I decided to put together a list of articles written by and about poets/writers during time of genocide in Palestine. As a poet myself, I’m trying to reframe my understanding of what it means to write and how to constantly resist the dominant narratives of adjusting or accommodating to the horrific violence I’m witnessing on my phone; to continue to see and grieve with the rest of the world calling for a ceasefire. Like Palestinian poet Hala Alyan says, “We owe them our endurance.”
Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide - Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
All the qualities of Craft, the qualities which make a “good” poem, pressured this violence—the violence of the liberal American unwilling to put their body and their peace of mind on the line, a violence which might exist fundamentally outside the boundaries the lyric can address—into disappearing.
It requires that we poison and betray Craft at all turns.
Palestine and all the struggles with which it is bound up require of us, in any and all forms of speech going forward, a commitment to constant and escalating betrayals of this machine.
Craft success is contingent upon ethical and political failure.
If you are a poet of conscience in this moment of genocide, this question must come up. Poetry is not a life-saving surgery. No matter how much we may repeat the metaphor, poetry is not water. It cannot write the bombs out of the sky. It cannot put back together the bodies of a loved one, or build a safe place for even a mouse to sleep in Gaza. But this is not to say that poetry or words in general are useless in a time of genocide. If words had no power to influence people's feelings about the bombing of hospitals or the military detention of children, then Israeli forces would not be arresting poets and other writers. - Priscilla Wathington
I look for counterpropaganda that speaks truth directly rather than debunking, that endless tail-chasing, exhausting busywork that would have us repeating the lie, wearing its groove so deep as we try to get the heavy truck unstuck from the mud. We need a tow, a plank wedged under the back wheels that turn. May we be fleas, porcupines, not countering overwhelming force head on but forcing them to address our endlessness, all our irritating smallness, close to the earth, close to the skin. - Rasha Abdulhadi
Every Throne Will Fall - Vajra Chandrasekera
How does Palestine free us? In thinking and learning about Palestine we find clarity about all struggle, which is connected not only by the power dynamic of oppressor against oppressed, but also by the very specific and deeply entangled recent history of the world, how it was violently shaped by European and American empires, and how those imperial dynamics are currently playing out in our long and painful age of decolonization, which is still very much ongoing. If you want to understand ten thousand struggles across the face of this earth, look at Palestine, then look back at where you live. The world resonates; history reverberates.
No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear - Toni Morrison
None of this bodes well for the future. Still, I remember the shout of my friend that day after Christmas: No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
What a Palestinian American Wants You To Know About Dehumanization - Hala Alyan
The concept of power is inextricable from stories we’re told. This has been true throughout history. Narrative distortions have been at times structural and by design. The more powerful a narrative, the higher the stakes of its preservation, and the more consequences there can be to questioning or speaking against it. It is worth paying attention to who can tell which stories: who is entitled to which language? Who is allowed to levy criticism, with which vocabulary?
In the urgency of moments like this, indeed, art is not a replacement for policy. Poems will not save us. Poems will not save Gaza. I say that as a poet. They will not stop what needs stopping, or single-handedly bring about action, policy change, Palestinian self-determination, rights, and dignity.
It is also true that poetry—and art and music and film—are offshoots of bearing witness: they fortify us, sustain us, especially in times of erasure. They help us rehearse empathy, and build the necessary muscle memory to call upon it regularly. They can also remind us what we’re doing and why, becoming useful as compasses, rest stops, places to sharpen our ideas and counter dissonance, to clarify our thinking, and our hearts, and to rest in community. They are where we unlearn stories, where we cut our tongues on new ones.
How Poetry Became a Tool of Resistance for Palestinians - Armani Syed
For Palestinians, poetry is “compensation for their lack of physical power,” [Atef] Alshaer says. “They have been exposed to these practices of violence by the Israeli occupation and left with nothing, so they have used their voice to the maximum [extent] possible.”
For displaced Palestinians, poetry is a space to rebuild their homeland through words, and make it “visible through such vivid and relatable language so anybody in the world could read that poetry and be somehow moved by it,” Alshaer says.
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[Najwan] Darwish adds that the current destruction in Gaza has caused immeasurable archival loss for writers. “For any colonial project, the main target is the land, but culture is also targeted.”
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Nonetheless, [George] Abraham says it’s imperative that poetry is just one tool in the process for Palestinian liberation and resistance against ethnic cleansing.
“Poetry can't stop a bullet. Poetry won't free a prisoner. And that's why we need to do the political organizing work as well,” they say. “But if we can't imagine a free liberated world in language, how can we build one?”
These are the poets and writers who have been killed in Gaza. - Dan Sheehan
This is why I am writing now; it might be my last message that makes it out to the free world, flying with the doves of peace to tell them that we love life, or at least what life we have managed to live; in Gaza all paths before us are blocked, and instead we’re just one tweet or breaking news story away from death.
Anyway, I’ll begin.
My name is Nour al-Din Hajjaj, I am a Palestinian writer, I am twenty-seven years old and I have many dreams.
I am not a number and I do not consent to my death being passing news. Say, too, that I love life, happiness, freedom, children’s laughter, the sea, coffee, writing, Fairouz, everything that is joyful—though these things will all disappear in the space of a moment.
One of my dreams is for my books and my writings to travel the world, for my pen to have wings so that no unstamped passport or visa rejection can hold it back.
Another dream of mine is to have a small family, to have a little son who looks like me and to tell him a bedtime story as I rock him in my arms.
Palestine Is a Story Away: A Tribute to Refaat Alareer - Mosab Abu Toha
What Refaat asked of every one of us was to tell his tale. And his tale and those of others need to change this world, need to stop the genocide. It is not fiction. It is not poetry. It is his life.
Refaat left us, but his word must not.
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I still foolishly hope that Refaat will come back to see a peaceful world for Palestinians, an end to the blockade and occupation, and a ceasefire that could bring water and food to the starving and bleeding children and mothers.
Refaat Alareer Was a Brilliant Poet and Intellectual—He Was Also My Teacher - Jehad Abusalim
The moment he picked up his Expo marker—a symbol later used to honor his memory—he taught us English as not just a language of vocabulary, grammar, and structures but also a tool for more profound understanding and expression.
Refaat understood that teaching and learning English presented a unique opportunity to break through the physical, intellectual, academic, and cultural barriers imposed by the occupation. He viewed English as an act of resistance and defiance.
Refaat did not just impart knowledge; he offered a glimpse of hope, a respite from the relentless pressures of Gaza. His classes were journeys, both intellectual and cultural, beyond the confines of the blockade, allowing us to explore new worlds and stories, defying the laws of physics and oppression.
I wonder if the question is partly a way of expressing horror not only at the sheer tremendousness of this violence, which is being enacted on an industrial scale – a scale that brings humanity so close to inhumanity that I think that for many it shakes the very sense of what we, as humans, actually are – but also at the way violence can make art-making seem quite futile and feeble, something easily crushed. Basically, it’s easy to feel useless, and from there it’s a short leap to despair. But I don’t believe we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical. - Isabella Hammad
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It’s true, international law is meaningless if there is no political will to enforce it. And the discourse of human rights has always failed peoples of the global south: it was produced almost entirely by Europeans, did not address coloniality, and it took the nation state as the framework without accounting for indigenous peoples and their rights, for example. - Isabella Hammad
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When every time I pick up my phone I’m seeing footage of destroyed neighbourhoods, grieving mothers, mass graves. It makes everything I have to say feel absurd and disgusting. In these moments I lose faith in language, in conversation, dialogue, everything. The only word that means anything to me at such a moment is the word: No. And all I want to do is repeat it to myself again and again, seeing these images of devastation and suffering. No, no, no. - Sally Rooney
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I said in my first message that at first I’d thought talking and writing seemed pointless, as you say, and they may continue to feel incredibly difficult, but talking and thinking as clearly as we can, even as we understandably do not feel cool-headed, is so important, it is our responsibility, when the politicians are telling the public that this is too complicated to understand. They are lying. - Isabella Hammad
The Voice Notes Refaat Alareer Sent Before His Death - Yasmeen Serhan
I teach English poetry this term and I have 200 students. I posted an announcement on our Facebook group telling them I’m sorry that I can’t help enough, I can’t protect them as I should be as a teacher protecting his students. And I asked them to write—to write poetry, Arabic and English articles, and I did help some of them publish articles and pieces and poems as part of my role as a teacher, despite me being extremely under pressure, having my home and my building bombed and having to evacuate to many places and shelters. - Refaat Alareer
Palestinian Poet Najwan Darwish: ‘We can’t begin to comprehend the loss of art’ - Alexia Underwood
For more than 70 days, every day, several times a day, I’ve been seeing videos and images of murdered and wounded children, in bombed hospitals, under the rubble, etc. I can’t stop thinking about them. I’ve started searching on social media, trying to find out what’s happened to them, their stories, their names. So, it’s a hellish moment. When you are in such a hellish moment, your thoughts about art and the role of art or poetry or writing can’t remain the same.
There was a moment at the beginning of the genocide when I thought I would never write again.
Usually I write on paper, and I carry a notebook with me wherever I go. I write poems in it as an everyday practice – like a diary. When I finish the pages of a notebook, I edit it and it becomes a poetry collection, a book.
It’s a metaphor for our lives as well, because even if [Palestinians] want to continue as a nation, as a people, we have to remember, but we also have to forget. And I don’t know what we should remember and what we should forget. People are acting brave and strong in front of the media every day. But Israel has caused enormous damage to our lives. There have been eight decades of suffering, if not a full century, because of this colonial project. It’s like living your entire life in a nightmare.
I think of writing as a testimony for history. If one day in the future someone reads my poetry, I think, or I hope, they will be able to tell who is the colonizer, and who are the people of the land. Literature can sometimes reflect this better than any political speech.
It’s difficult for me to talk about the role of artists, or writers, in a genocide. Maybe you are relatively safe for a moment, but you are not. No one is safe.
So here, you see the ironies of history; history mocks us. It shows us that the things we thought people suffered in the past – they’re still in front of you. It says, you think you are writing about the past; you’re really writing about your future. - Najwan Darwish
I am relieved that my novel is finally making its way into the world. And yet, what kind of world is it entering? How can one think about books during a genocide, when the poets are being arrested, the writers ripped apart by bombs? Even the book world is violently suppressing Palestinian voices: how many instances of censorship have we seen? How many Palestinian writers have been either openly or—more dangerously—quietly canceled?
Erasure is a dangerous thing, but it’s why I have to believe that stories matter. Writing is tedious but necessary work. Next year, the olive farmers in Palestine will be back at their trees, refusing to give up. I take my cue from them—these are my people, and their humble resilience will continue to inspire me.
The Writing Of Pain By Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
Layan Kayed was arrested again while I was in the process of gathering these stories—she had repeated a sentence I’d heard often from female detainees: “Imprisonment the first time is different: there’s mystery and discovery and fear and conflicting emotions. But the second time is abhorrent: there’s a sense of tedious reiteration, of scenes I’ve tried long and hard to wipe from my life. It’s repugnant, filled only with the stench of prison.”
They’ve stolen their time, a chunk of their life; the jailer punctured holes in their psyche and in their relations with others, have wounded provinces in their memory, and the traumas to be revealed in time will surface in the shape of their relationships and in their fear and in their gait and in their gestures. There are no reparations for that.
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Perhaps I’ll write about his longing to cry, or the writer’s longing, never to be realized, to stroke his hand, as she ponders that this is what poetry is. It was no more than that—just a conversation between a guava vendor and a writer —but it resulted in long discussions about the essence of poetry: it is what is left unsaid between the guava vendor and the writer desiring to arrive at the other end of the world.
It’s over 100 days of the genocide against Palestinians with the full support of the US government. Since October I’ve lost a lot hope in any form of government to be honest. I’m almost embarrassed to say I had any hope in the first place. I feel my bitterness and resentment rising in me again. What I learned over the years is community is where I build my roots, where my hope continues to grow, where love, dignity, and the work of liberation flourishes. Where the fight for a free Palestine flows continuously. This is what I hold onto.