We Teach Life, Sir
Rafeef Ziadah
Ziadah's answer to a journalist who asked if Palestinians would 'just stop teaching their children to hate' — a spoken-word poem that became one of the most shared performances of Palestinian poetry ever recorded.
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Recording: sternchenproductions (original 2011 performance)
We teach life, sir. We Palestinians wake up every morning to teach the rest of the world life, sir.
(excerpt)
About this poem
Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian-Canadian spoken-word poet, born in Beirut to a third-generation refugee family. She wrote “We Teach Life, Sir” in response to a journalist who asked her — while she was working as a Palestinian media spokesperson during one of Israel’s wars on Gaza — whether everything would be fine if Palestinians would just stop teaching their children to hate. A video of her performance went viral within days of its release in 2011.
The poem later gave its title to her 2016 album We Teach Life. Its refrain echoes Mahmoud Darwish’s “we have on this earth what makes life worth living” — an affirmation that Palestinians, having endured so much, are teachers of life itself.