By MILTON HATOUM*
Speech at the inauguration event of the “Center for Palestinian Studies” at the Faculty of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at USP
I congratulate all those who worked hard to create the Center for Palestinian Studies at the School of Philosophy, Literature and Human Sciences at USP. The existence of this center is a milestone and will certainly strengthen academic and cultural relations between USP and the universities of Palestine.
In 1982, when the occupying state bombed Beirut, Israeli General Rafael Eytan declared that Palestinians were “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” On October 9, 2023, Israel’s defense minister said he would fight “human animals”. With these same words, the white and racist characters in a short story by James Baldwin name African-Americans; then they torture and burn to death the body of a black man, as has been happening to many Palestinians in Gaza, including children.
As we know, James Baldwin, a black and homosexual American, was not only a great writer and essayist, but also a tireless anti-racist activist and defender of the Palestinian cause.
I remembered this story while reading the book. I want to be awake when I die, by Atef Abu Saif (Ed. Elefante). Atef, former Palestinian Minister of Culture, is the author of several novels, plays, reports and diaries.
Good fiction gives life to images of the past. Journalism, when it is viscerally honest and truthful, gives life to images and catastrophes of the present. Atef Abu Saif's recently published book is a testimony to a monstrous, cowardly and extremely cruel aggression that has been taking place for over a year.
As the title suggests, Atef Abu Saif wants to be awake when he dies. Countless times, on consecutive or alternate days, he felt or sensed that he was going to die. Fortunately, he survived. Atef Abu Saif speaks of this survival, always precarious, often in suspense, as if wakefulness and nightmare were a permanent state, or a thin, almost invisible line that separates life from death.
For almost 90 days, the writer witnessed the horror of the bombings from land, air and sea; he saw the mutilated and disfigured bodies of friends, relatives and many other Palestinians he knows, or knew, as many were murdered. Atef Abu Saif briefly tells the story of these people, mentioning other bombings against Gaza throughout this century, and the first Intifada (1987-93), when he lost childhood friends, was wounded three times and imprisoned for several months. He also reminds us that this daily nightmare to which his people are subjected has its origins in Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948, when 750 Palestinians were expelled from their homes and lands, and hundreds of villages and hamlets were destroyed.
According to the late Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, Nakba is not over. In fact, the catastrophe that began even before 1948 continued throughout the second half of the last century and culminated in this genocide carried out by the occupying state, but which was only made possible with the direct, massive and unconditional help of the United States government and, to a lesser extent, of some Arab and European countries.
Atef wrote in his diary: “Every day I look into the future like a blind man looking into the night.”
Edward Said pointed out that all the actions of the occupying power are aimed at the extermination of the Palestinians. He then added: “But the Palestinians will not disappear.” I think Atef Abu Saif and all of us agree with the author of orientalism.
Palestinians will not give up on living, nor on fighting for freedom; they will not give up writing, imagining, dreaming. The occupying and racist state has been killing poets, artists, actors, actresses, musicians, journalists, photographers and filmmakers. But this barbarity is not new.
On July 8, 1972, Israeli agents killed in Beirut the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, whose remarkable novel Umm Saad is mentioned in the book by Atef Abu Saif. On December 6, 2023, the teacher and poet Refat Alareer, author of the poem, was assassinated. If I have to die, translated into 30 languages and read on social media by more than 30 million people.
The bombs silenced the poet, but not the poem, whose premonitory title refers to the author's death, but the verses lyrically allude to life, childhood, and freedom. Refat Alareer lives and will live in this poem, which has become one of the most powerful symbols of resistance: a universal song written in Arabic by a young English-language literature professor at one of the 19 universities in Gaza that were destroyed, along with bookstores, schools, museums, theaters, and cultural centers.
Mahmud Darwich, another great Palestinian poet, wrote in the book Memory for oblivion: “the facts must speak”. Atef Abu Saif gave voice to the facts, which most of the mainstream media hides, manipulates or distorts.
In the afterword to his book, Atef Abu Saif addresses the reader: “What you hold in your hands was not intended as a diary. When I started, I wrote these texts daily because I wanted people to know what was happening. I wanted there to be a record of events in case I died. I felt the presence of death so often… I could feel it hovering over me, on my shoulder, and I wrote as a way of resisting it, of defying it – if not defeating it, then at least not thinking about it. As the war continues, all I can think about is survival. I cannot grieve. I cannot recover. My grief had to be postponed. My mourning postponed. Now is not the time to think about that. In this book, however, I can see everyone I have loved and lost, and I can continue to talk to them. […] I can still believe that they are here with me.”
We in this auditorium stand with you and with the Palestinian people, Atef Abu Saif.
*Milton Hatoum is a writer. Author, among other books by Report from a certain East (Company of Letters).
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