February 10, 2025

Reading Group Week 4

Hello, and welcome (back) to the reading group. We're starting with a new book this week, so I hope you'll join us as we read If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer.

If you haven't bought the book yet, you can buy it from the Open Poems bookstore. Please place an order soon.

If you already have the book, or you'd like to make an additional donation, you can donate to The Sameer Project. You can also donate to the Alareer family on Chuffed.

Quick note

I've made a "pay what you want" subscription tier if you're interested in supporting the reading group monetarily.

There's no premium content behind the paywall, but your collective support makes this work possible, and I wanted to give people an option to chip in some money if you're already supporting The Sameer Project, and donating to Sudanese people in need, and local mutual aid groups, and you're in a financial position where you can afford it.

There's more information on the Format and Roadmap page, which also lays out the roadmap for what I hope to read, and how you can participate.

As always, you can subscribe for free, which the interface is telling me I should remind you about

Readings

For this book, I'm generally aiming to read 6 to 7 pieces per week.

This week, I'd like us to read the following pieces:

• Foreword
• Introduction
• A Modest Proposal
• Israel's Power of the Camera: Gaza's Power of Gaza
• Gaza Mourns Vittorio Arrigoni
• If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale
• I Was Mustafa Tamimi
• Mustafa's Only Care

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Reflections and Discussion

I'll briefly recap the format for the reading group since we're starting a new book, but you can also read about the format and roadmap on this page.

• On Mondays, I'll email with some instructions for the week, and reflections to nudge discussions. That email will offer links to threads on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Twitter.
• At your own pace, you can comment on the social media posts (Bluesky, Mastodon, and Twitter), or you can chat with us via a Signal group chat (link in emails).
• On Saturdays at 12pm ET, you can join me for a video chat, where we'll talk about the readings for about an hour.

I'm also always on the lookout for new formats or new things we can try. If you have suggestions, please reach out.

With that, let's get to some reflections to get us started...

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Foreword

Over the years, Refaat and I had several discussions about his embrace of English literature instead of Arabic. Having been forced to leave my Arabic education at a young age, I would lament to him that it pained me to have never developed a sophisticated grasp of my poetically charged mother tongue. He agreed, mostly. But he found English more practical and pliable. More importantly, he wanted to master the language of the empire that oppressed him. Always thinking of Palestinian liberation, Refaat believed there was great value in speaking and writing to the people of empire to lay bare our humanity before them. He believed people were essentially good; that if they could only see what was happening to us, they would stop supporting our colonizers; that if they could see the magnificent beauty of our souls, they might love us. He also wanted to ensure our lives would be recorded despite rampant efforts to erase our presence in the world.

I was a little overwhelmed with feelings, mostly grief, by this paragraph of the foreword by Susan Abulhawa. I grew up having not learned Arabic, not unlike her, and came to feel a now familiar dull pang of regret at the missed opportunity to learn the idiosyncratic quirks of Iraqi Arabic, with idioms that sound comically folksy when transliterated and clearly carry with them more than a direct translation can accommodate.

What I can do with English now is something I can't do with any other language I've ever studied, and Arabic is not even one of those. It became an albatross for me - an elephant in the room that I've avoided, as much out of embarrassment as anything else. All this is to say... I feel what I hope is a close familiarity to Abulhawa's lament.

But Alareer's response surprised me on several levels:

"... he wanted to master the language of the empire that oppressed him".

The language of the empire that oppressed him.

I didn't think that his answer to Abulhawa would be so... practical, so... strategic. But my surprise quickly had to give way for Abulhawa's next relay:

[Refaat] believed people were essentially good; that if they could only see what was happening to us, they would stop supporting our colonizers... they might love us.

I spent... a while, after reading this paragraph, struggling. I floundered between anger, grief, sadness, hopefulness, and then a mixture of all of them.

For some time, I thought about how far away I was from this belief. I've been fully consumed by the thought that it's not enough to endear myself to people who try to kill me and people I care about; I need to make it as painful as possible - as difficult as possible - to hurt the people I love.

I think there was a time that I believed what Alareer expressed, but I've long since stopped caring if racists learn the error of their ways and love me. I only care to make their lives as miserable and as unbearable as possible until they leave the people I love alone. That feralness is as far as I can see, these days.

And yet... Dr. Alareer seriously expressed this hope to be loved. He died with the earnest hope to prove his humanity to the very people who went on kill him. He believed it so much so that he studied English, that he taught it in university, that he used it for his writings. These writings, that I was holding in my hands.

I am overwhelmed with anger and grief; I don't believe that making himself more legible, more understandable, to people who wished to kill him could keep Refaat Alareer safe. I want it to be true. I wish so badly for it to be true. But every moment I try to imagine that world, my brain interrupts that thought, and reminds me that he's dead. and I feel a little more quiet.

In the quiet absence, what I can hold up and bring into focus is how he wanted to ensure that Palestinians' voices would not be erased for the mistake of being uttered and written in Arabic. He spent decades studying English so that you and I could read this book, and the rest of his work, and love him and love Palestinians.

I'm compelled, obsessed to draw in every word of his that I can. He died believing in this. He died believing in us being good people. I cannot let that belief be wrong. I want to make a world worthy of the belief Dr. Alareer described and genuinely held, despite everything. I hope you'll give this collection the spirit of that attention.

Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitter

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If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale

Given its ubiquity, including on the late Dr. Alareer's twitter page, I'll share the poem here as a link to Twitter, and additionally as text for people with screen readers or other assistive tech. You can also read it at The Grayzone

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

I won't retread how much this poem transcended boundaries and reached out to people around the world, across languages, inspiring people to translate this work into dozens of languages, to be seen by tens of millions more people. I suppose I'm doing what I said I wouldn't do.

On this reading, I want to dwell on the hopefulness in this piece - something I don't think I had the space to cope with when I first read it.

so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
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

We've seen so many Palestinian children in photos and videos, mutilated, torn to pieces, by israeli occupation forces. I can only think of a handful of times that I recall seeing a child asking where their father was, or where their mother was.

Alareer's final wish sounded to me a little like the kind of loving, careful instruction a parent might give their beloved child - go sell these things, buy this kind of cloth with it, and make sure to buy strings; make the kite look like this, and make it fly. His final words to his children, his final loving act, were instructions to sell his things and give other children one last, gasping, fleeting feeling of love from their parents up above.

I will retread one more time, to reflect on something: I remember visiting an encampment on campus a number of months ago, seeing the symbols of the Palestinian movement: watermelons of course, keys of course, and — of course — a white kite. This poem has reverberated profoundly, in a way that I think a lot of people would immediately mutually understand the symbolism of a white kite now. I wonder, I hope, how many people have seen a kite in the sky and thought about the billowing embrace of their parents, long missed.

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I Was Mustafa Tamimi

Ten years ago not one single Palestinian (not even those with the wildest imagination) could have foreseen that certain kinds of rockets will be used in the struggle. But Israel made it possible. By crushing stone throwers, Israel was, albeit not directly, saying to the Palestinians, "you better think of other weapons." And Palestinians did.

In the midst of everything, something I keep being surprised by, especially in this piece, is how relentlessly, desperately, Alareer and Tamimi and so many other Palestinians suffer for hoping that "those trigger-happy soldiers may not shoot directly".

This piece was originally written in 2011. Just under 10 years prior, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by Israeli settlers with a bulldozer. The entire focus of this essay is about Mustafa Tamimi, a man who believed that Israeli soldiers would not look in his eyes and kill him, who was killed for that belief. In so many ways, mirroring the story of Rachel Corrie 8 years prior; and in many ways Alareer speaks to Tamimi to say that he was Tamimi 15 years earlier. And "two months before that it was a relative who had his skull smashed by an explosive bullet from an Israeli sniper". It's these nested and recurring tragedies of hope and faith in humanity, met with such abject violence.

When I read that "Palestinians did [think of other weapons]", I think about how reluctantly that process occurred. I think about every story about a Palestinian or an activist, like Rachel Corrie or Vittorio Arrigoni, who convinced themselves that a human being would be braced by the sight of another human being in front of them, and not bring themselves to kill another human being. And I think about how instead these Palestinians and allies were crushed, blown apart, shot at, and murdered in air strikes.

I think I'm spending considerable time dwelling on this, and I'm not sure why. I might spend more time thinking about this.

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If you have thoughts about any of these poems, or any of the other poems from this week, I would really like to hear your thoughts. Please @ me on Bluesky, Mastodon, or Twitter (whatever place you feel comfortable), or join the Signal group chat.

Other news

We're almost at the end of the email.

Next book

Our next book will be Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd.

You can buy the book at the Open Poems bookstore as with the last few books.

Future books

If you'd like to look ahead, you can look at the Format and Roadmap page to see what books we'll be reading on the horizon.

Questions or concerns?

Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out.