This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Text originally published Dec. 10, 2024

The Power of the Pen - Mr. Fish

Dear Refaat,

We are not silent. We are being silenced. The students who, during the last academic year set up encampments, occupied halls, went on hunger strikes and spoke out against the genocide, were met this fall with a series of rules that have turned university campuses into academic gulags. Among the minority of academics who dared to speak out, many have been sanctioned or dismissed. Medical professionals who criticize the wholesale destruction by Israel of hospitals, clinics and targeted assassinations of health workers in Gaza have been suspended or terminated from medical school faculties with some facing threats to revoke their medical licenses.

Journalists who detail the mass slaughter and expose Israeli propaganda have been taken off air or fired from their publications. Jobs are lost over social media posts. The tiny handful of politicians who condemn the killing have seen millions of dollars spent to drive them from office. Algorithms, shadow-banning, deplatforming and demonetizing – all of which I have experienced – are used to marginalize or ban us on digital media platforms. A whisper of protest and we are disappeared.

None of these measures will be lifted once the genocide ends. The genocide is the pretext. The result will be one huge step towards an authoritarian state, especially with the ascendancy of Donald Trump. The silence will expand, like a great cloud of sulfurous gas. We choke on forbidden words. They killed you. They are strangling us. The goal is the same. Erasure. Your story, the story of all Palestinians, is not to be told.

The Zionists and their allies have nothing left in their arsenal but lies, censorship, smear campaigns and violence, the blunt instruments of the damned. But I hold in my hand the weapon that will, ultimately, defeat them. Your book, “If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose”.

“Stories teach life,” you write, “even if the hero suffers or dies in the end.”

Writing, you told your students, “is a testimony, a memory that outlives any human experience, and an obligation to communicate with ourselves and the world. We lived for a reason, to tell the tales of loss, survival, and of hope.”

It has been a year since an Israeli missile targeted the second-floor apartment where you were sheltering. You had been receiving death threats for weeks online and by phone from Israeli accounts. You had already been displaced multiple times. You fled in the end to your sister’s home in Al-Sidra neighborhood in Gaza City. But you did not escape your hunters. You were murdered with your brother Salah and one of his children and your sister and three of her children.

You wrote your poem “If I Must Die” in 2011. You released it again a month before your death. It has been translated into dozens of languages. You wrote it for your daughter Shymaa. In April 2024, four months after your death, Shymaa was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with her husband and their two-month-old son, your grandson, who you never met. They had sought refuge in the building of the international relief charity Global Communities.

You write to Shymaa:

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

to sell my things

to buy a piece of cloth

and some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza

while looking heaven in the eye

awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

and bid no one farewell

not even to his flesh

not even to himself—

sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

and thinks for a moment an angel is there

bringing back love

If I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

You have joined the martyred poets. The Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam. The Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti who wrote his final verses on a death march. The Chilean singer and poet Víctor Jara. The Black poet Henry Dumas, shot dead by New York City police.

In your poem “And We Live On…” you write:

Despite Israel’s birds of death

Hovering only two meters from our breath

From our dreams and prayers

Blocking their ways to God.

Despite that.

We dream and pray,

Clinging to life even harder

Every time a dear one’s life

Is Forcibly rooted up.

We live.

We live.

We do.

Why do killers fear poets? You were not a combatant. You did not carry a weapon. You put words on paper. But all the might of the Israeli army and intelligence services were deployed to track you down.

In times of distress, when the world is enveloped by cruelty and suffering, when lives are perched on the edge of the abyss, poetry is the sad lament of the oppressed. It makes us feel the suffering. It is intuitive. It captures the mix of complex emotions — joy, love, loss, fear, death, trauma, grief — when the world falls apart. It creates in its beauty a salvific meaning out of despair. It is an absurd act of hope, a defiant act of resistance, taunting those who dehumanize you with erudition and sensitivity. Its fragility and beauty, its sanctification of memory, experience and the intellect, its musicality, mock the simplistic slogans and cant of the killers.

In your poem “Freshly Baked Souls” you write:

The hearts are not hearts.

The eyes can’t see

There are no eyes there

The bellies craving for more

A house destroyed except for the door

The family, all of them, gone

Save for a photo album

That has to be buried with them

No one was left to cherish the memories

No one.

Except freshly baked souls in bellies.

Except for a poem.

Writing, as Edward Said reminds us, is “the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”

Violence cannot create. It only destroys. It leaves nothing of value behind.

“Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry,” you said in a lecture given to your students in Advanced English Poetry at the Islamic University in Gaza. “When the Zionists thought of going back to Palestine, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, let’s go to Palestine.’”

You snapped your fingers:

It took them years, like over fifty years of thinking, of plann...

Letter to Refaat Alareer - Read by Eunice Wong

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