Intellectuals in the Gaza Strip are mourning Refaat Alareer, a professor of English literature and the enclave's symbolic voice, who was killed in an Israeli bombardment on December 6.
“If I have to die/You have to live/To tell my story (…) If I have to die/May it bring hope/Let a story emerge.” »
In early November, in Gaza devastated by Israeli bombs, writer Refaat Alareer published this poem in English in his X Report, an epitaph and bulwark against the permanent shadow of death in the enclave. He was killed in an Israeli bombing raid on Gaza City late in the afternoon of December 6th. He was 44 years old. His brother, sister and four of their children were taken. Their bodies still lie under the rubble.
His death shocked much of Gaza's intellectual elite, whose emblematic voice included Refaat Alareer. In the English literature courses he passionately taught for more than 16 years at the Islamic University of Gaza, a whole generation of English-speaking writers emerged. “He was more than a teacher, he was a mentor, a friend, and he truly cared about his students,” one of his former students, academic and writer Jehad Abusalim, wrote on X on December 8. The latter had one of his Texts published in the collection Light in Gaza. Writings Born of Fire (“Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire,” Haymarket Books, 2022, untranslated) then added: “For Refaat, English was a tool of liberation, a means of escaping the ongoing siege in Gaza liberate, a.” Teleportation instrument that challenged Israel's barriers and the intellectual, academic and cultural blockade of the Gaza Strip. »