours and days after his killing, Alareer’s poem If I Must
Die_ _went viral, resounding from social media to the streets.
Written to his daughter Shymaa in 2011, the seemingly simple verses
vibrate, stretched taut between tragedy, tenderness and resolve: “If
I die / you must live / to tell my story … let it bring hope / let
it be a tale.”

Shymaa and her infant son were killed by an Israeli airstrike a few
months after her father’s death; on 4 December, at a New York City
launch event for the anthology, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu
Toha reflected [[link removed]] that,
with both Refaat and Shymaa Alareer now dead, If I Must Die becomes a
letter to “each one of us who read or heard the poem”.

[a man holding a photo of a man at a nighttime protest]

Pro-Palestinian protesters in Cologne, Germany, display a photo of
Refaat Alareer in December 2023. Photograph: Ying
Tang/NurPhoto/Shutterstock

Alareer’s writing bears the imprint of influences both colloquial
and scholarly. The author and academic was born in 1979 in
Shuja’iyya, Gaza, a neighborhood with a history of fierce resistance
against the Israeli occupation. Alareer was shaped by this milieu: the
book recounts how, as a first-grader, he blacked out after being
struck in the head by a stone thrown by an Israeli soldier who was
“smiling ear to ear”; four years later he was shot by rubber
bullets for throwing stones at occupying forces. Over the years, he
witnessed numerous relatives killed or maimed by Israeli violence, and
sat for hours listening to his grandmother’s and mother’s stories
of dispossession and war.

These experiences, along with the violent Israeli response
[[link removed]] to
the peaceful demonstrations of the Great March of Return, when
Palestinians in Gaza marched weekly to the border fence symbolizing
their siege, sharpened the poet’s resolve to “[resist] the Israeli
occupation by all means available”. Alareer affirmed the role of
armed struggle as one dimension of the fight for Palestinian
liberation, but largely channeled his own fervor through his pen, as
well as the Expo marker pen
[[link removed]] that he
made famous when declaring, in the early days of the Israeli assault
on Gaza: “The toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But
if the Israelis invade … I’m going to use that marker to throw it
at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would
be able to do.”

Alareer completed his undergraduate work in English at the Islamic
University of Gaza before going on to earn an MA at University College
London and a PhD in English literature at Universiti Putra Malaysia.
Despite his love for his native Arabic, Alareer chose to publish much
of his work in English, which he viewed
[[link removed]] as
a vehicle to reaching the wider world. His poetry contains nods to
Shakespeare and echoes of John Donne, the English poet who was the
subject of Alareer’s dissertation and whose well-known line,
“Death, be not proud,” would fit well alongside verses like If I
Must Die. Meanwhile, Alareer’s courses
[[link removed]] at
the Islamic University of Gaza had his students contending with the
likes of Edward Said and the renowned Palestinian Egyptian poet Tamim
al-Barghouti alongside Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Swift and Mary
Shelley.

Alareer saw his focus on the English canon not as a mark of
anglophilia, but as a form of aesthetic self-determination and a
political strategy. An early essay in If I Must Die chronicles the
formation of this philosophy, tracing its beginning to the 23-day
Israeli offensive, Operation Cast Lead, in 2008-2009. Then a newly
minted MA teaching English in Gaza, Alareer used his time sheltering
from Israeli fire to plan lessons for his coming semester. While
revisiting Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe _– _the western
classic about a shipwrecked Englishman who, marooned on an island in
the Caribbean, is portrayed as a hero for his will to survive – he
was struck by Defoe’s treatment of Friday, a man indigenous to the
region who is portrayed as primitive and subservient. Alareer writes:
“It dawned on me how Friday’s story was mediated by a
self-appointed, colonial, supremacist master assuming ownership of a
land that was not his.”

Alareer saw his people, too, as being too often mediated, or
completely obscured, by western narratives. “Palestinians should
never be the Man Friday of anyone – we have to have our own
narrative,” Alareer resolved. He went on to teach English and
creative writing workshops, edit
[[link removed]] and contribute
[[link removed]] to
anthologies_, _and establish the non-profit We Are Not
Numbers,_ _which aimed to pair youth in Gaza with writing mentors.
“Palestine is a story away,” Alareer wrote in 2014:

Even as Alareer sought to cultivate Palestinian storytellers, he was
equally committed to fostering a critical Palestinian readership.
Encompassing works spanning from The Merchant of Venice to Charles
Dickens and the Israeli Jewish author Yehuda Amichai, Alareer’s
syllabuses invited his students to wrestle with their own artistic,
moral and national inclinations. In the essay Gaza Asks: When Will
This Pass? Alareer recalls: “To many of my students,
[Shakespeare’s Jewish character] Shylock was beyond repair. Even
Shylock’s daughter hated him!” However, with time, discussion and
close reading, Shylock became recognizable to his students as a
character who endured “an apartheid-like society [and] had to choose
between total submission and humiliation … and resisting by the
means available to him. He chose to resist, just like Palestinians do
nowadays.”

[a man speaks into a microphone]

Refaat Alareer in 2014. Photograph: Tony Heriza/AFSC

While If I Must Die defends and demonstrates the power of
storytelling, it is also shadowed with growing doubt. As the title
suggests, the book is shot through with death, its chronological
chapters proceeding through years of violent, compounding siege.
Following his own instructions to his students, Alareer’s reportage
and criticism lean on storytelling, arraying the impact of occupation
in granular, human terms – an elderly woman with cancer denied a
permit to travel for healthcare, the Palestinian corpses held captive
in Israeli prisons, the agony of a father forced to ration his
child’s food. He declares: “There is no normal in Gaza. We never
have normal days, because even when we go back [after a war] we go
back to the siege, the occupation, to dying slowly.”

As If I Must Die progresses, the situation in Gaza grows more
desperate, and Alareer’s defiance jostles with despair. Read in
2024, Alareer’s lamentations from years past are chillingly
prescient. In a 2014 essay, Alareer considers his nieces and nephews,
left traumatized and fatherless by an Israeli airstrike: “Unless
Israeli war criminals are brought to justice and the occupation ends,
my fear is these children will grow up feeling they were betrayed by
the world.” Eight years and some pages later, Alareer grieves:
“[My daughter] Amal is now two wars old.” He wonders: “When will
this pass? … How many dead Palestinians are enough?” After more
than a year of what growing numbers of experts consider to be a
genocide, this question hits with the weight of Gaza’s innumerable
and ongoing loss.

[the cover of a book called if i must die]

 Photograph: OR Books

If I Must Die_ _concludes with several post-7 October dispatches,
pages which throb with both Alareer’s and the reader’s dread.
“Israel [is] heading toward genocide,” he declared on 13 October,
decrying the western world’s overwhelming support for the bombing in
Gaza, and what he saw as its refusal to recognize the historical or
political context for the events of 7 October. In the early hours of
the still-unfolding attack, he told the BBC: “This is exactly like
the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is the Gaza ghetto uprising against
100 years of European and Zionist colonialism and occupation,”
adding that such an operation was “legitimate and moral”. These
three words attracted widespread vitriol. Soon after, he was singled
out [[link removed]] by
the pro-Israel opinion writer Bari Weiss for his sarcastic response to
a debunked story that Hamas had burned babies in ovens. Weiss accused
him of mocking dead Israeli children, and her large online following
unleashed a flood
[[link removed]] of
rape and death threats against Alareer.

But such were the least of Alareer’s concerns by then. Displaced
with his family multiple times in the first few weeks of the genocide,
he described a Gaza of “unprecedented horror” in which no place
was safe and hunger was already hollowing his children’s faces. In
subsequent interviews and posts, he recorded what were, at the time,
shocking escalations of violence, such as the bombing of schools and
hospitals.

“Israel long ago created the concentration camp,” reads an entry
from 26 October 2023. “But now this is an extermination camp.”

Less than a month later, Alareer would be dead, along with his
brother, his sister, four nephews, and a neighbor. The airstrike that
killed them on 8 December 2023 came one day after Alareer received a
threatening phone call from the Israeli military, prompting him to
relocate from a humanitarian shelter to his sister’s home, where the
bomb found him anyway.

The anthology both answers and extends the imperative of its eponymous
poem to “tell [Alareer’s] story”. But the author calls readers
toward a more expansive responsibility:

The promise was that [telling the stories of Gaza] will effect change
and that policies, especially in the United States, will be improved.
But honestly, will they? Does a single Palestinian life matter? Does
it? Reader, as you peruse these chapters … will you make this
matter?

This question was penned in 2022. Alareer is no longer able to witness
how the world fulfills, or fails, this plea.

* Palestinians
[[link removed]]
* Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Chronicle
[[link removed]]
* Refaat Alareer
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]