2023-12-11 06:24:52
A little over a month ago, Refaat Alareer published a poem of a few lines on his X account (formerly Twitter). Titled « If I must die »“If I were to die”)it ended with these words: “May this bring hope, may this be a tale”. The Palestinian poet’s dire premonition finally came true. On the night of Wednesday December 6 to Thursday December 7, he was killed in an Israeli strike on the north of the Gaza Strip, the epicenter of the fighting that he had refused to leave, his family announced 24 hours later . He was 44 years old. His brother, his sister and four of his nephews also died.
Professor of English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, where he notably taught Shakespeare, Refaat Alareer edited the book Gaza writes backchronicles of life in Gaza by young Palestinian authors, and published Gaza unsilencednot translated into French.
Making the voices of young authors resonate
The poet was above all one of the leaders of a young generation of authors from the Palestinian enclave who had chosen to write in English rather than in Arabic to allow their texts to cross borders. He notably participated in the creation of the association « We are not numbers »(We are not numbers”), founded in 2014 with the aim of giving birth to “a new generation of Palestinian writers and thinkers capable of profoundly changing the Palestinian cause”as its website explains.
Deploring that the daily reality of Palestinians is too often summarized by figures, which explains the name of the association, its founders intended to bring out new voices on the subject and, for this, imagined pairings with “mentors” to the foreigner helping them to write in English. A role which earned many emotional tributes to Refaat Alareer on social networks.
He could nevertheless make very controversial comments about Israel. In an interview with the BBC the day after the Hamas attack on the Jewish state on October 7, he shocked by describing the assault as “legitimate and moral”. It is “exactly like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising”he added, in a reference to the revolt of the Jewish population of the Polish capital, in 1943, against the Nazi occupiers.
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