Malinda Words: The residences of Refaat Al Areer

Where is Refaat Al Areer, do you know? It’s quite alright to say ‘no,’ for no one is holding a gun at your head demanding that you answer ‘yes,’ only to insist, again at gunpoint, that you show the way to where he is. You may not know and neither do I.

You may know, however, where he was and I do too. Refaart Al Areer, poet, teacher, objector and citizen, lived in Gaza. A refugee in his homeland, a hostage in his home, the Refaat Al Areer, refused to be shackled by circumstances, refused to be subdued by the subjugation that had become the de facto birthright of his people.

The body of Refaat Al Areer, like those of his fellow Palestinians, had been chained by a tyranny that had illegally occupied their homeland. They forgot to blindfold Refaat Al Areer; he was a witness to the occupation which was accompanied by all manner of harassment, brutality and humiliation for 75 years. And yet the tyrant and the tyranny which often spoke through the weapons of armed settlers and soldiers could not gag Refaat Al Areer,. So he wrote.

Refaart Al Areer learned words. He dug through the rubble that is the inevitable product of war. He gathered history and memory, and these he turned into words so that they could be read and recited over and over again.

He used words. He taught others to read and write. And in this way did he write of the inhumanity which was the daily bread he and his fellow citizens were forced to consume. And with words did he fertilise courage, that incredibly resilient soil which yields harvests of hope.

Refaart Al Areer was singled out for censure when he described the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 as ‘legitimate and moral.’ Legitimacy and morality are variously defined and the definitions are never objective. The Hamas attack resulted in around 1,200 people being killed. Two hundred and forty people were kidnapped. They were held hostage. Since then over 17,000 Palestinians have been killed even as millions continued to be held hostage.

It is easy to compare numbers and assign different values to acts of horror. Those who grieve or pray for the safety of loved ones would find that silly and even an insult. History is not or should not be a a game of assessing relative demerits, unless there’s cruelty of proportions that force us to talk the language of equivalency.

Killed. Hostage. Two words that the Palestinians have known for 75 years. There are no reports of Refaat Al Areer asking his detractors if they had even once expressed outrage at those other killings and the most heinous hostage-holding operation that world has known in recent memory. No reports either of Refaat Al Areer asking those who were horrified by the Hamas attacks how they defined horror, whether or not numbers count, whether or not sequence matter, whether the only requirement was to censure one particular act of horror and treat it as some anomaly that is not a product of history, not retaliatory in essence, whether it warranted the slaughter of civilians, bombing of hospitals and such.

Refaart Al Areer was killed on Friday the 8th of December. People gathered the following evening in Clark Park, South Philadelphia, by a memorial to Palestinians. None of them knew where he was. They knew where he was not. He was no longer in Gaza. He was no longer teaching in a university. He was no longer writing poetry seated somewhere, in a broken building, upon a charred leaf or a cloud aching with the weight of cruelty. He had wandered into his words and there he would remain as long as people love poetry and until the world is hurled to orbits that erase events, history and personality in and out of metaphor.

Those who ordered that particular attacked which felled Refaart Al Areer and those who shouted out their complicity in genocide by refusing to censure and instead cheering the butchers on do not know where Refaart Al Areer is or where he may have gone. They know he lived. They know he wrote.

And he wrote:

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 tale.

No one knows where Refaat Al Areer is. Many know where he was. We are left holding his words. We carry them as we carry in heart, mind and conscience the blood of the dead who are so many and whose numbers grow by so many hundred every day.

I don’t know where Refaat Al Areer could be. His words — their residences are known. Soon they will be turned into kites. They will delight a child. For now, they must do battle with the tyrant. I don’t know where Refaat Al Areer is, exactly, but this I know: he hasn’t stopped fighting.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 289th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

11 December 2023

The residences of Refaat Al Areer

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