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Palestinian Literature: Anti-Racist Approaches for English Teachers

Editor’s note: The anthology A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba, ed. Atef Alshaer, which Ali Al-Jamri recommends in this essay, is currently available free as an ebook from publisher Saqi Books, using the checkout code Absence100.

By Ali Al-Jamri

This essay was originally a presentation given to a network of teachers and is focused on the British education system, particularly the secondary school (11-16) English curriculum taught in most of the UK and its international schools. For non-UK readers, it is necessary to know that, at the end of secondary education, students sit their GCSE exams, including a mandatory exam on English Literature; for this, there are set texts and poetry anthologies chosen by the exam boards which students must study. While I write specifically about this context, I firmly believe that what I’ve written applies to education broadly.

 

Theory and Practice

The genocide in Gaza occupies a large part of public attention around the world, and the temptation is for schools and teachers to bring it into the classroom. When talking about Palestinian literature in schools, teachers often ask: how do we incorporate these things quickly in the curriculum?

I think that’s the wrong question. Obviously, it’s important to talk about what’s happening in the world, but when it’s reactive and not rooted in theory, it can be objectifying or tokenizing. I want to think about ways to include Palestine in our curricula that do not treat the topic as a curiosity, and which take an anti-racist approach to the subject. Because I’m talking about an anti-racist approach, what I’m talking about goes beyond Palestine. Palestine is at the root of liberation movements around the world, and thus this applies beyond Palestine, and to all forms of systemic discrimination, including antisemitism. I’ll be focusing first on anti-Arab racism in the British curriculum as it stands, and how to counter that, but this approach can apply to other contexts.

I rely on two books for my theory. The first is Orientalism by Edward Said. For our purposes, it’s enough to say that Orientalism is the process by which the East is ‘othered’ by the West, that is, the process by which it is metaphorically subjugated through art, literature, and culture, and how that ideational subjugation informs and legitimizes material, military, and political subjugation. Orientalism is essentializing, reducing complex humanity into a handful of tropes. Culture, and the way it is produced and reproduced, helps to justify racism. In short: If you dehumanize people in the culture you consume, it makes it easier to justify crimes against them.

The other book I bring as a bedrock of my approach is Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. One thing that applies here is how Freire differentiates between the oppressive “banking” method of pedagogy, wherein learning is “deposited” by the teacher onto the submissive student, and the “problem-posing” method, wherein teachers and students become teacher-students and student-teachers. In problem-posing pedagogy, critical thinking and trust in the students’ capacity to be full partners in the learning process are at the core. Freire argued that you can’t wait for a revolution to happen before educating the masses. Rather, education happens alongside revolution; education done right is revolutionary practice.

The role of teachers is thus critically important. It is in the teachers’ power to provide students with a curriculum that expands their capacity to think critically, to develop their understanding of moral choice, and to understand how they can actively shape the world around them for the better.

If teachers try to bring “current affairs” into the classroom without theoretical grounding, they risk trivializing the subject, turning it into a mere object of curiosity. A grounding in anti-imperialist (and, by extension, anti-racist) theory is vital, as it means that whatever teachers and schools do to build on that has solid foundations.

Arabs in the English Curriculum

But before I can talk about Palestine, I must talk about Arabs more broadly. As far as UK exam boards go, I am most familiar with the AQA English Literature specification for GCSEs (the exams all students sit at the end of secondary school). In it, there are no Arab authors or poets. Where Arabs are referred to, it is usually fleeting, and not as a point-of-view character.

I rack my brain to find any positive depictions of Arabs in the exam texts I’m familiar with, and the best I can find is this inconsequential line by one of the witches in Act 1, Scene 3 of Macbeth: “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone.” It’s a fantastic contextual line showing that Shakespeare could expect his Jacobean London audience to recognise Aleppo as a major Mediterranean port city; unfortunately, it’s completely irrelevant to any aspect of GCSE study.

Another relatively benign depiction comes in Scrooge’s memory of reading The Arabian Nights in Stave 2 of A Christmas Carol, complete with “dear old honest Ali Baba!” I find Dickens’ depiction here problematic for classroom use, not so much because of what Dickens wrote, but because his fantastical depiction is given without any further grounding context for modern students. Arabs are a fairy tale, not a people.

It only gets worse from here. In Frankenstein, for example, there is the character of Safie, the Arabian woman (secretly raised as a Christian by her mother, against her Muslim father’s knowledge) who is educated by the De Lacey family. Frankenstein’s “monster,” watching the De Laceys teach Safie in secret, is civilized alongside the barbarian (but thankfully Christian) Arab.

But this is not as bad as the depiction of Arabs in the poetry studied. The AQA Power and Conflict poetry cluster—a popularly taught, if not the most popularly taught, anthology of poetry for the GCSEs—is where it gets seriously problematic. These 15 poems are horribly stuck in a post-9/11 politics.

Three poems in this anthology are particularly concerning. The most benign of these is “War Photographer,” by Carol Ann Duffy, which lists the places the eponymous photographer has been: “Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.” This singular reference to Beirut in a student’s education locates it solely as a warzone. (The same critique I am applying could be made regarding the poem’s essentializing of Cambodia and Northern Ireland.)

The second problematic poem is “Kamikaze” by Beatrice Garland, in which the poet imagines the mental conflict of a WWII Kamikaze pilot who decides to turn his plane around, seen through the perspective of his daughter, who shunned him on his return. In an interview with Mr Bruff (a popular youtuber for high school English educators in the UK), the poet explains that “what really set me off with this poem was the destruction of the Twin Towers… I wanted to know, what is it that will make somebody willing to blow themselves up in the service of a cause?”

There is a lot to take issue with here: the meandering path of an English poet exploring 9/11’s terrorists by imagining the struggles of a Kamikaze pilot’s daughter to understand her ashamed father; the fact that her imagined pilot turns around, so he never commits the suicide attack which she claims to explore; the fact that this poem’s opening jumpstarts with a blatantly essentialist trope (Her father embarked at sunrise / with a flask of water, a samurai sword / in the cockpit) – the poem is frankly incoherent. And yet the poet’s self-professed context – 9/11 – means that is the context through which many students will encounter this poem.

But neither of these is as problematic as “Remains” by Simon Armitage (and it is painful that two of these three offending poems are by the UK’s current and former Poet Laureates). This poem comes from Armitage’s 2008 collection The Not Dead, which is based on interviews with British soldiers returning from Iraq and suffering PTSD. The Not Dead’s publication was accompanied by a documentary film about these soldiers.

“Remains” is a poem about an ex-soldier turning to drink and drugs to flush out the memory of killing a “looter” in cold blood. The poem opens with his unit sent to tackle a  raid on a bank. As they arrive, “one of them legs it up the road, / probably armed, possibly not”. We are told:

So we’ve hit this looter a dozen times

and he’s there on the ground, sort of inside out…

And it ends with these lines: 

not left for dead in some distant, sun-stunned, sand-smothered land

or six-feet-under in desert sand

 

but near to the knuckle, here and now,

his bloody life in my bloody hands.

The poem is based on interviews with the soldier who had been posted in Basra. This Iraqi man is never fully human, remaining always a “looter.” Thousands of British Iraqi and British Arab children read these lines: “sun-stunned, sand-smothered land” and receive them as the only part of their education which intersects with their identities. If you are an educator reading this – I ask you to take a moment to think of your Arab students and colleagues before you read on.

The true cruelty of this poem is realized in the documentary of The Not Dead. This version features the actual soldier whose interview was the basis of “Remains” (or it may be an actor in his role, I am not fully sure). The most watched YouTube upload of this clip featuring our “Remains” soldier in The Not Dead has some 25,000 views—this is huge, given the majority will be teachers playing it to their classes and students revising for their exams. Indeed, the majority of comments under the video are clearly by revising students, many of them left ahead of the most recent exam in May 2023.

This video features a performed, uncensored, infuriatingly racist version of this poem:

not left for dead in some distant, sun-fucked, stone age land

or six-feet-under in desert sand

 

but near to the knuckle, here and now,

his bloody life in my bloody hands

Imagine any Iraqi, indeed any South West Asian student watching this video to revise. We come from “sun-fucked, stone age” lands. To me, it beggars belief that a poem that needs to censor this into “sun-stunned, sand-smothered” should be part of the curriculum set by the exam boards.

Consider, then, the tropes that are depicted: the fairytale Arab; the barbarian Arab; the terrorist Arab; the looting Arab.

For many thousands of students across England and Wales, this is the total sum of knowledge about Arabs with which they complete their secondary education. Note that in the UK, History (which has its own issues, and which many anti-racist history teachers are already working to address) is an optional subject at GCSE. This amplifies the powerful role that the English subject has on a student’s cultural education.

Beyond the Curriculum

This has an impact beyond the curriculum. If we look at the wars Britain has been involved in since the year 2000, this is the list I have managed to put together:

  • Sierra Leone Civil War (2000-2002)
  • Afghanistan (2001-2014)
  • Iraq War (2003-2011)
  • Libyan Civil War (2011)
  • War against ISIS (2014-present)
  • Saudi War in Yemen (primary arms dealer and major military support provision to Saudi Arabia) (2014-present)
  • Ukraine War (2022-present)
  • Gaza (2023)

The majority of conflicts the UK has been involved in since 2000 are in the Arab world, and Afghanistan is often grouped with Arab countries by the West.

So what narratives are we feeding students? Arab students are not represented in the English Literature curriculum. The little representation that exists reinforces racist narratives.  What becomes of students who passively absorb this racism when they enter adulthood? Some will become politicians, business leaders, journalists or indeed teachers who re-entrench the material, military and cultural domination of the East by the West. Others will become citizens, workers and consumers who tacitly accept this domination as happening in a faraway place beyond their scope. Others, still, will resist these narratives, and there are countless who do (proven by the mass public support for a ceasefire), but they will do so in spite of their education, not because of it.

It is reasonable to conclude that, whether intentionally or not, this curriculum serves to manufacture consent for current and future wars that Britain will wage or enflame in the South West Asia and North Africa region. This curriculum has been taught since 2017 and Gaza is the first new SWANA war Britain has been involved in since then. Not a war though: a genocide.

And so, Turning to Palestine

Educators play a particularly special role: nurturing young people into active, critical thinking, morally upright future citizens of the world. The incremental progress is slow, often imperceptible in the moment, and yet absolutely essential. Every lesson is a small, important chance to help that classroom of young people become a positive future.

My overview of the British curriculum necessarily had to go broader than Palestine, to Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. That is because Palestine is wholly absent from the curriculum. Yet, we know that anti-Arab racism includes within it anti-Palestinian racism, and the depiction of barbarian “looters” in Basra extends to the dehumanization of Palestinians struggling to survive a genocide perpetrated against them with Western backing.

All this puts into context why we should be studying Palestinian literature in schools. It is not solely because the Israeli military and political class is committing genocide and Britain’s political elite (with a few notable exceptions) stand against a ceasefire. It is certainly not because teachers should use literature to evoke pity in students for the Palestinians. Palestinians neither need nor want pity, but rather, direct action.

If we hold Paulo Freire’s principles as a model, a good education is fundamentally revolutionary, and in Britain, today’s students have power to change the course of history. In the present, they can protest, as many students already are. In the future, they will grow up to be the politicians, voters, workers, and citizens who have a tangible role to play in whether the United Kingdom perpetuates imperialism, racism, and genocide—or works to end it. I am in the UK, and my focus is on this country, but there is no reason why what I have written does not apply to teachers and students of other countries.

The study of Palestinian literature can achieve two things, then:

  • it informs a problem-posing pedagogy that develops the critical thinking of citizens who can play a revolutionary role in society. This pedagogy should help students realize what that role can be for themselves and act on it.
  • it actively complicates the Orientalism of the set curriculum students are obliged to engage with. On a day-to-day basis, teachers are limited in affecting the mandatory curriculum, but they can affect how their students engage with and understand it.

How should teachers introduce this literature to their students? Schemes around poetry, or which are reliant on extracts, are easy to slot a new reading into; more ambitious teachers could try to build an entire scheme around Palestinian literature. However it is done, it should be presented as problem-posing. Teachers should present the subject from the perspective of resistance and liberation, not from suffering. Here are three questions I think can guide the teaching:

  • How does this text expand our horizons as human beings?
  • How does this text help broaden our understanding of the current situation in Palestine?
  • How can we build on this new knowledge?

The first question provides a guide to what particular takeaway the lesson(s) may provide. Put differently, it asks: what is the transformative power of this particular text? The teacher’s ability to help students understand the power of literature is important here.

The second is posed to avoid the objectification I’ve described above. Indeed, to study Palestinian writing and not speak of the present moment would be a betrayal. The teacher’s capacity to trust and guide the students to have a critical, moral discussion is paramount here.

The third question is there to build a web around this new parcel of knowledge. How can students expand on it and make use of it? Here, the teacher’s role becomes one of providing students with the resources to take that next, positive step. I spoke of how Freire argues for teachers and students to become teacher-students and student-teachers. The teacher should be guided here by the students and prepared to respond to their needs for further resources.

A final note, in the UK, and likely elsewhere, political neutrality is written into the Teacher’s Standards. That is, it is important that we are not seen to be imparting our partisan political beliefs on our students. I would say that, following this anti-racist approach, you would not be imparting your own beliefs, and you would be within professional remit. As should be clear by now, through the anti-racist approach, your role as a teacher is to facilitate the students’ critical engagement with the texts. There are of course plenty of high-quality references from the UN and elsewhere as to the genocide Palestinians are subject to, and having these sources to hand should also deter concerns that a teacher is bringing their own viewpoint. In presenting such facts, teachers shouldn’t tell students how to feel, but should be read to guide their students responses.

Having said all this, let’s turn to some literature that can be included.

Recommendations for Palestinian Literature in a School Curriculum

The recommendations that follow are limited by two things:

  • firstly, my own limits. I’ve tried to give a range, but I am limited by my own readings.
  • secondly, I have tried to keep this list deliberately short because too many options are overwhelming. If you have read this far, I hope that you take a few practical means to bring Palestine into the classroom.

Reading lists are provided, at the end, to bolster this small sample, which is meant not to be comprehensive, but to be a launching pad.

  1. Man and His Alarm Clock, Samira Azzam

This short story is available in the anthology A Map of Absence, ed. Atef Alshaer, published by Saqi Books. This anthology alone could be the basis of a whole scheme of work. Study it for narrative structure, tragedy, irony, and language devices.

The short story is about a man working on Palestine’s railways. He is woken every morning by an elderly man who, it is revealed, had a son who died after oversleeping, panicking, and getting run over by a train when late to work. The story ends with the old man’s death. It is contemplative and meditative. But the teaching potentials of Azzam’s short story are elevated by the next recommendation.

  1. Out of Time, Adania Shibli

The essay is available in both A Map of Absences and ArabLit’s anthology of work by Samira Azzam by this same title, Out of Time. In this commentary on Azzam’s short story, Shibli writes:

At first glance, this story might seem simple and safe, especially to the censor’s eyes. But it contributed to shaping my consciousness regarding Palestine as no other text I have ever read has done. Were there once Palestinian employees who commuted to work by train? Was there a train station? Was there once a train whistling in Palestine? Was there ever once a normal life in Palestine? So where is it now, and why has it vanished?

What a fantastic essay to present to students. This essay opens us to the transformative and radical powers of the written word. “What even is the point of all this?” is a question disengaged students pose to their teachers. Adania Shibli gives us the answer here: literature expands our imagination, it allows us to imagine the great possibilities of the world we may have lost, and the world we may reclaim. Such a mundane thing, catching a train, and yet how radical it is seen through Shibli’s lens. It elevates Azzam’s already powerful short story into a doorway of unimagined potential.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, if I could plan a whole scheme of work around Palestinian literature, I would start with the one-two punch that is Samira Azzam and Adania Shibli.

  1. “In Front of a Church in the Settlement of Antigua,” Najwan Darwish

There are many beautiful poems by Najwan Darwish one could choose, but I love this one for its power in Atef Alshaer’s translation. In this poem, the poet stands before a statue of the Virgin Mary (“A Palestinian peasant girl … a bereaved peasant girl”). The poem reclaims Mary’s Palestinian identity and creates a homeland wherever her statue is carved. Beautifully, at the end of the poem, the statue comes to life to comfort the grieving poet.

As a bonus, the book this comes in, Embrace, has parallel English and Arabic text – a great addition for any Palestinian or indeed Arab reading the poem; even if the student cannot engage with their mother language, it is inclusive to see their language in the English classroom.

  1. “Every Night, Morning,” Olivia Elias

What I love about this particular poem is its brevity and power. At its heart, it is a statement of the pen’s might versus the sword. And yet in defining the sword as an “extreme laboratory / of high-tech / terror”, it is unmistakeably placed within the context of occupied Palestine. Elias’s work was originally written in French and her book Chaos, Crossing, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, features parallel translations. Again, this opens a door to working with teachers of French.

  1. “Gaza City,” Nathalie Handal

This is another choice borrowed from A Map of Absence. Nathalie Handal’s poem is stark (“I wonder / if God is buried in the rubble.”). The poem fits within themes of “conflict” it is journalistic, it is bleak. Of all the poems there are about Gaza, I was drawn to this one because it was written and published years before today’s conflict; thus, it is a reminder that the conflict did not begin with the terrible attacks of October 7.

  1. “A Lover from Palestine,” Mahmoud Darwish

How does one choose any single Mahmoud Darwish poem? I am unsure. What drew me to this particular poem is my having once read that Darwish would have personally chosen to be a poet of love, had he had the choice. And so this poem, which blends love and nationalism (“Her eyes and the tattoo on her hands are Palestinian / Her name, Palestinian) I felt captures one of the conflicts in Darwish’s poetry that speaks to me. There is something powerful here in its marriage of romance and resistance, especially as the two subjects are usually kept apart in study.

  1. “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,” Noor Hindi

Bringing the F-bomb into a classroom is always a delicate matter, but worth real consideration. Many will be familiar with this poem, which has made the on social media. Its inclusion forces us to stay uncomfortable in what we are doing. We should not only be studying Darwish for his metaphors or Azzam for her narrative structure. We should not simply be asking “What was the writer’s intention?” as though in a sterile vacuum. This poem is a course corrector, a challenge.

It should be noted that poets are boycotting Poetry Foundation, the magazine/website this poem was published in, after they withdrew the publication of an anti-Zionist book review. Teachers should avoid using the text from Poetry Foundation; the text has been shared numerously online.

  1. “Born on Nakba Day,” Mohammed El-Kurd

There are many great poems by El-Kurd, but I really enjoy this one from his debut collection, RIFQA. It necessitates grounding in context. He was born on the 50th anniversary of the Nakba – what does that even mean? Providing the context to unpick the weight of this birth helps to unlock the expanse of Palestinian literature written before and after.

  1. Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, Sonia Nimr

I’m going to end on some fantastic YA fiction by Nimr. Wondrous Journeys is an incredible read that features female leads, magical realism, allusions to the One Thousand and One Nights, and depiction of Palestine – and the Arab world – without borders, if not without dangers. I particularly love the ironic satire of Arab patriarchy in its opening – set as it is in a cursed village where no females (not even amongst the livestock) are born for 50 years, such that the elders stop celebrating male births and women dress their sons as girls. Everywhere Qamar adventures, she is supported by a fantastic cast of queens, pirates, book merchants and more. “Form time reading” is a popular literacy intervention in UK schools at the moment—basically a class reader for teenagers—and why not Wondrous Journeys? The book is great for ages 12-14, but does have depictions of enslavement and allusions to sexual violence which teachers should be prepared to discuss sensitively. For younger readers, there is Nimr’s fantasy trilogy Thunderbird too.

Long-Lasting Change

What I’ve tried to set out here is a theoretical and practical framework for an anti-racist approach in English literature. My focus is on Palestine, because that is the current and most impactful decolonial work that can be done, especially as so many liberation movements are tied with Palestine.

Yet having started with Palestine, it does not need to end there. This approach can be extended to Sudan and Congo, where genocides are also occurring, and to the study of human resistance against violence, to liberation movements beyond.

This anti-racist framework can also be applied to other forms of racism, including antisemitism. Just as there are no Arabs in the curriculum, there are also no Jews. At GCSE level, the only depictions of a Jewish person that students may get are in Shylock in The Merchant of Venice and Fagin in Oliver Twist – both antisemitic stereotypes written by long-dead Englishmen. There are virtually no African writers on the syllabus, either. Liberation is linked, and breaking the chain of oppression in one place helps weaken the bonds everywhere.

Finally, I’ll end with this thought: the majority of works of English are not being written in Britain. Pupils will already be exposed to the British literary canon through their curriculum, their libraries, bookshops, and community. So how far can educators push their students’ boundaries by incorporating world literature?

Reading List

Ali Al-Jamri is one of Manchester’s Multilingual City Poets, a Bahraini British poet, essayist, editor, translator, and educator. His work has appeared in magazines including Modern Poetry in Translation, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, Zindabad Zine, Harana and more. He has been published in anthologies by Young Identity, and is a contributing author to teacher texts by Harper Collins. In 2021, he edited Between Two Islands and ArabLit Quarterly: FOLK.