‘As the bombs fall, I write’: The poets of Gaza

‘Growing up in Gaza is inspiring for poets – life here is poetry blown into pieces and scattered all over the place.’

Children eagerly thumbing through books in the kids section, youngsters scanning the covers, undergraduates searching for a quiet spot to work, others drinking their coffee as they read. The smell of incense. The piles of books. The yellow banner bearing the name Samir Mansour – the library and bookstore that was home to Gaza’s most passionate readers. I was a student of English literature – searching out novels, poetry collections, books from around the world – when I found it, directed there by friends who knew I would find what I was looking for. The first time I entered, I marvelled at its tens of thousands of books and left with a poetry collection by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and a Russian novel that had been translated into Arabic. It was the largest bookstore in Gaza. Now just a few books remain – among them Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Returning to Haifa – the story of a Palestinian couple who goes back to Haifa after the 1967 war to look for their baby, whom they were forced to leave behind in the war of 1948 (Nakba). How did that book survive all the flames and all the smoke to tickle our blazing yearning for our missing homeland and our missing Haifa?