Write an article on Palestinian poet on Wikipedia

In the past, when I wanted to know something about Palestine, I never researched anything further. Now, however, my style is to first write an article on Wikipedia. I have to do a lot of research in order to write an article, and as a result, I have a deeper understanding of Palestine, which I can then share with many other people.

Just as I was thinking about what to write about, I learned that an anthology of Palestinian poetry appeared in the May 2024 issue of Japanese poetry magazine Gendaishi Techo (現代詩手帖), and I immediately bought it. There are 12 Parestinian poets in the magazine, but only Refaat Alareer was mentioned in the Japanese Wikipedia, who was died in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.

So I started translating from Mosab Abu Toha, who had an article in the English Wikipedia. He was born in Palestine in 1992, studied English at the Islamic University of Gaza, and established a public library of English-language books in the Gaza Strip. It was the only English-language library in Gaza, an Arabic-speaking world. Abu Toha’s aspiration to establish a library as an oasis in a land where conflict continues unabated and to teach the meaning of knowing English was well received by the local people, and many adults as well as children visited the library. He later studied in the U.S., where he earned a master’s degree, and published his poems in various media. However, he is currently staying in Cairo, Egypt with his family after escaping bombings.

The library he founded was named the Edward Said Public Library. Said (1935-2003) was a well-known Palestinian intellectual who went to the United States, then gave lectures of English literature and comparative literature at Columbia University. He was active on Palestinian issues and in 1999 founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with conductor Daniel Barenboim. It is clear that Abu Toha respected Said.

The Abu Toha article had many red links that did not exist in the Japanese version, so I decided to translate them little by little, using Wikidata as a reference. The “Edward Said Public Library” had no Wikipedia article in any language, but I found only Wikidata, so I used that as a reference. In the meantime, I found the library’s official website and there was a video showing daily life in Gaza and the library’s activities. I hope many people will watch it.

New Japanese Wikipedia articles

• ムスアブ・アブートーハ (Mosab Abu Toha)
• アメリカン・ブック・アワード（American Book Awards, received for Abu Toha’s poetry collections）
• ベイト・ラヒア（Beit Lahia, the town where Abu Toha first established a library）
• スカラーズ・アット・リスク（Scholars at Risk, International non-governmental organization that helped Abu Toha study in the U.S.）
• エドワード・サイード公共図書館（Edward Said Public Library）