The Electronic Intifada 5 February 2025
Basil Abu al-Sheikh reads a poem that recalls his arrest and imprisonment by Israeli forces, in December 2024.
Poet Basil Abu al-Sheikh leaned forward in his chair, toward a crowd of about 50 people, to recite his poem. It was late December and we had gathered in this camp west of Deir al-Balah, in central Gaza, to listen to the works of those poets present.
The sun was setting and the tents glowed orange as a cold breeze reminded us of the harshness of displacement in winter. The Israeli occupation planes and drones could be heard above us. Some of those gathered sat on the ground, covering themselves with worn blankets or burlap sacks, while others sat on plastic chairs.
Abu al-Sheikh recited his poem in a defiant yet sad tone.
The shackles have wounded my heart, not my wrists
And the night has made my eyes sleepless like the stars
Neither tears nor blood are enough
And I no longer know whether my tears or blood have flowed
The crowd applauded for Abu al-Sheikh, and after the readings were complete, I went to speak with him.
Abu al-Sheikh, 55, the author of the novel Palestinian Sorrows, was one of several poets who had helped organize the reading. He said he hoped the gathering would provide a space for expression among the displaced in the camp – something to help them make sense of the long months of horrors inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza.
He said that the poem he read was about his arrest by the Israeli army in December 2023 and his imprisonment for four months.
At the time, Abu al-Sheikh lived in the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, with his family of six. The family had sought shelter at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, farther north, during Israeli bombings. Yet Abu al-Sheikh was arrested from the hospital and would not be released from Israeli imprisonment until March 2024.
While in prison, Abu al-Sheikh was tortured, mentally and physically. Yet the worst of it still awaited him. Upon his release, he was prevented from returning to his family by the Israeli military and was forced to head south. There, he learned that his eldest son had been killed in an Israeli airstrike in January 2024.
Since then, Abu al-Sheikh has lived in this camp in a tent alone.
“Poets and writers give people hope and encourage them to endure the tragedies of war,” he said.
Killing poets
Poet Ahmad Tayeh, another coordinator of this poetry reading, told The Electronic Intifada that he used to gather poets and writers for readings before the war at various cafes throughout the Gaza Strip.
“But the war dispersed the poets and turned them into displaced persons in different places,” he said, making it hard to keep track of who is where.
He hopes that the gathering will help “revive the literary and cultural sector that was widely destroyed during the war.”
Yet that revival will be all the more harder because of Israel’s killings and assassinations of poets and writers.
Poet and writer Heba Abu Nada, 32, was killed in an Israeli attack on the home where she had sought shelter in Khan Younis in October 2023. The author of the novel Oxygen Is Not for the Dead and many poems, Abu Nada was only beginning to show her strength as a writer, with her works gaining a wider readership and circulation and publication in English.
Her poem “Pull Yourself Together,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine, reflects, perhaps, on what is the use of poetry.
Darwish, don’t you know?
No poetry will return to the lonely
what was lost, what was
stolen.
Abu Nada documented the genocide of the Palestinian people on social media, writing about Israel’s massacres and her ever-shrinking list of friends, all martyrs now. She did not stop writing until she was killed.
“No one will stand by our side”
Since October 2023, Israel has killed an unknowable number of poets and writers. Estimates of those killed are available, and they vary, depending on the source, but the extent of the carnage wrought on Gaza’s literary community is something that will never be known.
Ramy Abdu, chairman of the human rights organization Euro-Med Monitor, told The Electronic Intifada that the targeting of Palestinian poets, writers and academics is “deliberate” and “aimed at destroying the cultural and creative spirit of the Palestinian people.”
This “cultural genocide,” said Abdu, is intended to “destroy any tool that might help the Palestinians express themselves and resist.”
This is why the reading at the camp for displaced people west of Deir al-Balah was so significant.
Abeer al-Riyati, 28, an Arabic-language teacher, attended the gathering and said that it was a pleasure to listen to “the poets reciting their verses.”
She appreciated the range of the poems’ subjects: “the suffering of war, another about longing for northern Gaza, and another recited a poem about love and flirting with the beloved.”
The topic of longing for northern Gaza turned out to be appropriate, for several weeks after the readings, a ceasefire was announced on 19 January 2025.
Abu al-Sheikh was able to return home to Jabaliya in the north. He told The Electronic Intifada that he was happy to be back, as he never expected this moment to come. He hopes to organize another poetry event in Jabaliya.
At each gathering of poets in Gaza, the presence of those gone is felt. As Heba Abu Nada wrote in “Pull Yourself Together”:
How alone we are!
This is an age of insolence,
and no one will stand by our side,
Never.O! How alone we are!
Wipe away your poems, old and new,
and all these tears. And you, O Palestine,
pull yourself together.
Abdullah Younis is a journalist in the Gaza Strip.
