I used to feel that in every portrait of a Palestinian family you could see the shadow of a person missing, and that is why my photos are dimly lit.
—Niraz Saied1
Cameras captured the father of Palestinian journalist Mohammed Mansour grieving for his son after he was killed by a targeted Israeli airstrike. Mansour’s body lies surrounded by mourners, his press vest still visible. His father grasps a Palestine Today TV microphone and presses it into his dead son’s hand, imploring him “احكي، احكي، ضلك احكي” (“tell, tell, keep telling”).
A few hours later, journalist Hossam Shabat was also deliberately targeted by an Israeli airstrike. Shabat’s final message, published posthumously, urged everyone not to stop bearing witness and to continue telling the stories of Gazans. When military or state actors justify the targeted killing of journalists, poets and writers by referring to them as terrorists, they acknowledge the perceived political power of words and ‘mere’ writing and speech. Reporting and contesting the actions of a powerful military appears to be taken very seriously as an active threat.
In the aftermath of his 2023 assassination, Gazan poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer’s notorious 2011 poem If I Must Die reads, in retrospect, as a last will and testament, asking survivors to write and narrate against forgetting. “Palestine is a story away,” notes Alareer in Gaza Writes Back, the anthology he edited in 2014, describing the power and significance of storytelling under occupation, land annexation and settler colonialism. He argues that liberation can be embodied in a poem or a tale.
Homeland and belonging are written into being as stories and poems, especially when land is usurped, places are renamed, city landscapes and infrastructures changed. Settlement erases and overwrites histories, but also physical spaces and their names. Storytelling can then become a reminder of the history of dispossession and ownership, and writing can operate as an unsettling act: straightforwardly imagining undoing settlement, telling stories and memories of those who are indigenous to the land, imagining pre-colonial times, the villages before settlement, the language and names once spoken there, unsettling or revoking the colonial establishment’s archives and narratives.
In the 2012 documentary The Neighbour of Al-Carmel, the visual artist Maisaa Azaizeh is seen in the middle of the city of Haifa drawing 3D images on the walls of old, deserted Palestinian homes in that city, imagining and reviving the memory of how they looked before the Nakba. This is art’s practice of unsettlement.
Palestinian fiction reads to us as resistance to reality. Even in the midst of genocide, the crime of crimes, with rogue settlers closing in, land fragmenting and disappearing at speed, letters are being written under the rubble. Stories are born in tents under military evacuation orders. Poetry is composed while sirens echo in the background. Literature remains true to life by paradoxically depicting death. It insists on survival in the face of obliteration, even if sometimes nothing more than a story is left standing. It is the native people’s insistence on telling the history of their land, of a time prior to annihilation.
Speaking about Palestine
This talk is based on a public lecture I was scheduled to give as the Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor for spring 2025 at Columbia University’s Department of Germanic Languages. However, I am delivering my speech in a lecture hall that is marked by absence, the absence of an audience. This setting reflects, if anything, the current state of affairs when talking about Palestine at Columbia and other academic institutions and public venues.