What does it mean to be a poet in a time of war? – asks Hind Jouda in one of her poems. What does it mean to feel almost extinct?

The genocide in Gaza has become unspeakable, a whisper buried under layers of denialism, censorship, oblivion, contortion of reality, disavowing the erasure of an entire people as the world looks on. The silence is coerced through repression, the threat of job cuts, of funding cuts, of social isolation, of shaming, and slanders and outright lies. 

In these moments we turn to poets as truth-tellers, to those who come to voice, crying out from under the rubble, finding the courage to say, question, denounce, and affirm life in the middle of a war. Amid death, terror, famine and the collapse of existence in all its forms, they rise to scream at us seeking to rescue what remains of our humanity. 

We Have Risen with Your Fall is a collection of poems by a group of Gaza-based writers and poets who continue documenting their experiences from tents, collapsed homes, destroyed streets, dried fields, deprived hospitals, improvised classrooms, and mud ovens. They write, enduring pain, despair, loss, sickness, perpetual displacement and daily catastrophes; they write, for survival, in spite of the world abandoning them. They burn their books to make a fire, they write. 

Through their wills, diaries and testimonies, we are invited to hold their lives, brutally stolen from them. 

We start with Hind Jouda, from whom we borrowed the line that titles our collection. 

In her poem “Thanks for Your Last Missile!” she calls on us, the silent and distant readers in the so-called civilized nations, by affirming “I Have Risen with Your Fall.” 

Is it us falling, and failing? Are we those who are blind, numbed, afraid, immoral, and dead already, while the Palestinians rise and live, even beyond the limits of endurance and human capacity? Is writing then seeking to question death itself, rather than a way to search for the deep meaning of life, as reality has become an absurdity in which nothing seems to make sense, no one is held accountable and we all become complicit? 

She says: “Writing is a way to document and preserve the legacy of humanity and its stories from oblivion. When telling the story of Gaza and Palestine, the wound is clear; there is no ambiguity in the story of Palestine, no matter how long the injustice and harshness of the occupation, or how much Palestinians are marginalized and denied of their existence. We must bring up our narrative because the world does not give us justice. Writers must document the suffering of their people. Every occupation has an end, as long as there is a living people who cling to their land and refuse to be treated as inferiors.”

Writing becomes an act of resistance, a way to continue striving for life in the face of death. It is an act of re-membering, literally reassembling bodies, naming, and conveying the voices of the deceased and the ancestors.

In Jouda’s texts, we hear an attempt to heal, to find relief from both a personal and collective suffering, her words are enfleshed with the raw materiality of war, the pain becomes striking, both in the body and in the spirit. Her poems are a scream and a hymn in the face of violence, a lament for the soul burdened by unbearable, undeniable crimes. 

She challenges us, reaffirming dignity against the brutality that has stripped the Palestinians of their humanity and us of ours along with them. 

“Writing does not stop the tremendous grief. Nothing can pull us away from Gaza and the breath of those living there. As long as the killing continues, the fear does not stop, the anxiety lives in your blood; as long as people are starving, thirsty, losing electricity and communication, fleeing, being killed, imprisoned, and burned alive in their tents by the occupation—while missiles and bulldozers demolish their homes, and the trees are uprooted, and the streets swept away…These are blows to the soul before the body; everything happening in Gaza is a wound to the soul. The slaughtered cannot be separated from their pain as long as the knife is embedded in them. There are no safe zones, no place that could make us feel that our loved ones will be alright. One feels ashamed to be alive, even if home is lost and we become displaced. The future seems more unknown and terrifying than ever; our minds are incapable of grasping the scale of a catastrophe that continues to consume us, which will undoubtedly affect our future, which cannot be predicted, nor do we know what it will ever look like.”