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A searing testimony from within a life under manifold oppression.
In I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza, Palestinian poet and cultural worker Mahmoud M Al-Shaer documents life during the ongoing war in Gaza with breathtaking clarity and devastating intimacy. Composed as a series of dispatches written since January 11, 2024, the author uses his voice to record his struggle to hold onto words in resistance to erasure and whilst bearing witness to unbearable violence. These texts offer not just a relentless chronicle of destruction, but a vital affirmation of presence, relation, and survival amidst the unspeakable catastrophes unfolding in Gaza.
From the wreckage of homes and futures, Al-Shaer builds language as shelter-raw, lyrical, defiant. His writing refuses the daily cruelty imposed by war and human rights violations, and demands the world pay attention. Each page pulses with an utterance that insists: I am still alive.
Mahmoud M Al-Shaer has dedicated this book to his three-year-old twins-Nai and Majd-now separated by nearly 1,000 kilometers and exposed to different traumas. All proceeds from the sale of I Am Still Alive (available in print and ebook formats) will go to the author to support his family and other Palestinians.
Mahmoud M Al-Shaer is a writer, poet, and editor-in-chief of 28 Magazine as well as founder and head curator of 28 Gallery in Rafah, Palestine. Al-Shaer coordinated cultural projects in collaboration with visual artists and writers for the publishing house Khuta, for Al-Ghussein House in Gaza City (where he was cultural program coordinator), for Rosa-Luxemburg-Foundation Palestine, and for Goethe-Institut Ramallah. He was co-curator of the New Alphabet School at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019-22) where he also co-edited (with Olga Schubert, Gigi Argyropoulou, an Rahul Gudipudi) edition #22 of DNA, the HKW's publication series released adjacent to the program. He contributed to the 12th Berlin Biennial (2023) and was also part of two exhibitions by the Quattan Foundation in Ramallah (Instant Modernism, 2023 and The - Valley Trail, 2021). Since the beginning of the -ongoing war in Gaza, he has been working at the field hospital of the International Medical Corps (IMC) in -Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis.
Recent, undeniable, painful as an open wound and written with great poetry, directness, and intensity, these dispatches from an ongoing genocide take us right into the middle of the unbearable and also thrive with the necessary cultural resistance against it. That Mahmoud M Al-Shaer is still alive on every page lets us feel and see how it is unconscionable to look away. This is the work we need.
- Jacob Wren, author of Dry Your Tears and Perfect Your Aim
The most promising way to confront the suffocating lack of empathy for the Palestinians in Gaza and the Westbank in public consciousness, especially places such as Germany, is through deeply grounded accounts of daily life under structural conditions of destruction and survival in this ongoing war-like those found in Mahmoud M Al-Shaer's Dispatches.
- Wolfgang Kaleck, attorney and general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Berlin
