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ABDELLATIF LAABI

The Empire of Death: The Prodigious Islet of Poetry

by Abdellatif Laâbi

Translated by Howard Slater

In the Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, published in 2022, Marwan Makhoul, one of the poets represented there, says:

To write poetry

that is not political

I must listen to the birds

And to listen to the birds

the noise of the bomber must cease

Unexpectedly, these few lines had a global impact. They were written on placards and brandished in several countries during mass demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people. They were printed on T-shirts and worn by many young people. One youngster didn't hesitate to tattoo them on his arm. Several musicians and filmmakers have seized on them to make them resonate in new ways, in ways likely to reach a wider audience.

Aimé Césaire, at the height of his creative adventure, had the wonderful intuition to place poetry among those "miraculous weapons" capable of "killing" the virus of hatred, of undermining the cult of force, of opposing everything in man that degrades the human, mutilates life, glorifies death.

And now this particular miracle is happening again and again. This time, it's happening in Gaza.

Gaza, that name that, just by saying it, makes your lips raw and your lungs burn.

Gaza, first a prison, then an open-air death camp.

Gaza, where the principles of hope, justice, liberty, fraternity, peace, exist only in old dictionaries that no one wants anymore; in the failing memory of old people abandoned in a milieu of ruins and whom, with an askance glance, the killers pass.

Gaza, wiped off the map, they say, while there remains survivors in who knows what circle of hell; the one where hope has been abolished; where one can no longer bury the entire body of one's dear deceased, but only fragments, shreds, a head if one is lucky. Where children are perhaps the only ones not entirely overcome by the catastrophe because they see the spectacle with virgin eyes, not having had the time to discover in adults what no animal is capable of doing, to travel into the dark past and future of the so-called human species.

Gaza, where eating, let alone getting medical treatment, and sleeping under a solid roof, belongs to a golden age, more legendary than real.

Gaza, where the poet Shorouq Mohammed Doghmosh goes so far as to conjure the Grim Reaper:

Give me one chance, O Death,

to live in my lifetime

a single night of love

The twenty-six Gazan voices, female and male, that we present in this anthology will probably not tolerate outside incursions – even the best-intentioned and supportive – blurring the rawness of their everchanging voice, veiling its sobs, stutters, gasps, and bouts of aphasia in the face of an apocalyptic reality where words are emptied of their substance and where it becomes illusory to seek the slightest shred of meaning in experience.

These voices do not need our pseudo-learned analyses, the bare minimum of our indignation, and the tremolos of our compassion. We can humbly accept their harshness: "Shut up! Let us speak." We have things to say to the world, and we do so with the means at hand, in a terrain where poetry has never set foot, in an extreme shortage of light, air, water, anything we can get our teeth into. We feel as if we are writing in the darkness of an underworld where only the muffled echoes of bombings and the thin threads of dying voices reach us.

“Shut up! Let us talk.”

I, Ashraf Fayad, say:

On this planet,

only human beings carry evil within them.

I, Rifaat al-Aareer, say:

I do not hate you.

I would rather help you to stop hating and killing me.

I, Hamed Achour, say:

I don't know if you'll believe me, but despite the terror that surrounds me, I feel a kind of sad happiness, because I have neither a wife nor a child to protect, a wife and a child whose only fault, like mine in this case, would be to have been born in Gaza.

I, Adham al-Akkad, say:

I have learned that the value of a human being

is equivalent to what he has in his pocket

Nothing of his wickedness

his intentions

or the origin of his misdeeds

has remained unknown to me.

I, Haydar al-Ghazali, say:

For eight months

my head has been under the guillotine

I wait for a death

that never comes

So, how can I describe my life to you?

I feel ashamed when I walk

past a woman

picking up the pieces of what remains

of her child

I, Niamat Hassan, say:

In Gaza

the mother is not like all mothers

She kneads bread with fresh salt

gathered from her eyes

and nourishes the homeland

with her children.

I, Hind Joudeh, say:

What can it mean to be safe

in times of war?

It means being ashamed of your smile

of being warm, of your clean clothes

of available water, of drinkable water

of being able to take a bath

and realizing that you are still alive!

Oh! my God

I don't want to be a poet in times of war

I, Doha al-Kahlout, say:

The eye of hope closes

I, Husam Maarouf, say:

He who stands behind the binoculars

cannot save the drowning man.

We want nothing more from you

We simply want to die

in peace

I, Mona al-Msaddar, say:

Life, now, after twenty-four steps, is not even worth talking about, or crying about.

I, Yousef al-Qidra, say:

The butterfly that desires the paradise of light

and fears burning itself

has no faith

Poets

are living martyrs.

I, Nasser Rabbah, say:

The war has ended

My mother has arrived to apologize

She said: there is no more room to welcome you

The cemetery is full to bursting

I, Enass Sultan, say:

"Each of us has a zone of oppression from which we operate."

I have taken to beginning my remarks with: "I am a woman, aware of it all the time."

(This is in no way a recrimination, it is a truth)

These citations gives us a small glimpse into what this anthology has in store for us: a dive into the tragic story unfolding before our eyes in Gaza, and what the poets (whether they live there or are part of the diaspora) belonging to this corner of Palestine, abandoned by gods and men, manage to convey to us: the last nuggets of what they have preserved within themselves of their ineradicable human identity.

Having frequented, "defended, and illustrated" Palestinian poetry for more than half a century, I tend to think that, generation after generation, it has embraced this idea, which I am not unhappy to have expressed: "A people can triumph over its oppressor only if it is morally superior to it."

The voices that emerge from this book largely honour the expectations of such an ethic. May the empire of death not submerge the prodigious islet of poetry!

Translators Note

This is the introduction to an anthology of contemporary poetry entitled Gaza: Y a-t-il Une Vie Avant La Mort? Éditions Points 2025 [Gaza: Is there Life before Death?] The poems were selected and translated from Arabic by Abdellatif Laâbi and collected by Yassin Adnan.