In the face of the military siege in Gaza, writer and teacher Refaat Alareer fought for the right of his people to tell their experiences and history. “As a Palestinian, I was raised on stories and storytelling,” writes Alareer. “It is selfish and deceitful not to hide the story.”
It was 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 to mark the year since the author’s death in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, If I Must Die contains a selection of journalism, literary criticism, essays and poetry written between 2010 and 2023. Taken together, they give a glimpse into the unstable 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 was still alive, but it was his death that brought his name into the world’s consciousness. In the hours and days after his murder, Alareer’s poem If I Must Die went viral, echoing from social media to the streets. Written for his daughter Shymaa in 2011, the seemingly simple verses tremble, stretched between tragedy, tenderness and resolution: “If I die / you must live / tell my story … let it bring hope / let it be a legend.”
Shymaa and her infant son were killed by an Israeli plane a few months after her father’s death; on December 4, at the first New York City event of the anthology, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha revealed that, with Refaat and Shymaa Alareer dead, If I Must Die is a letter to “every one of us who has read or heard. poetry”.
Alareer’s writing offers a range of inspiration both colloquial and scholarly. The writer and scholar was born in 1979 in Shuja’iyya, Gaza, an area with a history of violent opposition to Israel. Alareer was shaped by this situation: the book describes how, as a first grader, he blacked out after being hit in the head by a rock thrown by an Israeli soldier who was “smiling from ear to ear”; four years later he was shot with rubber bullets for throwing stones at the occupying forces. Over the years, he saw many relatives killed or maimed by Israeli violence, he sat for hours listening to his grandmother’s and mother’s stories of being displaced by the war.
These events, along with Israel’s violent response to the peaceful demonstrations of the Great March of Return, when Palestinians in Gaza marched every week to the border fence in protest of their siege, sharpened the poet’s determination to “[resist] the occupation of Israel by all available means.” Alareer emphasized the role of the war as one part of the struggle for the freedom of Palestine, but mainly expressed his passion through his pen, as well as the Expo marker pen that he made famous when he declared, in the first days of the Israeli invasion. Gaza: “The hardest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade … I will use that signal to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if it is the last thing I can do.”
Alareer completed his graduate work in English at the Islamic University of Gaza before going on to obtain an MA at University College London and a PhD in English literature at Universiti Putra Malaysia. Despite his love of his native Arabic, Alareer chose to publish most of his work in English, which he saw as a vehicle to reach the world. His poems have echoes of Shakespeare and echoes of John Donne, the English poet who was the subject of Alareer’s dissertation and whose famous line, “Death, be not proud,” was well suited to verses such as If I Must Die. Meanwhile, Alareer’s courses at the Islamic University of Gaza pitted his students against the likes of Edward Said and the famous Palestinian-Egyptian poet Tamim al-Barghouti alongside Virginia Woolf, Jonathan Swift and Mary Shelley.
There is nothing normal in Gaza
Refaat Alareer
Alareer saw his focus on the English canon not as a sign of anglophilia, but as a form of self-determination and political strategy. The first article in If I Must Die describes the formation of this philosophy, tracing its origins to the 23 days of Israel’s offensive, Operation Cast Lead, in 2008-2009. Then a newly minted MA teaching English in Gaza, Alareer used his time away from Israeli fire to plan lessons for his upcoming semester. I’m still revisiting Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe – of the Western classic about a shipwrecked Englishman who, stranded on a Caribbean island, is portrayed as a hero in his will to live – he was surprised by Defoe’s treatment of Friday, a local man who is portrayed as indifferent and docile. . Alareer writes: “It became clear to me how Friday’s issue was mediated by a self-appointed, ruling, arrogant master taking a land that was not his.”
Alareer also saw his people, as always reconciled, or completely obscured, by western narratives. “Palestinians should not be anyone’s Friday – we should have our own history,” Alareer corrected. He continued to teach English and create workshops for writing, editing and contributing to anthologies, and support the non-profit We Are Not Numbers, which aims to connect young people in Gaza with writing mentors. “Palestine is a distant story,” Alareer wrote in 2014:
In many ways, the struggle for land and rights in Palestine must be fought metaphorically and verbally… to destroy Israel’s narratives of a land without people, of a people without roots, of a people who never existed at all… through this writing. , we not only show our existence, but imagine our future.
Even as Alareer sought to cultivate Palestinian journalists, he was also committed to promoting a critical reading of Palestine. Works ranging from The Merchant of Venice to Charles Dickens and Israeli Jewish writer Yehuda Amichai, Alareer’s syllabus invited his students to challenge their ideas of art, culture and the world. In the article Gaza Asks: When Will This Be Over? Alareer recalls: “For many of my students, [Shakespeare’s Jewish character] Shylock was beyond repair. Even Shylock’s daughter hated him!” However, with time, dialogue and accurate reading, Shylock came to be known to his students as a character who endured “a society like racism. [and] he had to choose between complete submission and humiliation…and resistance as he found it. He chose to resist, as Palestinians do today. “
While If I Must Die defends and demonstrates the power of storytelling, it is also shrouded in growing skepticism. As the title suggests, the book is shot through with death, its chapters on a succession of years continuing through years of violence, increasing in intensity. Following his instructions to his students, Alareer’s speech and criticism relies on telling stories, organizing how to work in granular, human terms – an old woman with cancer refused permission to go to treatment, Palestinian corpses imprisoned in Israeli prisons. the pain of a father being forced to provide food for his child. He declares: “There is nothing in Gaza.” We never have normal days, because even when we go back [after a war] we go back to siege, work, death slowly.”
As If I Must Die progresses, the situation in Gaza becomes more desperate, and Alareer’s defiance grows more desperate. Set in 2024, Alareer’s cries from years past are terrifying. In a 2014 article, Alareer thinks about his grandchildren, who were left traumatized and fatherless by the Israeli airstrike: “Unless the Israeli criminals are brought to justice and the work is done, I fear that these children will grow up feeling that they have been betrayed by the country.” Eight years and pages later, Alareer cries: “[My daughter] Amal has already had two fights. ” He wonders: “When will this pass? … How many dead Palestinians are enough?” After more than a year of what many experts consider a genocide, the question comes down to the weight of Gaza’s untold and ongoing losses.
If I Must Die concludes with several post-7 October postings, pages fluttering with Alareer’s and the reader’s fears. “Israel [is] we are headed for genocide,” he announced on October 13, criticizing the broad international support for the bombing of Gaza, and what he saw as their refusal to recognize the history or politics of the events of October 7. “In the first hours of the attack still taking place, he told the BBC: “This is just like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is the uprising of the Gaza ghetto against 100 years of European and Zionist colonialism and occupation, “adding that such action was “appropriate and moral”. These three words attracted widespread vitriol. Not long ago, he was singled out by the pro-Israel thinker Bari Weiss for his sarcastic response to another infamous story about Hamas burning babies in an oven. Weiss accused him of mocking the dead Israeli children, and his online following revealed a flood of rapes and death threats to Alareer.
But that was the least of Alareer’s worries at the time. Displaced from her family several times in the weeks before the massacre, she described a Gaza of “unprecedented fear” where there was no safe place and hunger had already covered her children’s faces. In subsequent interviews and posts, he wrote what was, at the time, a terrifying increase in violence, such as the bombing of schools and hospitals.
“Israel in the past created a concentration camp,” reads an article from October 26, 2023. “But now this is an extermination camp.”
Less than a month later, Alareer would be dead, along with his brother, sister, four nephews, and a neighbor. The airstrike that killed them on December 8, 2023 came one day after Alareer received a threatening phone call from the Israeli army, prompting him to move from the shelter to his sister’s house, where the bomb found him anyway.
The anthology responds to and expands the significance of its poem “speak [Alareer’s] story”. But the author calls the readers to a further task:
That was the promise [telling the stories of Gaza] it will make changes and that policies, especially in the United States, will be improved. But honestly, will they? Does one Palestinian life matter? Is it so? Reader, as you read these chapters…can you do this story?
This question is written in 2022. Alareer can no longer see how the country fulfills, or fails, this request.