“In Haifa,” writes Abdalrahman Alqalaq, “people say that on the first night after settling in Wadi al-Salib, the settlers heard the screams and weeping of the displaced people who, 75 years ago, on April 22, 1948, fell victim to the massacres in that city. It is believed that it was the story of this fear that saved some of the houses in the neighborhood, inhabited by the absentees, from being colonized. Until the Absentees’ Property Law of 1950 was enacted. At this point, I would like to add my own story: Those who fear the cries of the dead believe in their return, and fear it at the same time.”

Alqalaq’s poems and prose trace the stories of three generations of a Palestinian family, across eight decades of exile. Born in 1997 in the Al-Yarmuk refugee camp at the outskirts of Damascus, the Palestinian poet and performer uses his writing to navigate the transgenerational legacy of expulsion. From the grandmother’s fleeing Haifa in the wake of the Nakba, to the grandson’s second displacement from Syria to Germany, Alqalaq confronts the unjust permanence of Palestinian refugee camps.

The father Samir and the grandmother Izdihar are recurring figures across Alqalaq’s writing. Neither lived to see the sea at Haifa again. Only after a subsequent displacement was their descendant Abdalrahman able to obtain the first legal document permitting him to “return” to Haifa: a German passport granted him access back to his family’s city. This return was enabled by his newfound citizenship in that same country that has contributed to the unresolved state of the question of Palestine, the same country that systematically erases Palestinian (hi)stories, the same country that is the second largest arms supplier to Israel during its ongoing genocide in Gaza. “I left the camp,” he writes laconically, “crossed the sea to the north, returned with a German passport / and the rubber boat that stuck to my skin was removed by the inspectors with disgust / as if it was an old chewing gum on my ankle. I said this is how I found my forefathers.“

The legacy of grandmother Izdihar shimmers between the lines of Alqalaq’s poetry collection Rite of Passage, published in Arabic in 2023 and translated into German in 2024. Izdihar shields her children from the details of her expulsion, bringing her descendants into a life far from the Nakba, from the catastrophe of her deportation. “Why didn’t you slam the camp gate in the child’s face and instead open the gate of your memory to Palestine?”, the narrator gently scolds his grandmother into account. The text traverses gaps in memory, filling the spaces left by missing documents with imagined experiences, and with untold stories taken to the grave. The text sporadically introduces narrative structures that sit ambiguously between memory, fact, and fiction. In these dazzling episodes something concrete and personal is uncovered; stories and fates from the banned archives of the Nakba become visible.

Parking Lots Instead of Humans

Returning to Haifa after three generations of displacement turns the traveller’s life, and his writing, upside down. It becomes an urgent theme and ultimately the core of Alqalaq’s new book in Arabic, The Thieves Beat Me to Haifa (2025), quoted at the beginning of this article. This new collection of poetry and prose, even more so than his previous work, escalates the rebellion against the permanence of the refugee camps: Alqalaq writes to push for their dismantling.

Arriving in the neighbourhood of Wadi Salib, Alqalaq is at last united with an ensemble of absentees, both alive and dead. Each familiar location stands as a reminder of ongoing dispossession, of the street barricades placed by Haganah militias in 1948 that left only one road open to Palestinians: towards the sea.

Alqalaq views the city through his grandmother’s memory. Taking on her gaze, he can peel away the settlements, the modern city built over ruins and Palestinian bodies. Street names, now overwritten, revert to their old titles. Time stands still, the present is suspended.

Searching for his grandmother’s home leads the traveller to realize that the building has been demolished and replaced by a parking lot. Alqalaq renders this moment of discovery with extreme austerity: the descriptions are sober and restrained. A street sign bearing the letter “P.” Opening hours. Parking fees. The house in historic Palestine, etched into the memories of three generations, has been “replaced” by a parking lot. Where the lyrical voice is met by the stench of metal and rubber tires, the absence of the grandmother and the history of Palestinian dispossession become traumatically present.

Time in the Camps

People often say that bombs can make time stand still. If the pressure wave caused by a blast did not destroy clocks outright, it would cause their hands to stop. After the siege and bombing of Al-Yarmuk, Alqalaq writes that he expected the world to stand still. Yet it continued. His texts, then, instead engage in a practice of modifying temporalities, of creating their own.

The opening text of Alqalaq’s latest collection, “Izdihar’s Eyes … Or, the Nakba Between the Door Shutters,” reveals how camps have preserved their own temporality for decades. Each night for fifteen years, the mother Nidal climbs up onto a chair to remove the wall clock, places it on a table, and then removes the batteries until morning. The loud ticking of the clock would prevent her from hearing if thieves try to break into the house. The narrator, however, never assumed this tradition had anything to do with thieves; as a child, he is relieved that time is standing still, a promise that everything in Al-Yarmuk refugee camp has ground to a halt. No death, starvation, funerals, marriages or protests will happen while the batteries are on the table.

Nidal creates a temporality for the camp inherited from her own mother. She, too, used to remove the batteries from the clock and put them back in the morning. The grandmother’s difficulty with memory, thought to be Alzheimer’s, is actually an ability to retain only two dates: either the 14th or the 16th of May, before or after the Nakba. When batteries are removed, new temporalities are created. Stopping the clock arms from moving turns time backwards, to an era before settler violence.