Premiere: Steve Wickham interprets Refaat Alareer's poem If I Must Die

Irish music icon Steve Wickham has shared a powerful new video, interpreting Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer's If I Must Die – available to watch on the Hot Press YouTube channel now.

Originally written around 2012, If I Must Die is one of Alareer's earliest English language works. As the poet explained in a 2018 interview with Global Rights International Magazine, he felt obliged, during Israel's offensive on Gaza, "to write back in English to reach out to the world to educate people about Palestine and save them from the dominant Israeli multi-million-dollar campaigns of misinformation.”

His works were not published in a collection before his death on December 6, 2023, from an Israeli airstrike.

According to Wickham, while reading If I Must Die, he felt an immediate connection to Alareer: "It was scary that he should write a poem about his own death, and then he dies in the way he's described in the poem. He was obviously imagining his death for a long time."

The musician soon started to interpret the poem with his band, and performing it at gigs.

"It was powerful every time we did it," he recalls. "It was just connection with him on a human level, just the pain and suffering of it."

Despite the heaviness of the work's themes – made even more poignant by the tragic end of Alareer's life – its words are lined with a certain hopefulness, or a "strange celebration of life," as Wickham puts it.

When considering how to share his interpretation of the poem with the world, the idea for the video came naturally.

"My earliest memories are making a kite with my brother and my father when I was three, or four," Wickham says. "That idea of making a kite is a universal one."

The rest was simple – just follow the poem's instructions:

"...buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza...
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above."

"I implore everybody to go out and fly a kite in memory of Refaat," Wickham concludes. "Make a simple kite, go out, fly it on a nice day and think of him. Some things are eternal, and I believe there's hope."

Watch Steve Wickham's interpretation of If I Must Die below: