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Written during an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the four new poems in Palestinian by award-winning Palestinian poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah call out the world’s blindness towards Palestine, its tragedy, and the Nakba that has persisted since 1948.
“I write now so that I do not die,” Nasrallah insists, and “every time they try to erase us, we become clearer.” These poems of resistance and agency are dedicated to Gaza, that small strip of land, which has become as large as the world, and whose struggle for survival is a project to liberate the world from darkness and tyranny. Translator Huda Fakhreddine’s interview with the author completes this special edition chapbook.
Ibrahim Nasrallah is a Palestinian poet, novelist, painter, and photographer. He was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1954 to parents uprooted from their home in Palestine in 1948. To date, Nasrallah has published 14 poetry collections, 2 books of film criticism, and 24 novels, 14 of which make up his epic Palestinian Tragicomedy series covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history. He has won many awards and honors, among them the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (The Arabic Booker) in 2018, the Palestine Prize in 2022, and the Grand Prize for the Novel from the Turkish Authors’ Association in 2023. Nasrallah is the only two-time winner of the Katara Prize for Arabic Novels: in 2016 for his novel The Spirits of Kilimanjaro and in 2020 for his novel A Tank Under the Christmas Tree.
“‘We are inside a large prison, but it is not made of walls and bars. It is a great wound we have been thrust into,’ poet Ibrahim Nasrallah tells translator Huda Fakhreddine. And from the depths of the great wound, these four sweeping poems elegize and insist on naming what Palestinians have been made to endure over the past 76 years of Nakba, culminating in the current genocide. Fakhreddine’s translations are a tribute to Nasrallah’s poems—her gifts as both scholar of and reader with authentic reverence for the Arabic poetic tradition offer us poems as electric and devastating as the original texts.”
—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
