Two new poetry collections from Gaza offer a powerful response to war, with students writing under collapsing ceilings and typing on phones with failing batteries. The collections, titled Folding a River and Let's Throw Away War, tackle themes of trauma, exile, resistance and love amid the ongoing conflict.
“Poetry keeps hope alive. Even in the darkest moments, Palestinian poetry continues to imagine a future,” said Nazmi al-Masri, professor of languages at the Islamic University of Gaza, during an online poetry event. “Poetry documents what cameras cannot always reach and what numbers can never explain.”
The collections were published in collaboration with Alison Phipps, professor of languages and intercultural studies at Glasgow University, and her Zimbabwean colleague Tawona Sitholé. Phipps noted that poetry is “the mother tongue of Palestine” and that young Gazans write in the tradition of great Palestinian poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Fadwa Tuqan.
Since the war began, 72 faculty members and 543 students from the Islamic University of Gaza have been killed, with 95% of the university's buildings damaged or destroyed. Despite this, 2,860 students graduated. Some poems are dedicated to the memory of teacher and poet Refaat Alareer, killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.
“These are not poems written in quiet rooms. They are written under collapsing ceilings, typed on phones with failing batteries, memorised because paper may not survive,” Phipps and Masri write in their introduction. Remarkably, the poems show little bitterness, reflecting a desire not to mirror the violence they abhor.
As one student said at the reading: “Let's throw away war.” The phrase became the title of their collection, published by Wild Goose Publications on the Scottish island of Iona. Phipps added, “For my students from Gaza, being alive is resistance.”
