You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times

In this deeply felt memoir, short story writer Teebi (Her First Palestinian and Other Stories) reckons with what it means to be an exiled Palestinian writer at a moment when Palestinians are being killed by the thousands in Gaza. The methods of execution, Teebi writes, are “so varied in their cruelty as to feel like an exercise in macabre creativity” and “a corpse exhibition.” The ensuing “precariousness of Palestinian bodies,” rather than stoke outrage, seems to devalue Palestinian lives and allow the world to simply look away, Teebi notes. In addition to documenting the current crisis through September 2024, with a focus on narratives spun around Palestinian death and identity (such as when an Israeli military spokesperson claimed the Arabic days of the week written on a calendar hanging in Al-Shifa Hospital were the names of slain terrorists), Teebi also documents the multiple waves of displacement faced by Palestinian families like his own, which was forced to leave Palestine in 1948 and Kuwait after the Gulf War. The writerly quandary of making a spectacle of death looms large throughout—at times the author balks at reducing more of the dead to “content” in an effort to move a world that has already decided not to care. Yet Teebi persists, with grace and force, in trying to find some small hope in the act of storytelling. (Sept.)