The Lessons of a Renaissance Scholar from Gaza: Dr. Refaat Alareer (1979–2023)
by Bernadette Andrea
How can we, as scholars of the early modern era (1500–1800), respond to the ongoing nakba, or catastrophe, in Gaza, where the death toll after seven months is over 35,000 people? Compounding the general destruction, every university in Gaza has been demolished, along with most schools, hospitals, and places of worship. How can we ethically engage our students who have mobilized throughout the nation and around the world to protest this scholasticide, which is a component of a genocide? As Audre Lorde reminds us, our silence will not protect us when we witness militarized police forces on our campuses brutalizing students, teachers, and their supporters for peacefully protesting an ongoing dispossession funded by US tax dollars and university endowments.
One avenue is through the scholarship, creative expression, and engaged pedagogy of a Renaissance scholar killed (along with his sister and her family) when an Israeli bomb demolished the building in which he sheltered on December 7, 2023: the beloved and deeply mourned Dr. Refaat Alareer. Alareer’s reading of Donne’s poetry, elucidated through Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories, as addressing and answerable to “future rebels” (Alareer quoting Donne’s “Love’s Exchange”) renews this seventeenth-century poet from a Palestinian perspective for further mobilization by a rising generation of scholars, poets, and teachers in Gaza and globally.
Alareer’s PhD dissertation, “Unframing John Donne’s Transgressive Poetics in Light of Bakhtin’s Dialogic Theories” (Universiti Putra Malaysia, 2017) opens with his prescient “Tribute to John Donne”: “I, spinning like a compass in my grave,/ Often there would pause and deeply ponder/ On what you people don’t get . . . ” Together, Donne, Bakhtin, and Alareer offer a contrapuntal trio for a class on early modern literature and how it can speak to the present moment. What resources did Alareer locate in the resistant language of the seventeenth-century Englishman, with “resistant” connoting literary experimentation and political struggle? How did the dissident theories from a twentieth-century Russian, who also was a scholar of Renaissance literature, lead a twenty-first-century Palestinian to conclude that “Donne seems to have adopted what we now call Bakhtinian rhetoric of resistance to contest the institutionalized violence against him as an emerging poet writing against the grain”? And how did this Bakhtinian “crossing of boundaries” inform Alareer’s own poetry and pedagogy?
Alareer revisits Donne’s life and writings with the aim of “unravelling how the marginalised voices resisted and contested literary authority, how they pushed their voices amidst a torrent of criticism and negative frames, and what literary techniques they developed not merely to survive but to resurface later in time.” The method he elaborates — “[a] study of literary resistance vis-a-vis marginalization” — is one that enables a paired reading of Alareer’s poetry and essays with Donne’s works. Both share a “guerilla rhetoric” and recognition of “the necessity of all members and aspects of life complementing each other.” In this spirit, Alareer evokes Donne’s “Meditation XVII”: “[n]o man is an island, entire of itself . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind . . .” This oft-cited passage becomes for him a tool of resistance towards a future of life-affirming laughter in the face of death-dealing destruction. Along with Bakhtin, Alareer recognizes that, as a “liberating force,” “laughter resists hypocrisy, defeats fear, and degrades power.” This form of laughter resists and persists.
Alareer’s poetic gift matured as he pursued his teaching career in the Department of English at the Islamic University in Gaza, where he offered classes on Shakespeare and other early modern writers. His most famous poem, “If I Must Die,” recited around the world in more than forty languages since his death, resounds as an anthem of hope and resistance in the midst of despair and destruction:
If I must die
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
He composed this poem for his five-year old daughter Shaimaa during an Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008–2009. She was killed by an Israeli airstrike, with her husband and their five-month old baby, on April 26, 2024.
In conditions of such incalculable losses — including his brother Mohammad “who was killed [in 2014] when Israel destroyed our family home” and to whom he dedicated his dissertation — Alareer’s way forward is to keep telling stories. As he reflects in his essay, “Gaza Writes Back: Narrating Palestine” (Biography, 2014):
As a Palestinian, I have been brought up on stories and storytelling. It’s both selfish and treacherous to keep a story to yourself — stories are meant to be told and retold. If I allowed a story to stop, I would be betraying my legacy, my mother, my grandmother, and my homeland. To me, storytelling is one of the ingredients of Palestinian sumud — steadfastness. Stories teach life even if the hero suffers or dies at the end. For Palestinians, stories whet the much-needed talent for life. (526–27)
Through his edited collections, Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (Just World Books, 2014) and Gaza Unsilenced (Just World Books, 2015), he sought to cultivate the voices of Palestinian youth as essential to this collective project of rememory — Toni Morrison’s neologism for “recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past” in response to the trauma of dispossession, whether through chattel slavery or settler colonialism.
As we bring Dr. Refaat Alareer’s scholarship and creative expression into our classrooms, the bibliographies in MEMOs (Medieval and Early Modern Orients) on anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-Orientalist scholarship and teaching are indispensable. Dr. Ramzy Baroud, a Palestinian scholar-activist whose work I have followed since he circulated his email newsletter prior to the rise of social media, recently posted a video contextualizing the student protests where he cites Antonio Gramsci. Baroud describes him as “that great anti-fascist intellectual who practically died in fascist prisons in Italy. He used to say to young students:
“Educate yourself, because we need all of your intelligence.
Mobilize yourself, because we need all of your enthusiasm.
And organize yourself, because we need all of your strength.”
When students asked my colleague Dr. Sherene Seikaly what they should do to meet our pressing challenges, she urged, “Read, read, as if your life depends on it!” (“Liberation Talk: A Round Table,” University of California, Santa Barbara, April 24, 2024). Her essay, “The History of Israel/Palestine,” in Understanding and Teaching the Modern Middle East, is another essential resource for classes on early modern topics with its attention to the historicity of contested terms and genealogies.
Dr. Stephen Salaita, in his chapter “Speaking in Times of Repression” from Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Haymarket Books, 2015), details the “countless ways to pursue justice on campus” considering each person’s situation:
Some are no more complex than being a good teacher and an honorable mentor. Others require only that we act in community rather than adhering to the individualistic cultures of capitalism and colonization. If assuming a public posture is something you want to do, though, then fear shouldn’t be a hinderance. (186–87)
His further advice, including lists of possible contributions (188–90), is generous in every sense of the word. In our classrooms, and in the “People’s Universities” growing on our campuses with their Dr. Refaat Alareer libraries, we will find multiple paths for scholars and students of early modern literature to respond to this historical moment and its goals of justice and freedom — for Palestine and for all oppressed people.
Bernadette Andrea is a professor of literary and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Her edited books include Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World, with Patricia Akhimie (University of Nebraska Press, 2019); English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707 (ITER, 2012); and Early Modern England and Islamic Worlds, with Linda McJannet (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). She was co-editor, with Julie D. Campbell and Allyson M. Poska, of Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2017–2024), and the President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2022–2023).
