The Stories and the Writers
The twenty-three stories in this volume were chosen from tens of submissions. All were originally written in English, except “Canary” and “Will I Ever Get Out?” (which were translated by Refaat Alareer and Mohammed Suliman, respectively). The stories were written by fifteen writers, only three of whom are male. Almost half of the stories started out as class assignments in my Creative Writing or Fiction classes. Many of the writers started as bloggers, and many had never written fiction before. Working closely with many young talents in Gaza has proven to me that all they need is proper encouragement, practical training, and close attention in order to blossom.
These stories present the unmediated voices of young people who are fed up with the occupation, the international community, and the aging Palestinian leadership. Embedded in these stories are rich layers of discourse and worldviews. Such worldviews sometimes echo old narratives or certain parts of them, but mostly they are unique, not merely in using English as a medium but also in giving profound insights into the Palestinian plight. As they wrote their stories, these writers were experimenting in many ways and at many different levels, starting with point of view, style, plot, and form. Particularly striking here are the stories that try to “invade” the psyches of Israeli soldiers, a relatively new phenomenon in the narratives of young people.
Even prior to Operation Cast Lead, young Palestinians were using blogging and social media to resist and expose the Israeli occupation. But the aftermath of the war witnessed a new influx of writers using these tools. Young people who had a very good command of English believed they had a chance to give voice to their worldviews. Many became very excited by the possibilities that their command of English and their social media skills gave them to break the isolation that Israel was constantly seeking to impose on them, and to connect with the solidarity activists from around the world who, in the years after Cast Lead, founded a plethora of new grassroots organizations to press for the rights of Palestinians—including the right of Gaza’s Palestinians to be able to live a decent, normal life, free from the endless privations of the Israeli blockade.
Many of these writers have English as their university major, which means they read both English and world literature. They are also very well read in Palestinian writings of all genres. They have always sought inspiration from Edward Said, Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Suad Amiry, Susan Abulhawa, Mourid and Tamim al-Barghouti, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Samah Sabawi, Ali Abunimah, these and many others. Writers like these clearly had an undeniable impact on the writings of the young Palestinian bloggers and writers. Therefore, writing that first started with a status on Facebook, a tweet on Twitter, a short blog post, and then long blog posts, evolved by practice and training into fiction writing, a genre that is more universal than any other type. The first wave of writing was mainly descriptive, a what-happened-and-what-I-think form of writing. That later gave way to fiction writing, which is the topic of this anthology. The move from writing articles, which some of those short story writers have done and still do, to writing fiction is a smart one. Opinion pieces and articles, while undeniably significant, usually have only short-lived impact and they tend to address people who already support you. But fiction, with its humanist concern and universal appeal, goes further by touching many more people, and does so not just momentarily but for many decades into the future. The young writers of this book well understand that fiction transcends time, belief, and place.
The book, as noted above, includes more female writers than male writers. The young women are not included at the expense of young men but because the fact on the ground is that more young female writers in Gaza use social media and write literature, particularly in English, than do their male counterparts. This shows how important young Palestinian women have become in recent years. They have managed to use all the available tools to take the initiative and play a significant role in preserving the Palestinian identity, resisting the occupation, and building a more open Palestinian society in which women and men are equal. The roles that Palestinian women have played throughout history are undeniable. And this young wave of female short story writers comes to continue the struggle and at the same time revolutionize it, adding their own sensibility and their own worldview. It is also notable that the women portrayed in the stories are powerful, independent, intellectual, and proactive. Their role is no longer restricted to giving birth to freedom fighters; they are the freedom fighters. How similar or dissimilar they are and what major concerns these young women voice in their stories should be left to researchers, academics, and reviewers to discuss.
Those young female writers who started as bloggers believed it was time to have their say and to contribute to standing by their people against the cruelty of the occupation by any means available. For the first time in the Palestinian struggle for independence, the young women take the lead in this form of resistance as female writers outnumbered male writers and, adopting the general framework of the existing Palestinian narratives, promote female issues and voice solutions and worldviews as powerful as those voiced by male writers. New narratives and voices, therefore, seem to have emerged, defying all the attempts to block them. In other words, the way in which Palestinian young women write—the language of their narrative/s, or the way a text is expressed—is a fight to prove the self. That is to say, it needs to be read with notions of identity—in this case notions of gender identity—in mind if it is to be fully understood.
The stories included in this volume are diverse in their themes, settings, forms, types, and experimentations. Although the book attempts to trace and record how young writers of the Gaza Strip reacted to Israel’s 2008–9 military assault, the stories include Palestine as a whole as an attempt to refuse any kind of division. Among Palestinians, no matter where they are, there is an emphasis on the Right of Return. Some stories are about West Bank issues such as the Separation Wall, settlements, or Jerusalem. Some do not have a particular setting, to suggest that the story could happen anywhere in occupied Palestine, or even any people under occupation.
The stories range from simple, punchy pieces, to long and complex ones, from allegorical to child-like bedtime stories. This is a fascinating collection of stories that goes beyond purely literary values to unite and bring together the whole of Palestine in one narrative: while Gaza has to endure Israel’s medieval siege and successive military assaults, the West Bank and Jerusalem have to experience Israel’s Wall and checkpoints, Palestinians of 1948 have to suffer Israel’s apart-heid, and those in the Diaspora have to endure not being able to simply book a ticket and come back home any time they feel like it. Most if not all the Gaza writers in this book have never been to other places in Palestine. The internet was the place where they managed to meet and interact with Palestinians from the Diaspora, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and territories occupied in 1948. Together they piece and construct the territorial fragments of Palestine into a fascinating entity that Israel still refuses to allow to exist in reality. In fact, they wrote about things they never experienced, like the Wall, the checkpoints, and the settlements. Gaza Writes Back focuses on writers from Gaza; however, the book fights and refutes the common misunderstanding that Gaza is a separate entity.
Themes
The stories in this collection explore a number of issues, but key among them are the issues of land, of death and dying, and of memory.
Regarding land, Edward Said has written (in Culture and Imperialism):
The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans the future—these issues were reflected, contested, even for a time decided in narrative.
A sense of the land develops from the spontaneous rootedness when one’s relation to the land is threatened by others. The stories here are endowed with the passion with which Palestinians relate themselves to the l
and. Land, place, and trees are central motifs in the stories of Gaza Writes Back. This attachment to the land and soil continues to grow in spite of all the practices and measures Israel takes to detach Palestinians from their land. The harder Israel tries, the more attached to the land these people grow. Therefore, many of these stories can be read in the context of contesting the Israeli narrative and myths of ownership of Palestine.
Some readers may say death and dying permeate these stories. It is an undeniable feature of many of them. What else do we expect from a generation that spent a considerable part of its life looking death in the eye? Due to the occupation, death has become a daily encounter for most Palestinians. Still, beneath this layer lies an insistence on life and a determination to live. Between the lines of these stories is a desire for survival. The very act of writing tells of the hope of a better life the writers have. The desire to describe and explore the experiences of life—including, in this case, that of death—so that others might lead a better life is the very act of sumud or steadfastness that has long characterized Palestinian life. The notion of giving up, of surrendering to the occupation, to most Palestinians sounds quite repulsive.
With respect to memory, we should keep in mind that to tell a story is to remember and to help others remember. Many, if not all, of the stories here zoom in on minute details in an attempt to engrave such atrocities or such rare moments of hope into the writers’ own memories and those of others. Because memories shape much of our world, telling these memories in the form of stories is an act of resistance to an occupation that works hard to obliterate and destroy links between Palestine and Palestinians. The stories here promote remembering and condemn forgetting. Even when the character is dying, his/her ultimate wish is for others to “to tell [the] story,” as Hamlet put it. And telling the story thereby itself becomes an act of life. Further, some of the stories here even chase the Israeli soldiers into their own memories and consciences, declaring that there will be no rest for the occupiers and that we Palestinians will keep breathing down your necks until you realize that occupation needs to end, or else we will spoil your most intimate moments by yelling at the top of our lungs, “Enough! Enough!”
Living and Writing in Gaza Today
These stories were all, of course, composed under very harsh circumstances. Gaza has been under an Israeli siege since 2006. The Israeli military authorities eased the siege just a little in the period after their quite unjustified attack on the Freedom Flotilla in 2010, and then again just after the Arab Spring. (But after the disgraceful developments in Egypt in the summer of 2013, the noose around Gaza was pulled very tight once again.) The lengthy political, economic, and intellectual siege that Israel has maintained around Gaza meant that, as they worked on their stories, all of our writers—like every single person living in Gaza—had to cope with the constant and debilitating structural violence of power cuts, isolation, unemployment, lack of basic goods, lack of books, lack of medicine and access to health care, extreme difficulty in traveling outside Gaza, and far too often pain, death, or the loss of loved ones. Meanwhile, Israel never halted its constant, intrusive surveillance over Gaza or its frequent use of direct lethal violence against the area’s 1.7 million people.
But the fiercer Israel grew, the more reasons Gaza’s Palestinians found to live, and to stay. With endless resourcefulness and commitment, they found workarounds to the many problems the occupation created. Books, basic goods, fuel, building materials, and many other things were smuggled through tunnels. (Even brides came and went out of Gaza through tunnels, and a number, albeit pitifully small, of Palestinian refugees from Syria were able to flee the terrible situation there and find some shelter in Gaza.) Nothing could stop us from living. Instead, these writers and I made use of the terrible circumstances and explored them in our stories, in what might be described as counterattack narratives. These stories were born in circumstances of fear and uncertainty similar to those that poor Anne Frank had to suffer; we lived situations as bad as those we saw in the movie “The Pianist.” And like Anne Frank and those who resisted in “The Pianist,” like any people anywhere who have come under occupation, we resisted and insisted on fighting back. In our case, we have done so by writing.
In 2011, one part of the outpouring of global solidarity activism mentioned above was the project that a group of US citizens launched, to fill a whole boat with letters written to the people of Gaza by people from around the world who cared about their fate, and then to sail it in to Gaza’s sea-lapped shore. They named their boat after the title of a book written (before his election) by President Barack Obama: “The Audacity of Hope.” Long before the boat could reach Gaza, the government of Greece, under great pressure from Israel, moved in and stopped it from completing its mission. But the spirit in which our book has been created and published is a spirit of strong reciprocity and appreciation for all the efforts made by people outside Gaza (including many very caring and well-known writers), to break through the intense intellectual and personal isolation in which Israel has sought to keep us caged. So now, five years after Operation Cast Lead, we are pleased to be able to tell everyone around the world who supports our right to live normal, and normally productive lives, that “Gaza Writes Back.”
Gaza writes back because storytelling helps construct Palestinian national identity and unity. Gaza writes back because there is a Palestine that needs to be rescued, at least textually for the time being. Gaza tells stories because Palestine is at a short story’s span. Gaza narrates so that people might not forget. Gaza writes back because the power of imagination is a creative way to construct a new reality. Gaza writes back because writing is a nationalist obligation, a duty to humanity, and a moral responsibility.
Refaat Alareer
November 2013
Note About Some of the Words Used
There are a handful of terms in Gaza Writes Back which may be unfamiliar to the reader.
It is customary for men and women to be given an honorific name as the father or mother of their oldest son, Abu meaning “father of” and Um meaning “mother of.” Thus, a couple who have a son named Samer may be called Abu Samer and Um Samer by family, friends, and acquaintances. Less commonly, someone may be named after his or her oldest daughter if he or she doesn’t have a son, or the moniker may be given even if a person doesn’t have a child. Palestinian children may use various names to address their parents. In this book, you’ll find Mama and Baba, the equivalent of “Mom” and “Dad.”
Kufiya is the traditional, checkered cloth worn as a scarf or headdress in Palestine and other Arab countries, where it may be known by other names.
‘Eid is the Arabic word for “holiday.” ‘Eidiyya is a holiday gift, usually money given to children.
The shahada is the Muslim declaration of faith.
The Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” is what Palestinians call their forced expulsion from their homeland as a result of the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948 and the seizure of Palestinian lands.
UNRWA is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the United Nations body established after 1948 to provide relief to the Palestinian refugees from that year on a temporary basis until they could return to their homes.
The Stories
L for Life
by Hanan Habashi
How are you, Baba? It’s been ages since I last sat and talked to you. I nearly forgot about my promise to write to you whenever happiness sneaks into my “little heart.” I’m afraid a letter filled with happiness risks never being written, so let me write to you without conditions; don’t deprive me of the sense of satisfaction I used to get when addressing you. Today marks eleven years since the day you were gone, but only now am I starting to realize how dearly I miss you, how your loss is too awful a beast to conquer. You know you are sorely needed. My only solace is that I know you feel my thoughts.
Life has become more painfully complex than getting a good grade in history or going out with Aunty K
arama’s family. Life is never that simple. What to tell you? Gaza is frustrating these days—well, these years. It’s a good exercise in patience, at least. This summer is the worst of all the summers that passed without you; breathing some good air has become a luxury we cannot always afford. When nothingness takes over, which happens quite too often, I sit in my room, which is fully exposed to the sun, gazing at the tiny mark of the gunshot and the ugly crack it left there. Yes, that very same crack on the wall caused by his rifle. Such an eyesore! Other times, I would gaze at it trying to recall how that soldier might look like. That huge creature grabbed you out of my bed and didn’t give you the chance to finish my bedtime story. I cannot remember anything but his dusty, black boots and the frightening rifle. So many times, I tried to imagine how he would look like and always ended up believing he is no more than a faceless monster. Maybe I have gone too far, thinking of him, of his life, of his family, of his wife whom he “loves,” of his smart kid who can get a good grade in math, of him laughing and crying. Baba, what would make this kind of human rejoice over the fact that I am living the agony of being fatherless, with an uncompleted story?
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