It’s sadly reported that one of Gaza’s most prominent poets, Saleem Al-Naffar, has been buried since last Thursday with his family under the rubble of the house where he sought refuge in Gaza City. The bodies can’t be retrieved. No one can check whether any person can be rescued.

Palestinian Poet Saleem Al Naffar

Life

Knives might eat

what remains of my ribs,

machines might smash

what remains of stones,

but life is coming,

for that is its way,

creating life even for us.

 

          Born in 1963 into the crude conditions of a refugee camp near Gaza City, Saleem was hardly of walking-age when the aftermath of the 1967 war with Israel forced his family to migrate to another camp of desperation, called Al Raml, near Latakia in Syria.

His word for that boyhood is “melancholy,” and it ended at age ten when his father passed away there, making Saleem the family-man most responsible for his mother, brother and sisters.

          Literature and poetry were his solace: he began writing lyrics in high school, and then studied Arabic literature at Tishreen University. After first seeking out any available stage for reciting his poems, Naffar soon began placing them in Arabic journals and newspapers.

As he began a family of his own, his literary reputation grew, and after the 1994 founding of the Palestinian Authority, Naffar returned with his family to live in Gaza. He still lives and writes there, publishing new critically-recognized volumes of poems, novels (for example, Nights of Latakia), and an autobiography (Little Memory on Happiness)—working also as an editor for a range of Arabic journals and magazines.

          “Generations of my family have endured the needless poverty of apartheid,” Naffar has said. “From that, I sometimes sing of our despair. But maybe people like my work because, even so, it never gives in to hatred or calls for violence.”

 https://jackdempseywriter.wordpress.com/2021/11/21/visions-of-justice/

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Mosab Abu Toha

@MosabAbuToha

 It’s sadly reported that one of Gaza’s most prominent poets, Saleem Al-Naffar, has been buried since last Thursday with his family under the rubble of the house where he sought refuge in Gaza City. The bodies can’t be retrieved. No one can check whether any person can be rescued.