Atef Alshaer and Alan Morrison, editors, Out of Gaza: New Palestinian Poetry (Smokestack Books, 2024)
Farid Bitar, Testament / Sajél. (Culture Matters, 2024)
Dareen Tatour, A Balcony Over a City Engulfed by War: Despatches, stories and poems from the new Nakba (Drunk Muse Press, 2024)
Fady Joudah, […] (Milkweed Editions USA/Out-Spoken Press UK, 2024)
I
At time of writing, the official death toll in Israel-Palestine since 7 October 2023 stands at 35,173 Palestinians, including over 14,500 children, 8,400 women and at least 498 people in the West Bank; and 1,139 Israelis, all of whom were killed during the 7 October attacks by Hamas and other Gazan militias. In addition, over 10,000 Gazans are missing, presumed dead under the rubble of buildings flattened by over six months of continuous Israeli bombardment; and over 79,000 Palestinians and at least 8,730 Israelis have been injured in the fighting. Grievously wounded Palestinians, under the collective punishment of a total blockade of food, water, fuel and medical supplies, continue to suffer burns and amputations while deprived of medicine, anaesthetic or antiseptics. Famine stalks Gaza, children are crushed by aid drops, grinning Israeli male soldiers pose for selfies with the lingerie of Palestinian women who have been killed or displaced from their homes. Israeli hostages, including elderly, ill, and very young people, are still being held captive in conditions that released hostages report include sexual abuse, while thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, often held indefinitely without charge, endure torture and sexual assault in Israeli jails. And still there is no ceasefire. Against the on-going maelstrom of violence – the furious escalation of the Israeli colonisation of Palestine; war crimes committed in the name of armed resistance; the world’s first AI-generated military operation; what scholars call a textbook case of genocide, funded, and politically fueled by Western states – it might seem that poetry is a frail, insignificant force.
In fact, as Palestinian literary critic Dr Atef Alshaer, co-editor with Alan Morrison of Out of Gaza, observes in his Introduction to this necessary new anthology, poetry has long been a source of strength for Palestinians, a powerful means of resisting cultural annihilation and gathering support for their just cause:
Poetry … this poor companion of the oppressed and anybody with a living soul, can serve as a humanising force, a repository of meaning and remembrance to lives lost and landscapes destroyed … Poetry can never replace the physical presence of humanity in the form of flesh and spirit, of personality, but it can speak for their absence. In this speaking, there is tenderest call for the corresponding and living spirits of other human beings to listen and respond.
Some might object that it is not Palestinians’ job to ‘humanise’ themselves. That is true, but at the same time, poetry inherently humanises its subjects: the qualities of personal and often intimate address are among poetry’s chief gifts to readers. And at a time of genocide, when dehumanisation is the fundamental driver of mass atrocities, any ‘humanising force’ is desperately needed. In a digital age, when small texts can fly round the world in a matter of milliseconds, it is not surprising that poems are speaking insistently for the absent in Gaza, and that millions of people are listening and replying, in marches, blogs, and social media posts. Out of Gaza includes several such poems. The cover image of a poem handwritten on a Palestinian flag, is the last verse of ‘Lines Without a Home’, by Marwan Makhoul of Upper Galilee, translated by Rafael Cohen, lines which went viral in the early days of the genocide:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t
political, I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent
The anthology also includes ‘If I must die’, by prominent Gazan poet and educator Refaat Alareer – who was killed on 6 Dec 2023 by a seemingly surgical Israeli airstrike after weeks of death threats from Israeli accounts. ‘If I must die / you must live’, the poem urges: live to make a kite that a boy whose ‘dad who left in a blaze’, might mistake for an angel, ‘bringing back love’. Honouring his speaker’s wishes, Alareer’s poem has been translated into multiple languages and carried on kite-shaped placards on protests all over the world. Less well-known, but equally moving, is work by poet and novelist Hiba Abu Nada, who posted ‘Good night, Gaza’ on X shortly before being killed, aged 32, by an Israeli bomb on Oct 20 2023. A short poem of spare restraint, its profound contrasts speak volumes to Abu Nada’s spiritual courage and literary maturity:
Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets,
quiet apart from the sound of the bombs,
terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer,
black apart from the light of the martyrs.
Good night, Gaza.
Also using social media to share his work internationally is Mosab Abu Toha, poet and essayist and author of the prize-winning debut collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear. Due to his young son’s American passport, Abu Toha was fortunate to escape the genocide into Egypt with his wife and children, from where he maintains his high profile on Facebook, sharing memories of Gaza like those evoked in his poem ‘What is Home?’:
It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo
before the walls crumbled.
It is my uncle’s prayer rug,
where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights,
before it was looted and put in a museum.
But marches and social media posts are not, of course, poetry’s only environment; poems also exist in relationship with the void of the white space on the page, and it is fitting that publishers are urgently producing books of Palestinian poetry for readers to spend reflective time with. The three collections reviewed here are by accomplished poets, galvanised by the genocide into periods of intense productivity. Out of Gaza contains work by a global range of well-established Palestinian poets, mainly writing in English or self-translating from Arabic. Also literally ‘out of Gaza’ is Mohammed Mousa, who has lived and worked in the UK, and whose mother, father, two sisters and his parents’ grandchildren were killed by Israeli airstrikes in November 2023. Mousa’s poems in the anthology appear to predate his catastrophic losses, and speak to his memories of life in Gaza, including, in ‘Hungry Gaza Skies’, the experience of sitting ‘alone on the roof’ during a night of Israeli airstrikes:
I wrap my little town in a carrier bag
and hide its people.
Still the moans of the young mother
reverberate in my head at 7 am
Exile might have saved Mohammed Mousa from being murdered with his family, but on the evidence of a poem entitled ‘In a country that doesn’t need me, doesn’t know my name, my skin colour, my favourite coffee, or even who I was’, life in the UK has not provided any sort of warm welcome for a young Palestinian man.
The anthology also includes Dareen Tatour of Galilee and Palestinian-American Farid Bitar, whose new collections are reviewed here, and a wide range of poets from the Palestinian diaspora, ranging from Australia to the US. Like Marwan Makhoul, Ali Abukhattab, Hala Alyan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tariq Luthun, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, and Deema K. Shehabi are producing intensely lyrical work that speaks to the dignity of Palestinians enduring dislocation, trauma, occupation, and the slaughter of their people. In ‘Gaza Renga’, Shehabi claims the Japanese collaborative renga to speak in a collective voice of the deprivation of light:
This place is all we ever
grieve for –
in illegible dreams,
in passing hours,
the daylight sealed
from our eyes,
and nothing is ever limned:
a baby on top
of the mother’s dried up
corpse in broad daylight.
Other poets experiment with form and address to convey the urgency of the Palestinian condition, fusing and juxtaposing the languages of poetry and protest, colonised and coloniser. Sara Saleh’s ‘The Business of Occupation Bingo’, is a poem laid out in a table; ‘Say Free Palestine’, an insistent ‘meditation’ on the vital importance of the chant. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s mournful ‘Abjadarian in Autumn’ is a bilingual lyric poem that ‘follows the order of the Arabic alphabet and refuses to settle for alternatives to letters and sounds for which English has no capacity’.
Poetry, Out of Gaza makes clear, answers a human need to be heard at a time of unimaginable pain, to insist on justice, and, where justice is not forthcoming, to generate empathy and hope. Whether poetry can also play a role in peacebuilding between Israelis and Palestinians is a vexed question, offensive to those who resent the assumption that Palestinians ought always to acknowledge the suffering of their colonisers; always be the first to denounce political violence. Palestinians have other priorities than reassuring Israelis. In her long list poem, ‘Questions the media should ask the people of Gaza’, Samah Sabawi suggests ways to tune into their more pressing concerns:
How do you bury your dead when you’re still running for cover?
How do you shelter from the bombs when they
follow you like your shadow?
How do you dig through rubble in worn sandals and bare
calloused hands?
How do you put together all the pieces of your loved ones?
Do you start with the head or the toes?
And do you always know where all the pieces go?
People directly, or even indirectly, experiencing war trauma obviously can’t be expected to empathise with their aggressors. And yet, if even poetry rules out the possibility of dialogue, how might it be achieved in the political process? It’s a question Refaat Alareer answered head on: ‘I am You’ is a searing address to his Jewish Israeli oppressor, calling out the historical mirrorings and reenactments that are still taboo to identify, even as they become more glaringly obvious with every new photograph of a mass grave or starving child in Gaza. Hala Alyan’s ‘Tattler’ depicts personal encounters with Israeli soldiers, unsettling in their sense of near-intimacy and threat:
I am honouring my script. I remove my shoes carefully. I let the Israeli soldier run her fingers through my hair until it feels more like love than anything else, and for a moment I wonder what she’d do if I shut my eyes, started singing until it was over. She follows every curl. She smiles thinly when I tell her not to worry, she couldn’t brush it if she tried. Don’t you understand, I want to say.
In ‘Discourse of I\You’, Ali Abukhattab takes a more ambiguous approach, accreting disturbing and sensual imagery that could portray a doomed love affair, or a political relationship of imbalanced power:
I am a soul that practices its secret habit
You are a body which exercises ceremonies of desolation
My nerves are the memory of dust
You act the tragedy of a mote
But Palestinian poetry does not need to engage with Israeli subjectivity in order to demonstrate its humanity. As Out of Gaza and the three collections reviewed here demonstrate, Palestinian poets are in the vanguard of contemporary creative writing practice, not for their political diplomacy, but for their ability to create stirring and innovative art in agonising circumstances that long pre-existed 7 October: a brutal occupation, bankrolled by the West, now engaged in apocalyptic violence not only against the people of Gaza, but also on our collective ability to imagine and build a better world. As Out of Gaza demonstrates, however, even under the most oppressive conditions, poetry scoops out space for the imagination to breathe.
II
Acutely attuned to the trauma of displacement is Farid Bitar, a Palestinian-American poet, artist and musician known for his distinctive mix of frankly political spoken word performances and sensitive lyric poetry, a discordant aesthetic rooted in Bitar’s exile from his birthplace in Jerusalem and early home in Jericho – where four family members were killed by Israeli napalm bombs in June 1967. Bitar later immigrated to New York; his parents and uncle remained. The latter joined the resistance, dying young from the effects of torture after serving twelve years in Israeli jails. It has been said that Palestinians do not experience PTSD, as there is no ‘post’ to their ordeals: even for those abroad, scars cannot form as old wounds are ripped open daily by the news cycle. Evidence of this hard truth, Bitar’s restless poetics has developed as both document and treatment of lifelong trauma, nowhere more powerfully than in his third collection, Testament / Sajél. Beautifully designed and thoughtfully introduced by Alan Morrison, the collection includes new poems, a translation of Bitar’s older brother’s elegy for their dead relatives, and a 2017 interview with the poet, all paired with a generous selection of the poet’s paintings, in which delicate Arabic calligraphy and Klee-like figures float on vibrant colour-fields reflective of landscapes and flags. It’s an invigorating combination: where the poems often pulse with pain and anger, the paintings shimmer with an irrepressible vitality, both words and images fuelling the fire of Bitar’s creativity.
Reflecting Bitar’s diasporic existence and Beat-like poetics, Testament / Sajél begins and ends with poems ‘on the road’ – both literally and emotionally – to Palestine. In ‘Journey’, the first poem, the speaker, in Jordan en route to the Allenby Bridge crossing into the West Bank, finds himself ‘breaking a promise’ of forty-eight years, ‘never to set foot’ in Amman: site of ‘Black September 1970 / Where King Hussein / Bulldozed the camps.’ The theme of psychological fracture recurs throughout the book, as poems swerve and bleed between relentless injustices. The title poem – Bitar’s translation of Mahmoud Bitar’s Arabic testimonial text in the voices of dead family members including their grandmother, aunt, and cousin – finds shattered echoes in Bitar’s own poems about family estrangements and losses over the decades. ‘my familia / had all gone fishing / and not returning’, the brief ‘La Familia’ comments dryly. Meanwhile, the volatile condition of being Palestinian affects every aspect of the exile’s life. In ‘Cousin Semite of mine’, the speaker, crudely insulted and fired from a paralegal firm in New York in 1984 expressly for being Palestinian, understandably ‘flung the door and threw a chair’ before getting the last pointed word.
Throughout the collection, Bitar also pays his own testament in sleepless witness to what he calls in his preface the ‘pure genocide and revenge by Israel’ that has followed the catastrophic Hamas operation of 7 October. From its opening line ‘Father never got over it in ’48 / Running out with the clothes on his body’, ‘Nakba All Over’ succinctly asserts the historical context of the current cycle of violence in Israel-Palestine – while also documenting the unprecedented scale of Palestinian civilian suffering in Gaza and expressing empathy for the hostages trapped too in ‘Armageddon’. While the brutal facts of the Israeli assault on Gaza will never lose their power to shock, Bitar’s own emotional responses also haunt the reader: his ‘left eye swollen shut’ with crying; his frantic, numbed lurches between despair and faith, expressed with eloquent simplicity in ‘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.
For, as ‘Marshlands Window’ explores, for those forced to endlessly relive it, the past is a omnipresent frame:
I found a window in the marshlands
With an egret worshipping on the ledge
I stand by and weep on the edge
Same window I witnessed atrocities
From my old house terrace in Jericho
Questioning easy, empty words of ‘the peace that never comes’, and noting Martin Luther King, Jr’s debt to Malcolm X, Testament / Sajél asks hard questions about the ethics of resistance and the possibility of individual recovery without collective justice. Yet hope persists: in references to Black Lives Matter and anti-Zionist Jewish activists, grassroots solidarity emerges as an abiding source of strength, while Islam, nature, and enduring family bonds also provide a fragile solace. In the last poem, ‘Citrine’, the magical pull of a crystal in the shape of Palestine provokes a new promise: to bring it home. Like Bitar’s captivating paintings, which charge Testament / Sajél with a sense of freedom and psychological power, the citrine offers a necessary ‘window / to another dimension / where everything is going fine’ (‘Marshlands Window’).
III
Palestinian poets living in Israel face severe restrictions under an apartheid regime determined to stifle their voices. In 2016, Dareen Tatour of Galilee became an international cause célèbre when she was arrested on charges of incitement to violence in relation to social media posts and her now iconic poem ‘Resist, My People, Resist Them’. The latter conviction was eventually overturned, but not before Tatour had spent over three years under house arrest or in jail. Awarded the 2021 Oxfam/Novib PEN Award for Freedom of Expression, after her release she took up a two-year residency in Sweden, but rejected permanent exile to return to her homeland despite its oppressive conditions. Persecution, though, has only fired Tatour’s muse. Since 2019, she has published three books in English translation with Drunk Muse Press: a prison memoir, My Threatening Poem; the Palestine Book Award winning poetry collection, I Sing From the Window of Exile; and now, in response to the assault on Gaza, A Balcony Over a City Engulfed by War, a slender volume of ‘Despatches, stories and poems from the new Nakba’, originally written in Arabic and translated by the poet herself.
This prolific output comes at a steep cost to Tatour’s personal security. As she discusses in the Introduction to the new book, for years threats of death and arrest, from settlers and the state have made it impossible for her to publish her work in her own land. In solidarity with the victims of the Gaza genocide, she has chosen to defy the ban, and in A Balcony Over a City Engulfed by War she piercingly sings in the memory of the dead of Gaza – and preemptively in her own, should assassination be the lot of this courageous poet. For poetry this is, including the ‘Despatches/Stories’, that make up the long first half of the book. One might argue these short texts are what the title suggests – micro-flash fictions sparked by war reportage – but social media platforms have increasingly developed a symbiotic relationship to poetry, and for some writers the closeness of a brief post to a poem has generated new forms, from Fady Joudah’s haiku-like collection Textu, to docupoetic variations of that ‘orphan’ form, the prose-poem. Though Tatour’s compressed narratives of children and families dying, grieving, and surviving in Gaza operate on the reader’s nerves like painful distillations of news reports, they have an emotional intimacy, intensity of language and expansive use of imagery that also give them a home in poetry.
The opening text, ‘Theatre of Shadows’, reads like a haibun, the Japanese prose-poem, its simple scene of children playing games with a candle breaking into terse repetitions of devastating violence and loss. In many of these texts, a seemingly descriptive title is loaded with lyrical or ironic significance. ‘Theatre of Shadows’ has haunting military and psychological connotations, while ‘Hug’ begins with a boy reassuring his sister in the rubble and ends:
He crawled on his stomach until he reached her and he began to
remove the clumps of stones from her little body. He held her until
another explosion was heard.
The sky embraced them.
In ‘Positive News’ a mother begs her only surviving child to survive the bomb blast that has annihilated their family, the phrase simultaneously bitter, numb and desperately sincere. The title ‘Compensation’, of a prose-poem worth quoting in full, raises for the reader wider questions of justice and reparations that the speaker is not at that precise moment considering:
I was distributing food to infected children. A child with amputated legs hugged me. A minute of love from him compensated for forty-two days of drought.
Although God is strikingly absent from these texts, the final image suggests spiritual renewal after a fast or retreat; and this fleeting glimpse of the power of human connection shines with a sense of deliverance. Language placed under pressure, electrified by the friction between author and speaker, and amplified by the silence of the page, is the hallmark of poetry.
While the lyric self is also largely absent from Tatour’s empathic docupoetic ‘Despatches’, the second section of the book consists of eight free verse poems written largely in first and second person. These lineated poems develop a strong theme in Tatour’s work: poetry as lifeblood, love and land, and an endless conversation with self and others in which the poet never ceases to dream and speak of freedom. For as Tatour writes in ‘I will not die’: ‘The dead are those who do not dream’. Speaking truth to power in ‘The General, my brother and me’, the speaker demands apologies from war leaders, and, on behalf of innocence and the Earth, insists:
I resist with the letter
and with the poem
so that I do not interfere with the shape of the field,
the colour of the sky
the waves of the sea and the light of day
As the Nakba accelerates, poetry’s powerful role in Palestinian culture remains a source of hope. The delicate eco-consciousness Tatour expresses here is a seed of the wise leadership Palestine needs.
IV
Born in Texas, brought up in Libya and Saudi Arabia, and now based in Houston, Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American poet, translator, essayist and physician. Author of six collections, his many accolades include the 2024 $100,000 Jackson Poetry Prize, given for a body of work that, the judges observed, ‘has consistently explored mortality, the poem’s capacity to archive the living and the dead, and to transform borders into thresholds.’ The award comes at a time of devastating personal tragedy for Joudah: at the time of writing, Israeli airstrikes have killed over a hundred members of his family in Gaza. Most of the work in his new collection […] was written in reaction to the genocide; these new poems – many, like fragments from a bombed text, entitled ‘[…]’ – form the shattered spine of a collection that defies annihilation to deeply mourn the dead; insist on the human right to thrive; and comprehensively question the way Palestine is thought, written and talked about in the English-speaking world.
The title itself forces the reader to stop and question easy assumptions about language. Accepting that the name of a book does not have to be a conventional word or phrase, one still might wonder how, or whether, to ‘read’ or ‘say’ the pictogram. In a profound sense, of course, the title is literally unsayable, moving beyond words in homage to the unthinkable suffering the book responds to. (For this reason, I do not italicise it here, though for ease of reference, I will use quote marks and page numbers to identify individual poems.) At the same time, the ellipsis inside square brackets operates as a sign, tempting readers to ‘translate’ the pictogram into verbal language. Especially given the context of attacks on free speech, it would be a mistake to try and pin down such a term, but the process of reading inherently invites, even demands, interpretation, and as the collection unfolds, with its repeated use of the title, the pictogram inexorably accumulates, if not ‘translations’, verbal connotations and echoes.
[…] suggests deleted text, but also texts that are hidden in both the past and the future: older emails in a thread, messages in the process of being typed. One might ‘hear it’, therefore, as ‘Nakba’ – literally ‘catastrophe’ – the on-going ethnic cleansing of Palestine, a violent erasure subject always to further deletions: ‘Where did the new war begin? // Whoever gets to write it most / gets to erase it best’, ‘[…]’ (p37) dryly notes. In the brutal palimpsest of the Gaza genocide, the dead are doubly erased: the obscene statistics do not include people missing under the rubble or deprived of medical care. Against the heart-numbing numbers and omissions, Joudah’s tour de force ‘Dedication’ – which ought to be carved in stone in Washington DC – offers in tender detail a litany of obliterated and vulnerable Gazans: from ‘the babies whose death certificates marked their brief presence on earth’ to dementia patients for whom forgetting may be ‘a mercy’; from horses and starlings to ‘olive oil: preserver of time’. Elsewhere, ventriloquising bureaucratic and media discourse, ‘[…]’ (p 19) flatly asserts: ‘We need to differentiate / between the dead and the not-here’. This mutable voice is a defining feature of the book, which vibrates with tense hurt, controlled anger, comprehensive grief and palpable irony, reflecting a mercurial second-person address, which loosely brackets the reader with implied Zionists, Americans, old lovers, a life partner, and the speaker’s ‘mirage // of a solid self in ruins // gigantic in departure’ (‘[…]’, 37). Against the entrenched power imbalances at work in these efforts at dialogue, the speaker in […] (p16] asserts, ‘I am removing me from the we of you.’ And for the avoidance of doubt, later on another speaker informs the reader: ‘I am not your translator’.
[…] also conjures physical presences: prisoners in a cell, bodies in a mass grave, or children being carried on a stretcher. As an image of imprisonment, death and care-giving, in the context of Gaza the pictogram also tragically suggests hospitals. Elsewhere, the book generates a reading of ‘tunnel’: ‘there is a light in the endless tunnel’, […] (p18) calmly claims, illuminating the later observation that ‘In Arabic pain is an anagram of hope’. But though grounded in the violence in Gaza, from its opening pages the book reaches beyond the ‘demolished present’, seeking, in both the future and the deep past, remedies for despair, and a vision of life worth watering.
Over and over, the poems overflow the boundaries of the present to reach for carefully qualified but nonetheless universal insights. ‘… you are / what you other …’, […] (p20) observes, an insight that generates a series of meditations on human violence, and an urgent need to communicate with one’s aggressors. In ‘[…]’ (p30), the Palestinian speaker confronts a Jewish ex-lover who has gone on a meditation retreat in the Negev:
Your husband is enlisted.
My people are not without blame,
no people are. Degrees matter.
In these sometimes bitter implied dialogues Joudah offers at times surprisingly playful possibilities:
Listen, ears
Are erogenous.
I’ll lick your ears against revenge.
The poems in the third section develop this language of intimacy in the context of loved ones, bolstering a sense of faith, somehow, in the future, planted in everyday acts of affection and desire. In honouring Eros, the poems also cherish the Earth and its cycles; on page 15, […] might even be read as seeds; self-erasure as a means of slow growth:
Garden, I choose you.
You are the time
I want to lose.
The book’s dialogue with implied Israelis concludes in the future tense: ‘You will be when we be’, (‘[…]’, p73), making a unifying symbol of the book’s final vision of the Sunbird, national bird of Palestine, flying ‘From all that we / to all that me’ (‘Sunbird’). Joudah’s poetics does not claim to be a curative:
Not everyone
is a physician
But sooner or later everyone
fails to heal.
Nevertheless, in its persistent interrogation of normative realities, and gentle probing of transcendent possibilities, […] inspires belief in the power of poetry to change the way readers perceive, not just the condition of being Palestinian, but also our individual and collective potential at this perilous historical moment on Earth. Recalling that ‘stanza’ means ‘room’ in Italian, perhaps one might also read the title […] as ‘poem-in-progress’. AKA Palestine.