Refaat Alareer – If I Must Die [Eerbetoon]

Beschrijving

The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023.

He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. “If I Must Die” is included here, alongside Refaat’s other poetry.

Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.

Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by one of Refaat’s closest friends and collaborators. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity.

— Recensie:

What comes through most strongly is Refaat’s dedication to truth and to the bigger picture. As he tells a CNN journalist framing the current violence as a response to Hamas: “If you start the story from B, then you blame the Warsaw Ghetto Rebels, you blame the Native Americans, you blame the slaves who rebelled against the slave owners, and you blame the Palestinians.”

Where Refaat’s intellectual clarity dominates the transcripts and blogs, his love of language and his deep capacity to communicate feeling are best demonstrated in the poems that punctuate the collection. Many of them have the writer embody a resistance figure: the imprisoned poet, the grieving grandmother. Elsewhere he speaks directly to the Israeli soldier enacting his torture.

His love of English verse and his great knowledge of that tradition come through powerfully. These are poems as devastating as they are playful: “I am in prison for words./ What would Hamlet say?/ Chains to the sweet?/ Cruel to be cruel?/ To die to die?/ No chance to dream?”

In the final piece of writing in the book, published posthumously, Refaat discusses a student offering him his place in the long queue for bread amidst a shattered city, the impossibility of taking it, and the beauty of the offer. The book ends there. A life cut heartbreakingly short.

Refaat writes that when the Israelis come for him he will defend himself even if it is only by throwing his pen at the soldiers. In the end they did not give him the chance. Following repeated threats, Israel killed him, his sister, his brother and four nephews in a single air strike. Months later they murdered his daughter, to whom his most famous poem If I should Die is addressed. Refaat’s newborn grandchild was also killed.

Amongst the mass killing, Refaat and his family were deliberately targeted by the Israeli regime. In the year since, it has been clear that the systematic killings of journalists, artists, poets, writers and professors is one aspect of the genocide in Gaza. This scholasticide seeks to undermine one of Palestine’s greatest achievements: its drive – despite generations of oppression and dispossession at the hands of Israel – to build one of the most educated and cultured populations in the world.

The book is both a tragic document of a genocide, and also a beacon of hope for a Palestinian future. As Abulhawa puts it in his beautiful foreword: “Refaat did not die, he multiplied!”