Having Once Been: Book Review by Emmanuel Merle

"... all I can say is how swept through I feel by the writings of the twenty-six poets in this anthology. Each utterance is like a cry.... They place themselves as close as possible to the wound."

Translated into English by Peter Brown and Caroline Talpe. You can read Emmanuel’s original review in French here.

Gaza, Is There Life Before Death?
An anthology of poems, translated from Palestinian Arabic to French by Abdellatif Laâbi, collected by Yassin Adnan.
Editions Points, (France), 2025. 208 pages.

It’s a bit obscene to write commentary, to write criticism (even and maybe especially when such criticism is admiring) about a poem written at night, during the few seconds of silence before or after a bombardment with the expectation, unimaginable to those of us who haven’t lived it, of the end. It’s equally impossible to imagine a poem written by a woman who demands to search the rubble for her children, hoping to embrace at least one of them, knowing it’s pointless and forbidden:

Please let me see her
even only once!

—Alaa al-Qatraoui

At best, all I can say is how swept through I feel by the writings of the twenty-six poets in this anthology. Each utterance is like a cry. Although the words are very carefully rendered, they locate themselves outside of all conceptual discourse or intentional esthetic prioritization. They place themselves as close as possible to the wound. As close as possible to the wound, that is to say, to objectively locate themselves at the remains of a child, a woman, or an old man with words that cannot extract themselves from the horror:

I saw one body with a smashed head
another, scalped
I could see through the holes in his chest
the air passing between his bones
Each day a bone detaches from his rib cage

—Walid al-Akkad