A Palestinian Canadian author’s journey of resistance through writing

For two years, Saeed Teebi — like millions in the Palestinian diaspora — has felt the horror of Gaza’s bombardment and suffering at a visceral level. After Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel launched a devastating campaign that a UN commission recently deemed genocide. At press time, the ceasefire’s first phase had begun, but uncertainty and humanitarian catastrophe persist.

In his new non-fiction book, You Will Not Kill Our Imagination: A Memoir of Palestine and Writing in Dark Times, Teebi reflects on how the assault affected him as a Palestinian Canadian and as a writer. He also examines the broader impact of art and language as an act of subversion.

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Teebi’s debut story collection, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. More recently, he was a writer-in-residence at Western University in London, Ont. He spoke to Sanam Islam about Palestinian identity and the role of imagination in resisting erasure.

SANAM ISLAM: Tell me about your upbringing as a Palestinian displaced from his homeland.

SAEED TEEBI: I was born in Kuwait, where my grandparents settled after being forced to leave Palestine in the 1948 Nakba [the mass displacement of Palestinians during the Arab-Israeli war]. Palestine was not a place I knew personally, but it was a very important part of my identity growing up. While Kuwait is supportive of Palestinians, it doesn’t grant citizenship and the privileges that come with it, to expatriates. I had a very clear idea of my distinctness. While I felt more connected to my roots, it also “othered” me so I didn’t truly feel like I belonged.

When I was 15, my family moved to Canada — first to Montreal, then to Toronto. It’s an environment in which, for most of my life, people have either been ignorant of the status and plight of Palestinians or showed outright hostility toward them.

While Canada welcomes you as a citizen, your background as a Palestinian is unwelcome. If you don’t keep it to yourself, you’ll face significant social repercussions that people from other backgrounds don’t.

SI: How did these experiences shape you as a person and as a writer?

ST: It’s a strange place to be because it means you can’t fully share who you are — basic things like family traditions or heritage. That creates a barrier to connecting with other people at a deeper level. In many cases, I simply withdrew from sharing and tried to become as anonymous as possible in terms of my background.

This affected my writing in profound ways; it essentially made me silent. While I became a lawyer by profession, I had been trying to write on the side since I was 19. However, it wasn’t until I was well into my 40s that my first book came out. It’s because I wasn’t ready to face myself and the world wholly until then. If you’re unclear about yourself or dishonest about yourself to others, then the kind of art you produce is going to be inferior to what you could create otherwise.

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SI: What does it mean to you to be a writer in the Palestinian diaspora at this time?

ST: I believe the only real responsibility that a writer or any artist has is to express what is important to them. When the genocide unfolded in 2023, I was working on a novel, but I couldn’t write it anymore. The scale of the horror was paralyzing. I tried to figure out a way out of it for months, but it felt frivolous to carry on doing imaginative work involving fictional characters.

I realized the way forward was to address it, in a meaningful way, through writing — for myself, audiences and perhaps in some incredibly small way for the people going through this unimaginable suffering.

I wanted to break the cycle of minimizing being Palestinian as a way of coping with the world. I wanted to make sure I have a tool for remembrance, so I and others in similar positions can say, “Let’s acknowledge what’s happened to us. Let’s acknowledge the journeys we’re on. And in light of the genocide, and in spite of the perpetrators, let’s try to forge a way forward.”

SI: Many artists in Gaza were killed in the conflict. What’s the larger impact on Palestinian identity from losing so many artists, poets, musicians and writers?

ST: They’re the best holders and transmitters of culture and history. They’re the best at documenting what is happening, how we feel and how it’s affecting us. Like many, I believe it’s not an accident that writers and artists were among the first to be killed by the Israeli regime.

The more you can erase a culture, the better positioned you are to erase the people themselves because their best expressers are no longer there. It’s just as much an assault on the imagination — of what we want to be and how we see ourselves in the future — as it is on bodies and places. However, it’s something that’s bound to fail. No artist is replaceable, but more new artists find themselves when this kind of assault happens.

SI: What is the role of art in creating change and hope during dark times?

ST: Being assertive about our identity is a form of resistance. It expresses that we will not be annihilated. We will not be removed. Our desires will not be quashed, whether that’s freedom, land or many of the other things Palestinians have been denied.

Artists also have a significant role in imagining what can be, which is critical, despite the rubble that Gaza looks like right now.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. This interview first appeared in Broadview’s Nov/Dec 2025 issue with the title, “Writing a Way Forward.”

Sanam Islam is a freelance journalist in the Greater Toronto Area.