Veto

A Creative Translation of Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die”
by Vyxz Vasquez & Nilufar Karimi

Refaat Alareer was a professor of world literature and creative writing at the Islamic University of Gaza. He was the editor of Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine (JWB, 2014), co-editor of Gaza Unsilenced (2015), and co-founder of We Are Not Numbers, a youth-led Palestinian nonprofit project in the Gaza Strip. A native of Gaza City, he received his MA in Comparative Literature from the University College of London (UK) and his PhD in English Literature at the Universiti Putra Malaysia. On December 6th, 2023, Alareer and several family members were murdered by a targeted Israeli airstrike in Gaza City. Before he was killed, Alareer posted his poem “If I must die”—originally written in English—on X along with the words: “If I must die, let it be a tale.” Since then, the poem has been translated into over 57 different languages.

Vyxz Vasquez is from the Philippines.

Nilufar Karimi is a poet, educator, and translator.