It has been more than a year of this genocidal siege on Gaza, with Israeli forces now expanding their attacks on people, homes, and hospitals to the West Bank and Lebanon. The loss, the suffering, and the violence are unrelenting. At every turn, we hear of entire family lines erased from the civil registry; that Gaza’s rubble could take ten or fifteen years to clear; that it could require three and a half centuries to rebuild; that every school and university has been destroyed.
And then there’s the incalculable loss of adults, children, and babies: gone. Sometimes, in the face of all this, it feels as though nothing can be said. And yet Palestinians in Gaza continue to write, even in the most difficult of circumstances. And they continue to imagine a different world. Here, we bring together Palestinian writers in and from Gaza to imagine a future. Recollections of this past year, reflections on where they are now, and thoughts about where they might be tomorrow all come together in this small chapbook.
We begin with a moment of silence. In his poem “Amjad,” translated by Wiam El-Tamami, Nasser Rabah writes about trying to find someone to listen to his grief about losing his closest friend: “Who will listen to me tell the story of Amjad? / Who will give me their heart—and a moment of silence?” After our shared silence, Nasser tells us about where he now writes, in his bombed-out home. “Only two rooms on the ground floor remain: this is where my entire family lives now. In a corner of one of the rooms, I curl up and write.”
The poet Batool Abu Akleen echoes what many have said about how they must go on writing, despite everything. She has been displaced, and she describes writing among the tents: “You’re sitting and everyone around you is just sitting and watching what you’re doing. It doesn’t feel good at all, but I’m doing it, because poetry is what keeps me alive. It’s what protects me from going insane.”
In her poem “A Miracle,” Asmaa Dwaima imagines not a future so much as a wonderment: “A miracle that allows us to start over. / The hand of God wipes away a year, / And takes us one year back. / A miracle: / That’s all I want.”
In this collection, we also remember the many journalists who were targeted and killed by Israeli forces. Poet Heba Al-Agha commemorates two of them in her poem “For Ismail Al-Ghoul and Rami Al-Rifi.” The pair were killed on July 31, 2024 while, according to Reporters Without Borders, they were in an isolated white car in the middle of an empty street, both wearing press vests.
We include one work by a writer who is not from Gaza: Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash.
The final poem in this collection is his “We Will Lose This War,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine, because it speaks so urgently to both loss and futurity. As he writes, “When our killers look into mirrors, / they will not see their faces, / but ours, many of us, in the mist. / They will finally realize that they have become nothing / but memories of ghosts in the great abyss. / They will never understand how they annihilated us / then annihilated us,/ then annihilated us, / and yet could not erase from their mirrors / our shining image.”
These poems and reflections do not exist separately from their authors, nor from the place and time in which they were com- posed. They are not here for passive reading. And so, at the end of this collection, we leave you with suggested actions.
As poet Rasha Abdulhadi has written:
“Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now.”
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