When Writing Is Survival: Inside Husam Maarouf's Gaza Publications

By Andy — 2026-08-15 — Literary News

Shells falling. Roof might be gone by morning. This is where the idea began.

Husam Maarouf was in Rafah when he founded Gaza Publications. Not in some office planning session. Not after the violence had stopped. During it. While cultural centers and libraries were being destroyed. The question that wouldn't leave him alone was simple and terrible: what remains if nothing is written down?

There's something precise about this distinction he makes. Death ends a person. Erasure erases that they ever existed—erases feeling, memory, proof of life itself. One is absence. The other is obliteration of the fact that anyone was there to begin with.

Maarouf had published before—poetry collections, a novel. But this was different. The idea stemmed from fear of obliteration and erasures that threaten the Palestinian story. He wasn't setting up a traditional publishing house. He was trying to anchor people in place at the moment their lives were being taken away.

What's remarkable is how unglamorous the logistics are. No printing press in Gaza. Impossible working conditions. So the team he assembled—an editor, proofreader, designer, marketing manager—they split the work: start inside, print outside. People volunteered because they felt something needed to be saved. Not because it was romantic. Because it was necessary.

The logo is an hourglass with a stopper in the middle. The sand doesn't fall.

That's the metaphor. In Gaza during those months, time didn't move like it does elsewhere. Work stopped. Study stopped. Plans for tomorrow stopped. The idea didn't come in a moment of calm or through careful planning—it emerged from the depths of danger. You catch the rhythm there: not some calm insight. Born from inside a crisis.

This matters because it's not unique to Maarouf. Since 2024, a growing number of testimonies, reflections, and narratives by Palestinian poets and writers on the ground in Gaza have appeared in English translation in magazines and anthologies. There's Saqi Books' Daybreak in Gaza, collaborative projects, translation initiatives. The literary community is treating documentation as an act of resistance—not flowery language, literal resistance against disappearance.

What's stranger is that this echoes older patterns. After the 2008–2009 war, poet Refaat Alareer initiated a project encouraging students to document their experiences through creative writing, resulting in the collection Gaza Writes Back. Alareer viewed writing as a form of testimony that outlives experience and a duty of survivors. Then he was assassinated in December 2023.

The work continues through other hands now. A man named Omar Hamad lost his personal library and home to Israeli bombings, then retrieved books from the rubble with a friend and opened the Phoenix Library in Gaza City. Same impulse. Different scale. Same refusal to let things disappear.

You're sitting in a bookshop in Thailand, reading about a poet in Gaza trying to print books when there's no electricity. The distance feels obscene. But here's the thing: Gaza Publications isn't metaphorical. Maarouf speaks from Gaza, and the books are real. You can buy them. You can support the project. The practicality is brutal—€100 donations, crowdfunding, international networks making it possible to print outside the Strip.

What strikes you, reading this, is that it's not inspirational. It's not hopeful in any easy way. It's people making a choice under fire: document this or watch it vanish. That's all. No romance. No neat ending. Just the oldest work there is—writing so that something survives, even if it's only the fact that you were here and felt something real.