At times of unspeakable horror, language easily becomes charged. Words are weaponized in wars, manipulated and rearranged to justify the most extreme forms of harm. Yet it is also language that we seek for solace, to say the unsayable. We wrench meaning out of words, shape them to find purpose, to connect and to create.
In crisis, people turn to poetry, not only to survey the scale of suffering, but to pause on its singular impact, whether with sorrow or steadfastness. “Poetry cares,” the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye has said. “Poetry tries to sing the quiet, subtle stories. Poetry cherishes and protects details. Poetry listens to the ones who are not in the headlines.”
Writers in Gaza today, threatened by relentless bombardment and displacement and forced to focus their attention on the small details of survival, have been leaning on language to document, communicate and seek refuge from the brutal war that has now entered its second year.
Very soon after the start of Israel’s fifth and by far its deadliest war on Gaza, poetry by Palestinian writers began to appear on social media and in literary journals worldwide by writers in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as the diaspora. Entire collections of poems were published within just a few months, pushed through production at a rate unprecedented in the turbulent history of Palestine or the Middle East. Literary publications raced to place themselves firmly on a “side.”
Yet Palestinian poetry, as the Lebanese-American translator and academic Huda Fakhreddine repeatedly asserts, is not only for times of crisis. “It is shameful that we only allow Palestinians space on the page when they are dead or being slaughtered,” she said in an interview earlier this year.
There is no doubt that this past year has seen an amplification of the voices of Palestinian writers worldwide, and a plethora of new literature from Palestine available in translation. “Out of Gaza,” edited by Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison, brings together urgent new poems by 15 Palestinian writers, mostly written in the diaspora. A collection by the Gaza-based poet Nasser Rabah is forthcoming from City Light Books next year. A newly formed collective, Publishers for Palestine, released a pamphlet of Palestinian poetry, “Poems for Palestine,” while the Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah produced an entire collection of poems, written mostly in 10 weeks last year between October and December. Its silent title, “[…]” — an ellipsis within brackets — urges us to listen only to the words within and the voices of the Palestinians they evoke.
“Palestine has always been a salient issue for many, and the literature produced around it aligns with how urgent it is for huge swaths of the populace,” Joudah’s publisher, Anthony Anaxagorou of Out-Spoken Press, told me. “If the books being published assist in giving people a robust framework to conceptualize the struggle of the Palestinian people, then that can only be a good thing.”
Numerous journals have launched special editions or content, including the Massachusetts Review, Lit Hub, Asymptote, ArabLit Quarterly, Jadaliyya, Protean, Mizna, The Markaz Review and many more, featuring literature responding to the crisis in Gaza.
This is in addition to the war diaries being written, translated and disseminated in real time, like Atef Abu Saif’s “Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide.” The diaries were originally serialized and appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde and The Washington Post, and have since been published in unedited form by Comma Press. More than 70 people — not only writers but also doctors, shopkeepers, farmers and office workers — contributed to “Daybreak in Gaza,” a new collection of memoir, essays and poetry by Saqi Books, collated by editors Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller.
A number of these publishers had to fight against fierce resistance, especially as some of the most powerful bodies in the industry refused to denounce Israel’s indiscriminate attacks on civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. “We have felt abandoned by the publishing establishment in this country,” I was told by Lynn Gaspard, publisher and managing director of the London-based Saqi Books.
“The reaction from our trade bodies and those with the strongest voices in the U.K. has been a major disappointment,” she continued. “The Society of Authors voted against bringing out a statement of support towards Palestinian writers and translators. The Frankfurt Book Fair canceled [Palestinian author] Adania Shibli’s award ceremony.”
The poems and war diaries emerging from Gaza are being translated into dozens of languages, joining the growing global calls for a cease-fire. For the poet Muhammad al-Zaqzouq, the narrative space carried more possibilities than a highly tuned poetic expression, allowing him to focus and elaborate on the important details and shapes of the extreme suffering he was witnessing.
Al-Zaqzouq, a 34-year-old father of three from Hamad City, a neighborhood northwest of Khan Younis, has been displaced more than 11 times since the war started last year. It took him five months before he was able to write. He said that at first, the war “crippled” him, that he was gripped by terror, on the run and constantly on edge. A chance glimpse at his “dying face” in a mirror that hung in the alley of a refugee compound where he was staying jolted him back into writing.
“The image reflected in the mirror was a realization of the scale of death and tragedy I was living, which I hadn’t written a word about,” he told me over an unstable Zoom connection. “I grasped at that moment that it was important, at the very least, to speak about my face, which was dying, and those of others that were dying. And about this whole intense moment of pain.”
From that point, at around Day 160 of the war, al-Zaqzouq began to revisit his memory of the night of Oct. 6, 2023 — how it had been calm and there were no signs of what was to come, how everything was upturned at 6 a.m. and the way his children awoke. Reliving the details of the war from Day 1 has been both retraumatizing and healing, he said, but also overwhelming, as it continues to rage around him. What began as a form of documentation soon developed into a responsibility: Friends and strangers, after learning that he is a writer, seek him out to record their stories in his developing memoir.
Al-Zaqzouq started working alongside the poet Mahmoud Al-Shaer to establish a community of writers in 2007 when they were beginning their own literary journeys at age 17, just as the Israeli blockade on Gaza was imposed, cutting off access to the strip by land, sea and air. They wanted to discover and explore the craft of writing and create a broad community of like-minded writers, but the political divisions at the time had resulted in the closure of associations and bodies that supported young writers. Their need to communicate with a local network, to recite a poem or hold a reading became crucial for them, so in 2013 they created a publication, Majalla 28, to provide the opportunity for themselves and other young writers to engage with a community, both locally and on a wider Arab and international scale.
Through their work on Majalla 28, they noticed significant differences between the work now being produced and that of previous generations. Their language, al-Zaqzouq said, differed greatly from the Palestinian poets writing in the period of the 1948 Nakba. He added that poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfiq Zayyad and Muin Bseiso wrote in a discursive, documentary style, focusing on issues related to loyalty and resistance. Their form could be quite combative, a style that was more relevant to the time.
Young poets today, al-Zaqzouq said, still engage with the national Palestinian cause, at times with doubt, at other times through faith, at times probing. But mostly, this new writing “is focused on the individual, the individual concerns, on their own personal obsessions.”
One such poem is by 19-year-old Batool Abu Akleen, named Modern Poetry in Translation magazine’s 2024 Poet in Residence. Her opening lines reveal a preoccupation with death prevalent in a war where thousands of corpses, whole or in parts, are being buried unidentified in mass graves:
I want a grave with a marble headstone
that my loved ones will water
where they will place flowers,
weeping when longing lacerates their eyes.
Before the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the start of the war in Gaza, Abu Akleen wrote about “the features of a city,” which was already a “prison,” whereas now, she told me, nearly all her poems are in dialogue with death. “When the genocide started, I refused to write. I used to say: ‘What will my words change? Who cares about this little girl in Gaza?’ I was afraid of writing, especially poetry. I didn’t want to face the reality.”
This changed after her professor, the writer and activist Refaat Alareer, was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Dec. 6, 2023, a month after he had shared one of his older poems, “If I Must Die,” on social media: “If I must die / you must live / to tell my story.” Abu Akleen responded to this call to action. “I am writing to tell his story,” she said. “I am writing because when I lost connection with my dad, who’s still in northern Gaza, for more than a month, the first thing he asked was: ‘Are you still writing? Do not ever stop writing our pains.’”
Poets who used to reflect on life and love are now finding themselves turning to the persistent violence that pervades their days. Husam Maarouf, who has published two poetry collections and a novel, said he used to write about nature, love, beauty, women, desire, the eyes and the soul, during the four previous wars on Gaza. “For us, war is nothing new; it is part of our fabric, our memory, our formation. But it used to come to us intermittently and lighter than this current war of extermination,” he said.
Maarouf’s poetry is now filled with “violence, with self-flagellation, with regret, defeat, with lament, fear”:
Who will bring us the smell of grilled meat
Our bellies are empty
Who will fashion us a key to deliver us from more tales of the dead
Our bellies are full
“I write about killings, disappointment, endings, about death, about helplessness, the siege, being cut off from the world, life, my nostalgia for the old life, about dismembered body parts, about victims, the dead, of children whose bodies are torn apart, about a corpse needing to be buried, about a people being exterminated, exiled from their home, my longing for my old home, to its nooks, my old library. All of these I lost.”
Art, he insisted, provides a parallel life for a person, a sanctuary in which they can momentarily forget their pain, which is essential: “People need windows with patches of light in the middle of the darkness, a space we launch towards to recall our old memories, which are full of a passion for life. I don’t think anyone can handle pain for long; they will always need some sort of cease-fire with life itself, with all its pain and sadness. I think poetry is this space in the darkest of circumstances.”
It is so important, he said, that he urges people around him to read, both poetry and novels, as a form of survival, an antidote to the “machine of death.” He also encourages everyone to write, whether they are confident with the written language or not.
“For a poet, poetry is a basic human need. Its importance lies in its response to an inner call.” Poetry, he said, is the way he is able to cope with the tragedy; it is the only way to subdue an inner tempest.
Basman Dirawi, whose recent poems have been translated and published on multiple platforms, told me that he constantly questions the “worthiness” of poetry. But every time he reads a post by someone in Gaza, he discovers that their greatest fear is to be recorded as a number in the news, or for their corpse to end up as parts rather than whole.
Dirawi was in Egypt training in physiotherapy on Oct. 7, 2023, and remains there now. In the past year, he lost his sister Eman, her husband and their four children, who were “left under the rubble for weeks,” and two of his best friends, Issa and Ouda. His poem “Has Ouda Arrived” mentions the dead by their names, but also their love for life, and lets them say something back:
My friends will meet in heaven
I’ll look up at the sky and ask Issa:
Tell me, has Ouda arrived?
He jokes: Haven’t you heard his voice?
In the same poem, Dirawi calls in the poet and novelist, Hiba Abu Nada, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home on Oct. 20, 2023:
They work up there in the new Gaza
In a hospital that’s not threatened with destruction
Then they sing and they laugh and they joke
Hiba sits in a corner, writing a new poem
Dirawi told me that his poems had always seemed to reflect the life he had lived and his interaction with it. “It’s still expression,” he said, “yet now I think of poetry more as documentation, as a duty to tell my people’s names and lives and raise a voice.”
After Abu Nada’s death in the first weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, the rate of poetry being translated and shared worldwide increased multifold. Fakhreddine, who has been teaching and translating Arabic poetry for years, was personally responsible for dozens of new translations of poems by Palestinians. The first poem she translated after the start of the Gaza war was Abu Nada’s “I grant you refuge” for Protean magazine, which evolved from a state of “panic and absolute horror,” without any idea where this would lead her. “I did not have a project,” she told me. “None of it was planned.”
Her other translations have been of poems by friends. “We are all horrified. They shared the poems they were writing as the genocide unfolded before our eyes and I find myself translating as I read. Translation is often the way I read. It’s my attempt to say what the poem says, a way, an attempt at inserting myself in its world, especially when I feel that it communicates something I feel and want to say as well.”
The impact of translation in the global opposition to the ongoing war was noted by the Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah, in a conversation held with Fakhreddine, who translated four of his poems for an illustrated pamphlet published this fall by World Poetry. “I have never seen translation of literature written for and about Palestine as active and impactful as I have seen it in the past few months.”
These poems, he said, have been translated into multiple languages and presented at anti-war events in solidarity with Gaza at universities, museums and other such spaces across the world. “Some poems reached hundreds of thousands of people, which is extremely important. It means that in this world, beyond the wall, there are still people who want to hear our voices with courage, with live consciences and with bravery.”
And in a war where control is rapidly being stripped, language, says the poet Doha Kahlout, is power, and words become an important weapon. Kahlout, who wrote to me from her current displacement near Gaza’s Rafah crossing, where she is waiting for the chance to make it to Egypt, said that before Oct. 7, her poems focused on her personal experience, a search for the self and the means to define it. Her voice fluctuated and her vision of herself was “confused.” But now, as the war transforms all language, meanings and words, her focus has shifted outward: “I’m now concerned with what it means to be human, and to seek out meaning, so much of which has been lost.” This, she said, was difficult in a time of war. “Neither location nor time allow you space in which to gather the strength of your mind and language. Everything happens with difficulty.”
She sent me a new poem she wrote, “After we became 504,” referring to the number the International Relief Agency allocated her family in the displacement room where she lives with 20 others.
Dreams dropped with our tears, and we devoted our days to running,
in wakefulness the heart is stung by bitterness, and sleep drowns
in the sugar of memories and yearning, the sun of immediate tasks
rises above your dream, you groan, you cry, you fight
to remain a person you recognize
In trying to take stock of the new poetry emerging from and about Gaza over the past year, certain patterns emerge. There is the poetry of witness, of documentary, of protest, poems that reference news broadcasts or detail tragic losses. Many of the poems, like Abu Akleen’s, set out instructions for burial, in a desire to manifest a sense of control. And some, like Hiba Abu Nada’s lingering “We are in the heights now,” envision a peaceful afterlife in “a new Gaza in heaven.” There are poems of nostalgia, poems that deliver political and historical context, of statehood and statelessness, of exile, extermination. There are poems that point fingers, but there are others that invoke humor and music, that are playful, that celebrate a long and rich culture, that stare in the face of those who threaten it with erasure.
“There will come a time,” Fady Joudah said in a 2013 podcast with the Palestinian poet and novelist Ghassan Zaqtan, “where we begin at the world stage to understand Palestinian literature in general, not just Palestinian poetry, as something that has offered and is offering and will continue to offer as long as the tragic situation continues, the human condition, our contemporary moment, something essential to examine, return to and look forward to as well. The Palestinian condition addresses not just the concept of statelessness, but actually the fragility and almost fabrication of the concept, of the human identity in an age of the nation-state.”
But the role of Palestinian poetry and literature right now, in this moment, as the war enters its second year with a death toll in the tens of thousands, cannot divert from the path to a cease-fire. “Publishing poets from Gaza is not enough. It will not stop the massacres,” Fakhreddine said. “The only moral and acceptable stand in this moment is to unequivocally call this what it is, a genocide, and do everything in one’s power to stop it.”
For those of us outside, there are many things we can do. For the people inside Gaza, sometimes poetry is the only tool at hand.
“Here I am now,” writes Mahmoud Al-Shaer, in a new poem he sent me, just a few weeks before he and his wife were injured in an airstrike. “Here I am now / Trapped inside the battlefield / The ground around me a potential pit for the rising belts of fire.”
“Writing is an opportunity to survive and create meaning,” al-Zaqzouq and Al-Shaer wrote, in their introduction to a Gaza-focused edition of the ArabLit Quarterly magazine published this spring. “When all horizons are cut off and questions left unanswered, we find in writing our opportunity to create value that opposes mass devastation; it is our opportunity at life and meaning, our opportunity to understand what we are experiencing, and to break through the isolation, with voices that want to resonate with others around the world.”
Abu Akleen echoed this sentiment in our conversation. “We write because we are unable to do anything but writing,” she said. “This is our way to say, ‘We are here.’ It helps us to feel that we’re doing something more than letting the sorrow devour our soul.”
Editor’s Note: The excerpt of Batool Abu Akleen’s poem was translated by Kay Heikkinen. Basman Dirawi’s poem “Has Ouda Arrived” was translated by Tala Ladki. The excerpts of the poems by Husam Maarouf, Doha Kahlout and Mahmoud Al-Shaer were translated by Nashwa Nasreldin.
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