If I Must Die
- Apr 23
- 2 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
★★★☆☆
Though I had not heard of Refaat Alareer before picking this book up from the New Releases shelf at the library, the back cover tells me that, before he was killed at the age of 44 alongside several family members by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City, he was a renowned poet and literature professor, and that the poem that gives this collection its name, “If I Must Die, Let It Be a Tale,” became a global symbol of dignified resistance in the wake of his death. Back in 2024, I read two excellent and indispensable books that shed light on the Palestinian struggle for autonomy and independence: Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and Ta-Nehisi Coates's essay “The Gigantic Dream” in his collection The Message. And while If I Must Die continues my exploration of this theme, I largely picked it up, alongside a few other books, to celebrate National Poetry Month.
As a poet and writer, I often feel terrible about not giving every book five stars, though more so for books of poetry than anything else. In this case, three stars feels doubly damning, as if I’m taking away from the import of Alareer’s words, of the beauty and heartbreak found in his poetry, of the horrors of living under repeated Israeli assaults, of the fears and concerns he felt for, and shared about, his family, his friends, his neighbors, his people. But, as a collection, If I Must Die is simply, simultaneously, too much and not enough. Or, as I have to remind myself in circumstances like these, too much and not enough for me.
In many ways, the pieces, many of which were reproduced from The Electronic Intifada, an independent online news publication focused on Palestine, serve as their own sort of repeated assault—articles and interviews amidst endless and endlessly unknowable bombing campaigns—and, powerless, I don’t know what to do with such annihilation. Instinctively, unable to absorb blow after blow (and, no, I am in no way comparing my experience of reading If I Must Die to the reality of living under the conditions documented in If I Must Die), I become numb. I despair. And yet, Alareer does not. Perhaps he is made of stronger stuff. Or perhaps resiliency is the posture with which life must be lived, if it is to be lived at all, but especially lived with dignity, with hope, even as that dignity and hope are threatened and destroyed daily. I don’t know how he did it, and he probably didn’t either, except to get up every day and do what he could. I hope that I will never need to be tested in such ways. I hope that, one day, neither will the Palestinians.
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