By Jim Aitken
Omar Hamad grew up loving fairy tales.
They took him into other worlds and later
he would go on to read ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’
Books, like the air we breathe, are considered
essential for living, according to Omar Hamad
and his close friend, Ibrahim Almasri.
The same outlook is held by Raneem Musa
and her team of volunteers who sift through
the rubble of the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza.
Omar, Ibrahim, Raneem and others who helped
dust down the scattered volumes from the rubble,
did so to preserve their identities, prevent their erasure.
For the genocide is also a scholasticide, they claim,
a deliberate attempt to obliterate the cultural affirmation
they receive from the books, granting them authenticity.
Omar had gone with a donkey cart to rescue books
hidden in the rubble. He went to the bombed-out schools,
universities, public libraries, to the graveyards of volumes.
And he cleaned them, gave them back their lives,
lives intertwined with all the hands that had held
them before, and the hands that would hold them again.
Raneem marvelled at all the hands that had held
the Great Omari Mosque’s manuscripts for over seven
hundred years, and she prayed for future hands to hold them.
And from the rubble Omar has created the Phoenix Library
with over six thousand books. It has become a place
of worship, a shrine of perpetual succour for perpetual readers.
For books indeed are good for you, nutrition for hungry minds.
They take you on journeys that enable you to grow internally
and they raise you above all the hate that surrounds you.
Reclaimed books are acts of resistance for they serve the future.
To alter Brecht – unhappy the land with bombed-out libraries.
Unhappy the land that needed to bomb them.
This poem has also been published in ‘War and Greed: Two Sides of the Same Coin’ by Dove Tales – Association of Scottish Artists for Peace.
