Writing as Resistance — Saeed Teebi’s Journey Through Words and Identity
In the midst of the world’s ongoing conflicts, Palestinian Canadian author Saeed Teebi has turned to writing not only as an outlet but as a profound act of resistance. His new book, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times , explores how language and storytelling can become tools of survival and defiance when identity itself is under siege.
For Teebi, the past two years have been emotionally shattering. Like millions across the Palestinian diaspora, he has felt the trauma of Gaza’s bombardment deeply. The aftermath of Hamas’s 2023 attack and Israel’s subsequent military response left an indelible mark — one that the UN has since described as genocide. Even with the first phase of a ceasefire underway, uncertainty and grief continue to loom large.
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Teebi, known for his acclaimed debut story collection Her First Palestinian , uses his latest work to reflect on what it means to be Palestinian in a world that often refuses to see or understand that identity. Born in Kuwait after his grandparents fled Palestine during the 1948 Nakba, he grew up feeling a constant tension between belonging and exclusion. Despite Kuwait’s relative support for Palestinians, citizenship remained out of reach. When his family moved to Canada, that sense of displacement only deepened.
He recalls that while Canada offered him a new home, it often came with a silent expectation — to downplay his Palestinian roots to avoid backlash or discomfort. This unspoken pressure, he says, left him feeling like he could never fully share who he was. It even shaped his art, leaving him silent for years before he found the courage to write honestly about his heritage and the collective pain of his people.
When the 2023 conflict reignited, Teebi found himself unable to continue his fiction work. The devastation made imagination feel trivial — until he realized that the very act of writing could itself be a form of defiance. Through his memoir, he wanted to reclaim his identity, refusing to minimize his Palestinian self simply to fit into the world’s comfort zones.
He speaks passionately about the power of art and the tragic loss of Palestinian artists, poets, and writers in the conflict. For Teebi, their deaths were not just individual losses but an assault on cultural memory — an attempt to erase voices that hold the collective imagination of a people. Yet, he insists that such erasure will fail, because from destruction, new artists will always emerge to carry forward the truth.
Ultimately, Teebi’s message is one of quiet but unyielding strength. To him, asserting one’s identity — to write, to speak, to remember — is an act of hope. “We will not be removed,” he insists through his work. “Our imagination will live on.”
(Source: Broadview Magazine, Toronto Star coverage)
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