From Sartre to Gaza: The Committed Writer in a Time of Genocide

By: Gabriel Pascua

In the same year as the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair (FBM), the awarding organization LitProm drew heavy criticism after postponing the awarding of the LiBeraturpreis to Palestinian author Adania Shibli. Following accusations and widespread boycotts against FBM for attempting to silence Palestinian voices, thus going against their own values of diversity and inclusion, LitProm explained that the postponement was due to the supposed polarizing climate that followed the “war started by Hamas” (LitProm). As the 2025 FBM draws near, pro-Palestinian voices continue to point out FBM’s complicity in Zionist Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people.

Sartre (second from right) and Simone de Beauvoir (right) visit a Palestinian refugee camp in Gaza in 1967 – Source: Middle East Eye. 

Writers and publishers, often precariously positioned, may find FBM too significant to skip. Yet solidarity requires sacrifice. As Faye Cura, founder of the feminist collective Gantala Press, put it: “To boycott the Fair is the politically strategic and moral thing to do.” This dilemma for writers, intellectuals, and publishers is not new. In his 1948 essay Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, Jean-Paul Sartre posed questions that remain painfully relevant today: What is writing? Why does one write? For whom does one write?

Writing is never neutral. For Sartre, "although literature is one thing and morality a quite different one, at theheart of the aesthetic imperative we discern the moral imperative” (67). Even amidst violent repression, to write is to confront and assert freedom, both one’s own and that of others. Commitment then is not about subscribing to an “ism,”but about the writer being present in history, shaping the immediate future (Sartre 286). Sartre’s call for littérature engagée was a radical demand in post-war Europe: literature must not merely reflect the world, but intervene in it.

This idea of committed literature (iltizām) took root in the Arab world as both a literary sensibility and political necessity. The growing politicization of literature was met with suspicion and resentment by the udaba, the old guards of the Arabic cultural world which reveled in high culture (Di-Capua 77-8). Writers and critics like Mahmud Amin al-’Alim, ‘Abd al-’Azim Anis, Husayn Muruwwa, and Suhayl Idris opposed the aesthetic elitism of the udaba,[NW1] represented by Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim. The key debate in Arab literature during the 1950s was between “art for art’s sake” and “art for society,” raising questions about literary form (shakl) and content (madmūn) (Di-Capua 80).

In his 1954 essay The Form of Literature, Husayn defended that beauty (jamal) alone should guide artistic judgment, warning against reducing literature to political content. Left-leaning critics like Muruwwa, al-’Alim, and Anis retorted that literature must reflect and intervene in social reality. After the 1954 Second Congress of Soviet Writers, which Muruwwa attended, iltizām increasingly adopted socialist realism, envisioning writers as engineers of the human soul in the postcolonial Arab world (Di-Capua 81-3).

But iltizām was not free from contradictions. Lebanese writer Raif Khoury broke from its Marxist orientation after the Soviet Union supported the establishment of Israel in 1947, warning against iltizām’s entanglement with rigid authority at the expense of individual freedom. Lebanese feminist writer Suhayr al-Qalamawi, while supporting Arabnationalism, criticized how state co-optation of iltizām sidelined the Palestinian cause in favor of abstract pan-Arab unity (Di-Capua 119).

Reading both Sartre and iltizām today, we are reminded that committed literature must not only serve political commitment, but must also guard against the very forces that claim to speak in its name. Yet Sartre’s own framework reveals limits. Sartre privileged prose over poetry, arguing prose is aimed at action while poetry is private, ambiguous, and politically inert (Sartre 30–4). Though he sought to galvanize readers into struggle, this prose/poetry binary reflects Eurocentric and Orientalist ideals of reason and clarity, dismissing oral and lyrical traditions as apolitical.

Palestinian poetry stands as a living refutation of Sartre’s assumptions. Palestinian literary figures like Ghassan Kanafani, Samih al-Qasim, Mahmoud Darwish, and Dareen Tatour wrote poems as acts of insurgency. Tatour’s Resist, My People, Resist Them, penned while she was in prison, is not mere expression but a revolt against Zionism and fascism. When children are buried under rubble and entire families are wiped out by bombs, eloquence alone becomes obscene unless it is bound to the cause of resistance. As Palestinian poet Noor Hindi wrote, “Fuck your lecture on craft, my people are dying.” No line more clearly exposes the liberal fetish for form over content, technicality over truth. “Artfor art’s sake” collapses in the face of genocide.

     Palestinian poetry then is an archive of survival and defiance, and a weapon against Zionism and imperialism. Itshows that poetry can be precise, collective, material, and revolutionary, as encapsulated by the final lines written by Refaat Alareer before he was killed by an Israeli airstrike in December 2023:

“If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story”

Palestinian poetry reclaims the right not only to mourn, but also to condemn, to resist, and to speak against the world’s silence. Here, Sartre’s question “What is writing” finds its clearest answer. Writing is the last breath of thecondemned made eternal, not a cry of despair, but as a call to arms. As Sartre wrote, “[a] day comes when the pen is forced to stop, and the writer must then take up arms… literature throws you into battle.” (69). Palestinian literature is a literature of resistance.

Committed literature now must do more than reflect on war. The writer must name genocide, denounce Empire, and combat literary apoliticism by politicizing aesthetics. As a writer from the peripheries, I confront choices Sartre laid bare. Must I climb the imperial ladder through academic compradorship, or embrace precarity as the “guilty conscience”of society; to appease through apolitical universality, or disturb with the unresolved legacies of conquest, exploitation and genocide, those ghosts of empire that linger violently in the South? These are the specters haunting literary commitment in a time of genocide.

To write today, truthfully and militantly, is to speak as Refaat Alareer did, even as the missiles fell. If one must die, let it be a tale that fuels the fire of freedom.

Works Cited

Di-Capua, Yoav. No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

LitProm. The LiBeraturpreis 2023 goes to Adania Shibli. 16 Oct. 2023, www.litprom.de/en/best-books/liberaturpreis/the-winner-2023.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Harvard UP, 1988.

Author bio: Gabriel C. Pascua is a Filipino scholar whose research interests focus on anti-imperialism, social and political philosophy, and liberation psychology. He graduated from the Ateneo de Manila University with a Bachelor of Arts Major in Psychology and a Minor in Panitikang Pilipino (Filipino Literature). He has published scholarly works in Clio’s Psyche, Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory and Anti-Imperialist Education, and SURI: Journal of the Philosophical Association of the Philippines.