Writing in the middle of active destruction isn't an exercise in artistic expression. It's a frantic defense mechanism against total erasure. When Palestinian poet and cultural activist Mahmoud Al-Shaer speaks about the harrowing daily plight of life in Gaza, he doesn't lean on political rhetoric. Instead, he focuses on the suffocating weight of maintaining a human identity when your entire world is reduced to tents, rubble, and the constant overhead roar of warplanes.
His book, I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza, captures an agonizing truth that mainstream media headlines constantly miss. Physical survival is only half the battle. The true, grueling struggle lies in protecting collective memory, safeguarding personal sanity, and preserving the very idea of a normal future against impossible odds.
The Heavy Burden of Staying Visible
Most people look at conflict zones through a lens of raw statistics. We see casualty counts, square footage of flattened infrastructure, and emergency aid tallies on our evening screens. But numbers don't capture what it means to wake up every single day wondering if your name will be the next one read aloud.
Al-Shaer often frames this through a haunting question: Are we real people, or are we just numbers in a ledger of war?
When basic necessities like clean water, shelter, and electricity vanish, daily life transforms into an exhausting logistical nightmare. Yet, the emotional toll cuts even deeper. People who spent lifetimes building cultural projects, writing books, and raising families find themselves shoved into tents in Rafah, forced to compress their entire existence into a few plastic bags.
Why Preserving Culture Matters More Than Ever
In the depths of crisis, cultural work is often dismissed as a luxury. Critics ask how poetry or art matters when people are starving. Al-Shaer's testimony flips that assumption entirely on its head.
He argues that documenting your own reality is an act of defiance. If occupying forces or sweeping violence can erase your history, your language, and your community spaces, they win a secondary victory. Writing dispatches from the ground is a refusal to let the narrative be written solely by the destroyers.
- Guarding memory: Collecting fragments of daily interactions before the war prevents the past from dissolving into ash.
- Humanizing the struggle: Refusing to accept either the label of helpless victim or stoic hero allows writers to show the messy, ordinary desire to just love, laugh, and walk down a busy Saturday market street.
- Binding culture to life: Keeping creative networks alive ensures that a society doesn't just survive biologically, but retains its soul.
The Agony of Separation and Displacement
For Al-Shaer and thousands of others, survival meant navigating unimaginable separations. Evacuations aren't clean logistical transfers. They mean tearing families apart, sending children or aging parents across borders while others stay behind, trapped in an unending loop of uncertainty.
Living in what he describes as a "cellar of impossibilities," where entire neighborhoods vanish overnight, forces a psychological rewiring. You can't plan for next week. You can't even safely plan for the next hour. You learn to treat a makeshift tent as a living room and a concrete slab as a dining table.
Moving Beyond Simple Empathy
If we want to understand what is happening in Gaza beyond the 24-hour news cycle, we have to listen to the voices of writers, artists, and teachers who lived through the siege. It requires looking past the sanitized press releases and confronting the raw, unvarnished human cost.
Support independent documentation. Read firsthand testimonies. Recognize that the fight for human survival in modern conflicts is inextricably linked to the fight for cultural survival and historical truth.
Hope so heavy to carry: Al-Shaer on harrowing plight, emotional toll, struggle to survive in Gaza
This video provides a direct look at the emotional and psychological challenges faced by those attempting to heal and rebuild after enduring long-term conflict in Gaza.
