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Reviews tagging 'Colonisation'
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire by Jennifer Bing, Mike Merryman-Lotze, Jehad Abusalim
16 reviews
rustedtrains's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Genocide, Xenophobia, Murder, and Colonisation
dragongirl271's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Minor: Child death, Death, Hate crime, Homophobia, Violence, Police brutality, Colonisation, and Injury/Injury detail
sshabein's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.5
Since the publication of this book in 2022, contributor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023. He wrote the poem you may have seen, "If I Must Die."
Contributor Mosab Aubu Toha was arrested in November 2023 while trying to cross into Egypt with his family. He was released three days later after international pressure.
Contributor Israa Jamal was still trying to leave Gaza with her family as of May 10, 2024, when yet another Israeli strike in Rafa required them to evacuate to a different area. I am unsure if they made it.
Other writers from this collection are still alive and writing about Gaza, but I couldn't find current information for all of them. I hope they are safe.
If you would like to know more about Gaza, to read Palestinian voices discussing the struggles and hopes they have for their homeland, this book is worth the read. (As of right now, Haymarket Books has the ebook version for free on their site.) It's a mix of academic writing, personal essay, poetry, and photographs that cover a wide range of subjects while still making it clear that the occupation needs to end. I admit to glazing over a bit in the AI chapter, and sometimes the academic portions were not exactly clicking with me, but that's a Me problem. Overall, very glad to have read this, and I learned a lot.
Ceasefire now. Free Palestine.
Contributor Mosab Aubu Toha was arrested in November 2023 while trying to cross into Egypt with his family. He was released three days later after international pressure.
Contributor Israa Jamal was still trying to leave Gaza with her family as of May 10, 2024, when yet another Israeli strike in Rafa required them to evacuate to a different area. I am unsure if they made it.
Other writers from this collection are still alive and writing about Gaza, but I couldn't find current information for all of them. I hope they are safe.
If you would like to know more about Gaza, to read Palestinian voices discussing the struggles and hopes they have for their homeland, this book is worth the read. (As of right now, Haymarket Books has the ebook version for free on their site.) It's a mix of academic writing, personal essay, poetry, and photographs that cover a wide range of subjects while still making it clear that the occupation needs to end. I admit to glazing over a bit in the AI chapter, and sometimes the academic portions were not exactly clicking with me, but that's a Me problem. Overall, very glad to have read this, and I learned a lot.
Ceasefire now. Free Palestine.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Colonisation, and War
mandaazzi's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
Incredible sources for people to learn more about all facets of Palestine's challenges and beauties!
Content Warnings
Minor: Child death, Death, Genocide, Gun violence, Torture, Violence, Police brutality, Islamophobia, Murder, Colonisation, and War
lettuce_read's review against another edition
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Colonisation, and War
Moderate: Genocide and Islamophobia
yourbookishbff's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
This anthology, compiled with support from the American Friends Service Committee, centers the voices and perspectives of Palestinians in and from Gaza as they reflect on the district's past and present while imagining its future. Published in 2022, many of the writers reference Israeli bombardment in 2014 and 2021, and it is a particularly harrowing experience to read their contributions now, in 2024, as Gaza is under far more deadly siege. Less than two years after his essay Gaza Asks: When Shall This Pass? was published in this anthology, poet and activist Refaat Alareer was killed in a strike that also killed his brother, brother's son, sister, and her three children. It's this stark contrast - the scale of death, displacement and structural devastation in today's Gaza and the cautious hope of Palestinians in 2021 and 2022 envisioning futures for another generation - that makes this anthology a challenging read.
While structured loosely around future visions of Gaza, the essays, poems and reflections range from highly academic to deeply personal, covering the lived environment and home construction, agrarian practices and the future of farming in historic Palestine, the use of AI in Israel's surveillance and oppression of Palestinians in Gaza, and so much more. The scale of creativity and resilience required for those living under military occupation and blockade is staggering - how do you build a home when you can't use concrete, how do you run a business when you don't have consistent access to electricity, how do you stock a library when you can't order books, how do you survive when arbitrary borders separate you from family, healthcare, employment, education and freedom? For those who've never experienced this level of surveillance and restricted movement - not to mention the constant threat of aerial attack, search and siezure, or imprisonment - the description of Gaza as the world's largest open-air prison takes shape into something visceral. By the time you get to the second-to-last essay, Let Me Dream, by Israa Mohammed Jamal, you begin to better understand the reality of multi-generational trauma and how it shapes those attempting to build lives in Gaza.
Another through-line in this anthology is Gaza's current population density and large refugee population. I hadn't realized that around 70% of those living in Gaza are refugees, and I appreciated how intentionally each contributor engages with the legacy and continuation of the Nakba in shaping Gaza's present and future.
I highly recommend this anthology to anyone interested in learning more about Gaza - its history, its present, and its people dreaming of survival. Thank you to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for an advanced listener's copy - I'm grateful that this new audiobook recording will make this collection more accessible to readers.
While structured loosely around future visions of Gaza, the essays, poems and reflections range from highly academic to deeply personal, covering the lived environment and home construction, agrarian practices and the future of farming in historic Palestine, the use of AI in Israel's surveillance and oppression of Palestinians in Gaza, and so much more. The scale of creativity and resilience required for those living under military occupation and blockade is staggering - how do you build a home when you can't use concrete, how do you run a business when you don't have consistent access to electricity, how do you stock a library when you can't order books, how do you survive when arbitrary borders separate you from family, healthcare, employment, education and freedom? For those who've never experienced this level of surveillance and restricted movement - not to mention the constant threat of aerial attack, search and siezure, or imprisonment - the description of Gaza as the world's largest open-air prison takes shape into something visceral. By the time you get to the second-to-last essay, Let Me Dream, by Israa Mohammed Jamal, you begin to better understand the reality of multi-generational trauma and how it shapes those attempting to build lives in Gaza.
Another through-line in this anthology is Gaza's current population density and large refugee population. I hadn't realized that around 70% of those living in Gaza are refugees, and I appreciated how intentionally each contributor engages with the legacy and continuation of the Nakba in shaping Gaza's present and future.
I highly recommend this anthology to anyone interested in learning more about Gaza - its history, its present, and its people dreaming of survival. Thank you to Netgalley and Dreamscape Media for an advanced listener's copy - I'm grateful that this new audiobook recording will make this collection more accessible to readers.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Murder, Colonisation, and War
Moderate: Child death, Death, Suicidal thoughts, Medical content, and Medical trauma
Minor: Homophobia and Torture
laurareads87's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
sad
medium-paced
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire is a collection of writings by Palestinian authors. It is extraordinarily diverse in terms of genre, including scholarly essays, poetry, first-person autobiographical narratives, and more. Informative, deeply impactful, and urgent. Reading this book right now - in early 2024, so soon after the murder of contributing author Refaat Alareer - is devastating.
As the introduction notes, this book "is an attempt to put into words certain aspects of the Palestinian experience in and around Gaza that have been ignored, underrepresented, and dismissed" as well as an "attempt to break the intellectual blockade and the political exclusion of Palestinian voices." Thank you Haymarket Books for making this collection freely available.
Content warnings: colonialism, violence, racism, war, grief, police brutality, murder, forcible confinement, gun violence
As the introduction notes, this book "is an attempt to put into words certain aspects of the Palestinian experience in and around Gaza that have been ignored, underrepresented, and dismissed" as well as an "attempt to break the intellectual blockade and the political exclusion of Palestinian voices." Thank you Haymarket Books for making this collection freely available.
Content warnings: colonialism, violence, racism, war, grief, police brutality, murder, forcible confinement, gun violence
Content Warnings
Graphic: Confinement, Gun violence, Racism, Violence, Police brutality, Grief, Murder, Colonisation, and War
ska1224's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
fast-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gun violence, Racism, Violence, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Islamophobia, Grief, Murder, Colonisation, War, and Classism
heliacentr's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Violence, Murder, and Colonisation
letsgolesbians's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
spent most of the last day of 2023 reading this wonderful book. i loved the format and layout of this book, a collection of prose, poetry, personal essays, and informational essays with a photo between each piece; my brain often feels like a pinball machine, fast and noisy and chaotic, and jumping from a poem to a photo to an essay to a photo to learning about architecture to a photo really worked for me.
any adjectives i try to use will fail to capture how i felt about this book—interesting, enraging, sad, empowering. all the words i think when i watch videos by bissan and motaz and hind every day. there are three pieces in particular i want to mention:
❤️ lost identity: the tale of peasantry and nature by asmaa abu mezied, about agrarian practices and place attachment. recommend for anyone who enjoyed braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer
🖤 exporting oranges and short stories: cultural struggle in the gaza strip, by mosab sbu toha, looking at books and literature, libraries, art, cinema, and other cultural works of palestine. recommend for readers, book fans, and people angry about book banning in the us
🤍 in the haze of fifty-one days by dorgham abusalim, a personal essay by a gay gazan man during the massacre summer of 2014
💚 and of course, i cannot write about this book without mentioning refaat alareer’s gaza asks: when shall this pass, may he rest in power
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Homophobia, Racism, and Colonisation