This is the first installment of “Preserving Gaza,” a series of interviews with Palestinian writers and scholars about particular aspects of Gaza’s history, heritage and cultural life, much of which has been destroyed by Israel’s siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip following the attacks of October 7th.
Atef Alshaer is a senior lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He is also a poet and translator who grew up in the Gaza Strip. His published books include Love and Poetry in the Middle East: Love and Literature from Antiquity to the Present, Language and National Identity in Palestine: Representations of Power and Resistance in Gaza, Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World and A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba. This conversation, focused on literature from Gaza, took place on February 22nd, and has been edited for clarity and length.
—Ursula Lindsey
●
Ursula Lindsey: We planned this conversation about Palestinian literature and writing from Gaza several weeks back. Since then, thousands more residents of Gaza have been killed in Israeli bombardments. An Israeli ground operation in Rafah—where over a million people have taken refuge—seems imminent. People are starving in northern Gaza. How can we think of and approach literature from a place that is suffering like this right now, that is being devastated as we speak?
Atef Alshaer: I think we have seen remarkable poems coming out of Gaza. At this moment I see literature and poetry in particular—because it’s kind of quick, you don’t need as much deliberation. I’m reminded of the poetry—it’s very, very moving—by a lady who was killed, unfortunately, shortly after she wrote her poems. And she anticipated the harsh fate that came her way. Hiba Abu Nada, have you heard about her?1
I translated one of Hiba’s poems and wrote the introduction for a volume of poetry that should be coming out soon.2 Israel has killed so many of the writers and thinkers and poets of Gaza, it really wants to kill the brains of Gaza. It’s doing it systematically, destructively and in the most cruel forms.
Poetry feels like it registers the moment, like it’s of this moment, and people who write from within Gaza, they write what is almost like farewell poetry, because anybody can be a target. In the poems that we have seen so far, they are saying their final words in poetry, because poetry survives.
And also, the Palestinians, I don’t know if I can say we’re fortunate, but I think in terms of literature we have a quite extraordinary and diverse literary record from before 1948 up until this moment, and it deals with all sorts of situations: massacres, suffering, hope, liberation, resistance, humanism, all sorts of themes. And I think people resort to this as a refuge from the bleak moment that we’re going through. There are people who are on the ground in Gaza who write poetry as a form of refuge, or to register the moment; as a spiritual companion to their very difficult lives and as a record for the future as well.
UL: What is Gaza’s literary heritage? Are there particular narratives associated with Gaza? What place has Gaza occupied in the Palestinian/Arab literary imagination?
AA: Gaza has an extraordinary history as a meeting point, really, between civilizations and continents. Geographically it’s between Africa and Asia, and it’s on the Mediterranean.
If you read Nur Masalha’s book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, we see that Gaza in olden times, in the Greek times, it was known for schools of rhetoric, of philosophy. And there were amazing archaeological finds that were housed in a museum in Gaza that was just destroyed by the Israelis.3 The Egyptians were in Gaza. Then you have the Greeks, then you have the Romans and then you have Islamic civilization. Gaza’s known as Ghazzat Hashim, because the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, Hashim ibn Abd al-Manaf, was buried there. It was the trade route going through Syria to Palestine. And then you have Imam al-Shafi’i, founder of one the four schools of law in Islam. Al-Shafi’i was born in Gaza; there’s a mosque named after him that was just destroyed. Then obviously you have the Ottomans who were in Gaza for four hundred years or more—from 1517 to 1918, when the British came. So during all that period you have literature—not poems or novels—but you have a lot of writing on Gaza. [The medieval historians and geographers] Al-Maqdisi, Al-Maqrizi, they visited Gaza, they wrote about Gaza.
In the modern period, from 1918 up until 1948, Gaza’s population was about 80,000, and it was populated by Bedouins, particularly in the South, where my family is now, in Rafah. And then in 1948 about 200,000 people came to Gaza—and they became 2.3 million with time. And from there on you start to see literature, poetry, novels; the refugees who settled in Gaza start writing about their experience, like they do today. You have Muin Bseiso. And obviously Ghassan Kanafani writing the famous “Letter from Gaza.” And Gaza from that time becomes really the vocal point of resistance against Israeli colonialism, against Israeli occupation. In 1956 Israel committed a massacre in Khan Younis after the tripartite aggression against Egypt by the British, the French and the Israelis. Somebody like Yahya Sinwar, the current leader in Hamas, his family was there, they were refugees from Askalan.4
Writing becomes almost part of the landscape of Gaza. People writing literature, painting, producing music, and that includes later on the Islamic movements, such as Yahya Sinwar, who wrote a novel called “Thorns and Carnations” while in prison, and documenting various layers of the struggle against Israeli occupation and family dynamics within the context of the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). You have lots of prison literature; many Hamas leaders wrote novels and poems; I analyzed some of them. They’re actually very telling as to their lives, what they think privately, special and sad moments, and the tragedies that have afflicted their families.
And then you have very important figures who wrote within the mainstream secular Palestinian literature, such as Atef Abu Saif, Yahya Ashour and before that Muin Bseiso, the most prolific of Gaza writers. He was a poet who emerged within what you might call the age of resistance poetry, which started mainly in the Sixties. He was a refugee in Gaza and started writing plays in particular. His plays were inspired, which was characteristic of the age, by Egyptian writers, recasting the old Arabic tradition but putting it in modernist terms, and also by third-world revolutions, for example, black peoples’ revolution; one of his plays is entitled The Tragedy of Ernesto “Che” Guevara—Guevara visited Gaza, actually, in the 1950s.
UL: When you talk about literature of resistance—could you talk about the goals or characteristics of this writing?
AA: From 1948 to the 1960s, the Palestinians were really just described or seen in the international political scene as a collection of refugees. That’s it, they are people who were in Palestine and were dispossessed and almost disappeared off the political map; Mahmoud Darwish contributed to collection called Victims of a Map. So the literature of resistance is a literature to speak to what happened to the Palestinians in 1948—to the dispossession, to the depopulation of Palestine—and it always tried to portray Palestine before it was destroyed, on the one hand, and also, on the other hand, tried to speak to the moment of resistance against the Israeli occupation and the emergence of a new Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in 1964. It was inspired by third-world literature and by third-world movements—in Algeria, in particular, in Africa. You had poets such as Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Muin Bseiso, Rashid Hussein, Fadwa Tuqan—all those figures emerged in the Sixties from the depth of the Palestinian tragedy, which they had lived and experienced. And they wrote about it by way of registering what Palestine was like before. So you have a very vivid description of Palestinian villages, Palestinian life before 1948, but you also have a very strong nationalist mobilizational tone towards the reclamation of Palestine.
From the 1960s up to the 1990s, up to the Oslo agreement, you have poems of resistance which are derived from the Palestinian experience: the pain, the suffering, the hardships; also, on the other hand, the struggle, the hope and the belief that there will be liberation one day somehow. The remarkable thing about Palestinian poetry—because it’s linked to Arabic poetry, because it’s linked to this great tradition—it’s quite mature poetry, it’s not just local. It’s poetry that anyone can read and, I would say, identify with, recognize as artistically very mature, very capable, very moving.
And then it moved, later on—particularly after 2000 with the Second Intifada and with younger poets like Mosab Abu Toha and Yahya Ashour from Gaza—in the direction of existentialist poetry, but still grounded in the Palestinian experience. I call this later stage post-resistance literature because it doesn’t have the same tone as the earlier resistance literature. I identify this literature as one which does not reference the national struggle in the familiar mobilizational tone but foregrounds it without dwelling on it. It is more artistically minded, in the sense that it wants to be read as international poetry, as part of the wider experience of human conditions and development in the literary sense. Therefore, it transcends the national moment to speak about the inner world of the individual poets, their hopes, frustrations and their vision too. It is not about the grand narrative of resisting the occupation, but more about how the individual registers their interaction and their will in language against often insurmountable odds and feelings of alienation.
UL: Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Gaza after October 7th, I’ve seen people sharing a lot of Palestinian writing online, including some of the older writing. Why do you think that people are finding it important to go back and share and read things that have been written even decades ago, from Gaza and about Gaza? What is the significance of this to us now?
AA: I think it’s actually very important to do this. I live in the West, I live in the U.K. I was, immediately after the 7th of October, on a well-known program on BBC Radio 4. The discussion was very, very disappointing. It was very difficult because it’s almost like Palestinian history started on the 7th of October and there is nothing else. So you don’t really have the blockade of Gaza for seventeen years—and actually much longer if one knows the history of Gaza. The destruction of Gaza so many times over, the thousands of people killed. Palestinian history has been cumulative, it’s been reiterative.
The situation in Gaza now—the volume, the scale—is so huge. The destruction is enormous. The intent is genocide. This is unprecedented. But I think the character of the enemy, if you’d like, the colonial power in question here, Israel—and the countries that support it, such as the U.S. and the U.K.—it’s a character of destruction right from the beginning, of negation of identity, negation of, as Edward Said called it, the permission to narrate. We almost need permission to narrate our own suffering and our own stories and be accepted as legitimate people with political and human rights.
Those poets and writers who came before, long before, they have recognized this, they’ve seen it, they’ve experienced it so many times. For example, Mahmoud Darwish’s volume called A State of Siege. If you read it now, it’s so graphic. It talks about what happened in 2002, the siege of Jenin and Ramallah and the destruction that was inflicted in these places. Or the destruction of the Palestinians in Beirut in ’82. If you read Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, it’s a very visceral account of the [Israeli] bombing of Beirut, it’s extraordinary. And also In Praise of the High Shadow, the long poem that goes with it.
So it’s kind of like history repeats itself, but more ferociously. I think that when people share such writers, they’re sharing their history, taking refuge in it. Saying: we are in this historical moment, but we also have this longer history. And it speaks to their own experience—the suffering, the anger, all that. It says to them: we have stayed, we have lived until now under such destruction.
There is nothing better than poetry and literature more broadly that has registered the depth of the Palestinian experience. No political pamphlet or discourse has done that. I think in two hundred years, three hundred years, subsequent generations when they look at this period, literature will serve as one of the main records as to the events that took place.
UL: Other contemporary writers—such as Refaat Alareer (who was killed by an Israeli strike in December), Mosab Abu Toha or Atef Abu Saif—have written books, in English or translated into English, that seem to want to bear witness and to educate Western readers about the realities of Gaza, about its people. A lot of Palestinian writing is being shared around the world in that same spirit—as an attempt at education, a gesture of solidarity. Do you have any thoughts on the way reading stories from Gaza can lead to greater understanding and empathy? What would you say, as a scholar and a poet and a translator, on the potential and the limits of literature in this regard?
AA: I think it’s really significant because Palestinians—they have neither power nor wealth. And in the world order that we exist within, if you don’t have power or wealth, you can be just eclipsed. Israel, in 1948, basically removed the Palestinians from the political map. And that’s why they refer to them as Arabs, just another Arab group with no political, no cultural references of their own. What literature has done is actually reinforce the existence of a people and create a very vivid portrayal of this nationhood. The total dehumanization of the Palestinians has been going on for a long, long time. Before 1948 and after 1948 they have been described in the most atrocious terms. And there has been an attempt to show Palestinians as people who are uncivilized. You know, when you have a current Israeli minister who says: “They are human animals, and we will act accordingly.” I think what our very beautiful literature has done, apart from everything else, is show: those people actually have one of the highest literacies in the Middle East, the highest Ph.D.-holding rates in the Middle East, they are very cultured people.
What Israel is doing in Gaza, destroying the universities… Refaat Alareer was teaching at this university and teaching people how to write stories in English, to address the world, to describe their suffering, using literature as a way to do that. I think all of that has been remarkable, but Israel is trying to absolutely eradicate that. Israel is describing the Palestinians as human animals on the one hand and on the other it is trying to destroy their culture systematically. What has been amazing, quite extraordinary, has been that the Palestinians have insisted on having a voice, on consistently writing their story. And writing in English and Arabic and other languages, writing wherever they are—but the reference point being what happened to the Palestinians and what is happening in Palestine now.
UL: Can you tell us a bit about writing, publishing and book distribution—about the literary scene—in Gaza before October 7th?
AA: There was quite an emerging scene of writers writing poems and novels. A lot of them didn’t find the platforms to publish their books and therefore they found the internet—Facebook posts and Twitter accounts and using whatever mechanism to make their voice heard. Many writers in Gaza have not been paid attention to enough. There were many people who were active but were not given the opportunity to emerge within the broader literary scene. But you have writers like Atef Abu Saif, who highlighted the destruction that Gaza has been exposed to in the last seventeen years. Another writer who came out of Gaza and gained some attention is Mosab Abu Toha, and that’s due to him being in the States and writing in English. But I think a lot more could have been done.
UL: I wonder if you have any thoughts on being a Palestinian writer right now as this is happening and trying to write about it. I think many of us are feeling hopeless about what words can do right now, at the same time that we feel the necessity to keep on writing, speaking out, telling stories, reading and sharing the words of others. The Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage has written that “every sentence we begin to write is full of hope” but “not to have it in you to start sentences is a sign of depression.” Do you have any thoughts on hope and despair and writing right now?
AA: I’ll start with myself because that’s what I know best. Since 2018 I’ve been writing for the newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed every two or three weeks about something in the Arab world or a book; publishing poems with them and translating and so on. I have found refuge while here in London in writing for them about the specific situation in Gaza and Palestine. Because I found this moment to be so extraordinary in terms of the scale of it, the suffering of people, my family in Gaza while I am here. And I found one way to engage with this situation, which is really urgent and essential, is to write. So I’ve kept writing every week. I find this is perhaps the most intimate interaction I can have with the situation—registering what it means, what I’m thinking. I’ve been focusing on different aspects—like doctors, how they’ve been targeted; children; houses. Today I wrote an article about starvation.
You have this destruction and this genocide and this killing going on every day, and you have the Israeli leaders pronouncing with such venom and such intent that they’re going to do more and more of it. So the heart sinks, really. And on the one hand you say: nobody’s listening, nothing is going to come of it. But I find this to be a fatalistic sentiment. I can’t myself give in totally, because there’s got to be a record, there’s got to be writing.
A lot of poets, a lot of writers, within Gaza, I’m sure they’re just struggling to survive and therefore they have no time for writing, no space. And then some try to squeeze time out of this madness and utter destruction they’re exposed to, writing because if God forbid they are lost—and some of them have been killed—that’s the record that will remain of them. It survives the moment. So their souls, almost, are living in their words.
Photo credit: Xinhu. People visit Samir Mansour’s bookshop in Gaza City, on April 14, 2022. The bookshop reopened in February 2022 after being destroyed during an Israeli bombing in May 2021; it was damaged again in October 2023.
This is the first installment of “Preserving Gaza,” a series of interviews with Palestinian writers and scholars about particular aspects of Gaza’s history, heritage and cultural life, much of which has been destroyed by Israel’s siege and bombardment of the Gaza Strip following the attacks of October 7th.
Atef Alshaer is a senior lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He is also a poet and translator who grew up in the Gaza Strip. His published books include Love and Poetry in the Middle East: Love and Literature from Antiquity to the Present, Language and National Identity in Palestine: Representations of Power and Resistance in Gaza, Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World and A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba. This conversation, focused on literature from Gaza, took place on February 22nd, and has been edited for clarity and length.
—Ursula Lindsey
●
Ursula Lindsey: We planned this conversation about Palestinian literature and writing from Gaza several weeks back. Since then, thousands more residents of Gaza have been killed in Israeli bombardments. An Israeli ground operation in Rafah—where over a million people have taken refuge—seems imminent. People are starving in northern Gaza. How can we think of and approach literature from a place that is suffering like this right now, that is being devastated as we speak?
Atef Alshaer: I think we have seen remarkable poems coming out of Gaza. At this moment I see literature and poetry in particular—because it’s kind of quick, you don’t need as much deliberation. I’m reminded of the poetry—it’s very, very moving—by a lady who was killed, unfortunately, shortly after she wrote her poems. And she anticipated the harsh fate that came her way. Hiba Abu Nada, have you heard about her?11. Hiba Abu Nada, 32, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her home in the Gaza Strip on October 20th.
I translated one of Hiba’s poems and wrote the introduction for a volume of poetry that should be coming out soon.22. We are in the heights now—
teachers, free of their crowded classrooms,
their voices no longer shouting to be heard,
new families without pain or sadness,
journalists taking pictures of heaven
writing about the eternal love.
All, all of them are from Gaza.
There is a new Gaza in heaven
without siege
taking shape now. Israel has killed so many of the writers and thinkers and poets of Gaza, it really wants to kill the brains of Gaza. It’s doing it systematically, destructively and in the most cruel forms.
Poetry feels like it registers the moment, like it’s of this moment, and people who write from within Gaza, they write what is almost like farewell poetry, because anybody can be a target. In the poems that we have seen so far, they are saying their final words in poetry, because poetry survives.
And also, the Palestinians, I don’t know if I can say we’re fortunate, but I think in terms of literature we have a quite extraordinary and diverse literary record from before 1948 up until this moment, and it deals with all sorts of situations: massacres, suffering, hope, liberation, resistance, humanism, all sorts of themes. And I think people resort to this as a refuge from the bleak moment that we’re going through. There are people who are on the ground in Gaza who write poetry as a form of refuge, or to register the moment; as a spiritual companion to their very difficult lives and as a record for the future as well.
UL: What is Gaza’s literary heritage? Are there particular narratives associated with Gaza? What place has Gaza occupied in the Palestinian/Arab literary imagination?
AA: Gaza has an extraordinary history as a meeting point, really, between civilizations and continents. Geographically it’s between Africa and Asia, and it’s on the Mediterranean.
If you read Nur Masalha’s book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History, we see that Gaza in olden times, in the Greek times, it was known for schools of rhetoric, of philosophy. And there were amazing archaeological finds that were housed in a museum in Gaza that was just destroyed by the Israelis.33. The National Museum attached to Al-Israa University was bombed on January 18th (as have been all museums and universities in the Gaza Strip). The Egyptians were in Gaza. Then you have the Greeks, then you have the Romans and then you have Islamic civilization. Gaza’s known as Ghazzat Hashim, because the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, Hashim ibn Abd al-Manaf, was buried there. It was the trade route going through Syria to Palestine. And then you have Imam al-Shafi’i, founder of one the four schools of law in Islam. Al-Shafi’i was born in Gaza; there’s a mosque named after him that was just destroyed. Then obviously you have the Ottomans who were in Gaza for four hundred years or more—from 1517 to 1918, when the British came. So during all that period you have literature—not poems or novels—but you have a lot of writing on Gaza. [The medieval historians and geographers] Al-Maqdisi, Al-Maqrizi, they visited Gaza, they wrote about Gaza.
In the modern period, from 1918 up until 1948, Gaza’s population was about 80,000, and it was populated by Bedouins, particularly in the South, where my family is now, in Rafah. And then in 1948 about 200,000 people came to Gaza—and they became 2.3 million with time. And from there on you start to see literature, poetry, novels; the refugees who settled in Gaza start writing about their experience, like they do today. You have Muin Bseiso. And obviously Ghassan Kanafani writing the famous “Letter from Gaza.” And Gaza from that time becomes really the vocal point of resistance against Israeli colonialism, against Israeli occupation. In 1956 Israel committed a massacre in Khan Younis after the tripartite aggression against Egypt by the British, the French and the Israelis. Somebody like Yahya Sinwar, the current leader in Hamas, his family was there, they were refugees from Askalan.44. Yahya Sinwar is Hamas’s leader in Gaza and is believed to have planned the October 7th attacks.
Writing becomes almost part of the landscape of Gaza. People writing literature, painting, producing music, and that includes later on the Islamic movements, such as Yahya Sinwar, who wrote a novel called “Thorns and Carnations” while in prison, and documenting various layers of the struggle against Israeli occupation and family dynamics within the context of the first Palestinian Intifada (1987-1993). You have lots of prison literature; many Hamas leaders wrote novels and poems; I analyzed some of them. They’re actually very telling as to their lives, what they think privately, special and sad moments, and the tragedies that have afflicted their families.
And then you have very important figures who wrote within the mainstream secular Palestinian literature, such as Atef Abu Saif, Yahya Ashour and before that Muin Bseiso, the most prolific of Gaza writers. He was a poet who emerged within what you might call the age of resistance poetry, which started mainly in the Sixties. He was a refugee in Gaza and started writing plays in particular. His plays were inspired, which was characteristic of the age, by Egyptian writers, recasting the old Arabic tradition but putting it in modernist terms, and also by third-world revolutions, for example, black peoples’ revolution; one of his plays is entitled The Tragedy of Ernesto “Che” Guevara—Guevara visited Gaza, actually, in the 1950s.
UL: When you talk about literature of resistance—could you talk about the goals or characteristics of this writing?
AA: From 1948 to the 1960s, the Palestinians were really just described or seen in the international political scene as a collection of refugees. That’s it, they are people who were in Palestine and were dispossessed and almost disappeared off the political map; Mahmoud Darwish contributed to collection called Victims of a Map. So the literature of resistance is a literature to speak to what happened to the Palestinians in 1948—to the dispossession, to the depopulation of Palestine—and it always tried to portray Palestine before it was destroyed, on the one hand, and also, on the other hand, tried to speak to the moment of resistance against the Israeli occupation and the emergence of a new Palestinian national movement in the form of the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in 1964. It was inspired by third-world literature and by third-world movements—in Algeria, in particular, in Africa. You had poets such as Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Muin Bseiso, Rashid Hussein, Fadwa Tuqan—all those figures emerged in the Sixties from the depth of the Palestinian tragedy, which they had lived and experienced. And they wrote about it by way of registering what Palestine was like before. So you have a very vivid description of Palestinian villages, Palestinian life before 1948, but you also have a very strong nationalist mobilizational tone towards the reclamation of Palestine.
From the 1960s up to the 1990s, up to the Oslo agreement, you have poems of resistance which are derived from the Palestinian experience: the pain, the suffering, the hardships; also, on the other hand, the struggle, the hope and the belief that there will be liberation one day somehow. The remarkable thing about Palestinian poetry—because it’s linked to Arabic poetry, because it’s linked to this great tradition—it’s quite mature poetry, it’s not just local. It’s poetry that anyone can read and, I would say, identify with, recognize as artistically very mature, very capable, very moving.
And then it moved, later on—particularly after 2000 with the Second Intifada and with younger poets like Mosab Abu Toha and Yahya Ashour from Gaza—in the direction of existentialist poetry, but still grounded in the Palestinian experience. I call this later stage post-resistance literature because it doesn’t have the same tone as the earlier resistance literature. I identify this literature as one which does not reference the national struggle in the familiar mobilizational tone but foregrounds it without dwelling on it. It is more artistically minded, in the sense that it wants to be read as international poetry, as part of the wider experience of human conditions and development in the literary sense. Therefore, it transcends the national moment to speak about the inner world of the individual poets, their hopes, frustrations and their vision too. It is not about the grand narrative of resisting the occupation, but more about how the individual registers their interaction and their will in language against often insurmountable odds and feelings of alienation.
UL: Since the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Gaza after October 7th, I’ve seen people sharing a lot of Palestinian writing online, including some of the older writing. Why do you think that people are finding it important to go back and share and read things that have been written even decades ago, from Gaza and about Gaza? What is the significance of this to us now?
AA: I think it’s actually very important to do this. I live in the West, I live in the U.K. I was, immediately after the 7th of October, on a well-known program on BBC Radio 4. The discussion was very, very disappointing. It was very difficult because it’s almost like Palestinian history started on the 7th of October and there is nothing else. So you don’t really have the blockade of Gaza for seventeen years—and actually much longer if one knows the history of Gaza. The destruction of Gaza so many times over, the thousands of people killed. Palestinian history has been cumulative, it’s been reiterative.
The situation in Gaza now—the volume, the scale—is so huge. The destruction is enormous. The intent is genocide. This is unprecedented. But I think the character of the enemy, if you’d like, the colonial power in question here, Israel—and the countries that support it, such as the U.S. and the U.K.—it’s a character of destruction right from the beginning, of negation of identity, negation of, as Edward Said called it, the permission to narrate. We almost need permission to narrate our own suffering and our own stories and be accepted as legitimate people with political and human rights.
Those poets and writers who came before, long before, they have recognized this, they’ve seen it, they’ve experienced it so many times. For example, Mahmoud Darwish’s volume called A State of Siege. If you read it now, it’s so graphic. It talks about what happened in 2002, the siege of Jenin and Ramallah and the destruction that was inflicted in these places. Or the destruction of the Palestinians in Beirut in ’82. If you read Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, it’s a very visceral account of the [Israeli] bombing of Beirut, it’s extraordinary. And also In Praise of the High Shadow, the long poem that goes with it.
So it’s kind of like history repeats itself, but more ferociously. I think that when people share such writers, they’re sharing their history, taking refuge in it. Saying: we are in this historical moment, but we also have this longer history. And it speaks to their own experience—the suffering, the anger, all that. It says to them: we have stayed, we have lived until now under such destruction.
There is nothing better than poetry and literature more broadly that has registered the depth of the Palestinian experience. No political pamphlet or discourse has done that. I think in two hundred years, three hundred years, subsequent generations when they look at this period, literature will serve as one of the main records as to the events that took place.
UL: Other contemporary writers—such as Refaat Alareer (who was killed by an Israeli strike in December), Mosab Abu Toha or Atef Abu Saif—have written books, in English or translated into English, that seem to want to bear witness and to educate Western readers about the realities of Gaza, about its people. A lot of Palestinian writing is being shared around the world in that same spirit—as an attempt at education, a gesture of solidarity. Do you have any thoughts on the way reading stories from Gaza can lead to greater understanding and empathy? What would you say, as a scholar and a poet and a translator, on the potential and the limits of literature in this regard?
AA: I think it’s really significant because Palestinians—they have neither power nor wealth. And in the world order that we exist within, if you don’t have power or wealth, you can be just eclipsed. Israel, in 1948, basically removed the Palestinians from the political map. And that’s why they refer to them as Arabs, just another Arab group with no political, no cultural references of their own. What literature has done is actually reinforce the existence of a people and create a very vivid portrayal of this nationhood. The total dehumanization of the Palestinians has been going on for a long, long time. Before 1948 and after 1948 they have been described in the most atrocious terms. And there has been an attempt to show Palestinians as people who are uncivilized. You know, when you have a current Israeli minister who says: “They are human animals, and we will act accordingly.” I think what our very beautiful literature has done, apart from everything else, is show: those people actually have one of the highest literacies in the Middle East, the highest Ph.D.-holding rates in the Middle East, they are very cultured people.
What Israel is doing in Gaza, destroying the universities… Refaat Alareer was teaching at this university and teaching people how to write stories in English, to address the world, to describe their suffering, using literature as a way to do that. I think all of that has been remarkable, but Israel is trying to absolutely eradicate that. Israel is describing the Palestinians as human animals on the one hand and on the other it is trying to destroy their culture systematically. What has been amazing, quite extraordinary, has been that the Palestinians have insisted on having a voice, on consistently writing their story. And writing in English and Arabic and other languages, writing wherever they are—but the reference point being what happened to the Palestinians and what is happening in Palestine now.
UL: Can you tell us a bit about writing, publishing and book distribution—about the literary scene—in Gaza before October 7th?
AA: There was quite an emerging scene of writers writing poems and novels. A lot of them didn’t find the platforms to publish their books and therefore they found the internet—Facebook posts and Twitter accounts and using whatever mechanism to make their voice heard. Many writers in Gaza have not been paid attention to enough. There were many people who were active but were not given the opportunity to emerge within the broader literary scene. But you have writers like Atef Abu Saif, who highlighted the destruction that Gaza has been exposed to in the last seventeen years. Another writer who came out of Gaza and gained some attention is Mosab Abu Toha, and that’s due to him being in the States and writing in English. But I think a lot more could have been done.
UL: I wonder if you have any thoughts on being a Palestinian writer right now as this is happening and trying to write about it. I think many of us are feeling hopeless about what words can do right now, at the same time that we feel the necessity to keep on writing, speaking out, telling stories, reading and sharing the words of others. The Lebanese-Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage has written that “every sentence we begin to write is full of hope” but “not to have it in you to start sentences is a sign of depression.” Do you have any thoughts on hope and despair and writing right now?
AA: I’ll start with myself because that’s what I know best. Since 2018 I’ve been writing for the newspaper Al-Araby Al-Jadeed every two or three weeks about something in the Arab world or a book; publishing poems with them and translating and so on. I have found refuge while here in London in writing for them about the specific situation in Gaza and Palestine. Because I found this moment to be so extraordinary in terms of the scale of it, the suffering of people, my family in Gaza while I am here. And I found one way to engage with this situation, which is really urgent and essential, is to write. So I’ve kept writing every week. I find this is perhaps the most intimate interaction I can have with the situation—registering what it means, what I’m thinking. I’ve been focusing on different aspects—like doctors, how they’ve been targeted; children; houses. Today I wrote an article about starvation.
You have this destruction and this genocide and this killing going on every day, and you have the Israeli leaders pronouncing with such venom and such intent that they’re going to do more and more of it. So the heart sinks, really. And on the one hand you say: nobody’s listening, nothing is going to come of it. But I find this to be a fatalistic sentiment. I can’t myself give in totally, because there’s got to be a record, there’s got to be writing.
A lot of poets, a lot of writers, within Gaza, I’m sure they’re just struggling to survive and therefore they have no time for writing, no space. And then some try to squeeze time out of this madness and utter destruction they’re exposed to, writing because if God forbid they are lost—and some of them have been killed—that’s the record that will remain of them. It survives the moment. So their souls, almost, are living in their words.
Photo credit: Xinhu. People visit Samir Mansour’s bookshop in Gaza City, on April 14, 2022. The bookshop reopened in February 2022 after being destroyed during an Israeli bombing in May 2021; it was damaged again in October 2023.
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