If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose – Refaat Alareer

[O/R Books; 2024]

In solitary life, I was a lost question;

In the encompassing darkness,

my answer was concealed

—“Existence,” by Fadwa Tuqan 

Throughout her writing life, twentieth-century Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan gave voice to the steadfastness of Palestinian resistance in the face of displacement, land theft, murder, and occupation. Born in the city of Nablus in 1917, she bore witness to atrocities committed by the Israeli regime, documenting her people’s grief in light of the 1948 Nakba, and the disbelief and anger engendered by the fallout from the 1967 Arab Israeli War. Her poetry, while beautiful, is not merely a string of prettified words strung together by slight sentiment: it possesses a stubborn power. As beloved Palestinian professor, writer and poet Refaat Alareer noted, her poems could leave demagogues and authoritarian bullies like Moshe Dayan shaking in their boots, for they knew from her truthful words that their vaunted positions were sustained by Israel’s brutal war machine, rather than the efficacy of their shallow stories. 

Refaat Alareer was murdered by Israel on December 6th, 2023, just over a year ago at the time of writing, in what many have deemed a targeted assassination. To commemorate his life work, O/R Books has released If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose, an essential collection of his most well known poems, interviews and writings about Palestinian life and the power of storytelling, organized in chronological order and compiled by Yousef M. Aljamal. As the past year has shown, the onslaught on Palestine is not only a demographic war, or a battle over land; it is a war over narrative. Alareer devoted his life to ensuring that Palestinians could reclaim their histories and share their voices with the rest of the world in order to achieve collective liberation. While the Israelis have the backing of a sophisticated military apparatus and decades of mythmaking on their side, Alareer was buoyed by the hope that the written word could humanize Palestinians to Westerners, and allow them to make their case on the world stage. In one powerful section of the book—a transcribed lecture to his students—he talks about Fadwa Tuqan, about being “just a poet,” and rhetorically questions how or why a state as powerful as Israel would be terrified of a wordsmith. He comes back with his own answer: having the marginalized speak up certifies their existence, disrupting attempts to muzzle them and erase the truth. Tuqan wrote for her own people, but the other side was also listening. 

Early poets—from ancient Greece to the Medieval Arabic poets of the Al-Nahda—were standard bearers of the news, speaking from memory to help archive the recent past. In the face of cataclysmic change and murderous genocide, their work possesses an urgency that cannot be denied, and as Alareer’s entire oeuvre shows, he felt that testifying was the writer’s ultimate responsibility. In one essay, he states: “Writing is an act not only of preserving history and the human experience, but also of resistance to intruders and colonizers. Although we do not write only because there is occupation and injustice, we write the kind of literature we do because there is occupation.” In his most well known books, Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (2013), and Gaza Unsilenced (2015), Alareer collected stories from Gazan writers detailing their hopes, fears, memories of displacement, and overwhelming grief. Harnessing their creativity became a tool of empowerment, a way to break through the invisibility cloak draped over Palestinians by the West. He wrote, “We not only assert our existence, but also envision our future.” Writing is, therefore, an assertive act—its promise emphasizing the vitality of one’s imagination and one’s determination to live.

After his death, Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” went viral on social media, representing the defiant spirit of the Palestinian people in the face of wanton cruelty. To quote the particularly affecting ending:

If I must die

Let it bring hope

Let it be a tale

Narrating one’s own story in the face of certain death is a powerful act of defiance, an assurance that the spirit will survive against sophisticated killing machines. As the anthology If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose makes clear, Alareer wrote this poem in 2011, dedicating it to his eldest daughter, Shaimaa, who was later killed along with her newborn baby a few short months after her father’s murder. The specter of death looms large in Alareer’s work, long before October 7th ever occurred—but so does thundering hope, and an indefatigable belief in the power of writing. 

Alareer, like Tuqan, may have “just [been] a poet,” but Israelis felt it best to silence him, while also destroying schools, universities, archives, sites of worship—hundreds if not thousands of years of history and layer upon layer of culture and tradition that existed far longer than the state of Israel could bear. The Israeli strategy has not only been to sever Gazans’ emotional and historic ties to their land but also to sever their tongues: to deprive future generations of the ability to control their narrative. Death and destruction have been willful attempts to tell only one version of history, but Israel has failed mightily on that front. The power of a poem is derived from those who read it, posing a danger that must then be negated by insecure and craven heads of state.

Alareer’s intellect was nimble and wide ranging, yet his work remained accessible both in tone and approach. In one affecting essay, written after the start of Israel’s 2008 onslaught on Gaza, he writes of his newfound annoyance with the novel Robinson Crusoe, which tells the story of a sole shipwreck survivor’s attempt to build a life for himself until his rescue: “For the first time, 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.” He points out the similarity between Israel constantly intervening in and claiming ownership of the Palestinian experience, noting how Crusoe would do the same to exert control over Friday’s narrative. The essay, of course, makes clear what’s at stake when we speak of the importance of telling our own stories as marginalized people. It’s also a crucial work of literary criticism, clearly stating the imperialist thrust of a well-trodden classic, even if Alareer doesn’t delve into the mechanics of the story for long. 

This is not to say that Alareer’s conviction in the sanctity of the written word was not undercut by the painful everyday realities plaguing Palestinians, especially those living in Gaza. He believed in writing as “an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world,” but there are passages throughout If I Must Die wherein he sometimes questions the potency of the endeavor, if not its moral impetus. The question becomes bigger, of course, as the years pass, and especially once Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza becomes undeniable in 2023: “Can a story or a poem change the mind or the heart of the occupiers? Can a book make a difference?” Insofar as poetry can document and archive the atrocities that Palestinians are experiencing, in the face of Western governments and corporate media enabling such evil impunity—how much more writing will it take to convince the world of the Palestinian right to freedom, to self determination?

Alongside If I Must Die, 2024 has seen the publication of vital Palestinian poetry in English, namely Fady Joudah’s […]: Poems and Mosab Abu Toha’s haunting Forest of Noise, both of which do the important work of centering Palestinian perspectives as they chronicle an impossible moment. But, there’s a nagging question for Arab writers and readers like myself working in English which these works raise, and that is the extent to which they can tear through the armor of imperialism while speaking the tongue of its master—in this case, the United States, the primary material supporter of Israel’s genocide. In his recent appearance on the Makdisi Street podcast, Joudah eloquently stated, “Palestine will be liberated in Arabic.” The podcast featured a nuanced conversation on the function of poetry in the face of obliteration, and the limits of solidarity. Working in English—the language of the oppressor—is a blunt tool that may prove successful, but its weaponization could also be overstated. While punctures to the narrative armor of Zionism have finally begun to appear in the mainstream, the pace of change is not nearly fast enough for the horrors continuing to unfold in Gaza, Lebanon, and now Syria. Palestinians have been forced to audition for recognition of their humanity on the world stage in English, but the perpetrators have yet to receive their comeuppance. 

Negotiating power structures in and through language is one of the important themes in post colonial literature, and Refaat Alareer’s work is a crucial addition to that well-established canon. To that end, saying that If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose is essential feels like a massive understatement. But, if there is one simple way to describe this important release from O/R Books, it’s to say that it provides a beautiful tribute to Alareer’s life and work. It is a testament to his sense of humor, empathy, and perceptiveness. The anthology is also an indispensable living document of a people’s fight against annihilation and a thesis statement on what makes us human. 

The question of how and when Palestine will be liberated remains, as does the eternal query on the role of art in times of violent socio-political change. We are, at this moment, witness to a fragile ceasefire, one that allows us to finally breathe a sigh of relief, even if the immediate future remains unclear. It seems fitting here to end with one of the last sentences Alareer wrote shortly before his death in 2023: “As Palestinians, no matter what comes of this, we haven’t failed. We did our best. And we didn’t lose our humanity.”

Yasmin Desouki is an audiovisual archivist, writer, and curator.