Can literature make sense of the devastation wrought on Gaza and its people?

From a tent in Gaza’s Al Mawasi, artist Raed Issa resorted to one of the oldest forms of storytelling. Using whatever tools he could find – charcoal salvaged from his studio destroyed in an air strike, hibiscus tea, pomegranate juice and scraps of cardboard – he set about drawing the scenes of every day life around him.

One drawing shows a father bending over to speak to his son, as the pair walk in search of water. The other is a portrait of an unknown woman wearing a traditionally embroidered Palestinian tunic, painted on used medical aid packaging.

The pictures are a nod to those painted by Palestinian modernists, who pioneered a nationalistic and nostalgic art that also preserved their fragile culture after the Nakba of 1948. But unlike his predecessors, Issa's images in a devastating war zone are anything but bucolic.

Issa is one of dozens of Palestinian artists, from Gaza and in the diaspora, to appear in Archiving Gaza in The Present, a new anthology of essays on Gaza’s art, culture, archaeology, environment and literature – and the need to preserve them from complete destruction and ethnic cleansing.

Water, a 2024 work by Raed Issa. Photo: Saqi Books

The book is edited by Venetia Porter, who recently retired from a long tenure as curator of Middle Eastern art at the British Museum, and Dina Matar, a professor of media studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. It is based on the papers of a conference held last year that tried to “make sense of the devastation of Gaza and its people”.

The concept of “archiving in the present” was developed.