This anthology takes its name from Refaat Alareer’s poem If I Must Die, written as an instruction to live, to remember, and to tell the story. Gathered in the shadow of ongoing devastation in Gaza and shaped by the loss of Alareer himself, these poems, artworks, and stories refuse silence, neutrality, and erasure.

Featuring work by Palestinian and international poets and artists, the collection bears witness to life under occupation while resisting the reduction of Palestinian existence to spectacle or statistic. It attends to grief and dispossession alongside love, joy, memory, and cultural continuity. Rather than offering a single argument, the book creates a shared space of testimony and attention, one grounded in lived experience rather than official narrative.

At once literary and political, this volume insists that memory is an act of resistance and that telling the story, again and again, remains necessary.

Contributors include Duha Hassan Al Shaqaqi, Jaweerya Mohammad, Shahd Alnaami, Sondos A. Al-Saqqa, Johnny Byutorie, Dr. Oumeima Mouelhi, Hallie Kunen, Shan Shan Song, J.E. Misz, Abigail George, Summer Qabazard, Mohammad Al-Moghrbi, Faiza Anum, and visual artists Taleen Muhanna, Nada Anwar Rajab, Alixa Garcia, and Safaa El-Sharief.