The hosts invite writer, editor, and translator Yousef Aljamal for a moving and intimate conversation that honours the life, work, and enduring legacy of the late Refaat Alareer — Palestinian writer, poet, professor, and beloved mentor assassinated by Israel in December 2023. Yousef was Refaat’s student, collaborator, and close friend. Yousef assembled and edited the book If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer which was published early this year. He speaks with clarity, wit, and tenderness about the man whose imagination helped birth an army of writers out of besieged Gaza, including the powerful collection Gaza Writes Back 

Together, the hosts and Yousef reflect on Refaat’s literary and political ethos — his belief that storytelling is resistance, that fiction outlives fact, and that freedom begins in the imagination. They unpack how Refaat fused humour with rage, literature with politics, the classroom with the battlefield. The conversation also considers the role of US universities, the complicity of elite institutions, and the radical hope fuelling a generation of students who refuse silence in the face of genocide.

The title of the episode cites Susan Abulhawa's introduction to the book If I Must Die where she writes that Refaat's death reminded her of Berta Cáceres of Honduras, "another indigenous leader who, like Refaat, was murdered because the light of her being shone too brightly...When she died, the rallying cry of the thousands who loved and followed her was, “Berta no murió, se multiplicó!”

Links to buy the books

If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer edited by Yousef Aljamal https://orbooks.com/catalog/if-i-must-die/ 

Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine edited by Refaat Alareer

https://justworldbooks.com/books-by-title/gaza-writes-back/  

Keywords

Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die, poetry literature, poetry storytelling, resistance, genocide, student activism, Gaza, settler colonialism, humour, legacy, education, poetry, writing as survival, social media, imagination, liberation, radical pedagogy, narrative power, campus repression, academic freedom.

A podcast by The Polis Project

www.thepolisproject.com