Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq and Mahmoud Alshaer —

Muhammad al-Zaqzouq and Mahmoud Alshaer are writers and editors; they are also friends and artistic collaborators. Especially active in Gaza’s cultural field before the genocide, they have continued to create new work and publish extensively over the past two years, under increasingly catastrophic circumstances. They write to us of their work, friendship, and continued creative collaboration in the midst of the genocide.

This exchange took place in Spring 2025. It was translated from Arabic by Alaa Alqaisi and Shaimaa Abulebda.

Can you tell us about the beginnings of your friendship and creative collaboration? How and when did the two of you meet?

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq: I can’t say exactly when, maybe it was around 2012 or 2013. I had just graduated from university and was feeling really unsettled, especially after spending years stuck in a kind of mental haze in Gaza’s closed-off and traditional atmosphere. I was looking for a different kind of voice, one that felt more like mine, or that at least matched the way I thought. Someone who shared my restlessness, my questions, my uncertainty. And someone who, like me, wanted to write, to simply say something that mattered.

Somewhere along that search, I found Mahmoud. Or maybe it’s that we both just stumbled into the same space, Itihad Gallery. It was a kind of hub where writers, poets, thinkers, and activists from all over Gaza used to gather. I still remember our first meeting clearly. We were in one of those old shared seven-seater Mercedes taxis that used to transport people in and out of Gaza City. He told me he was intrigued by the title of a terrible poem I’d written back in the day; it was called “I Gave Birth to Your Name on the Back of a Horse.” He said, “You must’ve read a lot of books to come up with a title like that.” I said I had, but honestly, at that point, I’d read very little.

I felt like I had to be like the other writers hanging out there, always talking about books I mostly hadn’t heard of. But from that first ride, I felt something toward Mahmoud. There was an energy in him, a kind of urgency that felt a lot like mine. I’ll admit, though, his energy was clearer and bolder than mine. I was more cautious, more anxious. I held back more.

Mahmoud Alshaer: I also can’t really remember exactly when our friendship started. But I do remember the place well. Itihad Gallery was one of those spaces that really shaped my journey. It brought me into contact with writers, poets, and artists from across Gaza, and sometimes even from around the world. That’s where I first met Muhammad, along with a whole circle of young writers. And that’s also where the idea for Majalla 28 [Magazine 28] was born. We wanted to create a literary platform that connected writers and artists with the wider community around them. The magazine officially launched in September 2013 at Shababeek Studio in west Gaza City. I remember my first real conversation with Muhammad—it was in a taxi. Just half an hour talking with him was enough to find the common ground we still walk together today. Muhammad sparked something in me with his questions, his doubts, his sharp thinking, and his distinct taste in literature. After that, he started introducing me to other creative circles, like a cultural salon in Khan Younis at the People’s Party headquarters, or poetry nights run by the Popular Committee for Refugees, or events by the Culture and Free Thought Association. We also joined regular meetups with the Utopia Knowledge Collective.

You were both very active in the cultural and literary field in Gaza before the war. Could you tell us more about your work and some of the projects you were involved in before October 2023?

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq: Yes, we were both involved in the cultural and literary scene in Gaza before the war, also under really difficult conditions. I’d say I followed Mahmoud’s work closely from the beginning, especially when he and a group of young writers in Gaza founded Majalla 28. At the time, we were living in a state of isolation, not just from the outside world but also as what you might call the “other” within the literary scene itself—the more traditional cultural institutions, the older generation of writers.

At the time, the political division in Palestine was at its height, and Gaza was going through repeated attacks. We felt completely cut off, living under siege, pushed to the margins. That’s what made the need for a different kind of voice feel urgent, and that’s where Majalla 28 came from. It’s true I wasn’t one of the original founders, but I was there from the start—issue zero, you could say—and I was always in close touch with Mahmoud. I used to visit him regularly at his home in the Musabbih neighborhood in Rafah. That neighborhood doesn’t exist anymore; it’s been completely destroyed by the war.

During those visits, we’d talk a lot about the magazine, what to include, who was contributing, and what kinds of events we could organize. Mahmoud kept encouraging me to take on a more central role. But for many reasons—it’s hard to go into all of them here—I didn’t have the time or capacity to fully commit. Still, I always stayed close, supporting and contributing where I could.

Later on, Mahmoud really pushed me to help edit issue eighteen, which was themed around resilience. We worked on it together in a way that felt inspiring and personal, as if each of us was looking for something in the other, and we found it while shaping that issue. It felt like a new beginning. Then in 2022, we worked on another issue together, titled “Hope, the Child of Despair,” in partnership with PEN/Opp.

After that, we started co-running Gallery 28, a cultural salon in Rafah, where we hosted many events. And suddenly I wasn’t just contributing here and there—I was a partner. And both of us felt a sense of ease and happiness in that partnership. The truth is, Mahmoud is someone deeply inspiring. I always feel like he knows how to bring out the best in me.

Mahmoud Alshaer: My cultural journey really began the day I realized I was making space for books on the same shelves where a small cosmetics shop in Rafah used to display its products. From that moment on, I decided to carry forward writing and my interest in culture and the arts, as a lifelong project. So, I started looking for gatherings, people, groups, or institutions that supported cultural life in Gaza. But by then, the political divisions among Palestinians themselves as well as Israel’s repeated assaults on the Gaza Strip had already led to the disappearance of cultural spaces, platforms, and collectives. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. What I did find, though, were people like me, also searching for such spaces where they could express themselves as artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians. That’s when we started thinking together about creating a literary and cultural magazine that would introduce young writers to the local community and offer a platform for a broad range of Palestinian creatives.

From the inception of Majalla 28, Muhammad played an important role, offering ideas, directions, and suggestions for both the magazine’s content and the events we held across Gaza City. He also took part in many of the magazine’s activities and workshops. I should say this: Muhammad doesn’t easily commit to new obligations in his life. It took me almost two years of extending invitations for him to join the editorial work on the magazine, especially during a period when our funding had dried up and we were in urgent need of volunteers to keep things going. Eventually, I managed to convince him to co-edit issue eighteen, themed "Sumoud" (Resilience). It was a rich experience, and I learned a lot from it. That issue was a turning point, it opened the door to working together on more projects. That’s how our shared creative work started to grow. Soon after that, we succeeded in launching Majalla 28’s physical space, the gallery, in Rafah, in southern Gaza. Muhammad played a key role in helping sustain the space and building partnerships with the community. He also helped design a workshop on open language as part of Majalla 28’s joint program with the New Alphabet School in Berlin (HKW). That workshop was a shared inquiry into the edges of language under siege. Later, I invited him to contribute to the joint issue we worked on with Kholoud Saghir for the Swedish magazine PEN/Opp.

At this point, I can’t imagine my creative path without Muhammad al-Zaqzooq somewhere in the picture. He’s always been active and engaged in shaping and following through on cultural projects, ones that continue to push us toward new ways of thinking and working.

You are both still incredibly active, involved in different literary projects as writers and editors, even in these catastrophic circumstances. Can you tell us about some of the projects you have been involved in since October 2023?

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq: When the war broke out in October 2023, I felt like I’d lost my voice. I fell into a state of silence—tense, frozen, as if something inside me had completely shut down. It was an overwhelming sense of heartbreak, a kind of suffocating disappointment, especially because the war came at a moment when I felt I was at my most active and productive, deeply engaged, and believing in the value of what I was doing.

As I mentioned earlier, I had been working with Mahmoud on inspiring cultural projects. We had just opened our cultural space in Rafah. And 2022 had been an extraordinary year for me, personally. I got to travel for the first time in thirty years of living in Gaza. I traveled twice, once to Berlin, as part of a joint cultural project between Gallery 28 and Between the Cultures of the World. I also received a grant to produce a digital comics magazine. Everything seemed to be falling into place in a way that felt almost ideal.

Then the war began and everything collapsed, suddenly and completely. It felt like someone had pulled the plug on a party at the height of the music and joy. I fell into a deep internal crisis. I remember the first call I had with Mahmoud, just a few days after the war started. I had been displaced from my apartment in Hemed City, the apartment I had waited years for, and was staying at my uncle’s house. I told him I felt locked up inside myself, sad, unable to do anything. He said, “Write. Write about your home, about the fact that you can’t live in it, about the disappointment, the shifting fates.”

At first, I couldn’t write. But after I was displaced to Rafah, and got physically closer to Mahmoud, I visited him for the first time during the war. And little by little, we started to find the will to act again, to try to say something.

Out of that visit came “Gaza, Gaza, Gaza,” a special issue of ArabLit Quarterly that we coedited. It was published in Spring 2024 and brought together writing from inside Gaza and the diaspora.¹

Then we worked together again to edit Letters from Gaza, published by Penguin SEA.² That experience was deeply meaningful and moving, as if we were reinventing meaning itself in the middle of destruction. How could these testimonies, these essays, stories, and reflections become a narrative strong enough to face annihilation with a will to live, to create, to make art?

The book was well received. It became a bestseller on Amazon in both the US and India, and it’s been downloaded hundreds of times each week from different parts of the world. Lately, I’ve started sending Mahmoud readers’ messages and impressions about the book as they come in. He tells me he reads them the moment they arrive. It’s been a rare feeling, like something bright manages to shine through all this heavy darkness, giving us a bit of light.

Mahmoud Alshaer: In every war we’ve lived through, cultural activity would come to a stop because of the sheer weight of the humanitarian crisis that war brings. But usually, once the various wars or military escalations of 2013–2023 had ended, I would throw myself into organizing events and projects that could offer some kind of hope or healing, both for myself and for others. But this war, which has now gone on for more than 625 days, has brought something new out of me: the ability to keep creating cultural work in its midst.

It wasn’t easy for me, personally, to feel safe meeting up with others. But displacement, the collapse of geography, and the sheer length of this war eventually created a need for connection, for meeting, for trying to plan a future, even if that future felt completely uncertain. I saw Muhammad for the first time during this war in January 2024, at my family’s house in northern Rafah. He was just like me: scared, disoriented, unable to make any decisions. But I told him there was a space in the house with both electricity and a stable internet connection and so we agreed to meet again. Those means really encouraged him, especially because at that point, the electricity had been completely out for three months, and the infrastructure we once knew had been wiped out in the first few weeks of the war.

Muhammad hesitated more than once, but each time we continued trying to build something together. And eventually, Gaza, Gaza, Gaza came to life with ArabLit. It was bold, loud, and powerful. As spontaneous as it was on our end, the voices we brought together in that issue were direct, strong, and deeply moving. A lot of credit goes to Marcia for her patience and understanding of what we were going through. That issue was published just as I was being forcibly displaced from Rafah to al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, in May 2024.

I saw Muhammad again in August. By then, Marcia had reached out to Penguin SEA and helped us develop the idea for Letters from Gaza. We next worked on collecting texts for six months, and that process came with huge challenges. We had to relocate more than once. And with every new displacement, the infrastructure collapsed and had to be rebuilt from scratch. In between every move, a new military phase would begin, costing more lives, including those of writers and cultural figures we had been in touch with to contribute to the book.

I often think about how necessary it is to archive the present, what we’re living through in Palestine: the wars, the challenges, the moments of hope, the fear, the confusion, the loss, the drowning. We’ve never really had the chance to build a living archive. And that, I think, is what I’m trying to do in the work I share with Muhammad. Even though we have no idea what tomorrow will bring—life or death—even though everything is uncertain, even though there’s doubt all around us, we still share a desire to continue producing creative work, both personally and together.

How have your work and creative collaborations together been different since the beginning of the genocide? Have you had any chance to meet in person, or has your communication been entirely online?

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq: In the early weeks of the war, in November 2023, I was displaced from Khan Younis to Rafah, which at the time was relatively less tense. Meanwhile, military operations were devouring Khan Younis from end to end. Once I reached Rafah, it became possible for me to see Mahmoud. We met several times at his home, which was still standing then and had a stable internet connection. It was a space where we could sit together, talk, reflect, and stay in touch with the world beyond the destruction, a small space where we tried to think, to write, and to imagine.

We worked there on developing several projects. Mahmoud’s home became a kind of makeshift cultural center, right in the middle of isolation, loss, and devastation.

But in May 2024, Israel launched a ground invasion into Rafah, and Mahmoud was displaced too. We both became displaced—I again in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, and he as well. After a period of no contact, we met again, this time by the beach. The sea became our meeting point, a temporary place outside the wreckage, though it was crowded with the displaced, their tents, and the heavy stories they carried.

We would sit on the sand, the sea before us, and endless rows of tents stretching around us. We talked about the genocide, about pain, writing, the uncertain future, and the desire to escape this hell. And despite everything, we were working, writing, thinking, creating in the midst of annihilation, in a space that held nothing but the expanse of blue before us.

Mahmoud Alshaer: Since the start of the war, I’ve barely met anyone. I don’t go far from home and its surroundings, and I’ve kept turning down any plans to get out of the house. But I stayed in touch with Muhammad, especially after Khan Younis was evacuated in December 2023. We met several times at the family house, and I always encouraged him to visit me and not to face everything in silence, as if I were inviting myself to a meeting of healing through being with him. We talked about our personal and cultural challenges, our dreams, our wishes, our fears, and our terrors. The meetings always led to collaborative, creative work.

Congratulations on the publication of Letters from Gaza, a collection of poetry, letters, and monologues that you have coedited. Could you tell us more about the process of putting together this collection?

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq: Editing Letters from Gaza was a very special experience, and perhaps even an exceptional one in every sense of the word. Initially, we had no idea that Penguin would be the publisher. Mahmoud and I were only thinking about how to create a context to collect texts that offer living testimony to the ongoing genocide: poetry, narratives, diaries, reflections, and even internal monologues.

We discussed at length the temporal structure of the collection: to begin with the texts that reflect the shock of the early days, and then move to emotionally thematic texts on grief, screaming, breakdown, weeping, acceptance, then transcendence, and maybe, finally, despair or what comes after. But we realized that the texts themselves surpass this chronological division, that they encompassed all of these emotional states at once, that the genocide has created a new emotional and linguistic dictionary—one that couldn’t be simplified or categorized. We brought together texts from multiple writers whose visions and writings resemble the Gaza that most don’t know: the Gaza that loves life; the Gaza that loves, writes, and dreams; the Gaza whose people resemble all cities, but that is trapped in an unending crime. The texts read like testimonies of flesh and blood—no theorizing, no romanticizing—just profound moments of honesty and an immense power to pierce readers’ consciences and stir their memory and responsibility.

Perhaps that was one of the reasons this book resonated so widely around the world—because it doesn’t claim to be anything beyond its own honesty. It’s genuinely real. It’s stripped of any ornamentation. It’s a collective voice struggling to survive, trying to say: We are here and we want to live.

Mahmoud Alshaer: Like everything that grows and blossoms, Letters from Gaza was the completion of one such life cycle, a successful effort in building something and working through it until the end. After the publication of the Gaza! Gaza! Gaza! issue, I became more interested in diaries, from within a place facing a genocidal war. What does hope look like? How is it built? What is the meaning of anything now? What is certainty? We passed along these questions and many more like them to other writers to see what kind of life could be found amid all this loss and destruction. The chronological structure was just a starting idea. For six months, we received essays, texts, testimonies, and stories from contributors. Reading them felt like standing in front of a mirror—so many texts said what I couldn’t put into words myself.

Once the contributions were complete, the timeline collapsed, and the materials rearranged themselves into a lineage that belongs solely to this genocide—a timeline that gradually offers the reader a chance to draw closer to the challenges of choosing survival, again and again.

Congratulations, also, on your forthcoming book, Mahmoud, which is titled A Year on the Abyss of Genocide and is coming out in September.³ Can you tell us more about this book?

Mahmoud Alshaer: The texts that comprise this book are my personal experience—my challenges, my questions, my account of what’s been happening to me over the past twenty-one months. In the first four months, I doubted the very point of writing itself. It wasn’t easy to process the collapse of meaning, values, humanity, and law in the face of what has been happening to Palestinians in Gaza. The events were worse than my worst nightmares. On October 8, it was as if someone had changed the course of life itself. Our lives vanished and became impossible in the face of fire targeting the Gaza Strip from land, sea, and sky.

In the fifth month, a fundraising campaign was launched to support me and my family amid the total collapse of every form of life we had managed to create. Through that campaign’s platform, I began to document my days, writing testimonies and texts. Friends at ARP Books then stepped in and compiled these writings into a book, edited by Leanne Simpson, with a foreword by Nasrin Himada and an afterword by Fadi Ennab.

The book I Am Still Alive: Dispatches from Gaza was also published and presented in Berlin during this year’s edition of the MISS READ book fair.⁴

Muhammad, congratulations on being signed on by RCW Literary Agency! We understand you have also been working diligently on a book about the genocide since October 2023, which is now being edited by Adania Shibli and translated by Katharine Halls. Is there a publisher for the book yet? And is it finished or still in progress? Tell us more.

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq: Since the outbreak of the war on Gaza in October 2023, I’ve found myself in a state of paralysis and disorientation, overwhelmed by the scale of the humanitarian catastrophe and the daily anxieties of that period. That sense of helplessness grew with each image of destruction, each tragedy echoing through the place. This creative paralysis lasted 106 days. Writing felt impossible amid the roar and pain of war, as if words had lost their ability to capture or contain the enormity of the catastrophe.

But that darkness began to clear away thanks to the support and encouragement of Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. She urged me to see writing as a way to do something in the face of ruin, not only as an act of resistance but as a path to survival and an attempt to make sense of what’s happening around me. Her words restored my faith that writing is both possible and necessary in such moments.

Since then, I’ve been writing a literary text with a unique form that blends the novel as a fictional narrative and the memoir as a living space of engagement with the self, the other, and the surroundings. I don’t view the memoir here as a traditional documentation of events in a chronological order, but rather as a tool for a deeper understanding, a tool that reconfigures my personal experience within a broader collective context. In this text, I am trying to explore how the war has become an existential experience that redefines my relationship with life and death, with identity and belonging, and even with writing itself, which has now become an expression of survival and a means of questioning reality anew.

The text attempts to dive into the depth of the self, but it doesn’t stay there long; rather, it comes back to engage with the outside world with all of its tragedies and complexities. I write about the war, not just as a political or a military event but also as a comprehensive human condition that touches every detail of life: from personal relationships to the meaning of the homeland, to the shifts in values when faced with death. I try to use a language that balances poetry and precision in order to embody the psychological, social, and cognitive changes we go through in times of war.

For me, writing has become a space for reflecting on the big questions: How can literature help us make sense of the world amid its chaos? How does a person redefine their sense of self and identity when faced directly with death? And how can literature convey this complex experience to others, bridging individual experience and collective consciousness?

I don’t think of writing as a direct retrieval of pain or as a simple documentation of suffering. Rather, I aspire to create a literary space that celebrates humanity, even in its darkest moments. Memoir, to me, is a form of creative resistance—resistance to psychological collapse and to the forgetting of the small details that make us human.

I also try to show how the war reshapes the details of everyday life, and how ordinary things can turn into sources of terror or hope. I write about the places that were destroyed but that remain alive in memory, about the relationships that shifted under the weight of fear, and about the attempts to hold onto a flicker of hope amid the shadows of despair. It’s a multilayered text that moves between the individual and the collective, between the past and the present, in an effort to understand this historical moment that still casts its shadow over us.

It was not an easy writing experience. It required confronting both the self and the world at the same time. But it was also an opportunity for renewal, for rethinking the role of literature in understanding the human being and documenting their suffering—not through stories alone but by exposing the deep emotions that pain leaves etched in our souls.

Today, I’m still working on this literary project, driven by a desire to communicate my voice and that of my community to the world. I believe that literature can be a space for healing, not only for the writer but also for the reader, and that it has the power to transform pain into reflection, war into an opportunity to rethink the meaning of humanity.

Like you mentioned, the book is being translated by my friend, translator Katharine Halls, whom I came to know during this war. If there’s one good thing I’ve gotten out of this catastrophe, it’s getting to know Katharine. She’s a remarkable human being, and she has played a major role in this project. Her translations of parts of the manuscript were the reason I was offered representation by RCW Literary Agency. I believe RCW has already found a publisher for the book, and we are now in the process of preparing it for publication.

Where are you now? Can you describe where you are sitting now as you answer this, what is around you, who is there with you? How long have you been there and how did you arrive there?

Mahmoud Alshaer: Currently, I’m in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis, and I’ve been here since March 31, 2025. This is my ninth forced displacement since May 8, 2024. We were forced to return to al-Mawasi after the resumption of firing again after sixty days of the ceasefire agreement that began on January 19 of this year. During the ceasefire, I returned to our family house in the north of Rafah city, after being displaced for eight and a half months. I lived again in the house for seventy days before I had to evacuate at the end of March. Satellite imagery on April 20, 2025, showed that the area was completely destroyed. Our house, the houses of my uncles and cousins, those of my neighbors, every house in our neighborhood was erased.

I live with my wife, Hadil, thirty-two, and our daughter Nai, three. We’re a family of four, but Nai’s twin, Majd, was evacuated to Turkey for medical treatment, accompanied by my mother, in November 2023. So now, the three of us are living through the phases of this genocide together. I’m in a room within an apartment that has three rooms, a living room, kitchen, and bathroom. The room rent is $1,150 per month. Around me are many bags, three mattresses, and in front of me is my laptop, sitting on the dining table I brought from home. Surrounding this rented apartment are tents in every direction. At this moment, the entire population of Rafah and the residents of Khan Younis are seeking refuge in al-Mawasi, Khan Younis—over half a million people pushed into a place that lacks any infrastructure capable of offering people a dignified life.

Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq: I'm currently in al-Zawaida town. This is our eleventh displacement since the beginning of the war. It’s the tenth time I’ve had to leave my apartment, fleeing from death with my three children and my wife, Ula. We’ve fled to places we never imagined we would one day seek refuge in: We’ve slept in overcrowded shelters, in an apartment near the sea, in a tent, in a house overlooking the rubble of my family home, in my uncle’s guest room, in rooms we never thought we’d ever have to spend the night in.

Today, when we arrived in al-Zawaida, Ula said it was the first time in her life she had ever set foot in this area. I jokingly replied, “See? War has its benefits. It introduces you to new places!” Then we laughed together, a dark, bitter laugh that carried nothing but the sour taste of these days.

We’re not doing much other than raising hope, just as we’ve been doing since the beginning of the war. I love this expression: “raising hope,” the one Mahmoud Darwish used. Because hope, to me, is like a living being that we care for like a fragile child. It begins small, then it grows and matures. And sometimes it dies. But even from its remains, we create new hope—in an endless cycle of rebirth and rupture.

Right now, we’re exhausted. Truly, in the deepest state of exhaustion and despair. All we want is to survive, plain and simple. My youngest is asleep over there, in the corner of the room. The large living room is empty except for bodies worn down by displacement and anxiety. We’ve slept in so many places, we’ve lost all sense of distance and time. We no longer know how many days have passed, or how many times we’ve been scattered. All we know is that we’re still trying and still raising this hope.