Pay No Heed to the Rockets by Marcello Di Cintio

Reviewed by Ian Thomas Shaw

Although not a new book—it was published in 2018—Marcello Di Cintio’s account of his encounters with Palestinian writers continues to leave an indelible impression on readers. Rather than offering a sweeping history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or a journalistic catalogue of atrocities and diplomatic failures, Di Cintio approaches Palestine through its literature, its storytellers, and the fragile persistence of cultural life under occupation and siege. The result is a deeply humane and intellectually curious work that refuses to reduce Palestinians to mere subjects of geopolitics.

Literature becomes the lens through which Palestinian life is understood. Again and again, Di Cintio returns to the question of what storytelling means for a people fragmented by checkpoints, exile, military occupation, and historical dispossession. For them, literature is not a luxury or an ornament to political struggle, but one of the principal means through which identity, memory, and dignity are preserved.

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its resistance to abstraction—particularly the kind of abstraction that has so often contributed to the dehumanization of Palestinians. In much Western discourse, Palestine appears either as a battlefield or as a diplomatic problem. Di Cintio foregrounds human beings instead: conversations in cafés, family histories, poetry readings, neglected libraries, and the emotional geography of divided cities. He pays particular attention to the symbolic importance of books themselves. In a landscape where movement is restricted and borders dominate daily existence, literature becomes a form of mobility, memory, and resistance.

The spirit of Mahmoud Darwish hovers over the entire work. The title itself evokes Darwish’s famous injunction to keep making coffee despite the rockets—a metaphor for the resilience of ordinary life amid violence. Di Cintio understands that Palestinian cultural survival depends not only on political resistance, but also on the preservation of rituals, language, and artistic expression. His interlocutors span the full spectrum of Palestinian society: gay writers, religiously observant writers, atheists, feminists, nationalists, former prisoners, and children. Rather than presenting a monolithic portrait of Palestinians as uniformly heroic, resilient, or tragic, Di Cintio offers a kaleidoscope of human strengths and frailties, leaving readers to assemble for themselves a fuller understanding of Palestinian life.

Di Cintio is also acutely aware of his position as an outsider. He avoids the self-important posture that often undermines travel writing about conflict zones. Rather than presenting himself as an authority capable of “explaining” Palestine, he acts as an intermediary, allowing Palestinians to articulate their own experiences in their own voices. This humility gives the book much of its emotional credibility. The narrative voice remains reflective without becoming intrusive or domineering. At times, Di Cintio even questions his own ability, as a non-Palestinian, to tell the stories of the people he encounters. He need not doubt himself. His storytelling abilities are exceptional, and his perspective remains both expansive and authentic.

Some readers seeking a more systematic political analysis, however, may find the book episodic or indirect. The structural realities of occupation are certainly present, but they emerge organically through lived experience rather than through sustained analytical exposition.

I found the chapters on Gaza particularly powerful, in part because I lived there in 1993–94. Much of what I witnessed during my own stay foreshadowed the fragility of the peace process and the resulting violence inflicted on the population. The spirit of the Gazans I encountered firsthand, some thirty years ago, is captured with remarkable sensitivity in Di Cintio’s work. The book depicts a pre-genocide Gaza, two years after Operation Protective Edge—a conflict that left thousands dead—yet still socially, culturally, and politically intact. Unlike the Gaza of today, where more than two million people barely survive amid devastation and displacement, Di Cintio’s Gaza—though battered and constrained—remains vibrantly alive, sustained by artistic creativity and an enduring culture of resistance. It is a Gaza where writers can still create, teach, argue, and dream under conditions seemingly designed to extinguish those very capacities. Di Cintio demonstrates how literature becomes not an escape from reality, but a means of enduring it. Yet, even now, that endurance may contain the seeds of resurgence, as writers, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens begin the long process of rebuilding Gaza. As we have learned from the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust and seventy years of the Nakba, you can kill in incalculable numbers and deprive a people of the basic means of survival, but you cannot kill a people’s soul.

Pay No Heed to the Rockets is an important and deeply moving book—one that succeeds not by offering a definitive explanation of Palestine, but by listening carefully to the voices that continue to narrate it from within.

Pay No Heed to the Rockets is published by Goose Lane Editions.