Last Saturday, we parked in the old town. Upon leaving, we found a paper on our car window which we initially thought was a parking ticket. Instead, it was a poem and the story of a man and his family who are no longer with us. The poem was titled “If I Must Die,” written by Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer.
“If I must die, you must live to tell my story, to sell my things, to buy a piece of white cloth and some string, to make a kite with a long tail, so that a child somewhere in Gaza, looking up to heaven waiting for the father lost in a flash without a chance to bid farewell to anyone, not even to his own flesh, not even to himself, will see the kite you made flying up there and think an angel is there sending love back down. If I must die, let my death bring hope, let it be a tale.”
Refaat Alareer was a member of the Palestinian intelligentsia with a doctorate in English literature.
He believed in the power of narrative and the written word as means of resistance against occupation and founded the organisation “We Are Not Numbers” (wearenotnumbers.org) in Gaza.
Many members of his family were killed in the 2014 bombings, while he himself was killed last year on December 6 in what was considered a targeted bombing of his apartment.
Besides him, six other family members were killed in the same incident. A few weeks later, his daughter Shaima, for whom he had written the above poem, gave birth to her first child, writing to him: “I have beautiful news. Did you know you’ve become a grandfather?”
The beautiful news lasted four months. The infant and mother met the same fate as the grandfather and the thousands of other Palestinians who have been lost and continue to be lost so unjustly in a strip of land where even those who live prepare for their death.
And since Shaima likely didn’t get the chance to make the kite for us survivors to watch as it travels across the sky, sending love from so many lost souls, a piece of paper on a windscreen – like a travelling message – reminds us of their passage through earth.
And of our obligation to tell their story. To say they weren’t numbers but people who wanted to live, yet departed in a flash without even a chance to say goodbye to anyone, not even to themselves.