“If I Must Die”

In the aftermath of Palestinian scholar Refaat Alareer’s death from an Israeli airstrike in Gaza, his poem “If I Must Die” was shared around the world. Clips of Hollywood actors reciting the poem spread rapidly through social media. Alareer’s metaphor of a white kite became a ubiquitous symbol in protests around the world, representing Palestinian futurity and the collective power of storytelling:

If I must die

You must live

To tell my story

To sell my things

To buy a piece of cloth

And some strings,

(make it white with a long tail)

So that a child, somewhere in Gaza

While looking heaven in the eye

Awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—

And bid no one farewell

Not even to his flesh

Not even to himself—

Sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above

And thinks for a moment an angel is there

Bringing back love

If I must die

Let it bring hope,

Let it be a story.1

In Noor Aldeen Hajjaj’s testimony, reproduced in this section, he echoes Alareer’s meditation on imminent death, particularly the loss of entire families in Gaza. He contemplates their last wishes as a practical one: “If we are to die, then let us die together.” Despite writing under unspeakable conditions, Alareer’s and Hajjaj’s works do not simply call for witnesses to tragedy. Instead, they seek a shift in consciousness.

In each testimony or poem, writers featured in this section offer a sensory mapping of Palestinian experience as it comes face-to-face with death. Amanda Joyce Hall identifies a striking resemblance between the opening line of Alareer’s poem and Jamaican American poet Claude McKay’s famous sonnet “If We Must Die.”2 The context of McKay’s poem was the Red Summer of 1919, during the surge of white terrorism that spread through Black neighborhoods in every region of the United States. At the time, McKay was working as a waiter in a dining car on the Pennsylvania Railroad, hastily writing sonnets during station stops. Fearing that he and his fellow Black train crew could be attacked at any moment by a white mob, McKay reflected later that “it was the only poem I ever read to the train crew.”3 His poem entreated his coworkers not to be run down “like hogs” but to fight: “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, /  Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”4 The urgency of formal compression thus binds McKay’s words to those of Alareer’s and Hajjaj’s—well-suited to poetry—enabling it to be distributed and amplified in organizing spaces and across social media. This speaks to Jasper Bernes’s fitting observation that “poetry makes nothing happen, but a poem might.”5

The selection of poems, living wills, social media posts underscore the importance of literary mediation in the face of death. Hind Joudah’s poem accentuates these stakes by asking: “What does it mean to be a poet in times of war?” Often exceeding genre conventions, these testimonials can be read as acts of “narrated humanity,” which Cynthia G. Franklin describes as “bring[ing] into being aesthetic forms and narratives [that] are not ancillary but central to movements.”6 As Hall notes in her reading of the internationalism evoked by the white kite in Alareer’s poem, she discerns a “multi-dimensional unfolding on various temporal and geographical planes, not unlike the undulating route of a wayward freedom kite that billows in transnational winds.”7 In this sense, the motif of the white kite marks the sudden intimacy of death but also elicits death’s metamorphosis into collective meaning, traversing space into possible futures—“my kite you made, flying up above.” For Hall, the kite’s transcendence over disparate experiences of colonial racism calls to mind June Jordan’s appraisal of internationalism not as a connection forged out of sameness but as a form of relation that cultivated a radical consciousness. It is through an internationalist perspective that she distills the violence of colonialism and apartheid, connecting Black struggle in the United States to Palestine and the African liberation movement. As Jordan puts it poignantly, “South Africa was how I came to understand that I am not against war; I am against losing the war.”8 Internationalism was thus generative of a new paradigm of political consciousness, not simply a mirror of her own experience.

Jordan’s conclusions resonate deeply as we take in the words of Hiba Abu Nada, who writes of the toxicity of Israel’s genocidal war machine: “I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous / and the shades of cloud from the smog.” Or, in Al-Meqdad Jameel Meqdad’s sardonic appeal to his dehumanizing oppressors:

Take your time

Before swooping down to choose us as your prey

Maybe we were Western enough for you to go away

And leave us to get on with our lives

Even if just for a little while

This collection of poems, testimonies, and living wills posted to social media—some by well-known Palestinian writers and others not—invites readers to cultivate a political consciousness that is not against war but against losing the war.