Poetry may not be the most practical response to aerial bombardment, but for many Palestinians in Gaza, it has become a line of defense amid the rubble and ongoing killings. Nazmi al-Masri, professor of languages at the Islamic University of Gaza, put it succinctly at an online poetry event: "Poetry keeps hope alive. Even in the darkest moments, Palestinian poetry continues to imagine a future." He added that it gives people a language to express collective grief and documents what cameras cannot always reach and numbers can never explain. "When destruction erases physical spaces, poetry becomes a witness to history."
The reading featured student work celebrating the publication of Folding a River, a collection by Alison Phipps - professor of languages and intercultural studies at Glasgow University - and her Zimbabwean colleague Tawona Sitholé. Phipps noted, "Poetry is the mother tongue of Palestine. It's the artistic medium that they move to," having been involved in joint cultural programmes with the Islamic University of Gaza for 17 years. With 95% of the university's buildings damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombing, all classes are now online - when solar power permits a brief video meeting or, in this case, a poetry reading from disparate parts of Gaza via mobiles, laptops, and consoles.
Since the war began, 72 faculty members and 543 students have been killed; in the same period, 2,860 students graduated. Masri explained that Palestinian poetry has a long tradition centered on homeland, exile, memory, resistance, love, identity, displacement, and survival, often combining lyrical beauty with political testimony. Some poems were dedicated to the memory of Gazan poet Refaat Alareer, killed in an Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023 along with his brother, nephew, sister, and three of her children. Masri felt the students were answering Alareer's famous poem: "If I die / you must live / to tell my story … let it bring hope / let it be a tale." Masri said, "Alareer's poem travelled across the world because it expresses something very simple but very powerful: the fear of disappearing without being remembered."
At the reading's end, one student said, "Let's throw away war," which became the title of their poetry collection, published by Wild Goose Publications - an imprint of an ecumenical Christian community on the Scottish island of Iona. As Phipps and Masri wrote in the introduction: "These are not poems written in quiet rooms. They are written under collapsing ceilings, typed on phones with failing batteries, memorised because paper may not survive."
Phipps noted that Folding a River was written to accompany an academic study of displacement and gender violence, and they discovered poetry was "really helpful too, and really valued by refugees. They found it restorative and empowering." She explained that in Islam, certain forms of representative art are not part of the cultural language, so poetry, calligraphy, and embroidery in abstract modes are the forms found across Muslim countries. "In cultures where people have been deprived of carrying out all sorts of labour, you find them turning to very meticulous art such as henna tattooing." Young people in Gaza wanted to write in the manner of great Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan, so Wild Goose invited them to submit their work.
Remarkably, the poems display near-total absence of bitterness or rancour given the suffering. Phipps, who has helped bring students from Gaza to study in Glasgow, said she believes the young poets do not want to reflect or become the violence they abhor. "For my students from Gaza, being alive is resistance," she said. In the words of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha: "We carry our houses in our hearts after the walls are gone."