Emerging voices of resistance: A postcolonial perspective on noncanonical selected Palestinian poems after the 7th October 2023 attacks

Resistance literature refers to literary writings that confront systems of colonial oppression and articulate the lived struggles of subjugated communities in their pursuit of liberation. Past studies explored resistance literature with a focus on canonical works done by salient writers , including Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, and Fadwa Tuqan. The October 7, 2023 attack on the Israeli territory produced a new generation of noncanonical Palestinian writers who have encountered the brutal genocides committed by the Israeli army and its allies. Due to their direct engagement in these heinous wars and their experiences of exile, diaspora, and loss, these young writers offer a fresh perspective on resistance writing that has not yet been examined in scholarship. Therefore, this study aims to explore the noncanonical writings on resistance by these young voices in two noncanonical poems: Refaat Alareer's “If I Must Die” (2012), became widely circulated as a response to the events of October 7, 2023, and Amany El-Regeb's “You've Demolished My Homes in Your Hubris” (2023). The methodological approach used in this study is based on qualitative textual analysis, specifically employing close reading and thematic coding. These codes were not imposed in advance but emerged inductively through the reading process and were informed by postcolonial theoretical frameworks taken from Edward Said's Orientalism (1979), Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics (2019), Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1963) and Wa Thiong'o Ngugi's Decolonising the Mind (1986) to analyze the emerging resisting voices. The current study concludes that both poems by Alareer and El-Regeb, although noncanonical, have succeeded in spreading a discourse of resistance that opposes false claims by the Global Mass Media, which justified the murder of Palestinian people in the name of fighting terrorism after the October 7, 2023 attacks.