If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer

 

 

 

He was a volunteer at the Gaza zoo.

 

And in a way, because of If I Must Die, Refaat Alareer’s posthumous collection of poetry and prose, so are you.

 

A zoo, for all its captivating wildness, is still a garden, a place where what’s held is cared for (hopefully), inasmuch as what’s seen there is often unseeable in that elsewhere known as one’s daily life. If I Must Die, however, invites us to see, and starkly, into the new and wild zoo of a daily life cut short by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. 

 

And since, like Samuel Beckett says, “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness,” welcome to a strangely silent field trip through this zoo, a spacious holding of words both wild and wounding, as we walk through the way Alareer makes music out of the madness of his last months, even after being silenced.

 

The book’s eponymous poem bears repeating in its entirety, serving as both map and guide for the rest of our tour:

 

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

​

Alareer’s subsequent poem, “O, Earth,” brings us down and onto the ground immediately, as if the kite that flew above the you and the me in this troubled garden has made clear where we’re all headed:

 

O, Earth,

If in my life I am to hurt

Let my dirt in you give birth.

O, Earth.

 

This is the stuff of John Donne, Alareer’s companion in thesis and dissertation, his battered heart becoming the loam that allows him to “rise and stand” after being forced to “break, blow, burn,” all while being made new, still captive in the unforgiving wilderness of this zoo.

 

“This book is a reminder to keep Refaat’s legacy alive. If I Must Die speaks to a man who loved life, who took pleasure in it, and at the same time, who treated seriously his life’s mission as an educator for liberation,” writes the book’s editor, Yousef M. Aljamal. It does not escape me that the primary reality of a zoo, albeit often denied, is captivity. Alareer bursts from these constraints in “Over the wall,” a paean to his grandmother who is both here and everywhere:

 

“There,” points Grandma.

She had a tent that was a home.

She had a goat and a camel.

She had a rake and a fork and a trowel.

She had a machete and a watering can.

 

Refaat, too, had a home, in Tel al-Hawa, bombed three days before his death. In the book’s foreword, Susan Abulhawa, after having watched a video he shared with her of his house’s decimation, writes that Refaat’s “books were integral to his identity. His place in the world as a thinker, a teacher, a writer, was anchored to his library. To see it dismantled, discarded, and burned, I believe, turned off the lights in an unreachable part of him.”

 

But the poem continues, its inextinguishable light personified in one who came before Refaat, and who will be here long after:

 

I am sure of Grandma

Who always was

And is still

And will always be. 

She smells like soil. 

And smiles like soil.

And blinks like soil

When touched by rain.

 

This same soil into which our kite dove, and into which Alareer’s hurt gives the very dirt beneath one’s feet new life, this is the shared ground upon which both he and his Grandmother stand, proclaiming together: 

 

Grandma is here

But lives there.

“Over there!”

 

Thus does our zoo find its freedom, beyond its own walls, even and especially in its inherent wildness. “What a zoo!” emerges figuratively from Alareer’s mouth in “And We Live On…”:

 

And another day in Gaza

Another day in Palestine

A day in prison

And we live

Despite Israel’s very much identified flying objects

That we see more than our family and friends

 

Alareer completes the circle of our tour with “When I Stoop”:

 

On the other side of the wall (Behind the bars)

Sits the jailer.

As he turns back

And looks me in the eye,

He pours mountains of boredom

And lets loose a sigh.

I look back and smile.

 

It is no wonder Refaat volunteered at the zoo. He knew what all the caged animals know; that they, too, after the long end of this day’s night, will emerge into a fierce and wild morning, once again taking their rightful place on this planet, after the systems of control and domination come to an end, as they always do. Because, as he finishes the poem, it is the mighty who fall. The lowly have nowhere to go but up and over the zoo walls:

 

Inside my prison,

I also stoop,

But when I do, 

I stoop to conquer.