So the Light Won’t Leave Me

This month Ḥattā lā yatrukanī al-dawʾ (So the Light Won’t Leave Me), a collection of Nima Hasan’s poems written in the second year of the genocidal war on Gaza, was published by Al Nasher Publishing in Ramallah, Palestine. Below is Rania Jawad’s introduction to the book, in the author’s own translation, followed by two excerpts translated by Huda Fakhreddine.

Rania Jawad’s Introduction to Nima Hasan’s ‘So the Light won’t Leave Me’

Without apology, Nima Hasan writes what she feels, what she sees, what she hears, and what she thinks. Writing publicly nearly every day of the genocidal war, Nima’s writing contributes to the legacy of words that have become and will continue to be how we recall and know the experience of the nakba of this genocide. She puts words that have come to define the brutality of the genocide—hunger, tent, bread, waiting in line, death—into a language of images that captures what genocide is. It is a language which accumulates its seconds, minutes, hours, days, and months into a calendar of its own, an alphabet of its own, a temporality of its own. She writes about waiting in line, where an attempt to steal a moment of love amid the destruction confronts the more urgent need for a loaf of bread; about the tent apologizing for what it cannot be, a place of refuge, shelter; about the act of writing that becomes a substitute for what cannot be obtained—a loaf of bread, a refuge for emotions, water.

At the same time, she does not allow her language of the everyday or the mundane to be covered over or blurred by dominant discourses or ideological formulas that have no room for life’s contradictions. She writes of a woman applying lipstick, empty perfume bottles, cities that no longer know themselves, the grief of mothers, the death of a flower seller. The poem becomes a space to expand life, to see and envision beyond the obliteration of past and present in Gaza, and beyond the brutal realism of the genocide.

This is a collection of poems written by Nima in the second year of the genocide (from October 2024 to July 2025), a year that brought more mass displacement, massacres, and decades-long policies of systematic destruction and starvation. The genocidal war began long before October 2023 and will not end with a temporary ceasefire or negotiations. From this reality, Nima describes writing as “a method of salvation from the burden of death, sadness, oppression, and anger” that surrounds her. In place of screaming or crying, she puts her experience and anger and oppression into the form of a poem or text.

Born in Rafah, Nima has lived her entire life in the Gaza Strip, leaving only once about two months before October 2023, when she participated in the Palestinian International Book Fair in Ramallah. Under siege and where forced displacement is constant, Nima wrote these poems with a combination of spontaneity and measure despite the unconstrained barbarity of Zionist violence. As readers and editors, we are conscious of the moments of life she grasped in order to write and share her words with us. The editorial intervention was therefore minimal with no words altered.

I recall Nima’s words in a virtual dialogue I organized with her at Birzeit University in January 2024 on the act of writing during the genocide:

“The war stirred a rage of the pain inside me and made me write. Pain is always a powerful instigator for writing. Sadness is always a powerful instigator for writing. Here, pain is a flood of death, corpses piling on your head, on your chest, on your heart. You are a corpse now, and this corpse must express itself. Imagine, the dead speaking. Here we are, speaking.”

And, here, we listen…

From So the Light Won’t Leave Me

By Nima Hasan

translated by Huda Fakhreddine

Had my father built our neighborhood window,
you would have seen me waving.
Had I learned to sow wheat in the scorched land,
my head would have become a rolling field.
Had my mother taught me to weave grief,
I would have made a sweater to shield me from this fear
and you would have heard me singing
as if I had never died.

-November 18, 2024

 

I lose the key to our city
and weep along the road of return.

Everyone is gone. Cinematically,
I wave for the light to stay,
to not leave me.

This earth has lost its way,
and still it spins and spins
on itself.

I am now either something
or nothing. No one can see me
to prove that truth.

I find no water
for the feather on my head
to grow.

Countries loom before my eyes,
moments before sleep,
before I drift away.

And every evening, death comes back
at bedtime, to listen to my stories.

-December 8, 2024

Nima Hasan, a mother and single caretaker of seven children, is a writer, poet, and social worker from Rafah. Her published works in Arabic include the novels Where the Flames Danced and It Was Not a Death and the book Letters from a Perpetrator. Her poetry has been published and translated widely in print and online publications. She was awarded the Samira al-Khalil Prize in 2024 and a selection of her writings during the genocide were published bilingually, in Arabic and French translation by Souad Labbize, titled Be Gaza (Les Lisières, January 2025).

Rania Jawad is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her recent publications and work focus on women’s writings from Gaza during the genocide, and the production and politics of testimonial writing.

Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge). She is also the author of a book of creative nonfiction, Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun) and a poetry collection, Wa min thamma al-ālam (And Then the World). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures.