Global Day of Action: #ReadforRefaat

January 15, 2024

JANUARY 15, 2024 — This marks forty days since the Palestinian poet, editor, and educator Refaat Alareer was killed in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. Today, Publishers for Palestine are calling for a Global Day of Action, followed by a week of events, in which we read his poetry in public and refuse business as usual, demanding an immediate ceasefire and an end to the genocide and the occupation.

Last month, during #ReadPalestine Week, Publishers for Palestine called on people around the world to read works about Palestine and by Palestinian writers. Now, we are asking everyone to go out in public and make reading an act of protest.

On January 15, readers around the world will honor the life, work, and resistance of Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) and other Palestinian writers silenced and/or killed by Israel. Forty days after Refaat’s death, people around the world will be reciting one of his poems in public. The reading can be in your workplace, at your school, in the mall, on the bus, or out on the street. Read in a group or during a demonstration. Disrupt business as usual. Record and share your reading on social media.

Check out the Publisher for Palestine events page for more, and download a PDF of his best-known poem “If I Must Die,” at publishersforpalestine.org/refaat/.

The title of the poem echoes Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay’s “If I Must Die,” which ends:

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

Readings for Refaat:

Find readings by Palestinian poets at our SoundCloud and YouTube. If you would like to share a reading, tag us on Twitter at @arablit.

You can find more about the two books Refaat has co-edited, Gaza Unsilenced (2015) and Gaza Writes Back (2014), from publisher Just World Books.

Also read and share work by other Palestinian writers and poets who have been killed under bombardment include Hiba Abu Nada (read her poems in English translation: “I Grant You Refuge” and “Not Just Passing,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine, and translations from her Twitter feed into multiple languages on Gaza Passages); Salim al-Naffar (read his “Drawing Class” in English translation), as well as poets Omar Faris Abu Shaweesh, Shahdah Al-Buhbahan, Nour al-Din Hajjaj, Ahmed Mortaja, Husam Maarouf, Mahmoud Jouda, and Nour Swirki, among others. You can find translations of some of their thoughts at Gaza Passages.