Out of Gaza: New Palestinian Poetry

Muhammad Hussein

When an Israeli air strike killed the prominent Palestinian writer and scholar Refaat Alareer in Gaza back in December, it signalled not only the random and wanton destruction of an area in Gaza City, but also the deliberate targeting of the man known as a leader of a new generation of writers and poets in the besieged enclave.

His killing was further evidence of the Israeli occupation regime's campaign to assassinate Gaza's Palestinian intelligentsia and academic class. This stemmed from the belief that with the killing of such figures would come the gradual decline of literary development and the articulation of revolutionary thought, leaving the oppressed people with the natural desire for liberation but without intellectual guidance and support.

Thus, does the role of poetry reveal itself in the significance of human consciousness, manifesting not only in concepts such as romance or longing, but in the very spiritual need for self-determination and dignity.

Atef Alshaer, the editor of Out of Gaza: New Palestinian Poetry, writes in his introduction to the book that, while "Guns, bombs, rockets, and other tools of killing and destruction are deafening methods of silencing and robbing people of their humanity," poetry is the "poor companion of the oppressed and anybody with a living soul" which serves as "a humanising force, a repository of meaning and remembrance to lives lost and landscapes destroyed."

The "higher calling of humanity makes poetry a duty," he stresses, and this is what he and his co-editor Alan Morrison and the fifteen Palestinian poets represented in the compilation attempt to fulfil.

READ: ‘Let it be a tale’: On Refaat Alareer and the martyrdom of the Gaza intellectual

Presented as responses to the ongoing Israeli invasion, bombardment and destruction of the Gaza Strip, the works of the featured Palestinian poets hold within them two key elements and lessons. The first is the overwhelming sense of hopelessness and melancholy expressed in the poems, which fills the book in a way that makes the ongoing and seemingly endless suffering in Gaza ever more palpable. One example of this is Farid Bitar’s poem “Unexplained misery”:

I keep screaming, for the bombs to stop dropping

I keep praying for a miracle

I keep thinking this is a bad dream

And when I awake

Everything

From the previous day

Is just the same.

The second outstanding element expressed in the compilation is the very blatant irony and hypocrisy of the Zionists' genocide of Gaza's Palestinian population when compared with Jews' own history as an oppressed people, not least as recently as eight decades ago.

Alareer articulated this well in his poem “I am You”, which he directed at the Zionist occupier and invader:

I am just you.

I am your past haunting

Your present and your future.

I strive like you did.

I fight like you did.

I resist like you resisted

And for a moment,

I'd take your tenacity

As a model,

Were you not holding

The barrel of the gun

Between my bleeding

Eyes.

Here, Alareer seems to have referred not only to the atrocities and massacres experienced by Jews throughout World War Two and the pogrom-filled decades leading up to that, but also to the resistance of the Jewish people throughout history during their numerous exiles and displacements. It is a "tenacity" often attributed to Semites — and that includes Arabs as well as Jews — by orientalist writers and historians.

Now, in the age of the ongoing Zionist project, the progeny of some of those tenacious people are the oppressors attempting to crush the resistance and humanity of the more recently tenacious people, just as the Babylonians, Romans and Nazis did to Jews in earlier times. Alareer continues:

The victim has evolved, backward,

Into a victimiser.

I tell you.

I am you.

Except that I am not the you of now.

In Bitar's poem, “The Journalist”, he also alludes to this phenomenon:

Watching hundreds of naked men

Ordered to kneel down blindfolded

In the carnage of destroyed streets

Stripped of their dignity

This enemy is insisting to relive

Days of Warsaw ghettos of WWII

Vengeance is their calling.

Rarely is there a book on the market that compiles poetry written by Palestinians — most of whom live outside of their historic homeland, for the same reason that figures like Alareer are no longer with us — in a way that brings out succinctly the emotions and cynicism of the Palestinian plight, the historic irony of the contemporary oppressive Zionist project, and the focus on the current invasion of Gaza in what is the fifth war imposed on the besieged territory in recent history.

READ: The slaughter of Palestinian scholars in Gaza is a deliberate Israeli tactic