At the moment when, at the UN, a Franco-Saudi initiative places the recognition of the State of Palestine on the international agenda, it turns out that shards of lucidity, even before those of politicians, can emerge from poetry and literature. What do three recent works by Moroccan authors tell us about Palestine, each in a different way?
Index IA: Library of Mediterranean Knowledge
What can literature do when Palestine cannot?
22-med – September 2025
• In the face of political impotence, literature becomes a fragile but vital weapon for Palestine.
• Three Moroccan authors resonate, each in their own way, the muffled voices of Gaza.
#palestine #literature #poetry #memory #mediterranean
"What use are poets in times of distress?". Quoting the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, in the aftermath of World War II, Patrick Chamoiseau states that he writes his latest essay What Can Literature Do When It Cannot? (Seuil Libelle, 2025), to question its utility or more precisely to affirm its necessary uselessness. In a text written in sensitive fragments (a sentimentheque), the Martinican author refers, starting from the Holocaust, to Theodor Adorno, who said that it was "impossible to act as if nothing is happening".
In his historical-literary ramble, going from Faulkner to Glissant, from Kafka to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not to mention the countless primordial fables and poems of forgotten peoples, he seeks to signify to us, in echo to the current atrocities in the Middle East and elsewhere, the urgency of grasping what literature could save us from. Not from death or horror, that goes without saying. But from the illusion of a totalizing universal, from the grand Western-centered narrative. He also points out our inability to grasp the incredible diversity of "poetic captures" and "narrative organisms" that help to stitch together the "whole-world" through unexpected connections.
In the Face of Palestinian Powerlessness
Let’s tighten the focus on Palestine. Two years after the traumatic attack on Israeli civilians, there is increasing unanimity that the response causing the near-total destruction of the Gaza Strip, the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians, and the famine of a besieged population was not only disproportionate but criminal. In passing, this tragedy reveals the unexpected defeat of universal values, so terrifying is the denial and impotence in the face of the unspeakable.
What can literature do, then, in the face of all this, in the erasure of lives bombed at the whim of endless arms supplies, in the dehumanization and animalization of inhabitants with no way out, as a prelude to their desired extermination or deportation? Three publications by Moroccan authors seem to attempt, each in their own way, to modestly say, echoing Chamoiseau, "now that we see, know, read, that we are all responsible for our actions and inactions, we say, yes, literature can do something". It can, instead of selling us the same false universalizing discourse, help us see how gracefully humans can "diversalize" and thus express their irreducible soul from their places of life and tiny paths of hope.
Laâbi and the Twenty-Six Voices of Gaza
In The Anthology of Contemporary Gaza Poetry (Points, 2025), the twenty-six texts gathered by Moroccan author Yassin Adnan and translated by Abdellatif Laâbi are presented to us as striking echoes of Aimé Césaire's intuition that "poems serve as miraculous weapons capable of killing the virus of hatred and undermining the cult of force". In his introduction, Laâbi quotes these verses from the young Palestinian poet, Marwan Maaqoul, which have become emblematic and widely shared on social media:
To write a poetry
that is not political
I must listen to the birds
And to listen to the birds
the noise of the bomber must cease.
Refusing any form of analysis that he qualifies as "pseudo-scholarly", Laâbi applies to the readers of these unknown, invisible poets, speaking from within, from a charred matrix, the following injunction that they impose on us: "Be silent. Let us speak". The Moroccan poet thus invites us to read them in their incredible fragility and immeasurable power. Behind his desire to let their voices emerge as desperate human emanations, he allows us to see this place "abandoned by gods and men" and their poems as the ultimate form of resistance against death. Through the beauty and strength of their words, they prove the validity of this idea that he rightly holds dear: "a people can only triumph over its oppressor if it is morally superior to him".
Benzine and the Story of a Counter-Report
The Franco-Moroccan writer, Rachid Benzine, who has transitioned from Islamic studies to fiction to portray this other human continent (Muslims) that the West often looks down upon, has become in a few years an advocate of short texts, centered on a phenomenon or a character, to directly convey gaps in representation that need to be filled. In his latest novel, which resembles more of a novella, The Man Who Read Books (Julliard, 2025), Julien Desmanges, a young photographer who went on assignment in Gaza before 2014, to capture the photo that would hit home, wanders through the alleys, the debris, the surrounding chaos, and eventually stumbles upon an old bookseller, Nabil El-Jaber, next to Hafez's tea room, who speaks perfect French and possesses disconcerting patience.
Through this narrative subterfuge, where instead of taking a photo, the reporter becomes the recipient of an unexpected story, the author finds a roundabout way to narrate, through the personal and familial journey of a single man, Palestine since 1948, exile, prison, Haifa, the PLO, apartheid, UNRWA, studies in Egypt, imprisonment in Israel, but also the books accumulated around him, deciphered in the turn of a glance: Hugo, Hamlet, Darwich, Genet, and many others. The epilogue of the book informs us that, having returned eleven years later to a devastated Gaza, the bookseller, like all traces of places he had known, visited, or taken the time to appreciate, was nowhere to be found. As if Benzine sought through this memory, reconstructed with a certain sensitivity, to take stock of what disaster could not erase, the love of books filled with lives. This parabolic tale has been received, in the deafening silence of Francophone literary figures, as an incredible reminder of reality.
The Stubborn Dreams of Kébir Mustapha Ammi
In the face of the desire to give voice to the subalterns or to circumvent the possibility of bringing forth a narrative from the rubble, Moroccan-Algerian writer Kébir Mustapha Ammi chooses to express, in his own way, the malaise in the face of the Palestinian drama through the even wiser voice of lyrical poetry. Already in 2021, he published a haunting elegy titled The Old Man, which has since been translated into seven languages. Desperately clinging to hope, he writes: "I have sworn / To build / On the face of the absent ... / The stubborn soul of a child ... / A peaceful and fraternal sky on his shoulders".
And now he recidivates with an even shorter poem, published simultaneously in Arabic and French, Draw Me a Happy Palestine (Al Manar, 2025). In a utopian surge, both dreamy and ironic, affected and dignified, obstinately attached to life and resolutely committed to a human ethic, the author projects himself into an ordinary description of the (im)possible.
"Draw me a Palestine
With farmers in the fields
And people jostling in buses
at rush hour."
Driss Ksikes is a writer, playwright, media and culture researcher
and associate dean for research and academic innovation at HEM
(private university in Morocco).
Cover Photo: ©Ahmad-Ardity-Pixabay