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

Teebi, Saeed

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1668084686 ISBN 13: 9781668084687

Verlag: Scribner Canada, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

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A vital, fearless memoir explores what it means to be a Palestinian in this moment, the effects of the genocide on Palestinian art and imagination, and that to even claim a belonging to the land from a country thousands of miles away is an act of subversion—a book that Omar El Akkad says “so perfectly contextualizes and humanizes so much of what has led us to this awful moment, and one that will be remembered long after.”

Imagination is a more powerful force than hope.

Acclaimed author Saeed Teebi was at work on his first novel when the attacks on Gaza began in late 2023. The violence and cruelty of the attacks, accompanied by the assent and silence of international governments, stunned many across the globe, like Teebi, into a new state of permanent horror.

What does it mean to be of the Palestinian diaspora in such a moment? What does it mean to be of a people who have sustained such a large-scale assault not only on their homeland, but their entire identity? What is the role of art, of language—of imagination—in asserting one’s identity, when that very assertion is read as an act of subversion?

In this incisive work, Teebi explores, with searing, razor-sharp prose, the effects of genocide on the bodies, minds, and imaginations—of Palestinians especially, and humanity in general.

This is at once a memoir of one family’s displacement, a scathing indictment of global complicity in the face of brutality, and a profound rumination on art and imagination as a means of defiance. It is an astonishing work of resistance by a major intellect, and it is both urgent and timeless.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Saeed Teebi is an award-winning writer and lawyer. His debut short story collection, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for several awards, including the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Prize. His nonfiction has appeared in The Globe and Mail and The New Quarterly. Born in Kuwait, he resettled in the United States, then Canada. He now lives in Toronto.

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Chapter 1: Fear and Bodies – 1 – Fear and Bodies
A chasm of time ago, in the spring of 2022, I moved to the suburbs. My family was fledgling. After my first marriage ended some years earlier, I began a second one in 2019. Then came a baby girl the following year, at a crest in the pandemic. We had outgrown our rental in the Junction area of Toronto. The sedate rhythms of Oakville suited my wife, a committed suburbanite.

When we took possession, we removed our masks and breathed the quietude. Our new house had an extension that flooded it with light. There was a ravine behind the fence of our backyard. We had a kitchen island that on its own was larger than the whole kitchen of our previous place.

The house also had a staircase, exposed all the way to the top. Dark-varnished treads and handrails, with wrought iron balusters. The staircase rose in a seashell whorl up to a skylight, which cast a gentle illumination down upon it. When you entered the house, you could see all the way up to the second floor. It was easy to think: How many years before my daughter descends this staircase in a wedding dress?

Our early days brought predictable excitements and apprehensions. The revelation that we had gone so long without hearing a fire engine howl. The glee swirled with anxiety about filling all this new space. Decoding which of the neighbours were friendly, and which needed to be treated with delicacy. But a feeling I did not anticipate was that I would be terrified of my own second floor.

The staircase. I kept thinking about that staircase, how high and how exposed it was. How a thing could fall from up there, and how much that thing could suffer in the brief journey. A small, fragile thing could plummet, carom against a hard railing, and hit a tread or two before landing, probably in a form unlike the one it started with.

I kept thinking of my daughter—eighteen months old at the time—wriggling and bucking in my arms as we passed by the staircase from our bedroom to hers, or vice versa. How unsteady my footsteps can feel as I’m carrying her, how clumsy and unsafe are my arms.

At first I dismissed these as just intrusive thoughts. I am mostly immune to irrational agitations of this nature. This is owing less to innate poise than to a kind of lifelong recklessness, and a tendency to forget the hurts I sustain, big or small. I simply do not dwell on things that could injure me or others. When I do, I seem to have a higher tolerance for danger than most.

But the staircase was a different matter. I was obsessed with the thought of my daughter falling from that height. With her fragility, it could be fatal. I obsessed most over how I might be the cause of such a fall, that somehow I would trip while holding her, or that my hands would spontaneously spasm.

The visions—for that’s what they became—took on a certain thickness in their character, an omnipresence. No longer were they confined to short, imagistic blurts when I passed by the staircase; they now came to me when I was on my living room sofa, reading or watching TV. They came to me when I was driving to work or taking a walk trying to conjure words for my writing. They were vivid and sustained enough to be viscerally hurtful. Sometimes they were so overpowering I’d let out a small, involuntary scream.

The problem got so severe that I talked to my wife about it, which I did not do lightly. She was already possessed of an extensive catalogue of phobias that I hesitated to add to. But all she did was nod that yes, we do have to be careful around the stairs. There was no terror in her eyes at all.

By now the visions had become laced with impossible elements. My baby daughter would, on the way down, be torn and mutilated in ways that were beyond the capacity of a simple fall. Sometimes there would be flames enveloping her. Sometimes this small person that I adored—sometimes she would be thrown.

The visions were never about hurting myself on the stairs. Only my daughter, over and over.

My new house felt like it had sustained irreparable pollution. The visions were a persistent smear on my surroundings, the new furniture and the new paint. When we were upstairs, I no longer trusted myself to carry my daughter, so I made her walk, even early in the mornings when she still wanted bodily warmth and her little feet were wobbly. As she walked I reminded her in a sharp tone to stay as far away as possible when she passed the railing. If she insisted I carry her, I locked my arms all around her like a football, flexing to an ache, and I moved sideways, crablike, with my back to the staircase. An absurd sight, but I had to minimize the risk.

I’ve never considered the act of writing to be therapeutic, but I did think of writing a short story about the visions. It would be the grisliest of horror stories, I told my wife, a total departure for me. Perhaps then the visions would let me go. But there is a moment in a narrative when you expect a solution to emerge, or otherwise for the story to reach a horrible climax. I had none of the former and no stomach for the latter.

Eventually I had to come to terms with what my visions reminded me of: my father and balconies. My father could not bear seeing me or any of my siblings go near one. If we did, he would rush to scold and yank us out of the danger zone, our thin arms smarting from the roughness.

But it did not make sense to me that I’d inherited this fear from my father. From my previous marriage I’d had a son, who was now in his teenage years. I’d never felt these irrational fears for him when he was a child. Why, now, was I possessed by this new impulse to overprotect? I was in my forties. How could an inherited fear spring up so late in life?

I put this question to the contractor I brought in to give me an estimate for walling up the staircase. For a few months before that moment, the visions had ebbed. My daughter was older. She could handle herself, rarely even allowing me to carry her anymore. Sometimes I could even pass by the staircase without a horrible notion invading my psyche. But in late 2023, the visions came back again, torrid with heat. My daughter’s body felt so endangered to me.

I didn’t know how long I’d have to live like this. I needed a resolution. This was supposed to be a home.

By now, of course, the precariousness of Palestinian bodies has been demonstrated with a brutality and frankness unseen in contemporary history. When I first had my visions, they were, despite their force and immediacy, at a remove. It felt clear to me that they were imaginative visions. This meant I could dismiss them. Once they had passed, I could separate myself from them, rationalizing that they had no connection to reality, not really. My actual eyes, the organs in my skull, had not seen the horrors.

I would have never expected that these eyes would, starting in October 2023, see so many real Palestinian bodies destroyed in so many different ways. Many of the bodies were as small as my daughter’s, and smaller. What was I supposed to do with these new, far more horrific sights?

The hoariest of writerly clichés is that the role of the writer is to witness. Whether it originates from a feeling of ineffectuality in the face of intractable problems, or from an earnest faith in witness and documentation, I find its durability surprising. Not long ago I read a new novel by a renowned author that centered on artists living through various European wars; at the end, the curative value of the artist as witness was proffered as some kind of epiphany. But as my smartphone had for months tingled every hour of every day with new footage and documentation of an Israeli killing rampage that showed no signs of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribner Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1668084686
• ISBN 13: 9781668084687
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar