What is Refaat Writes Back? All you need to know about our newsletter.

Why did we create this newsletter?

These past few months, I’ve found myself repeatedly reminded by Primo Levi in his preface to If This is a Man: “The need to tell our story to ‘the rest’, to make ‘the rest’ participate in it had taken on for us, before our liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with our other elementary needs.” He continues on to point out that his account of his detention in Auschwitz was not written in a logical manner but to satisfy its urgency. In the face of an unrelenting military aggression that is killing tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, telling our story becomes a need.

Refaat Writes Back was created to fulfil the urgency to tell our stories, not to prove anything, not to document, for there is no lack of reporting coming out of Gaza, but to satisfy the need to create, and to tell the story of Palestine. To continue in our ancestors’ human practice of telling stories of us, of the land. 

Context of the name of the newsletter 

Dr. Refaat Alareer went back to work after the 23-day attacks on Gaza in 2008-2009 determined to make storytelling part of his curriculum. His Short Story class studied works of fiction in English from around the world from Hemingway, Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, Pirandello to the iconic works of Palestinian authors like Ghassan Kanafani. His assignments included writing a short story, a task most of his students hadn’t laboured through before. Out of hundreds of submissions, came Gaza Writes Back, an anthology of short stories by young writers from Gaza. Dr. Alareer, the editor, and his work inspired this newsletter.

Dr. Alareer was assassinated in Gaza on December 6th, 2023. He had received a call from an Israeli threatening him. Later an Israeli pilot dropped a bomb where Dr. Alareer was staying, at his sister’s house. His sister and several other family members were killed in the explosion. Refaat Alareer was a poet and a short story writer. He was a John Donne and English Literature Scholar, an alumnus of the University College London and Universiti Putra Malaysia. His students, friends, neighbours, and colleagues loved and revered him. Along with Gaza Writes Back, he co-edited with Laila Al Haddad Gaza Unsilenced, a collection of essays on the 2014 attack on Gaza. He is the co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, a project that matches experienced writers with young writers in Gaza. 

On Writing Back and the English language  

In The Empire Writes Back the authors look into the development of Literature in English around the British Empire, subverting the prescriptive notions of English and creating literature outside the traditional canon, outside what is dictated as “English Literature”. In GWB, Dr. Alareer starts by quoting Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah: “Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control. They frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit”. Refaat wanted to position the literature produced in English by Palestinian writers in Gaza in this context of subversion, to use the English language not just as a means of communicating universally, but as a means of disruption as well. This newsletter follows suit. Our authors will predominantly write in English. We will indicate any texts that were translated and publish their original language as well. 

It’s important to keep in mind that writing for the authors of this newsletter isn’t reactive. It is first and foremost a creative endeavour where they explore the complexity of language, where they engage with other pieces of literature, and where for some, they remember their loved ones who were taken away so violently. 

Our authors

This newsletter will feature the work of writers who are mainly from Gaza, but we welcome submissions from indigenous people who have fought or are fighting colonialist aggressors all over the world. 

A lot of the authors we will publish here are former students of Dr. Refaat Alareer. By contributing to this newsletter, they pay homage to his memory and everything he taught them. 

What kind of texts will you be publishing? 

This newsletter will publish short fiction, poetry, personal essays, and creative pieces of writing in the form of journal entries or monologues. 

Who are you? 

My name is Rawan Yaghi. I am one of the contributors of Gaza Writes Back. I have known Dr. Refaat Alareer since 2008. He taught me as part of a US funded English Language program at AMIDEAST. In 2010, Dr. Alareer invited me to attend a Creative Writing course he was leading at the Islamic University of Gaza. Later, I joined the Islamic University’s English Department and Dr. Alareer taught me a course of ‘Introduction to English Literature’. Dr. Alareer encouraged me to read books that changed my life, such as the Biography of Malcolm X, Susan Amiry’s ‘Sharon and my Mother in Law’, Susan Abulhawa’s ‘Mornings in Jenin’. Through the short stories of Luigi Pirandello, Dr. Alareer introduced me to Italian Literature which I went on to study at the University of Oxford. He taught me to see radicalism in Shakespeare and in literature in general. In 2014, after the launch of Gaza Writes Back, Dr. Alareer, Yousef al-Jamal, and I went on a book tour in the US. He was like big brother to me and he taught me to love writing and to not be afraid of using my voice. I feel a great responsibility to continue Dr. Refaat Alareer’s mission in uplifting and continuing the human practice of storytelling in Palestine in the written form.

This newsletter comes as part of the REFAAT Initiative, a project started by a number of Dr. Alareer’s friends and students to keep his memory alive. 

Our supporters 

Comma Press is an independent publishing house based in Manchester, UK. Their popular running series, Reading the City, “has proven that people's engagement with place can override other barriers to reading fiction in translation, and has now visited over 20 cities worldwide.”