“We could die this dawn,” Refaat Alareer tweeted on December 4, along with an audio of bombs falling nearby.
“I wish I were a freedom fighter so I die fighting back,” he added.
He was killed two days later, fighting back as only he could, with lines of his 2011 poem foretelling his own death being repeated, translated and shared the world over, and turning into a symbol of Palestinian resilience:
“If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story…”
“We are enveloped in thick layers of gunpowder and cement. There are several bombs and shells each and every single minute. It’s suffocating”, he wrote on the same day.
For Refaat, this suffocation did not start with the current war in Gaza, but had been his constant companion as a promising literature student in the UK, and ended up turning him into a storyteller of Gaza’s besieged desires.
He also helped his young students at the Islamic University of Gaza City write and publish their own stories, memoirs and poems. The University, the site of proud convocation ceremonies to many a young Gazan, now lies in rubble, and yet the words of Refaat still stand, testimonies to his undying quest for reaching out to the world and telling his story.
As he fought back the occupation with words, his own and others’, the face of the “enemies” stared back at him across the fence that now lies shattered. And he told them:
I Am You
Two steps: one, two.
Look in the mirror:
The horror, the horror!
The butt of your M-16 on my cheekbone
The yellow patch it left
The bullet-shaped scar expanding
Like a swastika,
Snaking across my face,
The heartache flowing
Out of my eyes dripping
Out of my nostrils piercing
My ears flooding
The place.
Like it did to you
70 years ago
Or so.
***
I am just you.
I am your past haunting
Your present and your future.
I strive like you did.
I fight like you did.
I resist like you resisted
And for a moment,
I’d take your tenacity
As a model,
Were you not holding
The barrel of the gun
Between my bleeding
Eyes.
***
One. Two.
The very same gun
The very same bullet
That had killed your Mom
And killed your Dad
Is being used,
Against me,
By you.
***
Mark this bullet and mark in your gun.
If you sniff it, it has your and my blood.
It has my present and your past.
It has my present.
It has your future.
That’s why we are twins,
Same life track
Same weapon
Same suffering
Same facial expressions drawn
On the face of the killer,
Same everything
Except that in your case
The victim has evolved, backward,
Into a victimizer.
I tell you.
I am you.
Except that I am not the you of now.
***
I do not hate you.
I want to help you stop hating
And killing me.
I tell you:
The noise of your machine gun
Renders you deaf
The smell of the powder
Beats that of my blood.
The sparks disfigure
My facial expressions.
Would you stop shooting?
For a moment?
Would you?
***
All you have to do
Is close your eyes
(Seeing these days
Blinds our hearts.)
Close your eyes, tightly
So that you can see
In your mind’s eye.
Then look into the mirror.
One. Two.
I am you.
I am your past.
And killing me,
You kill you.
