Paperback of the week: You Must Live – New Poetry from Palestine

The poetic motif wuquf ‘ala al-atlal, or “stopping by the ruins”, has been in use since the pre-Islamic period. In it, the landscape – haunted by what once was – becomes representative of loss and longing. In the classical mode, these were poems characterised by a bittersweet nostalgia. When the modern poets of Palestine adopt the same motif, the sense of loss is more agonised than wistful, the wounds raw and bleeding. 

You Must Live collects recent work by 30 poets from Gaza and four from the West Bank, and many of their poems (compiled and translated by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor) describe a landscape that, since the IDF’s reprisals following the 7 October attacks on Israel, has been mercilessly and comprehensively destroyed. 

We have all seen the pictures. The architect Eyal Weizman calls it “ungrounding”, a brutal process in which bulldozers are as devastating as bombs. In Nasser Rabah’s poem A Battlefield of Ashes, a family eats “our meal of rubble”.

Images of death and destruction are inescapable here. “Dear war,” writes Haider al-Ghazali, “I will trim your fingernails, / I will wash your hands / of my people’s flesh.” Anes Ganema describes cheeks “gaunt like raised graves”. Waleed al-Aqqad makes the chilling confession: “I have never seen a corpse intact.” “So many amputated hands,” writes Nema’a Hassan, “trying to shake mine.”

If the work is remarkable, so was the manner of its transmission. In their introduction, Odeh and Bloor explain the poems “arrived as text messages, screenshots, photographs of handwritten pages, and as social media posts. We tracked edits as the poets fled one so-called ‘safe’ zone for another, finding themselves in overcrowded tent camps.” 

Only after embarking on the editing process did they realise whenever “someone’s phone connected to a satellite, or received a message, they became a potential target. And to reply might entail life-or-death decisions: standing atop rubble, the signal is sharper but leaves one exposed.” That the poets were willing to take this risk tells of the desperate urgency of the situation, and despair at the sense that a people’s livestreamed destruction is being met with such indifference by foreign governments and much of the world’s media.

While the genocide (as a UN special commission has termed it) forms the malevolent core of this collection, it is approached in a variety of ways. In The Gravedigger, Khaled Juma opts for bitterly dark humour, describing a worker whose business was a one-man, one-shovel operation until he moved to Gaza. “Now my shovel is useless.” He buys a little digger, then an excavator, hires all the unemployed. “Still, it’s not enough. / I have built a business with death. / Now we are first on the stock exchange.”

More frequently, the tone is exasperated. “I’m fed up with death,” writes Othman Hussein. Suleiman al-Hazeen protests that Gazans want “just one evening / without rocket launchers, / without criminals, without planes, / without tanks, / without murderers”. For Fida’a Zayed, it’s the sound of the drone that proves most challenging. “Since morning, the drone hasn’t shut up. / It won’t stop. / Wherever I walk I hear its buzzing.”

Sometimes escape is attempted – not physically, which is almost impossible, but by way of some pattern of thought. Returning to Othman Hussein (one of the discoveries of the book for me), in his poem My Share of Dreams, dreams are “like provisions”, “secretly distributed among us”. “I built a dream,” he writes, “and moved entirely into it. I decorated it with plains and valleys.” But in the midst of this escapist fantasy of an unbroken land, a reversal of the wuquf ‘ala al-atlal, the anxiety of reality intrudes as he admits, “I was afraid it would collapse.” He mounts some resistance, urging in the final line “don’t let your dreams drop into the mire of this night’s terrors”, but the sense remains that the nightmare will still be there when the sleeper awakes.

You Must Live: New Poetry from Palestine, translated and edited by Tayseer Abu Odeh and Sherah Bloor, is published by Penguin (£12.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.04 (15% off RRP). Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Bashar Taleb/AFP/Getty Images