Read Palestine: Light In Gaza & Palestinian poems

In the essay “Gaza asks: When shall this pass?” poet and academician Refaat Alareer  writes with force and vulnerability about the long-held resilience of Palestinian people, the reliance on saying “it shall pass” from grandmother to mother, transmitted intergenerationally. One form of resistance is storytelling, as he writes: 

“It’s both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to yourself—stories are meant to be told and retold. If I kept a story to myself, I would be betraying my legacy, my mother, my grandmother, and my homeland.” 

Yet writing is not an easy endeavor to keep at, when Israeli forces attack and bomb universities. Answering the dire situation they are in, Alareer students’ joke, asking “for short-range stories and long-range stories”. Living under constant military attacks seeps into one’s language, and how can a university, how can a story respond? In his essay, Alareer underlines that the occupation wants to undermine knowledge and openness, a point he returns to often. Not long after I finished reading his chapter, I found out he had been assassinated by an Israeli airstrike, along with his sister’s family (this is in December 2023). In this horrifying moment, we are left to ask, why would a poet be targeted? What power is held in his words? How do we honor his legacy?

His essay is the first one in the anthology “Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire” edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Mike Merryman-Lotze, which contains a plethora of writings, political and personal essays from Palestinians, and is up as a free ebook from Haymarket Books as a response to the current, ongoing genocide in Gaza. Following the Publishers For Palestine #Read Palestine week, I read the above anthology and two poetry books, “Everything Comes Next” by Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye and “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza” by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha. 

Light In Gaza – the many forms of resistance & resilience

Here are just a few of the ideas put forth in “Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire” : 

• Asma Abu Mezied’s essay explores how Israeli occupation stripped Palestinians not only of their fertile soil, but their cultural practices as well, imposing the water-intensive cultivation of strawberries and cut flowers which can only be traded through Israel. 
• Salem Al Qudwa wrote about the need for culturally-sensitive housing design amidst constant war – as houses are often destroyed, Palestinians need forms of architecture that are both resilient and attentive to their needs and desires, as certain forms of architecture promoted by NGOs never feel like “home” and make it impossible for them to keep their families close. 
• Discussing Gaza’s electricity precarity, Suhail Taha tries to find solace in recognizing it as a result of a refusal to bend to imperial powers, writing “What could be more beautiful than a darkness that keeps reminding us of our steadfastness, a darkness interrupted only by the light of the moon?”. 
• Mosab Abu Toha writes about Gaza’s cultural struggle being “a site of oppression imposed both by external and internal forces. Israel bans books and the Islamists ban music and film.”, unraveling Gaza’s production and dissemination of short stories, film and theater, as well as his own project of creating the Edward Said library, which encountered numerous challenges. 
• Yousef M. Aljamal shows how travel restrictions are current manifestations of Nakba, beginning his essay with a true tale of wit and resistance in which his father escaped the Israeli soldiers’ humiliations: “We Palestinians were dancing under occupation decades before this incident, and have ever since.”
• In his poem, Basman Aldirawi underlines the extreme pressure of living under occupation and the constant buzzing of drones, resisting to internalize what the occupier wants to project onto him “A voice inside my head, whispering / You’re a full human even if / You feel like half.” 

Small wonders in Naomi Shihab Nye’s poems

In Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry volume  “Everything Comes Next”, we find wonder at both life and death – little moments enter one’s heart forever, a seed of kindness can germinate from the tiniest gestures. Nye knows the small power of words and wields them like a dancer moves their body: for example, in the poem „Sifter”, imagination is a savior, metaphor “opens doors”. Her volume is one filled with ordinary magic, with mesmerizing hopefulness and attentiveness to the miracle of the mundane – in her poem “The traveling onion”, one finds a space in which the invisible beauty of the onion and its taste are admired. In this world, violence is not forgotten, it is impossible to forget, as for a Palestinian, it is ever-present (its weight and incomprehensibility can be found in the poem “The day”). And yet, there is an urgency of joy amid annihilation (“Every day was your birthday”). It is, maybe, exactly in the midst of pain, the place in which celebration is most needed. As “The Shopper” shows us, life doesn’t require much, all its challenges and its becomings can be found in the redness of the ordinary tomato, at the grocery store. 

I am often in awe of Nye’s poems, and two that I hold dear to my heart are “Museum”, which I just discovered in this collection and “Gate A-4”. Museum is a prose poem that explores so much: youth, curiosity, difference, inequality, parenthood/childhood relations and more. It turns you around with a change of perspective characteristic of Nye’s metaphors, except this time it’s literal. “Gate A-4” I’ve read many times before, a poem of finding community and making “home” in a non-space such as an airport. It’s a poem in which responding to a stranger’s needs makes one see connectedness, marking the strength of Palestinian solidarity. I’ll say it: I tear up almost every time I read it. 

Roses amidst rubble in Mosab Abu Toha’s poems

Mosab Abu Toha’s “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza” is a volume of poetry holding the immense pain of living under settler-colonial occupation and apartheid. By putting it into words, words which can be “a returning device (…) to be able to see (…) again”, we are shown both the violence and the dreams of the people living on a land where “breathing is a task, / smiling is performing / plastic surgery / on one’s own face”. It is not only there that “Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets.”, yet Toha’s poetry collection marks the specificity of the Palestinian struggle. For example, he recalls the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, and the turning of people into “terrorists”: “My grandfather was a terrorist— / He departed his house, leaving it for the coming guests, / left some water on the table, his best, / lest the guests die of thirst after their conquest.” Because the political situation is so dire, he is left asking for “a better death”, a poem that strikes hard in the current context of Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, where, like in its lines: “Our bodies are disfigured and twisted, / embroidered with bullets and shrapnel. / Our names are pronounced incorrectly / on the radio and TV.”

Yet Mosab Abu Toha writes with a shard of hope, with “songs in Arabic, / poems in English I recite to myself, / or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.” hidden in his ear. His site is wherever “a child does not confuse a cloud / for bomb smoke.” and his insistence, both in writing and his life, as a founder of the Edward Said English language library in Gaza after the destruction of his university’s library, is that “We love what we have, no matter how little, / because if we don’t, everything will be gone.” 

In this struggle to hope against the odds, I found similarities between Nye and Toha’s collections. Yet, at the end of Toha’s book, there is an interview which adds context for the reader. In it, Toha writes that “In the U.S., I could write about a tree bending down to drink from my teacup while I’m walking in the morning, or a squirrel sipping from a glass I left on the porch. But while I’m in Gaza, I can only think about the constant sound of the drones, the F-16s, the seashore littered with bodies or shrapnel.” These last few words ring in my ear, as someone who has never experienced war, someone who can write about trees bending down. Not only must we struggle for a free Palestine, but do so with full recognition of what is taken from every being that lives under occupation. 

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I cried, unfailingly, reading each and every one of these books, with the heavy heart of a reader plunged deep into a world of violence – and yet removed from it. The extreme injustice Palestinians are subjected to under Israeli occupation is unfathomable. By reading about the small details of living life under a blockade – in overcrowded cities, not allowed to travel to meet one’s family members or to get medical treatment, constantly under bombardment or humiliating violence, always with drones in the air, perennially at risk – by listening to their voices, by being open to learning about this, we can put ourselves into an emotionally informed position of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. 

For Romanian readers, you can consider browsing this book of translations and essays by queers in solidarity with Palestine, which I helped edit – Queerș pentru Palestina (luări de poziție, eseuri și poeme) – and which can be found (in a beautiful, handmade by Pagini Libere, physical form) next week in Cluj (at coop) for the Week of Solidarity with Palestine (8 -14 January) & fundraising for Jenin (here you can donate from anywhere).

Our power, as individuals, is small, yet we can each participate in boosting Palestinian voices and refusing to give in to Israeli propaganda. And as collectives we can do much more – BDS, protest & strike for a free Palestine.