Poetry may not be the best response to aerial bombardment, but for many Palestinians it has become a line of defence amid the rubble and ongoing killings in Gaza.
“Poetry keeps hope alive. Even in the darkest moments, Palestinian poetry continues to imagine a future,” Nazmi al-Masri, professor of languages at the Islamic University of Gaza, says at an online poetry event held by his students.
“Poetry gives people a language to express collective grief,” he says. “In Gaza, poetry documents what cameras cannot always reach and what numbers can never explain. When destruction erases physical spaces, poetry becomes a witness to history.”
The reading of student work was held to celebrate the publication of Folding a River, a collection by the poet Alison Phipps – who is also professor of languages and intercultural studies at Glasgow University – along with her Zimbabwean colleague Tawona Sitholé.
“Poetry is the mother tongue of Palestine. It’s the artistic medium that they move to,” says Phipps, who for 17 years has been involved in joint cultural programmes with the Islamic University of Gaza.
With 95% of the Gaza university’s buildings damaged or destroyed by the Israeli bombing, all classes are online in precious moments when there is enough solar power to generate a brief online video meeting or, in this case, a poetry reading from disparate parts of Gaza via mobiles, laptops and consoles.
Since the beginning of the war, 72 members of the university faculty and 543 students have been killed. In the same period, 2,860 students graduated.
“Palestinian poetry has a long and influential tradition centred on themes of homeland, exile, memory, resistance, love, identity, displacement and survival,” Masri says. “It often combines lyrical beauty with political and human testimony, especially in response to displacement and war.”
Some of the students’ poems are dedicated to the memory of their teacher, the Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike on 6 December, 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister and three of her children. Masri feels the students were answering the call of one of Alareer’s most famous poems, in which he says: “If I die / you must live / to tell my story … let it bring hope / let it be a tale.”
Masri says: “Alareer’s poem travelled across the world because it expresses something very simple but very powerful: the fear of disappearing without being remembered.”
At the end of the reading, one of the students said: “Let’s throw away war.” It became the title of the collection of their poems, published by Wild Goose Publications, the imprint of an ecumenical Christian community on the Scottish island of Iona.
As Phipps and Masri write in their introduction: “These are not poems written in quiet rooms. They are written under collapsing ceilings, typed on phones with failing batteries, memorised because paper may not survive.”
Phipps says: “We wrote Folding a River to accompany an academic study of displacement and gender violence … and discovered the poetry was really helpful too, and really valued by, refugees. They found it restorative and empowering so we ran poetry workshops.
“In Islam, certain forms of representative art are not part of the cultural language so poetry, calligraphy and embroidery – but in an abstract mode – are the forms you’ll find across Muslim countries,” she says.
“In cultures where people have been deprived of carrying out all sorts of labour, you find then turning to very meticulous art such as henna tattooing.”
She says they discovered that young people in Gaza wanted to write in the manner of the great Palestinian poets such as Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan, so Wild Goose invited them to submit their work for publication.
Given the terrible suffering that has been inflicted on Gaza and the Palestinian people, the poems are remarkable for the near-total absence of bitterness or rancour.
Phipps, who has helped bring students from Gaza to study in Glasgow, says she believes the young poets do not want to reflect or become the violence that they abhor. “For my students from Gaza, being alive is resistance,” she says.
In the words of the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha: “We carry our houses in our hearts after the walls are gone.”
Excerpts from poems in Let’s Throw Away War
Holding on to life
As resistance,
To carry the stories
Of those who left us,
Whose spirits remain carved
Into the silence of this place.
Aya Ashraf Elsourani
from Survivor’s Guilt
They plunder your sleep, destroy your peace,
Their crimes scream loud, just cease!
They burn your world, then dance so free
Above your pain and destiny.
But still my voice breaks the night.
I fight, I fall, I rise, I write.
Hanan Jalal al-Kafarna
from Defiant Darkness
We do not ask for support.
We ask for dignity.
We ask for freedom.
We ask for safety.
We ask for the right to learn,
to teach,
to speak in our own names,
to write ourselves into existence.
Manar al-Houbi
from Give Me Time to Breathe
Between us, the sky will not collapse.
Even if the roofs of houses have already fallen,
we will build a horizon from scraps of cloud,
and teach the wind to carry our names forward.
We will not count the losses.
We will count the rivers that refuse to dry,
the stones that keep warmth after fire,
the children who draw suns on ruined walls.
Shahd Alnaouq
from Be My Brother
