Comma Press pays tribute to Palestinian poet Alareer

Comma Press founder and c.e.o. Ra Page has paid tribute to Palestinian writer and educator Refaat Alareer who was killed in an air strike in Gaza City last week.

Alareer was a professor of comparative literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and a founding collaborator for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a storytelling project through which international writers mentor young Palestinians to "tell the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news". He edited Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (Just World Books) and had been working with Comma Press on a superhero project, as well as a project with the Washington Post to build a collective literary “memory map” to commemorate lost places in the Strip.

Page said: "Above all else, he was generous. He always championed others, ahead of himself. He was a great writer, but his mission was to support and give a platform to others. We had the honour of spending a lot of time with him in Gaza last year, driving around in his funny little car – definitely the smallest, most peculiar car in Gaza – listening to audiobooks and podcasts on his sound system, and trying to translate hilarious Palestinian idioms into English rhyming couplets. He was gracious, gentle, patient and funny. He had a wicked sense of humour and no fear of the perpetrators of lies and double-speech, two attributes that might have got him killed.”

Page went on to say: “Refaat’s legacy will be the way he has exposed the lunacy of this age. People are more concerned about ‘performing’ an empty morality than actually being moral. In the West, we are scared or conditioned into only saying the ‘right things’ in a way that somehow enables and encourages us to stand silent while actual genocide is being committed. Refaat’s life and death shows that world for what it is: mad.”

Pam Bailey, co-founder of WANN, added: “When I set out to find the best writing coach in Gaza to join We Are Not Numbers, Refaat was universally called out by both students and graduates. He was tough, but kind; strict, but flexible. Above all, he was fiercely passionate about preserving Palestinian culture and sharing it with the world through the power of the word and, as he said in his last poem, the teacher’s ‘marker’.”

Alareer documented daily life under Israeli bombardment in Gaza on X, formerly known as Twitter. Some of his remarks about Israel and Hamas caused offence.