Mahmoud M Al-Shaer - I Am Still Alive

Mahmoud M Al-Shaer's poetry takes your breath away. It is as if time stands still and the noise dies down: here is a clear and solitary voice speaking from a heart of darkness. How he comes into language, and how he summons the strength to give testimony, is as improbable as it is moving. Nobody will be able to say: We did not know. - Carolin Emcke, author of Against Hate and recipient of the 2016 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Association Throughout the 600-odd days of this genocide, Gazans have been documenting daily life in abundance, often paying the cost with their lives. As readers, we must actively bear witness and honor the work of publishers who have taken up their responsibility to disseminate these crucial voices with care, above all in contexts of dire repression such as that of Germany. Mahmoud M Al-Shaer's dispatches both document the lived and felt reality on the ground, countering the institutionally enforced abandonment of empathy, and provide a profound meditation on the limits of language faced with the barbaric and unimaginable. Where for Al-Shaer language might seem helpless, his words pulsate with an affirmation of life-he is, as he writes, ""consumed with survival."" This exquisite collection should be required reading, so that ""never again"" can really mean never again, for anyone and everyone. - Shela Sheikh, editor and senior lecturer in International Politics, University of London Institute in Paris After reading Mahmoud M Al-Shaer's​ I​ Am Still Alive: ​ Dispatches from Gaza, there is something that cannot be forgotten and can never be erased: ​this is the voice of a poet defiantly present within and attentive to the catastrophe, yet also looking beyond, to a future we can rebuild together. These Dispatches relay the testimony of an expert witness who, amidst peril beyond comprehension, reaches out to a global audience to insist that solidarity is our only pathway to survival. - Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land, founding director of Forensic Architecture and 2024 Right Livelihood Laureate