Samar Yazbek | Your Presence Is A Danger To Your Life - Voices From Gaza

In the year following 7 October 2023, Samar Yazbek met with hundreds of survivors from Gaza, asking each of them about their experiences of that day and the months of destruction and displacement that followed. From these encounters comes Your Presence Is a Danger to Your Life, a selection of twenty-six testimonies from ordinary civilians aged thirteen to sixty-five, whose lives have been irrevocably altered by what may one day be remembered as one of the most savage military offensives of our time. Adapted from warning flyers dropped moments before a bombing, the book’s title captures the impossible reality of life for Gazans. That reality is laid bare in accounts marked by unimaginable loss – homes shattered, loved ones vanished, limbs obliterated – and mechanisms of cruelty that defy comprehension. In gathering these testimonies, Yazbek brings into focus the human lives behind the headlines, and the survivors’ determination, even amid devastation, to speak and to be heard.

‘Since the start of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians, I have been grasping for words. Yazbek has done something extraordinary. She has captured the vocabulary we have all been searching for by turning to the people who witnessed this violence first hand in Gaza. The book does not make heroes of genocide survivors, nor does it romanticize their struggle. Instead, we are invited to mourn with them, to marvel at their endurance, and to be sobered by humanity’s capacity for barbarism. Yazbek shows us what it means to bear witness, to make space for grief, pain and suffering too vast to be contained, and how to do so with dignity, respect and humility. She has once again modelled what it means to be a keeper of humanity’s memory.’
— Tareq Baconi, author of Fire in Every Direction

‘This is a remarkable, shattering book that holds its voices with dignity and care. It speaks to us from a red world of absolute loss, yet is suffused with an extraordinary persistence of love. Beyond geopolitics, rhetoric, territory and leaders, there remains the bare fact of broken lives and the unbearable weight of human love.’
— A.L. Kennedy, author of Alive in the Merciful Country 

‘While narrating death and destruction, the witnesses Yazbek spoke with still found a way to illustrate that, in the words of Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah, they taught life. Many insisted on showing Yazbek pictures of their families and of themselves when their bodies were still whole; some entrusted her with a list of names of the people they lost; they defied erasure by every means available to them…. Yazbek’s collection of testimonies, spanning the shattered lives of children as young as thirteen to the weary wisdom of the elderly, refutes the diminishment intended by the airdropped leaflets. If the leaflets claim their presence is a danger, Yazbek proves their erasure is the true catastrophe.’ - Ibtihal Rida Mahmood, Arab Lit