Dareen Tatour
“I regret being sent to prison for a poem, but it will be impossible to stop my writing.”
“Dareen Tatour is a Palestinean poet, playwright, photographer and political, feminist and social media activist. Tatour was born in the village of Al-Rina, Nazareth, and considers the Arab town of Reineh her home. She completed studies in engineering, programming, media, and film direction. Through her writing and photography, Tatour has sought to highlight the injustices Palestineans face and in particular encourage Palestinean women to speak of their experiences facing and overcoming abuse and human rights violations.”
Read “Resist, My People, Resist Them,” the poem that led to Dareen’s two years in jail and under house arrest.
A Female Cry
O my life, nestled in the heart of paper
Look here:
Our sorrows have slammed shut the door of hope
Their ghosts embracing our color
Until we appeared like them
The ink in poems of worry.
Look at them, how they sink their teeth
In my side
Wolfing down my blossoms and sweet scents.
They killed my spring in its entirety
Stole my very life from the world
Unleashed the season of sleeplessness.
O my life, I have grown tired.
Let me depart to live out my life
Secluded forever in the silence of my land
Let me, for I cannot overpower them
Charged as they are by rays of daylight and twilight alike
My chains won’t be broken by you, O Fate,
While the trees of my oppression go unwatered by hope
I will go on living by withdrawing inwards
I feed off the fires of time, and burn up
So long as I am imprisoned by silence
So long as I am occupied by sadness.
How long have I lived on the ground of hope
Beset by the flowers of life
I water them from the spring of struggle
Raise them up through the resolve of youth
I play… sing for existence itself,
Look forward to the birth of peace.
I reveal every light with my eyes
Yet these sorrows, O life of mine,
Follow me like my own name in the heart of this place
Like echoes.
O my silent letters in the drowning sea:
Let me struggle on in nothingness
Alone with these sorrows, with tears of regret
I will always be inhabited by pain
As long as I accept being silenced.
O my dream, kidnapped from my younger years
Silence has ravaged us
Our tears have become a sea
Our patience has bored of us
Together, we rise up for sure
Whatever it was we wanted to be.
So let’s go
Raise up a cry
In the face of those shadowy ghosts.
For how long, O fire within,
Will you scorch my breast with tears?
And how long, O scream,
Will you remain in the hearts of women!1
Mosab Abu Toha
“No one chooses one’s birthplace; once born, one does have the right to decide whether one belongs there or not.”
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet and writer from Gaza. He is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022, City Lights), which won a 2022 Palestine Book Award. Abu Toha is the founder of the Edward Said Library, and from 2019 to 2020, he was a visiting poet and librarian-in-residence at Harvard University. In 2023, he received the Derek Walcott Prize for poetry.
Along with some 200 other men, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was arrested by Israeli forces on November 19, 2023 while attempting to cross the border at the Rafa gate into Egypt with his family. He was subsequently released after being interrogated and beaten. Read about it here.
Untitled
A father wakes up at night, sees
the random colors on the walls
drawn by his four year old son.
But he’s dead after an airstrike.The colors are about 4 feet high.
Next year, they would be 5 or 6.
But the painter is dead and the
museum has no new
paintings to show.2
What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike
Turn off the lights in every room / sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows / stay away from the stove / stop thinking about making black tea / have a bottle of water nearby / big enough to cool down / children's fear / get a child's kindergarten backpack and stuff / tiny toys and whatever amount of money there is / and the ID cards / and photos of late grandparents, aunts, or uncles / and the grandparents' wedding invitation that's been kept for a long time / and if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other / and hold on tight / to whatever number there was / on the cake / from the last birthday.3
Hind Joudeh
Hind Joudeh is a Palestinian poet and short story writer living in Gaza. Joudah was born in al-Bureij refugee camp. Her first collection of poetry, Nobody Always Leaves, was published by Mosaique House in Amman in 2013. She is the editor-in-chief of Magazine 28, an online magazine showcasing Palestinian cultural productions in the arts, music, and literature.
Magazine 28 on Facebook
More poems by Hind Joudeh
What does it mean to be a poet in war time?
What does it mean to be a poet
in war time? It means that you
apologize. You apologize
excessively to the burned-out
trees to the birds without nests
to the flattened houses to the
long cracks in the road's
midsection to the children, pallid
in death and before it and to the
face of every grieving or
murdered mother
What does it mean to be safe in
a time of war? It means you are
ashamed of your smile of your
warmth of your clean clothes of
your yawning of your cup of
coffee of your undisturbed sleep
of your beloveds alive of your
satiety of accessible water of
clean water of your ability to
bathe and of the coincidence that
you are still alive!
Oh God I do not wish to be this poet in a time of war!4
Samih al-Qasim
Samih al-Qasim (1939-2014) was a Palestinian poet and journalist with Israeli citizenship. He refused to join the Israeli military and was jailed and lived under house arrest several times for his advocacy for a Palestinian state.
Listen to this beautiful reading of al-Qasim’s poem “Enemy of the Sun.” It was recorded by Mariam, owner of a now closed Instagram account called @whatmreads_. Used with permission. (Mariam chose not to read the entire poem. See the words below for the full poem.)
I wanted to narrate this poem for so long as a tribute to the Palestinian people and their brave spirit. ✊🏼🍉 ~ Mariam
This image is from Enemy of the Sun: poetry of Palestinian resistance, January 1970. A new version is being published in 2025.
George Jackson, an activist and revolutionary writer, was incarcerated in California for more than a decade until he was killed in 1971 by prison guards during an escape attempt. This book was among the books Jackson had in his cell. Since that time, this poem has served as one of the bridges between U.S. Black and Palestinian liberation movements.
“A Poem by Dareen Datour,” by Dareen Datour, Jadaliyya, January 8, 2018, accessed on November 20, 2023.
“Four Poems from Mosab Abu Toha,” by Mosab Abu Toha, The Markaz Review, July 14, 2021, accessed on November 20, 2023.
“What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Airstrike,” by Mosab Abu Toha, The New York Review of Books, May 11, 2023, accessed on November 20, 2023.
“What Does it Mean to be a Poet in War Time?,” by Hind Joudeh, The Gaza Poet’s Society, November 18, 2023, accessed on November 20, 2023.