by Ahdaf Soueif
There were days on PalFest, stunned by the ferocity of hatred written into law and enforced by those who are little more than children, when I would stop to look around at the fellowship in which I found myself and wonder, but what can writers do? And a little while later I would find myself in a verse by Faiz, the only place of solace in the universe.
though tyrants may command that lamps be smashed
in rooms where lovers are destined to meet
they cannot snuff out the moon
Translated by Agha Shahid Ali
Sometimes, it would be Shahid’s poems I’d turn to – those great, heartbreaking poems about Kashmir which placed him in the pantheon of poets such as Darwish and Faiz.
In this dark rain, be faithful, Phantom heart,
this is your pain. Feel it. You must feel it.
Well, Shahid, I felt it. Even though it wasn’t my pain, not directly. What might still be done with that pain, and what it might mean to be faithful to it, has yet to fully reveal itself. But for today, I can do this much. I can take the best known of Faiz’s Palestine poems and render it into English, so that some of those who didn’t know it in Urdu might know it now.
LULLABY TO A PALESTINIAN CHILD
Don’t cry, child
Your mother has only just
cried herself to sleep
Your father has only just
taken leave of grief
Don’t cry, child
Your brother
chasing dreams as if butterflies
has wandered into a faraway land
Your sister’s bridal palanquin
has entered a foreign land
Don’t cry child
In your courtyard
they have bathed the sun’s corpse
they have buried the moon
Don’t cry child
For if you cry
parents, siblings, moon and sun
will make you shed more tears
But if you smile, perhaps one day
they’ll cast off their sorrows
they’ll turn to you
and play.
THE GAZA SUITE: JABALIYA
Suheir Hammad
a woman wears a bell carries a light calls searches
through madness of deir yessin calls for rafah for bread
orange peel under nails blue glass under feet gathers
children in zeitoun sitting with dead mothers she unearths
tunnels and buries sun onto trauma a score and a day rings
a bell she is dizzy more than yesterday less than
tomorrow a zig zag back dawaiyma back humming suba
back shatilla back ramleh back jenin back il khalil back il quds
all of it all underground in ancestral chests she rings
a bell promising something she can’t see faith is that
faith is this all over the land under the belly
of wind she perfumed the love of a burning sea
concentrating refugee camp
crescent targeted red
a girl’s charred cold face dog eaten body
angels rounded into lock down shelled injured shock
weapons for advancing armies clearing forests sprayed onto a city
o sage tree human skin contact explosion these are our children
she chimes through nablus back yaffa backs shot under
spotlight phosphorous murdered libelled public relations
public
relation
a bell fired in jericho rings through blasted windows a woman
carries bones in bags under eyes disbelieving becoming
numb dumbed by numbers front and back gaza onto gaza
for gaza am sorry gaza am sorry she sings for the whole
powerless world her notes pitch perfect the bell a death toll
LETTERS FROM GAZA
Atef Abu Saif
When I was at school one of our English-language classes was writing a letter to your friend abroad inviting him to visit you in your hometown. With our bad English we were taking a long time finding words and forming sentences to make the invitation generous and the place exciting. We were paying attention to this class in particular; we knew that this letter always came up in final exams.
When I grew up I would find out that this invitation would never be written. Now I am forty-three years old and I have lots of friends all over the world and I have never invited a friend to visit.
In the letter we would write descriptions of how beautiful Gaza was. We would refer to the beach, the huge orange orchards, the souks and the historic sights – Christian and Muslim. We thought they were attractive; the forty-five kilometres of sandy beach where – so close to the sand they almost hugged its visitors – grew vineyards, orchards of figs, olives and orange trees.
When I studied in Europe I always suffered from this inability to invite people – especially during vacation times. You can visit a friend but a friend cannot visit you. When everybody was talking about vacation plans I had to keep quiet. I never spoke about how beautiful the place was – every place is beautiful in one way or another. I never made any effort to convince others to come and see me in my hometown. The impossible visit would never take place, visitors would never arrive and they would never enjoy the welcoming hug and hospitality. Journalists, human rights activists, international delegations, a few politicians might arrive, especially in times of escalation and tension, but your guests will never arrive. When you grow up in Gaza you know that that invitation is only a question in your high-school exam, just a language exercise, something you train to do but never practise.
And when everybody left for home I stayed in the student dorms contemplating the hundred obstacles I would face if I decided to cross the road to Gaza. This started when I did my BA at Birzeit University in the West Bank and all us students from the Gaza Strip would stay on in the empty student hostel during all the Eids and all the vacations when all the other students went home to different West Bank cities to be with their families. I remember when I entered Birzeit in 1991 I needed only one permit – a blue one – to cross from Gaza to the West Bank. By the time I finished my studies there I needed a permit to leave Gaza and another to enter the West Bank and another to stay in the West Bank. There was also a permit that allowed you to leave despite the blockade, a card that stated your identity as a student and a magnetic card with your security information. Mostly you had to have all those on you at all times. And you had to show them to the Israeli soldiers on demand. No complaints.
Are the Palestinians victims of geography? Is it their fault that their homeland happened to be the most holy place on earth! The idea of God and religion was created after the Palestinians had made this piece of the earth their homeland. Prophets were sent after the people had built their Canaanite cities and cultivated their farms. Geography is an enemy. Its very logic runs against the course of nature. History as well is not much different. But when it comes to history, it depends where you’re reading history from and according to whose narration. But Palestinians like their geography, their landscape and their history. They love to name their children after their cities. I did for example. My only daughter is named after Yafa, the city where my family lived for centuries before being forced to leave to make way for the state of Israel. For my grandma, Aisha, no city is like Jaffa; no sea is like its sea, no fragrance is scented like the breeze there. Her lamentations for Jaffa no writer can capture. Living in Gaza, her soul remained in Jaffa. The refugee camp she lived in, and where I still live, never became a hometown for her. In her memory and mind she used to make up another present that rested on the continuity of the past. And then, when many people were forced to leave Gaza in 1967 after the Israeli occupation of the Strip, she said she’d rather die than leave. At least Gaza was part of the big country called Palestine where her beloved Jaffa was. Thus I was actually lucky to be born in a geography that limits my ability to move. Because you have to be more than lucky, you have
to be given a hand from heaven to be able to leave and come back, to see other places and return. A student of mine lives exactly on the border fence with Egypt. When she opens her window she sees the streets of the Egyptian border town of Rafah: people walking and cars moving. Her only dream is to cross that border, a dream she’s now finished university without fulfilling.
Gaza is a hot place for news only. It is a bakery for delicious exciting breaking news. People come here to make stories about wars. Nobody comes just to visit. Dignitaries and public figures come to find out about Gaza. Sartre came to Gaza. My dad saw him in the street.
I always felt I was living inside the television, permanently standing in front of the news anchors. And I always wanted to escape this feeling. But even when I manage to leave Gaza – especially when I was studying in England and Italy – I don’t succeed in escaping; always worrying for my family and thinking of the death that seeks them. We were born during war and we die during war. What we live are moments stolen from the devouring mouth of death. These are the moments that can be written about. The moments that Aisha, my grandmother, lamented and wanted to revisit. The moments we want always to share with our beloved.
Now, nearly twenty-five years after the imagined invitation letters I wrote to ‘friends from Europe inviting them to visit me in Gaza’, I still write letters to people who do not come – who cannot come, who are not permitted to come – visit. But Gaza is always there in the news and in any presentation about ‘the Middle East Conflict’. One day it should escape the news. One day it should be able to think of its dream away from the noise of war. One day her people should live normally and their imagined invitees must come.
GAZA, FROM CAIRO
Selma Dabbagh
Like most foreigners I travelled into Gaza with a mission and as part of a delegation. The year I went, 2012, PalFest was composed mainly of Egyptian writers, bloggers, musicians and film-makers who had been constructing and energising their own revolution at home. We were known as the ‘Egyptian Delegation’, and as an English-Palestinian writer I was in a minority of one. I didn’t know it then, but my energetic, optimistic gang of fellow travellers were then probably at their peak as a group. Since 2012 some, most notably the blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah, have been imprisoned in Egypt on the basis of spurious allegations.
Permission had not been granted by the Egyptian authorities for their nationals to travel until two days before we left. There was mention of tunnels without any details (steps and mud? possible collapse and attack?). A media campaign was postponed by a day because of violence outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo, but then ‘Yay!’ is tweeted and facebooked from Cairo and Gaza; we get the go-ahead and are off. Slowly off: seven hours to the border and four sitting at it. In the hateful space that the Rafah border crossing is, an oud player from the band Eskandarella started strumming softly from one of the moulded plastic seats next to the waiting, smoking, pacing crowd that we have become. The holding station is momentarily transformed as if a magical circuitry now networks throughout the space, communicating something deep and connecting that we feel for a transient moment, until the oud player is asked to stop.
And then to leave.
He does not have the right papers.
We’re lurched into Gaza by a swinging coach and greeted with a WELCOME TO PALESTINE sign. We all cheer – it’s a sign that has been fought for, a forbidden word now writ high – although we’re not so dim that we can’t absorb the tragic disappointment masked by this proclamation.
Darkness falls in a deep, soft way that makes the sky and full moon appear like a felt collage. An abandoned missile-struck building grinning toothlessly out to sea reassures us that we’re in the right place before we drive up along the coast of the most populated strip of land in the world. The sea breeze billows in cubes of glowing fabric that are greenhouses shaped like modernist oriental tents. It feels as though we’ve sneaked into a secret garden, a forbidden city. For a long time on that slow, meditative, evening drive, I thought that we were driving through an uninhabited part of Gaza.
It took daylight to show me how wrong I was.
It wasn’t uninhabited at all. The population had, quite simply, been blacked out; the plug had been pulled on them. Driving down the same road the next day, the busy villages, refugee camps and towns became visible. Without the sun, Gaza is a place with hardly any light. The Israeli air, land and sea blockade, and their bombing of the main power plant in 2006, have made fuel and electricity scarce. A couple of hours from the grid is the norm. Those who can afford to, back up their supply with generators, which in turn need fuel to run.
Almost all the petrol stations are roped off, waiting. It only takes one person to generate a rumour that a delivery is on the way for a petrol station to become blocked up with queues of cars, tractors, motorbikes and pedestrians that stretch for miles and can last all day. ‘From the time I came to the Festival until I left at night, they were there waiting – a long, long line,’ said one student volunteer from Deir el-Balah refugee camp. ‘I could not even see my town as I approached it, since everything was so dark. Only when the car’s headlights shone on it, did I realise we were at my house.’
Without electricity, that first night’s sky had the depth desert skies have. Seeing the full moon above the sea and a broad tree with outstretched boughs standing over the haphazard mounds and glinting tomb plaques of an unwalled graveyard, I was overcome with wonder. It was a night that flattered and deceived. The same graveyard, by day was a desolate place. The tree was scraggy and under-watered, the land dusty with blue plastic bags worrying at the bumps that told of hurried, unanticipated deaths too frequent to deal with properly.
I was on the hotel’s fifth-floor balcony overlooking the sea before anyone else got up. As I breakfasted a group of boys cartwheeled along the beach, the clumsy ones trying to follow the vertical pirouettes of their mentor. This is the same beach where two years later, in 2014, four boys will be killed by an Israeli missile in front of foreign correspondents – also eating breakfast. The Israeli Military Advocate General later deemed the action to be entirely legal.
By the side of a building that houses aid workers busy with laptops, briefcases and water bottles, a group of men come to work. They step out of cars, wearing suits, gripping plastic carrier bags by the neck, and then gather at a table under a makeshift pagoda in the unused garden of an old hotel. They stand to greet each other. They have pieces of A4 paper that they pass from one to the other and then they sit. I wonder if theirs is the future of the cartwheelers.
We fill our days with talking and observing. ‘Watch! Photograph! Observe!’ a green-eyed man with a dust-clad face shouts at us, as he rides past on an open-backed truck with others similarly pasted with sweat and grime, while we walk along by bullet-hole-ridden buildings in Rafah. ‘Witness our Tragedy!’
I turn heads by walking around the Islamic University with mine uncovered, accompanied by a bearded English literature professor (a man of extraordinary manual dexterity; I have watched him scoop individual grains of rice off the table with a ring-pull) who points out the construction of new laboratories. The previous ones were bombed during the Israeli assault of 2008–9.
I ask about the strike on the university. ‘They did it more than once. Every time they flew over us they dropped a bomb. Four times it happened. Maybe five, six.’
‘Anyone killed?’
‘Two, maybe three?’
There is an exhibition in the university hall of photographs from the 2008–9 Israeli attacks: a picture of white phosphorus being dropped, the smoke streaking down like giant pipe-cleaner spider legs, straddling the buildings. ‘Do you know white phosphorus?’ asks my guide, a young student from Gaza City. In my mind’s eye I see images from newsreels of children screaming down streets with it stuck burning on their skin. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I do,’ although this feels feeble as I probably don’t know it, nor do I ever want to know it, nor should anyone ever have to know it in the wa
y that this young population does. As I nod solemnly all the girls around me giggle.
Probably about my hair.
The students in Gaza are as students in an ideal world should be: ballsy and bright. ‘Why should Palestinian writers have to write about politics? How do you write from a child’s perspective? Does revolutionary writing go stale? What do you think about our campaign for the hunger strike in the prisons? Do you support the boycott of Israel? Why are people so ignorant about Gaza? What are you doing about it? What can we do about it?’ In the main lecture hall a banner for a conference on reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah is strung up. At Al-Aqsa University the lights go off every ten minutes and the students laugh like it’s a big joke, ‘Ha! It’s done it again!’ Poetry is read by the light of a mobile phone.
We have a battle of mobile phones on our closing night. Plain-clothes security – said not to be Hamas by Hamas and to be Hamas by everyone else – grab a phone from a girl in the audience and yell at us that if we film security we will be shut down. We shout. A cry comes from the poet Tariq Hamdan that seems larger than him and breaks my heart: ‘You do this for Palestine?’ and security film us in revenge with their mobile phones. We try to continue but get shut down anyway and are then apologised to profusely by the government.