Refaat Alareer's "If I Must Die"
Literature In This Endlessly Grim But Determinedly Hopeful Age
Opening excerpts from “Portrait of the Artist as a People’s Historian,” Karthik Puru’s review of Refaat Alareer’s posthumous book, If I Must Die:
Portrait of the Artist as a People’s Historian
By Karthik Puru
One year and two months into the acceleration of the Israeli military’s ethnic cleansing campaign that major U.S. literary institutions still refuse to call a genocide, late Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer’s posthumous work If I Must Die (OR Books) comes not requesting recognition, but instead raising the bar for what it means to be literary in the current moment. Released to mark the anniversary of Alareer’s targeted killing, the book is a work of digital and oral history compiling the former Islamic University professor’s poems, editorials, articles, lectures, and interviews from the last decade-plus of his life, which together read like an epic poem chronicling the life of a man of his people.
The book emerges a call to action rather than a mere commemoration. Named for Alareer’s viral poem, the book’s (arguably even the poem’s) core driver is a quote from Nigerian author Chinua Achebe: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” When living in a time when many deny that the hunt is happening and are calling it a “conflict,” how do the lions counter the narrative? The book’s answer is ask the reader to take a simple action: to ensure that the story of his people reaches far and wide—an internationalist collaboration, laughing in the face of the oppressor. This is the simple reason Alareer wrote in English and not Arabic.
From Wilfred Owen in 1917 rhetorically asking, “What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?” to Kevin Powers in 2014 directly stating, “War is just people making little pieces of metal pass through each other,” contemporary Anglophone antiwar poetry and literature has largely been the purview of conscientious objectors and soldiers who fought in wars and either succumbed or got disillusioned. The imperialist invasions of the U.S. coupled with national liberation struggles worldwide in the latter half of last century, however, saw survivors of displacement, persecution, and torture enter the American lyric by offering what poet and activist Carolyn Forché terms a “poetry of witness” that serves as “evidence of what occurred,” while being “as much about language as are poems that have no subject other than language itself.” […]
Alareer’s work also serves as a blueprint for political artists worldwide.
The title of Refaat Alareer’s If I Must Die is taken from his central poem in the book titled “If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale,” which is reminiscent of the renowned poem “If We Must Die” by anti-imperialist Claude McKay. Alareer’s poem title echoes further the first line of McKay’s great poem of resistance and liberation: “If we must die, let it be not like hogs.” Amazing how so-called parochial or partisan literature is so very universal and eternal and so often tightly linked in theme, principle, emotion, thought, and imagination no matter how far separated by time and space, transcending physics and defying establishment attempts to disappear from history.
Refaat Alareer’s book and poem — “If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story / … / If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale” — stand strong, and eternal, against one of the most vicious and depraved and ongoing atrocities of this age or of any age, the genocide of Palestinians and others by the American-Israeli bombings and massacres across multiple countries and lands in western Asia.
We live in an age of monstrous imperial atrocity and great populist upheaval against the plutocracy that pillages, ravages, and obliterates. “Atrocity” and “atrocious” date from the 1530s and 1660s meaning “enormous wickedness” and "heinous, extremely criminal, enormously cruel” and stem from the root words “fire” and “to see.” The world needs words and creations, literature, like Alareer’s “If I Must Die” to counter the enormously wicked, criminal, and cruel death-fire that is bombed down on defenseless innocents in a genocidal pillaging by the oh so respectable American and Israeli plutocrats who rule like the most heinous Satanic figures imaginable in their space-age infernal realms. These atrocious figures are incredibly violent plutocrats and their enablers who attempt to pass on the street and in the media as decent people and who attempt to buy your vote.
In spite of Genocide Joe Biden’s current rule and Con Don Trump's recent win, social media and the people's media manifest continuously online, working 24/7 to remake America and the world as progressive populist, as opposed to pseudo populist. Chaotic populists are mixing in too. The way of the world, only more so now. Populism in America — action against unjust elites, the plutocracy — comes in all forms: especially pseudo populism (Trump and establishment Democrats), progressive populism (Bernie and the Squad), and chaotic populism (assassins and bomb throwers against plutocrats like Trump and health insurance executives and others). Rage at the plutocratic financial, political, and military establishments — peak centers of fraud, coercion, and lethality against the people — seems to be at an all-time high, for good reason. This righteous rage needs to be converted into progressive structural gains.
In a sane and humane world, the progressive populists will pervasively prevail, and transform life, revolutionize the peoples and the planet, along with the literature of the peoples’ on the planet. The world fights desperately for both its sanity and humanity in these ever more transparently vicious, genocidal, and terminal times, to which Refaat Alareer’s posthumous book “If I Must Die” vividly attests.
From OR Books:
The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. “If I Must Die” is included here, alongside Refaat’s other poetry.
Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.
Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated [in If I Must Die] by one of Refaat’s closest friends and collaborators [Yousef M. Aljamal]. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity.
If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale
by Refaat Alareer
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
Refaat Alareer: “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade, if the paratroopers charge at us, going from door to door, to massacre us, I am going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I do.”
