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Tag: gaza

  • When I Walk in Gaza, I Put My Hands in My Pockets

    When I Walk in Gaza, I Put My Hands in My Pockets

    Ahmad Bassiouny writes from Gaza. Translated by Ibrahim Fawzy.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    I can’t find an introduction that fits. I’m fed up with counting genocide days. The number of martyrs is high. My fingers ache. I feel as though the teeth of the dead are biting me, clutching at me; I’m a tomb for martyrs, and inside me are many, and the dunes in my heart are dry. I’m an autumn tree; my leaves fall one by one. The tomb is full. Get an axe to cut my fingers. I’m done with counting.

    ~

    All Will Know

    Strolling down the souq in al-Nuseirat, witnessing the destruction of homes and markets, I bump into our building’s guard. We engage in chitchat about the ongoing atrocities. He shares the heart-wrenching news that my home and my brother’s have been bombarded. I say, ‘No problem. Money will come again. What really matters is souls.’Material harm, rather than a dear one, as the Palestinian proverb goes in such times of destruction. ‘How are you and yours?’ I ask.

    ‘I’m still alive, and my wife and children are still with me,’ he says. ‘But the rest of my family has been martyred. My siblings and uncles are all gone. Our building was bombed. They exterminated us.’ His eyes are red.

    I console him, ashamed. I share that my niece’s son, along with my cousins’ children, are all martyrs, and that the fate of my niece’s second son – he was kidnapped by the occupying forces – is unclear.

    He consoles me, pats my hand, and so I do the same, turning martyrs over in our fingers.

    ‘Where are you staying now?’ he asks.

    ‘Here in az-Zawayda. Near the historical site. You?’

    ‘I took shelter in a storehouse. The people there welcomed me in – may Allah compensate them.’ His voice wobbles.

    ‘How do you buy what you need?’

    My question seems to strike him. ‘I sold my phone for 500 shekels,’ he says. ‘And I’m spending them.’  I see the overburdened pride in him. ‘I need to feed my kids. I sold my phone – so what? Why should I keep it? Who would I call? My family’s all gone. I don’t want any more news. And if I became a martyr, everyone would know anyway.’

    ~

    Muhie/Mukhie

    Today, Muhie is sick. A ten-person family was displaced along with us and Muhie is their three-year-old son. He’s in the very first stages of soaking up Arabic, pronouncing ‘ha’ as ‘kha’, ‘sa’ as ‘tha’. Arabic weeps when he speaks. We call him Mukhie the Israeli because the way he pronounces Arabic is like a settler learning it for the first time. Ironically, Mukhie is fair skinned with blue eyes and blond hair. If Israeli soldiers saw him or heard him, they’d think him a hostage.

    Normally, Mukhie wakes up, greeting everyone with a cheerful ‘Mornin awl’, and then moves towards me, gives me a ‘Mornin’ too, and asks if there is water, and Arabic weeps.

    ‘Morning, Mukhie!’ I say, smiling. ‘All the water is for you.’

    He has become the soul of the camp. He helps us chop and collect the logs. He plays with the children of the village, acts as their leader. Everyone surrounds him. But at the same time they somehow steer clear.

    Muhie’s father is frightened for his children. He tries to shield their eyes from the panic and the fear. ‘When you see a tank, I’ll let you drive it,’ he had once promised Muhie. And then Muhie had admonished his father: ‘We saw tanks and soldiers but you didn’t let me drive. You said “Not now”. I don’t like people lying to me’.

    Except it didn’t sound like this. Every word was mispronounced. Arabic wept. If I wrote it how he said it, you wouldn’t understand. But this is Muhie, and this is how he speaks. And the sixty of us on the farm have learned and adopted it.

    I ask Muhie’s father about his promise. ‘I don’t want him to be traumatised by the tanks and soldiers,’ he says. ‘So I told him, “I’ll let you drive it unless you give me trouble,” so that he’ll think of the tank as nothing more than a car. Only when he grows up will he understand that it’s the car of the dead.’

    But as I say, today, Muhie is sick, grappling with a stomach bug because of contaminated water. He coughs as if a tank is marching over his chest. His lungs are inflamed from the dust of the ongoing shelling. This is a child who thinks life is just a toy: he holds it, turns it over, loosens and tightens its screws, pulls at its rope, all so that he can understand its structure. The crucial point remains: death isn’t a core part of his life.

    ~

    The Tale of Two Cancers


    ‘A cup of coffee and some water, please. After that, I’ll tell you everything.’ He is Abou Ali, a 55-year-old man. He is new to the farm. He lost his wife and their only child after the occupation forces bombarded the house that had sheltered them for 40 days. They had been martyred shortly after he was displaced.

    Abou Ali had refused to leave Gaza. He had promised not to repeat his father’s mistake, not to carry the stories of a third and a fourth migration on his back. So he had decided to stay in Gaza, to witness the occupation’s violence. We don’t like to hear about it, but we must, because collective memory is built on shared scenes, the accumulated narratives of the farmer and the land.

    ‘As I prepare to go to bed,’ Abou Ali says, ‘I pray three prayers: the Isha Prayer, the Absentee Funeral Prayer for the martyrs, and the Night Vigil Prayer. Then I lie on my bed, and before sleep creeps over my eyelids I place my ID in my shirt pocket and a piece of paper with my full name in my trouser pocket. Just in case. If my house is bombed with me inside, and I’m torn to pieces, my name might then be found in my hand or foot. That one night, as death surrounded us, I took my pen and wrote my name on my hands, my feet, my chest. I felt like a narcissist.’

    That night, Abou Ali’s house was bombed. When the window fell onto him, thick pieces of concrete came with it and formed a pyramid over his body. And when the ceiling fell, that pyramid shielded him. ‘I don’t know how I survived. What I did know was that I could no longer stay at home. I headed to al-Rantisi Hospital, where they care for children with cancer. It’s become a refuge for children and families escaping two cancers: disease and occupation.’

    He continues. ‘When they controlled the area around al-Karama Street, and they set out from the  roundabout that separates al-Karama Street from al-Nasr Street, and the quadcopters fired on every passer-by – that night, I don’t know how I fell asleep. When I woke, it wasn’t to Fairouz’s voice, but the tank’s muzzle hailing me at the window under which I slept. And at that moment, I realised that cancer had spread through the body of the city.’

    He continues. ‘They ordered us to hold our IDs in our right hands and raise white flags in our left and exit the hospital one by one. They then directed us to walk in a straight line from al-Nasr toward al-Galaa Street until we reached the checkpoint on Salah al-Din Street, where we could pass to a safe area. I didn’t comply. I veered off from al-Galaa Street toward al-Rimal to reach Shifa Hospital. As I was walking, I saw corpses thrown to the ground – men, women, children, teens. Some had been hit by sniper fire, more than once. Some had been shelled, more than once.’

    He continues. ‘Here is a hand and a head. There a foot and a toe. This is a shoulder. I didn’t know who had leaned against it. But it was lying in a long street today, no one to carry it. This street was a tomb with neither tombstones nor sand. Just corpses. Even the undertaker’s corpse was lying on that street.’ He continues.

    ~

    The Story Isn’t a Story, Nor the Hero a Hero

    I understand. I understand that we have grown accustomed to stories with happy endings, or at the very least with a hero. Even stories with sad endings have heroes. But here? Nothingness. The story isn’t a story. The hero is not a hero. Nor is Gaza that Gaza that I know, the Gaza I used to tell others about.

    Once, in Ramallah, a friend had asked me, ‘Ahmad, tell me about Gaza. What colours is it? How does it smell?’

    ‘Gaza is shelter for me and all Gazans,’ I had said. ‘The sea is ours; the streets are for us. When I walk in Gaza, I put my hands in my pockets. I know the streets. I never fear getting lost. I never expect an attack from a stranger. I stroll through Gaza in peace, as though I were in my own bedroom. I have wandered the streets of Cairo, Amman, Istanbul, Doha and Ramallah with my hands in the air and nothing in my pockets except for my phone. My hands were ready for strangers. In all my life, in all my places, I have never felt secure anywhere except in Gaza.’

    Today, a year and a half after that answer, I now say, ‘You might read, Ghadeer, that all the world is safer than Gaza. Today, my hands are in the air, crossed like Christ. Today, my pocket is a graveyard. When I put my hand into it, my fingers embrace a martyr. Today, the stranger is here. The attack is a silent cancer. Today, I’m fed up with counting genocide days, and the tomb is full.’ shoulder their boats: poets reciting their poetry standing up, writers ached and hunching over their desks, the many named and nameless who carry the suffering of the world on their shoulders to the shores of the sea.

    Ahmad Bassiouny is a Gazan writer. He holds an MA in Political Science and International Relations from the Doha Institute for Post-graduate Studies. His work has appeared in various outlets, and he produced a number of documentaries for Alaraby TV. 

    Ibrahim Fawzy is an award-winning literary translator. His translations have appeared in various literary outlets. He is an editor at Rowayat, Asymptote, and Minor Literatures, and podcasts at New Books Network (NBN).

  • Dice

    Dice

    By Gazan writer Nayrouz Qarmout, translated by Sawad Hussain and Perween Richards.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    Nayrouz Qarmout was the English PEN x The Mosaic Rooms Writer in Residence in 2021. This piece, translated by Sawad Hussain and Perween Richards, was specially commissioned as part of this residency. It is published here for the first time, on the day Nayrouz Qarmout is announced as an Honorary Member of English PEN.

    ~

    Crossing to Gaza

    Saturday morning, 8.30am

    With steps noticeably light, cheeks flushed, features seemingly smaller, shirt buttons tight across his hanging middle, he advances steadily in a long line that’s burdened with luggage, with bags of all sizes and colours.

    Children wear cotton pyjamas, as if they have just woken from a deep sleep. A girl watches her favourite cartoon on her mother’s mobile. An old man in filthy clothes sits in his wheelchair, begging someone to let him skip the line with his two sons. He has just had a delicate operation on his large intestine.

    ‘No!’ yells the man in charge of the queue. ‘You, over here. And your sons go to the back.’ One of the boys swears furiously, and the other smokes his cigarette in one breath and crushes it under his heel.

    As far as the wall stretches, the line is long. Soft threads of sunlight sneak up on the faces in the queue. With his steady steps, he stands close to her. Behind him are two women; one is younger, rubbing her belly and complaining of nausea, waiting for a seed she planted. Her husband squats with his back against the wall, smacking his passport across his thigh, muttering, ‘I wish I could rip you in two.’

    A faint voice says: ‘I’m going up ahead. When I turn and give you a quick wink, sprint to that gate – it opens at nine on the dot.’

    Equaliser; dominoes on the table

    Thursday night, 8.30pm

    A Morocco goal in Algeria’s net. Shisha clouds fill the atmosphere, but it’s the frost that pricks at the warmth of those seated. One of the drivers bundles himself in a thick abaya with an eye-catching camel hue. The skin around his eyes is cracked with broad lines drawn by the scorching sun. Four others are wrapped around a table – a wooden slab raised up by rusty metal legs – dominoes lined up waiting for one of the drivers to say the word. It seems that the driver doesn’t have any say in moving unless it’s on the surface of this table. Eyes are fixed on the hanging TV screen, and the sound of a spoon stirring sugar rises with the neighing drivers, and the ball shoots through, equalising.

    She keeps her pale shoes clean, wrapping one leg over the other as usual. The flush-cheeked man to her side laughs heartily when she shares a story, unsure of how true it is. ‘The Indians used magic one day to score their goals, and they’ve been banned from the game ever since.’

    ‘Really!’

    ‘So let’s say some Quranic verses over the ball and score a goal.’

    They chant as one: ‘Verses or no verses, our luck’s run out!’

    The driver hosting tonight’s session clinks a spoon against her tea glass. ‘More sugar for you?’

    ‘No, I’ve got enough thanks.’

    She drinks a little tea, and takes a long drag from her shisha. She’s the only woman in the drivers’ get-together.

    ~

    Faintly, she calls out to him. ‘Balon… Balon…’

    The jeep vibrates with the melody of his snoring, laden with songs of land, sea, and air carriers. He wears a thick coat, his cheeks still rosy whenever she looks at him in the front mirror from the back seat. A dim light on the ceiling of the car breaks through the pitch-black of a cloudy night; her body trembles, she rubs her arms and legs hard – her clothes aren’t enough.

    She takes a glimpse into the side mirror: burning charcoal and smoke, branches being eaten by a weak fire around which two old men sit. She trains her eyes on the fire to get warm, and remembers her mother’s words. ‘Feeling full and feeling warm, both are in the eye of the beholder, my dear.’ Still seven hours to go till dawn breaks.

    But Balon is deep in sleep. After watching the match, they had walked a long way together, and bought ghee-filled layered pastry from that girl. Throughout the game her eyes had darted between the screen and this girl, wrapped in a thick rug, surrounded by packets of cigarettes, sardines, potato chips and piles of pastry, reviewing how much she’d sold. ‘I want to taste this,’ she said to him. ‘What is it?’

    ‘Meshaltet!’

    ‘I thought as much. Buy me one.’

    They shared it on the way back to the car – quite a distance – which sat at the front of the queue of graves and death-trap buses moving at a leisurely pace. They called this travel. Having arrived early, they’d been able to get this position up front. Sugar sticks to their fingers. They laugh after sucking the nectar from its edges, chatting about Covid and how to avoid catching it, or any other epidemic, on this road.

    ‘You know, people from Gaza buy so much of this dessert,’ he had told her. ‘Whenever they go back to their country.’

    Her body is still trembling, so much that even the hardness of the mountain rocks piled up can’t endure it and the night loosens its dread into the hearts of the sleepers. She can’t move anymore, the cold’s needles sunk into her joints, pricking her endlessly, taking her ability to hear, leaving her earlobes stiff. She has nothing thick and warm that isn’t packed in her carefully locked luggage.

    She looks back, and it seems that there are coffins closing in on their owners. Through the windshield of the car behind her, a group of women are visible, their silence stirring up resentment in the night. An elderly man gets out of his car and paces back and forth, trying to deceive the cold. But it is of no use.

    The dawn begins to whisper – to the call for prayer into the night. Balon opens his eyes. ‘You okay?’ he asks.

    ‘Please.’ Her voice breaks. ‘Do you have anything I can throw on myself? I’m going to die in this cold.’ She pauses. ‘Turn the heat on for a little bit.’

    He turns on the heater and brings her a blanket that he has used on similar trips. She has lost all feeling in her feet.

    ‘I told you to let me put the cloak on your shoulders but you refused. I brought it just for you.’

    ‘Stop it,’ she replies immediately. ‘I hate abayas.’ They laugh together.

    ‘You should go on and sit with the group of women over there,’ he kids her. ‘Trust me, you’ll feel warm.’

    ‘I can’t take their talk right now.’ She cackles. ‘Go back to sleep, don’t worry about me.’ She falls asleep with the first signs of morning.

    ~

    Laughter from young mouths fills the hall of an old camp with mural-covered walls. ‘How did I know it’s a camp?’ she asks herself. But silence hangs over a clothesline fastened to the wall; a plastic Coca-Cola bottle is cut, now a pot for basil; a windowless frame. Colourful children’s clothes are thrown on a rope, no clothespins to catch their scent. She can almost smell the lack of detergent in them. Scattered slogans: Resist, Fight, Strive, The storm passed by here, Freedom, Revolution Fighter, names of martyrs. She sinks among the sleeping seashells, no sound reaching them. The depths consume the truth in scenes from her memory. Still sinking, tender wheat stalks stretch upwards around her. She hides, concealed, protected by travelling verses from all the walls of life around her. The water clings to the sky, and the ears of grain are bells in the air, and are silent.

    She starts to feel warm. Her face touches the edge of an embroidered robe, and a silk thread spins confusion in the stitches of this existence around her; a white shawl lowers onto her. It’s her grandmother’s face, in her hand a blue basket, from which she offers a thorned plant. As soon as she touches it, drops of blood spill from her fingertips. ‘What’s this?’ a quivering voice asks.

    ‘Akkub, I brought it for you from Bethlehem.’

    Again she hears her mother’s voice on the phone, talking to her friend from the burning of her mother’s grave. A war on Gaza has hijacked the kitchen in her home.

    She looks at her finger, the stone of her ring gleaming: a gift from her frightened friend’s mother. He had left for Bethlehem with her bag, but his mother was unable to follow. She didn’t have permission to cross.

    A man grabs her hand, his beard is dark. ‘Come on then, let’s cook the porridge!’

    ‘No, no burbara!’ she screams. ‘I’m still trapped here, I didn’t get out, I didn’t cross.’

    One image after the next: an apartment window overlooking the sea, a window facing a wall; a final window overlooking the shifting desert sands. Her body collides with the ground, her eyes open – it’s the roof of the car! ‘Will you have some coffee?’ Balon asks.

    She can barely say ‘Yes. I can smell it.’

    ‘It’s Mood coffee. I always ask people to bring it back for me from Gaza. You finally woke up.’

    ‘I was in London.’ She smiles.

    Friday morning, 8.30am

    In one hand he has a cardboard cup of coffee, and in the other a tray of Levantine sweets, strands of hair curled into nests and stuffed with pistachio. Plastic wrap secures it in place.

    ‘Hey, where’d you get that from?’ she asks.

    He smiles calmly. ‘At the petrol station. When you chose sandwiches to buy and then went the bathroom.’

    In that moment, she asks him to wait in the supermarket. She moves animatedly, rushing to her path, to find her way back, something growing within her – it’s her longing for her homeland.

    She had finally convinced him to stop at a petrol station. There, she’d gone in to buy some things. Balon had refused to stop, driving at breakneck speed. Hours passed. All he’d wanted was to get there early and make his way to the front of the long line. Once at the station, she walked out and made her way towards the shop with its elegant goods and bumped into a girl wearing a black cloak selling dessert to the cars at the petrol station. The light from a car’s front bumper reflected off her tray, the shrink-wrapped pistachios in the girl’s palm shining.

    They looked at each other for a long time. They were like twins. She apologised then hurried along. Before thinking about food, she bought some sanitisers, wet wipes and water bottles. Balon caught up with her. ‘What’s all this?’

    ‘Please, not now. There’s still so long to go.’

    As she went up to the bathroom, he placed the items at the cashier, and approached the girl to buy a tray of sweets. Unlike at most of the stops, she’d found that the bathroom was clean.

    In the morning he tells her the story: ‘You know she’s a Syrian girl. She makes these sweets at home and sells them every night to those passing by the station.’

    ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

    ‘I’m the driver and I read customers,’ he replies. ‘You would’ve sat with her for forever and we don’t have that kind of time.’

    She drinks her coffee quickly, tasting a little of the Syrian girl’s dessert, while those feet start walking alongside the queue of cars – measured, heavy steps on the desert sand that make a scratching sound that pinches the cold in her rebellious insides.

    ‘Balon, I need to go to the bathroom.’

    ‘I was waiting for you to ask that.’ He smiles. ‘Let’s go.’

    She opens the car door. The morning world is crowded with feet that wear different shoes; but the owners’ faces are all united in the exhaustion drawn on them. The drivers exchange crude jokes. They brighten up when they see Balon. She seems confident as they walk the road together to then cross train tracks to an old building on a side street. As usual, Balon is joking all the way; her hair agitates, revealing a clash from the night before.

    ‘Screw you Balon. You made me eat and drink this time, not like my last journey.’

    ‘How else would you pass the time then? Don’t tell me you’re in the mood for reading.’

    ‘How could I read now? Our journey is more than enough for others to read about.’

    He looks at her cautiously. ‘Don’t you dare write about it.’

    She looks at him in silence. ‘What? I got it, I got it. Don’t worry it’s just the bathroom.’

    The driver in a camel-coloured cloak teases, ‘Balon you’ve filled out!’ Balon chuckles. All the drivers fear him – even the older ones. Daylight reveals coal ash dressing the corners of the motorised coffins. Spaces extend on both sides of the street, scattered with a few trees, behind which the intentions of foxes lurk, their shadows fleeing in the dead of night, destroying any illusions, wondering if they have managed to capture their prey. Darkness recedes, the last pages of night folded away. A man relieves himself, hidden behind the wheel of a car; the door of an medium-sized minibus opens while a mother changes her child’s diaper on one of its seats; a teenage girl applies lipstick in the side mirror, matching the hijab of a woman who is still carefully wrapping it, its burgundy colour more elegant still.

    Climbing three steps, they reach the building. A white cat, brushed with grey, rummages through rubbish bags at the open door to a room where mattresses lie on the floor. A child is still asleep on one of them. As she enters, she finds some old-fashioned sofas and worn-out beds. ‘This way!’ Balon gestures.

    ‘What?’ she replies.

    ‘It’s the bathroom,’ he says.

    She makes her way to it. Tissues are scattered on the floor – it’s far from clean. She tries in one way or another to relieve herself. She stands in front of the dimly light mirror, looks at her face, and decides she won’t wash it. ‘I don’t feel the need to,’ she says to herself.

    She washes her hands then opens the door. Balon is waiting for her outside. ‘Wait for me,’ he says.

    ‘I’m waiting,’ she replies quietly. How much patience that road needed.

    A friend had mentioned that this place was rented to families waiting for the ferry for 150 LE a night. The ferry that cuts through a canal, which throughout history has been the added value in the starting of civilisations.

    ‘Let’s wait for the train. It comes through here every morning.’ Balon seems happy about this fact. ‘You know, I haven’t set foot in Gaza in eleven years. I miss it.’

    They make their way to the car again. The weather suddenly turns, getting increasingly hot. The sun shoots its rays to weaken the limbs of already-tired children, rendering them unable even to play. The sound of weeping fills the place. An old man groans, complaining of a phantom pain; wives complain to their husbands of being tired and the queues grow, the waiting endless. ‘A thousand passengers today,’ someone tells the driver, while two other drivers are bickering.

    ‘You stole my spot when I was sleeping,’ he accuses him, all while those measured steps fire shots into the sky.

    ‘Get back in your cars!’

    She hardly remembers anything; the mists of memory catch up with her as the mirror darkens and her vision blurs. Her eyes widen to grasp the shadows of parallel worlds. The car descends into darkness and falls into a tunnel, the rain thickens, the desert collapses. Al-Najashi’scane of justice taps the ebony-covered floor. The pattern – inlaid mother-of-pearl triangles – is a mirror, reflecting the path of the delta’s flow and the birth of new species, new life.

    ‘Who believes in the game?’ he cries out. The strands of her hair are flying, and Balon’s cheeks are flushed. Droves of people in black abayas are queuing. It’s the Syrian girl who makes the sweets, the man who sold her the sandwiches, the driver who stirred the sugar in her cup, that other man who exchanged his camel abaya for a black one, the elderly man who wanders at night, the teenaged girl applying lipstick, the other woman slowly wrapping her hijab, and others – they all live in those mirrored triangles. He repeats his cry, ‘Who believes in the dice snake? The Nile is najashi brown, and it longs for its snake and the water of its homeland.’

    ‘No, we’ve strayed too far. We need to cross the canal to my country.’ She cries out.

    He ignores her cries. ‘The dice has six faces.’ He strides towards her.  She is sitting alone in the cafe, the screen showing a goal being scored. The smoke from her shisha rises. He continues addressing her: ‘You know, the dice has six faces. The first face is a snake that does not release its venom but eats fish and small frogs. The second face is a grain of wheat that will protect Saint Barbara, and the third is an Akkub thorn that will ease the pain between two cities. The fourth a bite of meshaltet to create goodwill between a desert and a sea. The fifth face is the Aleppo pistachio that takes the Syrian girl to the station, the sixth a brown foot that brings you to the Nile.

    ‘Snake (first face) + Brown Foot (sixth face) = the snake will return home to the Nile to devour all the fish and frogs he desires.

    ‘Grain of Wheat (second face) + Aleppo Pistachio (fifth face) = Saint Barbara will be protected, and the Syrian girl will arrive at the station.

    ‘Akkub (third face) + Meshaltet (fourth face) = the pain between two cities will be eased, bringing goodwill to the sea and the desert.

    ‘You must choose between feeding an animal, protecting two women, and bringing peace to two cities and two natures. Look at the total sum of the faces, every choice equals seven steps, either forwards or backwards. In the end, it’s either the Nile or the canal. Over there is life and back there is a Return.’

    Everyone is exhausted. They start snapping at each other. Most of them chose life. She remains silent. His cane taps the ground. ‘Silence.’ He goes on, ‘In 24 hours you will give me your answer.’

    She opens her eyes and they rest on the car window. The pressure in her ears is overwhelming. The buses are lining up, and the sound of a metal plate vibrating under the weight of its wheels resembles a hungry lion’s roar. Her chest tightens; she can’t breathe. The car is filling up with sand. She can feel it in her teeth. And her throat is filling up with water, and she clings to the dress of an Egyptian farmer and paddles her torch to the surface. The fire does not fade.

    The cane slashes the belly of the water, the blood of countless workers gushes out into the canal, and the helmets of soldiers cling to the abyss. The bodies are hiding from her. The farmer is trying to float to the surface. A lifeless military uniform throws luggage from the top of a shipping container loaded with people, burning an unjust history. Land swallows up the river water in an unnatural way, leaving humanity to wonder if the Statue of Liberty can ever return home from New York to Egypt, a trophy of a saint’s revolutionary promise.

    Everything is on fire, even her insides. ‘I need to breathe.’

    ‘Patience, it’s the canal. We’re between two seas,’ Balon says.

    Floating cities with Chinese script on their sides go past. ‘Which sky are we in? Seventh heaven?’ she asks.

    ‘I don’t know,’ he replies. They keep going, falling into the arid desert of the 1,000 passengers.

    She wakes as she climbs the steps at the top of the tunnel: Oxford Street underground station, London. Loud music is playing as she walks out. She stands at the top of the stairs and slowly breathes in the priceless air that smells like freedom. She wonders if everyone around her shares her sense of freedom after being suffocated in the underground for mere minutes. Reaching the top of the staircase opens the door to a world of well-heeled, fashionable shoes that have trampled all over the world in the quest for ‘civilisation’.She can smell the smell of empire-building wafting from the marble buildings, stones telling the stories of past glory.

    Twilight engulfs the pink sky, people of all different colours and shapes walking past her. Everyone is wearing something else; different fabrics and materials, cheap and expensive all at the same time. Everything has its own charm. Everything seems too fast. But she still remains trapped in her own reality. She picks up the pace, walking faster on the pavement,but her feet feel heavy. The storefronts are drawing in the crowds, and the city is screaming with signs of life. But she can’t hear it. She pleads with the city, ‘London, wipe away my sorrow. Absorb my anxiety, my pain. Do not abandon me. Do not abandon my joy.’

    The window returns – the window opposite a wall closing in on her imagination. She sits nearby, writing some words. She looks up and glimpses part of a cloud and a tree whose leaves are heavy with raindrops, and pedestrians’ feet walking by her basement flat on 226 Cromwell Street.

    She grips the mug of hot tea and takes a sip. She’s listening to music and trying to stay warm. But no heat could calm the anxiety in her.

    In contrast, in the noise and chaos of the city she found the calm she needed – not like the constant hum that occupies her memory, her imagination, that’s still stuck on a mural-covered wall in a refugee camp, where a man with a dark beard reached for her hand to cook the burbara, and where her mother’s voice called to remind her of the Akkub thorn and the saint in Bethlehem.

    ~

    She opens her eyes and queues of people rush to a window from which they’re selling chicken sandwiches. The cars are too close together, exhaustion drawn on their faces, and the rocky mountains envelop people in a spot in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a concrete well. ‘We’ve arrived at the Maydan roadblock.’ Balon tells her. ‘You’re finally awake.’

    She can’t bring herself to smile. ‘I was back in London.’

    The day passes, and a violent storm carries them on their way. Balon is driving the car at breakneck speed; a few times, it jumps up and their heads hit the roof. There are several barriers along the way: bags filled with sand, stones, and question marks. Their bags were searched several times, by old hands, young hands, rough hands. The wind carries the sand to chase their window and the salt to the edge of the street, a natural stop sign. The sky turns white, and the plants disappear, and so do the signs of a possible life.

    Cement blocks with shut windows are interspersed on one side of the road. These were built by the government, for the families of the victims of a terrorist attack. A mosque and everyone inside it was blown up, and the people were compensated with these small houses. Balon talks at length about terrorists and smugglers.

    She had asked him several times to stop at a gas station, but he refused because he wanted to arrive early. He had to stick to his plan at any cost. The goal was too precious to risk getting lost in the depths of the desert. She insists and asks him again, ‘I need to go to the bathroom!’

    Now he quickly replies, ‘Let’s go.’ They get out of the car and cross the military checkpoint to use their bathroom.

    She lets out a scream as soon as she opens the door. ‘What is this?’ Dried urine forms a thick layer that covers the bathroom floor. Her foot slips in a still pool, on whose surface swarms of flies gather. You can’t tell which faction they belong to.  ‘What is this filth?’ she mutters to herself. She walks out. This place broke something inside her. She was starting to crack. A voice murmurs, ‘It’s the call of the return–it purifies the soul and washes away all its impurities, no matter how intertwined.’

    The soldier standing by the barrier gives her a scrutinising look. ‘What’s wrong with you? You need something?’

    She doesn’t say anything. She just walks through the barrier. Balon follows her. ‘What happened?’ he asks.

    ‘I told you we should’ve stopped somewhere else before the checkpoint. They’re punishing themselves, not us,’ she shouts. He tries to calm her down. She yanks the car door open and takes the bottled water. She pours it onto her shoes and then scrubs them with sand three times. Anger is eating her up inside.

    She begins to remember the dog Balon had run over while he was speeding. And there was also the woman on the road whom he refused to give a ride to when her car ran out of petrol. He had shut his humanity off twice, just to go on his way.

    He needs to connect the desert and the sea – to bring peace to two cities.

    Night again, and the pale-yellow lights on the road are waning. She is completely exhausted, and Balon is getting increasingly tense the closer they get to their destination. He calms down for a moment and turns to her. ‘We’ll go spend the night at my aunt’s house.’

    She interrupts him. ‘No, just take me to any gas station.’

    ‘Not happening. I’m a man and I can’t accept that.’ 

    She laughs sarcastically. ‘You ran over a dog and left a woman stranded in the desert.’

    ‘No arrival without sacrifice; think of them as an offering to the desert sands.’ 

    They enter a narrow passage. He parks the car and opens a metal gate. Climbing three steps, they reach the entrance and pull back a curtain that opens onto a simple living room where worn-out rugs are scattered on the floor. His aunt Sabah, a kind woman who shares her mother’s name, has cooked her dinner; a grilled chicken, no less.

    ‘I’m sorry but I can’t eat anything right now,’ she says. ‘I’m just so tired.’ She lies down on one of the sofas. ‘Please let me sleep here.’ There, she receives a visitation from a believer, who whispers in her ear, You killed the saint of the desert, you let go of the Akkub thorn, the wheat no longer grows. How will you ease the pain between two cities? You have cut the cord that connects two natures.

    ‘Not me!’ she screams. She wakes up and the sound of her coughing fills the room. The aunt holds her. She brings her some sandwiches and juice from the fridge in the middle of the room. The fridge looks like the ones they sell goods out of in shops. Sabah’s house must also be a place of business. They stay up together, eating and talking. ‘My son disappeared for many years. Later we found out that he had been in prison. He joined one of those cells,’ she complained.

    She was filled with questions about these cells. Was death tailor-made to fit their size, or did they fashion death in their own image? They creep into crevices and lay in wait, suddenly appearing when ideals, places, and resources cause division. Even the individual self is divided: we contain within us two separate entities that are unclear, separate and contradictory. But their death is not natural, doesn’t fuel history or feed the soil; it uproots plants, and pollutes the fertility of the land.

    They talk about their respective areas, Gaza and Sinai, until she falls back asleep. ‘I’ll wake you up at the dawn prayer so you can leave early,’ Sabah whispers.

    Saturday morning

    She wakes up to the feeling of dew on her eyelids. Sabah has woke her up at dawn. She washes her face with a little water, puts on her shoes and her coat, and pulls her damp hair back in a ponytail. Balon helps her carry her bags back to the car. A group of young men, their neighbours, are busy carrying red bricks, trying to finish building their house. A new life begins. Bricks made of Nile mud, burned for the sake of isolating others. The desert saga of red brick houses that burn in summer and stay cool in winter.

    Balon, still flushed, brightens everyone’s day here. The music he plays in the car alternates: current music, then older music, from before the Arab Spring and the years that passed too quickly since then, and then current music again. ‘You listen to my favourite songs, even though you’re about ten years younger than me!’ He seems relieved.

    ‘Yes, I like the rhythm.’ They both fall silent.

    ‘Look at those high-rise buildings.’ he points. She looks and at the same time sees a medium-sized truck carrying workers piled on top of each other, their keffiyehs wrapped around their head, their faces tanned, their shoes torn.

    ‘Who are these high-rises for?’ she asks.

    ‘We don’t know,’ he chuckles. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and live there!’ Their laughter rises with the sound of the music.’

    He is still driving fast; it seems that other cars have overtaken them. He stops, gets out of the car, then almost immediately gets back in and drives back past them. ‘What did you do?’ she asks.

    ‘Some problems can only be solved this way,’ he says.

    He’s probably paid someone off. They stop at another checkpoint, where the soldier inspects the contents of a single bag. He opens it and looks surprised to find it filled with books: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, Elif Shafak’s The Three Daughters of Eve, The Truths We Hold by Kamala Harris, Identity by Milan Kundera, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, Leo Tolstoy’s A Confession, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

    Balon approaches the soldier and whispers something in his ear. She turns around and looks out the rear windshield. The inspection continues and the soldier peeks into her window. She watches a group of soldiers sitting around a table, having breakfast while the queue behind them gets longer and the bags waiting for inspection linger. Balon shuts the trunk. She turns towards him, ‘Any other checkpoints to go through?’

    ‘Probably not,’ he replies. The car is still beset by the choice of going onwards or turning back.They have crossed the canal, and the road to the city by the sea gets longer, testing her imagination.

    ‘There were so many trees here – olive, peach, even almonds. They uprooted them, the water no longer reaches this part of the land anymore.’ It’s Balon playing tour guide of the mysterious desert sands – well, a guide that only tells her what he wants to relay.

    ‘Imagine if this desert were green. A green, peaceful route to our city,’ she says.

    ‘The military barracks protect our children in the city. My wife and I are expecting a baby girl, you know,’ Balon says.

    She looks out of the window, and one image after the next from her recent memories comes to mind. An elderly man lying on the ground, surrounded by broken glass. Fourteen people crammed into a seven-seater Peugeot. The old man’s feet are right up in a little girl’s face, which is lit by the moon; the girl freezes with terror in the middle of the night. She goes forwards and backwards. All night long the sounds of gunfire and the howling of dogs echo in the desert’s cold air. She finds herself copying the older man’s movements – the one who has returned from Kuwait after thirty years, after his wife died, who keeps pacing, trying to keep warm. A soldier shoots the ground by her feet, and another man shouts at her, ‘You have to sit down!’ But she can’t sleep, not until morning, when she collapses into a deep sleep, resting her forehead on the back of the seat in front of her.

    This was after she had left the private car she rented for herself. She had realised that the driver had no hope of getting to the front of the queue, and she simply did not have the serenity to stay in this motorised coffin. So she paid him and dragged her bags out of the car and paid for half a seat in another car that was in the front of the queue. Otherwise, she would have spent another week in the wilderness. In the car, there was barely room to move. She had to sit with her legs contorted for hours. The heat of the afternoon intensified, and it felt like the sun was burning off everyone’s eyelids. They were dripping with sweat, so much so that the little girl’s hair was wet with it. Blisters devoured their skin, and a plastic bottle in the driver’s armrest melted in the heat. There is no mercy in forgetting. 

    A faint voice says: ‘I’m going up ahead. When I turn and give you a quick wink, sprint to that gate – it opens at nine on the dot.’

    She starts running, a young man is running alongside her too, and he helps her with her bags. The officer behind the gate is smiling. She is out of breath as she enters the waiting room to stamp her passport with an arrival visa. The room is still dark.

    Nayrouz Qarmout is a journalist, author and women’s rights campaigner. Born in Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Damascus, in 1984, as a Palestinian refugee, she was ‘returned’ to the Gaza Strip at the age of 11 as part of the 1994 Oslo Peace Accord, where she now lives. She has worked in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, raising awareness of gender issues and promoting the political and economic role of women in policy, law, and the media. She has won a number of prizes including the Creative Women’s Award for her debut collection The Sea Cloak, which was the bestseller at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2019.

  • My Eraser is a Memory

    My Eraser is a Memory

    Nayrouz Qarmout writes from Gaza

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    Do I continue after the 2014 war, returning to that shaking window, writing and writing?

    It’s been almost seven years, and as the pain has grown, my pen, that extension of my body, has flowed. The wound has expanded with memory, and fitted itself, naturally, to the shape of a story.

    My ear is to the window. As I listen, I think of it growing, becoming an eraser at the head of a pencil. It removes one pain and creates another. The hearing creates a bright, frightening place in memory. It awaits what’s coming: the screams.

    It seeks out the pain of a child that it will, in a moment, bring to the surface; it makes a shadow where a mother once smiled. We live at the edge of a precipice that divides two lives.

    In an instant, there is a plume of smoke. There are tears. They are hidden in memory, and in that eraser.  

    There is a sound, and I remain behind the window. There is a thundering silence; it is numbing. The explosion inside me spills the blood of faces I’d surreptitiously hidden within me.

    I was weary of today’s Nakba Day anniversary for the empty pain it brings. And yes, it is empty – buried inside a cannon, a battleship, a tank; it is now a plane that comes in from afar, blowing things up, setting off the memory. But it only goes off through my loyalty to the cage that keeps my people safe from harm.

    Sheikh Jarrah smiles at us; the child in Gaza cries in farewell to his father. My memory is an eraser; it takes it all in, and it removes the feeling so that it can withstand.

    Nayrouz Qarmout is a journalist, author and women’s rights campaigner. Born in Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Damascus, in 1984, as a Palestinian refugee, she was ‘returned’ to the Gaza Strip at the age of 11 as part of the 1994 Oslo Peace Accord, where she now lives. She has worked in the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, raising awareness of gender issues and promoting the political and economic role of women in policy, law, and the media. She has won a number of prizes including the Creative Women’s Award for her debut collection The Sea Cloak, which was the bestseller at Edinburgh International Book Festival 2019.

  • If Gaza were a story

    Doaa Mohaisen grew up in Gaza. When she moved to Qatar, she was confronted with ‘the fakeness and fragility of the hero narrative’.

    ‘What is your greatest flaw?’ Hala asks from the driving seat as we pass through Doha city centre, on the way to meet our fellow grad students.

    ‘How about we start with our classmates’?’ I respond, the lights of Doha’s glamorous nightlife casting patterns on the car’s dark interior. ‘Let’s see… Sarah can be blunt and is convinced she knows what everyone is thinking; Ghadeer insists on using long, pretentious words and can’t keep a single thought to herself; Aisha is hot-headed and never finishes a sentence with a full thought; Nahla is meek, rarely decisive, and is difficult to read most of the time. You,’ I say turning to Hala, ‘you are finicky and take too much pleasure in correcting people’s grammar and I… well, I am a perfectionist, an idealist and a drama queen.’

    There was something quite liberating about playing this game. We embrace the faults in others because, being so profoundly flawed ourselves, they allow us to relate to them, to sympathize and connect. And what is true of other people in real life also applies to characters in fiction: be they heroes or anti-heroes, protagonists or villain, it is the flaws that make them approachable.

    As we arrive at the restaurant, I begin to speculate: Would the world sympathize with the Palestinians more if they were characters in a story?

    Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina begins with the following statement: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Every Palestinian family has its own story and clings to it defensively, knowing that even its suffering is unique and thus, in some ways, precious. And if a family member leaves home, they have no choice other than to carry their suffering with them. Indeed, you could leave Gaza, but Gaza will never leave you.

    When I introduced myself to the class on my first day in graduate school, and explained that I was fresh from Gaza (not born and raised in Doha like most other Palestinian students), my classmates stopped playing with their phones, suddenly, and looked up at me, as if for the first time. Some students hung around after the class had finished to ask me about the situation in Gaza. One theatrically announced, ‘You are all heroes!’ The statement irritated me, reminding me of the sort of rhetoric you see in Arab newspapers. ‘We are not heroes,’ I snapped. ‘We are simply humans who have been presented with this obstacle in life and are expected to endure it. We haven’t endured it because we are heroes, but because there’s no alternative. We did not choose this struggle. Nobody chooses to live in the largest open-air prison, where there is no future, no drinking water, no electricity, where more than 60 percent of those aged between 15 and 29 are jobless, where you have to buy food every day because fridges are useless. Nobody chooses to live in a place where you can get sick and die because basic medication isn’t provided on time or provided at all. Would you give me your easy life and First World problems in exchange for being called ‘a hero’?’

    I was a mad, angry Gazan on my first day of graduate school. I was mad because I couldn’t see myself ever sympathizing with a hero.

    Attributing heroism to Gazans reinforces the representation of difference by portraying an image of the Palestinian as one born with special capabilities to bear the unbearable. As I was growing up in the Gaza Strip, I was, like other Palestinians, fed with the narrative claiming that the Palestinian cause is central to the Muslim Ummah (community), that Palestine was in the thoughts and prayers of Muslims around the world. As we were bombed, killed and forced to evacuate our homes, we were reminded that Palestine is what unites the Muslim world, that Palestinians are heroes who are defending the honour of our Ummah. But what I realized after traveling to a fellow Arab country for graduate school was the fakeness and fragility of the hero narrative; it was a tool used by sluggish Muslims to exempt themselves from blame.

    After explaining the 12-year siege, from scratch, yet again, to some of the students gathered round me, one of them, Maha, asked, ‘But Doaa, what can we do?’ ‘At very least, equip yourself with some basic awareness of what is happening on the ground—that would be a first step.’ It was shocking to see how many of my fellow Muslims and Arabs were quite clueless about the situation in the Strip. On another occasion, I heard a classmate say, ‘I wish I could pray at Al-Aqsa mosque like you do.’ I could barely keep myself from snapping at her, but I reminded myself that I had to be patient.

    It dawned on me that the people around me needed a serious antidote to the historical amnesia that had taken hold of them; it was similar to the realization that had dawned on the organisers of the Great Return March, back home: the world was forgetting fast.

    Ahmed, a friend of mine had been one of the organizers of the Great Return March. At the beginning, I told him people should not go. Why risk their lives when they could live and be of help to their country? ‘What do they have to lose, Doaa?’ he asked me abruptly. ‘Nothing,’ he went on.

    I thought my perspective on the March would not change, but as the photos of the first Friday and the second came in, I had a change of heart. I was once again a mad, angry Gazan, but this time I was also devastated. I tried to convey to my friends back in Gaza how sorry and depressed I was to see the photos coming from the border area, but they suspected I was just exaggerating. My depression was a joke to them. They couldn’t understand how getting out of bed every day could pose such a challenge to me. They didn’t appreciate that merely being with these people, with all their First World problems, as clueless as they were indifferent to what was happening, could be unbearable. But get out of bed I did, to put on a façade each day to help get me through it all—telling everyone I met, whether they wanted to hear it or not, about what was happening back home. When I arrived back at my apartment each night, I would take down the façade and weep. Alone. Just like the Gazans back home, realizing they too were alone, from the very moment they were first told they were ‘heroes’ and that Palestine was a cause that united all Arabs and Muslims.

    I am a mad, angry Gazan whenever I meet Arabs or Muslims as free as birds but wanting to preach to me about my imprisonment. In reality, they couldn’t care less. So should we stop asking for help altogether? Should I just stay in my bed when Gaza hits the news again and never talk about the realities abroad? Should I just stay quiet, hold my tongue? The author Ghassan Kanafani offered an allegorical answer to this question back in 1962.

    In Men in the Sun, three Palestinians, each with a story of his own, arrange to be smuggled from Iraq to Kuwait in the hope of securing jobs at oil refineries. At each checkpoint, they hide in an empty water tank, enduring an intolerable temperature in the process. When they beg for an alternative to the unbearable heat of the tank, the driver, Abul-Khaizuran, convinces them of their ability to endure like the many others before them. But at the last checkpoint before Kuwait, he gets delayed by a border patrol, and when he returns, he finds all three men have died, apparently passively. ‘Why?’ he keeps asking himself. ‘Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?’

    Doaa Mohaisen is a 22-year-old Palestinian. She is a contributor to Novell Gaza and a writer for We Are Not Numbers. She studied English Language and Literature at IUG, is currently doing an MA at HBKU, Qatar, and works as a freelance translator.

  • Over the sound of the drone

    Gaza is a city that has grown up at war. Conflict seems to be the natural state of affairs here. People are born in wars and die in wars. Many never really free themselves from it at any point in between.

    Growing up in this kind of environment, you cling to anything that offers continuity, or suggests stability; anything that seems to have the power to outlive these endless wars. Something that can outlive them, I learned, is stories. I was always fascinated by the anecdotes and legends my grandmother, Eisha, told us as children. Many of them were stories about her early life, before the Naqba. I would hear similar stories from neighbours in the refugee camp where I grew up (and still live). As an aspiring writer, I always felt it was my duty to keep telling and re-telling these stories, to weave them into my own, and to make them public. Stories of love, adventure, anger, estrangement, nostalgia, social dynamics…

    Sometimes, when we’re caught in the middle of momentous events, I also feel a duty to write about what’s happening right now, right this second. So I have this habit of keeping a kind of a diary whenever war breaks out. Every morning, before attempting to go about a normal day, I handwrite an account of the day before. Sometimes these notes provide raw materials for my fiction, weeks, months, even years later. I regard them like first-hand, eye-witness accounts, almost as if they weren’t written by me. I kept this kind of diary during the previous two assaults on Gaza, in 2008 and 2012. Indeed, I have handwritten pieces dating all the way back to the late 1980s: the eye-witness accounts of a teenager!

    The last Israeli assault took place just a few days after my return from a book tour in the UK. My publisher, Ra Page, at Comma Press, wrote to me to ask if my family and I were safe. By that point I was well into my routine of handwriting diary entries. I believe it was about the fifth day. For a change, I typed one out directly into English, rather than Arabic. He posted part of it on Facebook, then sent all of it to a website in the States. He kept posting my new diary entries from that day onwards, to newspapers and websites around the world. Eventually they started appearing in major international newspapers. The diaries have now all been collected into a single book entitled, The Drone Eats with Me.

    I was not writing news reports about the situation in Gaza. I was trying to talk about my personal life, and the lives of my relatives and friends in these circumstances. War turns you into numbers. I was trying to counteract this, to show that we are human beings. That we have to carry on living, despite the war, in these situations. That the human soul isn’t lost, necessarily, under the rubble, nor are its memories or dreams. I was trying to humanize what war tries to dehumanize.

    I was also trying to reassure myself that I wasn’t actually dead already. Sometimes in the insane smoke of war, you do begin to wonder what’s a hallucination and what’s not. Through writing these pieces and then seeing them appear in international newspapers, I felt that I must be still alive. More importantly, I felt that I was doing something. I was telling these stories of the present, in my own way.

    So The Drone Eats with Me should be read against this backdrop. It strives to counteract the media presentation of Gaza as a city occupied only by numbers. Without knowing they would one day appear in a book, my diary entries were presenting another Gaza. A forgotten Gaza. An unseen Gaza.

    In the media, Gaza is just a victim. It is a city of war, of destruction, of assassination and of poverty. All of which it is, of course. But besides this, it is also a city full of life. A city where there are cafés, artists, fishermen, farmers, beaches, children. Gaza produces literature like anywhere else – but because of the Israeli siege and the difficulty of movement into and out of the Strip, the writing it produces doesn’t reach wider audiences. There is a vibrant cultural life in Gaza but it is hidden behind the curtain of the news. Young authors, female and male, meet regularly to read their work and listen to each other’s. But they struggle to ever get it published as there is no specialized publishing house in Gaza and their communication with publishers outside is limited. Often they receive invitations to read their work outside of the Strip, through festivals like PALFEST which takes place in other Palestinian territories, but they fail to get permits to leave.

    It is important that these authors are given a chance to speak and to have their works read and discussed. It is important that this other Gaza has a chance to be heard over the sound of the drone’s constant buzzing.

    ‘Witnessed, lived, and recorded page by page. A searing account of living through the 2014 bombardment of Gaza. We who report it can never capture the true scale of individual and collective suffering. As a Gaza resident, Atef Abu Saif’s diary provides an insight no outsider could ever have achieved.’ – Jon Snow, Channel 4 News

    Find out more about The Drone Eats with Me.

    Read an interview with Sarah Irving, who translated one of the short stories in The Book of Gaza (2014).

  • No more trips to the beach, no more ice cream in Gaza

    Last year I took my three year old son, Zino, to Gaza on his second trip to visit his grandparents, three uncles, four aunts and many cousins. It was warm; the April wind wasn’t too chilly for his half-English, half-Palestinian olive skin. Despite waiting for hours at the Egyptian side of the Rafah border, we got in and, to Zino’s delight, a family beach trip was planned for the next day. He is in love with the fresh air and sea water and was thrilled when he was taken by my two fishermen uncles on their small fishing boat.

    Today, Zino is four and a half years old, a bit older, and asking difficult questions. Not just the ‘How was I born?’ type, but also ‘Why is Gaza being bombarded?’ The innocent soul inside him doesn’t comprehend why that lovely holiday place is being ruined. A few days into the assault on Gaza, he was watching Channel Four News and saw images of destruction from the tragic attack on four children playing football on the same beach where he once stood and had an ice cream. I will never forget the look on his face as he turned around to me. He recognised the beach but only said, ‘Oh no, there will be no ice cream in Gaza, and it is too hot.’

    gazaboy

    The ones who are paying the heaviest price in this tragic situation are those innocent souls. Zino is thousands of miles away in London, yet he is having his fantasy world of Neverland shattered in front of his eyes on the small screen. The children living in Gaza have of course paid a higher price than anyone, not just with their bodies, but with the destruction of their own fantasies, the same ones that may have kept them going in what has now become a wasteland around them. Seeing their beach, playgrounds, schools, hospitals, homes, mosques all being targets for the Israeli war machine has left them with nowhere to go, not even the little worlds inside their heads. Over the phone, my six-year-old nephew tells me, ‘Spiderman and Batman cannot come to Gaza to fight the baddies because the border is always shut.’

    This kind of thing doesn’t make the news on a lot of international media outlets, who keep on reporting Israeli propaganda without even any fact-checking, always giving the same excuse of a Palestinian rocket having been fired from the vicinity of a school.

    Even if we assume this is correct, which hasn’t been proven, does this give anyone the excuse to target an area deliberately, knowing that it is highly likely that children will be killed?  Those very same children have now witnessed three wars on Gaza in less than six years.

    I have written about those previous wars and had hoped that I wouldn’t have to again. Now I am writing this and dedicating it to the spirit of those children in Gaza, not those who died, because hopefully they are happy somewhere else, but to those who are still there, to those who have become Hogwarts ghosts as the assault rages on. Thousands are either badly injured or waiting for their turn.

    Zino wants to go back to Gaza as soon as the border is open. He already knows that it will be different from last time. But he says he wants to go so he can take the recipe for ice cream. His Teta (grandmother) can make it then give it to the children in Jabalia Refugee Camp.

  • Life in War

    Nayrouz Qarmout follows her short story for PEN Atlas with a gripping diary piece from the heart of the conflict in Gaza, describing what it’s like to look after family, prepare food, and scan the internet for messages as the missiles fall.

    Translated from the Arabic by Ghada Mourad and Tyson Patros.

    I sleep for only a few hours at a time. I haven’t really been able to sleep since the beginning of the war on Gaza. My eyes hurt; I have a constant headache, never-ending worry. I do not know what the date is, or how many days have passed in this war. Night has merged with day. In the early morning hours I try to think of nothing other than the sound of birds, an antidote to the hum of warplanes and drones, to which my eardrums tremble. My bed and my window shake when missiles fall and crash like earthquakes.

    I try to relax in the hope of getting some sleep. My white cat, with her fluffy fur, sneaks onto my bed. She moves her whiskers on my face and bites my feet to woo me into giving her some food. I feed her despite my drowsiness. With every powerful hit of a missile the cat races, terrified, to shield herself beneath a table or chair – it’s her survival instinct. Even my cat is trying to preserve her life during the war. I know the location of the missile strikes by observing which direction she runs away from danger.

    I have a beautiful canary, but he no longer chirps like the rest of the birds. He too is afraid of the sound of explosions. I try to talk to him, and sing for him, until he pecks at my fingers. Then I know that he has returned to life.

    I decide to take a few hours sleep in the morning, given that I didn’t sleep at night. But every time I hear a powerful strike I unconsciously take my iPhone from the side of my bed and begin to browse and read the news, commentaries, and people’s reactions to what’s happening in Gaza. I make sure that my friends and relatives who are on Facebook are okay. I read the articles that discuss the war on Gaza and share the links, but I don’t understand my mixed feelings. In every moment of fear, I look to the daylight and I feel reassurance engulfing me. I don’t know, perhaps it’s faith in life.

    Amid the warplanes and the navy ships and the tank shells, Israel imposes a curfew without announcing it directly to residents. I remain at home, fearing the danger of moving in the streets or leaving the house. I feel like I’m in a tiny prison, like those held in the prisons of the occupation. I try to have a nice and meaningful day. I love to walk, and so I walk for long hours inside the house. I count the tiles on the floor. I recount the tiles on the floor. I organise my thoughts. I envision my world. I think about what’s happening. Sometimes an idea of what to write occurs to me while walking. I walk until I reach a window and I stand beside it. I look out onto the street, to the sea, and to the colours of the sky near the sea. I take a deep breath and feel relieved that I still sense the beauty of the image.

    My brother’s daughter – the brother who married recently – is only four months old. I play with her a lot. She is very beautiful. Her eyes are bright. She has a huge smile wide enough for the world. Two days ago she realised that she can take hold of the things around her. She grabbed my hand and it made me rejoice. But when somewhere nearby was bombed, she clenched my hand firmly, and as soon as the sound of the strike ended her smile returned. I feared for her. I hugged her for a long time. She is truly an amazing child that knows no fear.

    The electricity regularly cuts out. We try to compensate with electric generators and UBS batteries, and thanks to them we are able to operate many of the appliances. I turn on the television to see the live broadcast of events in Gaza, the opinions of political analysts and the international perspectives about what’s going on. I feel bored. A lot of repetitive talk. As soon as I see the images of massacres and blood in Gaza I feel sad, I weep, but I quickly regain my composure and turn off the television.

    I turn on the radio to listen to the local stations. Their correspondents broadcast from the field and announce the names of the martyrs and the wounded. They play uplifting revolutionary songs. I talk to my father, who has a deep knowledge of Palestine’s history, and we try to predict what might happen.

    My mother is also very keen to discuss the situation in Gaza. She shares her conclusive opinions about what’s happening on social media using her iPad. In this month, the month of Ramadan, we’re accustomed to preparing so many delicious dishes and meals. As soon as my mother feels in danger she prepares the most wonderful food with hints of rare spices. She has mastered cooking the food of Damascus; she was born there. She craves a cigarette after fasting, even though she stopped smoking years ago. But she began smoking again with the onset of the war. She laughs and says that our life is going up in smoke ‘so let me enjoy my cigarette!’ She recounts for us the circumstances that the Palestinian people have faced and the struggle she and my father have gone through. They joined the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. She said ‘we were young then, and we could resist with all our energy’. I help her. I joke with her. I provoke her a bit, because I love her anger.

    Our housekeeper cannot come to work. His house is far away and the road is dangerous. He also has a small family to look after. My sister and I take it upon ourselves to clean the house and arrange the belongings. I love to clean the floor and see it shine. In this act, I think that everything becomes clearer in my mind. Every day I take great pleasure in wiping clean the dust of the bombing and destruction that engulfs the house and its furniture. We leave the windows open to avoid a build up of air pressure in case of bombing. And I cannot turn on the air conditioner or the fans as they require the windows to be closed and need electricity. The summer is very hot here. You don’t find a lot of plants and trees in Gaza. The occupation has uprooted most of our trees, which increases the heat, and increases the humidity of the air because Gaza is on the coast.

    I love to polish cups and glasses. I search for tranquillity and calmness within me. I reorganise the cups in the cupboard. I watch satirical Ramadan television programmes on Arabic channels with my brothers. They steal us away from the stifling atmosphere of war, which lays siege to our movements, dreams and aspirations.

    My brother loves to smoke nargilah and play guitar. I love the embers of the charcoal when they burn, the pull of the water pipe and the scent of fruit that flavours the tobacco – even if it is harmful for your health. I love listening to music. When people smoke nargilah the conversation and joking intensify. We become sad when we remember my uncle who was martyred by a direct hit of an Israeli missile years earlier. It was my uncle who taught us how to prepare the head of the nargilah and fill it with tobacco. My uncle was so happy when we returned to Gaza from abroad after the Oslo Accords. He pulled me out of the car window to kiss me, all those years ago. He hadn’t seen my father for more than twenty years as he had been forcibly exiled from his country. We discuss what’s happening as if we are young again. We have points of view which we try to analyse and connect to reality. We drink coffee to help us stay awake and alert if danger arises. The smell of coffee is amazing. It is lovely.

    I love to prepare desserts. We prepare a special dessert during Ramadan – Qatayef. It’s a pancake that we glaze with butter, then fill with cream, sprinkle with grated pistachios, and soak in honey and rose water. We feel distressed and pray even more for people who have no food; they already lost everything. And yet I don’t want us to lose the beauty of this month despite the harshness of the circumstances. We have to live.

    I shower a lot because of the severity of the heat. I love water and the lather of soap. Even though we filter the water several times with specialised equipment to be able to use it, it’s still polluted. Israel stole our water. I think of those who were displaced from their homes and not even permitted to bathe. They have no water. They have no beds to sleep in. We try to donate through aid that is collected by every single neighbourhood; clothes, food, money and many other necessities. But I know that they are not at peace as they lost their homes and their stability. I thank God that we still have our home. But there is an ache in my chest for those expelled from their homes.

    I write and I write. I write my diaries, or a political article, or a prose poem, or a short story. I burst with anger at what’s happening. My people deserve nothing but life. I observe the various cities throughout the world that are in solidarity with us. I feel reassured that true humanity has not dissipated. Many friends, here and abroad, contact us to check on us. They raise our morale. They ask, ‘how are you all doing?’ We always say that we are doing well. But the reality is that Gaza is not well. We are trying to persevere until the end.

    I try to sleep again, but I am very alert. Any movement wakes me. My brother sneaks into my room quietly and takes my computer charger. He wants to exploit the electricity before it cuts out again. His movement wakes me even though he walks with extreme caution. I laugh. I try to go back to sleep.

    One night among these nights of war, my family and I felt that the air was suffocating us. People said that toxic gases had been released into the air. We must be wary of them, shut the windows and drape soaked cloths over our noses. We were confused and didn’t know whether to open the windows for fear of bombing or to shut them for fear of poisonous gases. We were not able to sleep. Laughter pervaded the house. My brother and sister and I don’t know why we laugh. We figured that maybe it was laughing gas. It is the irony of the situation in which we live.

    On another night, the Israeli Occupation Forces launched a missile to warn us of a more intense bombing that would be arriving shortly. We deferred our sleep until the strike, and gathered in the middle of the house searching for safety. We do not have any safe shelters. The bombing was delayed. Where is the warplane? Bomb us and finish your disgraceful work, we want to sleep!

    Israel drops flyers from the sky, advising that we vacate our homes, warning that they will invade some of our territories. I scoff at these flyers. I prefer death over serious injury or another exodus. I do not want to be displaced. I shall die in my home. Yet I swear that I love life.

    Ghada Mourad is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine.

    Tyson Patros is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

    The Book of Gaza, edited by Atef Abu Saif, and published by Comma Press, brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story from that era, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, of what it means to be a Palestinian, and how that identity is continually being reforged; stories of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what many have called ‘the largest prison in the world’.

    Another testimony from Nayrouz Qarmout has been published in The Electronic Intifada.

  • Umm Ahmed: Newsflash

    A rare and incredibly moving piece of fiction from Gaza, from writer and activist Nayrouz Qarmout. In this short story, Nayrouz communicates the everyday experience of life in Gaza; where fear and horror collide with moments so full of life and love. Nayrouz also contributed to the PEN award-winning anthology The Book of Gaza, published by Comma Press in June.

    Translated from the Arabic by Sarah Irving

    As dawn breaks with the twittering of birds, she stands by the kitchen windowsill. Every day she greets the sunrise, absorbing through the window the radiance of the new day, the scents of the morning. But despite the mingling perfumes, fear invades the heart of Umm Ahmed.

    Umm Ahmed stands by the window, meticulously washing her dishes, glasses and cutlery, escaping from the noises of aircraft and raids and bombs into the sound of water flowing from the tap. She contemplates the soap-bubbles on the glasses. The sunlight on the water droplets shimmers in her eyes, but her mind and heart are filled with images, with pictures of children consumed by shrapnel and fire. Tears run down Umm Ahmed’s cheeks and mingle with the sound of the water on the dishes.

    She looks to the sky and sees far-off smoke, burning buildings. She jumps at the sound of an ambulance speeding, its tyres fighting the asphalt of the road, the paramedics inside. The radios in the street sing for the resistance. She talks to herself:

    – See who died, you sons-of-bitches, hunting our children like birds…

    The phone rings. Umm Ahmed dashes to it; her sister answers

    – Hello.

    – Hello. Are you OK?

    – We’re good. Tell me how you’re doing?

    – They’re bombing our neighbourhood, Umm Ahmed. I’m scared for the children.

    – What are you waiting for? Get the children and bring them here. Our house is safe.

    – OK. I’ll get the kids dressed and find a car to take us all.

    – Take care, we’re waiting for you. God keep you.

    Umm Ahmed looks at her son, Ahmed, and her daughters, Jenin and Jaffa. They’re sleeping deeply, after a month of the long days of war. She hasn’t closed the windows all night, for fear of explosions and shattering glass. They are sleeping on mattresses which she has dragged into the middle of the house, abandoning their rooms and beds to avoid some of the danger. But danger is everywhere, no matter where they go.

    She switches on the UPS battery, which gives the house a little electricity during the continuous power cuts, so that she can watch the tragedies unfold on the TV. She flicks from channel to channel, watching not just the news bulletins but also savouring the experts, analysts and reporters guessing what the date might mark the end of the war. She mutters to herself:

    – What’s the use in telling people they’re going to die? We know that.

    Ahmed wakes up and rushes to his computer and mobile, checking his messages before he’s even wiped the sleep from his eyes. He, too, is talking to himself:

    – Oh my God… they shelled such-and-such a building, so-and-so was martyred, fuck your fathers you sons-of-bitches. You’ll get what’s coming to you. Mum!

    – Yes?

    – Tell me the news!

    – I heard you, you don’t need me to tell you. Now – your face – to the bathroom! You smell foul. Go and get washed before the water gets cut off, there’s a little bit of hot water.

    Her sister arrives with her two small children, their eyes puzzled, their voices broken and hesitant, breathing shakily, terrified by the death-missiles. They enter the house:

    – Oh! Umm Ahmed, such terrifying scenes – bodies sprawled, blood in the streets, they don’t fear God, the Lord take them…

    – The main thing is that you’re here safely, but you need to be strong for the kids.

    – God help us!

    – Wake up Jenin…

    She looks at her sister next to her, calling on God: Let Jaffa be OK, it’s not a problem if I die, but she’s only little…

    Her Jawwal mobile rings, and it’s one of the children’s aunts, then another…

    – Hello? Salaam Aleikum.

    – Sister, they’re shelling around us…

    – Our house is safe, come to us.

    – Aleikum as-Salaam.

    – There’s something happening everywhere…

    – Come soon, it’s a long way…

    Umm Ahmed’s house was in the middle of Gaza City, not far from the sea, filled with the scent of the waves and the sand. Umm Ahmed’s sister lived in the north, in Beit Lahia, while her husband’s sister was way down in the south, in al-Qararah. It was an area of burning, shelled by Israeli tanks and artillery, and bombed by warplanes, where Palestinian fighters resisted and planned their retaliation from a network of tunnels.

    The house was shaking from shells being fired by the warships out at sea. The walls and windows were rattling, along with the beds, chairs and dishes. But it was safer than the other houses.

    Jenin runs to her mother and kisses her, Umm Ahmed clings to her daughter, praying to God to protect her and keep her safe.

    – Mum, is Auntie coming to stay?

    – Look Jenin, the house is cramped but it is big enough to hold a thousand friends. Insh’allah they’ll get here safely.

    Abu Ahmed, fighter and martyr, was killed seven years ago in another painful war, but still his memory and the sound of his voice live on with his wife and children. It was a fine memory of a fierce fighter, one who did not give up his land or his principles. He believed in freedom and in a free people, he loved the Palestinians. He wasn’t extreme in his attitudes for the sake of an idea, he understood life and navigated it gently, like a soft stream.

    One sister arrives with her three children and is greeted. Dripping with sweat, she takes off her headscarf:

    – Aah, Umm Ahmed! Where are you Abu Ahmed? See what they’re doing to Palestine, destroying hospitals and schools full of people. What do the Red Cross do? How did it come to this? A new exodus of people leaving their homes for the schools, the occupation forces us from our homes, and the world sits back. Where are the Arabs? Where are the United Nations? Where is Ban Ki-moon?

    – Be patient, sister. We must be steadfast. God is with us, and right is with us.

    The Gaza Strip has a high population density. The buildings are crammed together, with cement roofs. Chatter from every apartment entangles itself with the conversation at the next window. Water is scarce and the electricity gets cut off incessantly. Very few people can travel or leave. But the Palestinians love this patch, they say, and say that it is a land blessed by God.

    Everyone gathers in the house, cowering at the thought of still being within the enemy’s sights. It is the month of Ramadan, and summertime too, so the high temperatures inflame everyone’s moods. Bodies dry out in the long hours of fasting. Perhaps there will be a great reward from God. Most people venerate God, believe and pray to Him. Some are stubborn and reject the idea, through suspicion or uncertainty. But everyone agrees on one reality: they are Palestinians.

    Umm Ahmed goes into the kitchen with the other women to prepare the iftar meal to break the day’s long fast. It has intensified their appetite for food and they search for foreign tastes amongst beautiful fantasies in hidden stories of love, in sea-shells which carry the echoes of far-off memories. They talk, giggle, belly-laugh, swap pots and pans, and Umm Ahmed says to her sister:

    – When the Athan calls out for the maghreb prayers, I want a coffee and a cigarette to settle my head. My head aches from sleeplessness and the sound of missiles. Leave what you’re doing and get a cup of coffee ready.

    In the centre of the house the girls gather together with Jenin and Jaffa, who have woken up late, to lay out a dish of their favourite sweets – qatayef, beloved of the Arabs during the month of Ramadan. They flinch at every missile, crouching as the earth shakes, then carry on chatting, smiling, trying to ignore the uproar of war. Now and again they flick through the TV channels looking for soap operas, a satirical comedy or a romantic drama to steal a few moments away from the horrors of war.

    Like grown-ups, the boys discuss military matters, deconstructing, analysing and each competing to assert his point of view, then getting angry, supporting the resistance, swearing oaths, offering to sacrifice themselves at any moment. Feelings and thoughts clash and collide, veering between accepting their fate, or resisting, standing up to an enemy that possesses weapons they don’t have. Ultimately they are happy with the dignity of combat, even if it is with meagre weapons. And yet they also dream of a leadership that knows when to start and when to end a war.

    The boys grow up too young, aged prematurely by the successive rounds of war. They forget the joy of life and its heedlessness and take on the mantle of manhood and a wise head.

    – Mama, get the coals ready for us, we want to smoke a nargilah!

    – For God’s sake, I wish that nargilah would break! The house is full of smoke and soot, I’m tired of cleaning all the time!

    – Mama, how many Ahmeds do you have?

    – Ah… you!…You are not so innocent are you? You always remind me of your father. You’re so like him.

    They arrange the table, bringing bowls and plates, putting each dish in front of the person who likes it most.

    Ahmed steals a bowl of his favourite salad and, along with his aunt’s son, goes running around the house, his cousin chasing him:

    –  Bring that back, it’s not yours! I asked them for it!

    Wrestling and laughing, Ahmed brings the bowl for his cousin.

    The Athan rings out with great humility, the prayer of the poor, a deep calm. But it also stands as a warning that there should be no-one out in the street right now, nothing to be heard except the sound of the drones and of dishes being passed around, strange smells, the first morsel of bread in the mouth of each person after extreme hunger and thirst.

    Blood floods over the table, mixing with the food and drink, as each of them are fragmented. The laughter disappears, the family make no sound, there are no walls to offer safety anymore. Smoke and dust coat everything, the windows topple inwards, the glass shatters.

    There’s a newsflash on the TV screen: the world watches Umm Ahmed’s windows as a bird flies up from the windowsill. But Umm Ahmed can’t see her house from the world’s point of view, she can’t see the broadcast.

    The rocket surprised everyone. There was a morsel of food and a cry of life, a cry that was stifled. The aunts couldn’t rescue their children, the missile was too fast for them.

    Umm Ahmed’s house was safe, that is what she told everyone. Her sisters fled from death, but met a different one. She had preserved the memory of her husband well, and protected his connection to the land, but she couldn’t protect everyone.

    Ambulance crews and civil defence services rush to Umm Ahmed’s house, begin to wade through the rubble and body parts, their shoes becoming coated with blood. The coal for Ahmed’s nargilah is still burning red. Umm Ahmed had been heating the coal for her son when the missile struck. Her little girl had been carrying a glass of water to quench her mother’s thirst after the evening call to prayer. After years of standing strong, Umm Ahmed’s kitchen still houses her family: Umm is still there under the window, holding Jaffa. There is no longer any glass in it; her window is the whole sky. But Jaffa didn’t die. Her eyes are wet and dazed. She doesn’t speak. She holds onto her mother. Everyone is martyred and Umm Ahmed is dead. But Jaffa didn’t die.

    The Book of Gaza, edited by Atef Abu Saif, and published by Comma Press, brings together some of the pioneers of the Gazan short story from that era, as well as younger exponents of the form, with ten stories that offer glimpses of life in the Strip that go beyond the global media headlines; stories of anxiety, oppression, and violence, but also of resilience and hope, of what it means to be a Palestinian, and how that identity is continually being reforged; stories of ordinary characters struggling to live with dignity in what many have called ‘the largest prison in the world’.

    Another testimony from Nayrouz Qarmout has been published in The Electronic Intifada.

  • PEN Atlas – One Year On

    PEN Atlas editor Tasja Dorkofikis looks back at a year of dispatches from around the world, and looks forward to more cutting-edge literature, essays and articles in translation in 2013

    Dear Readers,

    The looking back and summing up season is upon us, and I’d like briefly to look at the PEN Atlas as it nears the end of its first year of life. Our main aim has been to look at new voices and literature all over the world and to introduce them to an audience in the UK by commissioning new and original blogs written by writers, critics and translators.

    English PEN itself has a translation programme helping both the promotion and translation of international literature via two Writers in Translation Awards – PEN Translates! and PEN Promotes! – and some of the books featured in the Atlas come to us through these grant schemes.

    In many of our 2012 blogs we looked at how writers dealt with political problems and conflicts in their countries, in this way supporting the core PEN activity of defending and promoting the freedom to write and the freedom to read. We will be returning to many of these countries again next year, as unfortunately most of the conflicts covered by the Atlas are still underway. These continue to make it difficult for writers to express themselves freely as well as endangering their lives. Samar Yazbek wrote to us from Syria about the perils of reporting from a war zone and in January we will have another Syrian, Nihad Sirees, one of the winners of a 2013 English PEN Writers in Translation Award, writing about Aleppo and its incomprehensible destruction. And later in the year we will be covering another of the PEN Award Winners: Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, which compiles some of the most exciting new writing borne out of the Arab Spring.

    Hassan Blasim discussed the aftermath of the war in Iraq and the role literature plays in how society deals with tragic events. The Devil’s Workshop by Jachym Topol, again one of the winners of a Writers in Translation Award, deals with the more distant past of concentration camps in Belarus. We will be talking to Jachym Topol later this year.

    Selma Dabbagh wrote very movingly from the Palestinian Literary Festival about the fragile situation in Gaza. Alas, the crisis there has deepened and we will return to the festival next year to look at the response of writers to the events there. Lydia Cacho’s reporting from Mexico has won awards and accolades. For us, she wrote about taking risks and being afraid. She is still reporting and still in danger.

    We hope that as the reviewing space in print media shrinks, PEN Atlas, like some other literary websites, is filling that gap and providing more outlets for literary criticism and debate. 

    We also have been following trends and reported on developments in international publishing by featuring specialists’ opinions. We have looked out for new writers who might be interesting for a British audience and for publishers here. In this way, we have introduced Alisa Ganieva from Dagestan, Yuri Herrera from Mexico and Park Wan-Suh from South Korea among others.  

    PEN Atlas dispatches in 2012 took us all over the world, from Mexico and China to Greece, the Netherlands, Croatia and Russia. And as we continue to explore the world’s literature in the New Year, we hope to bring you closer to interesting places and introduce you to new writers.

    And if you still have any presents to buy, you might find inspiration here in our list of books recommended by publishers, writers and festival organisers. And for literary inspiration look at one of our most moving stories this year – Santiago Gamboa’s ‘Of Poets and Aviators’.

    In the meantime, happy festive reading and all the very best in the New Year!

    Tasja Dorkofikis,

    Editor, PEN Atlas

     

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 3

    In her third PEN Atlas despatch, British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh reflects on Palfest, dealing with criticism, and what freedom feels like

    The Palestinian Festival of Literature must be the most controversial literary festival in the world. In 2011, the Festival was tear-gassed, venues were closed down, and settlers filmed participants in Hebron saying ‘We have a record of you, we have you on tape, we know who you are.’ That was the Israelis. This year, Egyptian authorities stalled on the permission-granting process for its nationals to travel to the Festival until media attention embarrassed them into granting permits on the eleventh hour.Then Palestinian security disrupted and closed down the poetry reading by a teenager at an event in Gaza City and gave us a message by filming us, that was not unlike the settlers’ message. There are few peoples who Governments are less keen to give a voice to and there are few people, confirmed on my recent visit, more urgent to have a voice, than the Palestinians.

    I recently came across the term PEP, an acronym used in the US for Progressive Except Palestine, to describe those individuals who advocate adherence to human rights principles and will espouse all sorts of liberal, possibly even radical views of world politics supporting freedom of expression, but who hit a blind spot when it comes to the Palestinians. This is all too often due to the lazy conflation of  ‘anti-Semitism’ with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israeli policies.

    My novel, Out of It, was mainly set in Gaza and written from afar. I did not know how it would feel to go back to a place that I had been living in as a fictional world for such a long time. I only knew it fleetingly from a couple of visits that I had made in the nineties when the place was going through a building boom of institutions and authorities. Our enthusiasm for the Oslo peace accords was muted. We felt a keen sense of humiliation in the compromises agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the professional incompetence that they were prone to display. But no one anticipated the horrors that were to come in the form of F16s raids on schools, UN institutions and homes, together with the use of white phosphorous and the seeping, debasing nature of the blockade.

    I have been mildly chastised by pro-Palestinian reviewers for ‘unflinchingly’ portraying the divisions within Palestinian society in my novel. I became more defensive over this point, than over the criticisms of it being anti-Israeli which were knee jerk in their nature and predictable in their existence. Learning how serious the divisions between factions has become during my visit to Gaza this time, confirmed my view that I had done the right thing by addressing them in Out of It. I do not believe that a writer should avoid writing about the failures that they would rather not acknowledge. The writer of fiction is not the PR agent for any government, nor even for any group of people. They should be free, within the bounds of responsibility, to write what they observe, feel and consider important. It is my view that when writing about a societal conflict which a writer of fiction has the power to create, a writer presents new representations of old realities and explains worlds seen frequently in a sensationalist way by the media, but they should not be tied down to partisan positions, nor be expected to uphold them unquestioningly.

    Going back to literature for answers, there is a line by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani where he says that no matter what our failures are, these do not excuse the conduct of our oppressor. This needs to be recognized as well. The old adage that two wrongs do not make a right is too often forgotten.

    Our Festival ends in Cairo, addressing a packed audience in a downtown theatre, where the walls of surrounding buildings are stenciled and spray-painted with revolutionary graffiti.

    I fly back to London, calculating that I have been in seven countries in two months, desperate to be back home after two weeks away from my children. My ex-husband has been staying with them in my flat. I go out the night after coming home, driving in a car with a full tank of fuel. A CD given to me by a Californian friend, ‘Happy New Year Selma, Funk Soul Divas,’ scribbled on it is on. It is a summery evening and the city glitters, almost burns as the lights come on. I discuss topics with my friends from the personal to the political in an unlimited, indiscreet way. The question, What does it feel like to be free? What does freedom feel like? whispers in my ear and I vow to find ways, to build on ways of sharing my relative wealth of freedom with those that I left behind, and I am grateful to PalFest for providing me with some means of being able to do so.

    About the Author

    Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

    In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

    Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

    Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

    Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

    Additional Information

    Ghassan Kanafani, (1936-1972) the famous Palestinian journalist, novelist, and short story writer, whose writings were deeply rooted in Arab Palestinian culture and inspired a whole generation during and after his lifetime.