Gaza Writes Back

by Refaat Alareer

  “Forgive me, but I need you to smile for the camera, son.”

  “I cannot. I do not like cameras. I do not like pictures.”

  I left his room as I did not want to bother him, my only son.

  “Do you think history repeats itself?” my history teacher once asked me unexpectedly.

  It was hot and I felt sweaty. I could hardly breathe. This question hit me hard. I was broken. I stood hiding my cheek—I used to do that whenever I was the center of attention—then cried. I cried until I could no longer feel the awful heat; it was like being in a bubble, hearing nothing but my deeply buried memories. Everybody in the class, including me, was stunned by my reaction. After a while, the teacher told me to sit again. I finally spoke, “People all turn into dust at the end, teacher. I think history does not repeat itself, yet when we go back in time, by thinking, our memories dominate our present and future.” I knew how much hypocrisy my answer implied, for what I thought about was my mother’s scar on her right shoulder.

  My history teacher did not accept my answer; she believed in a highly organized world, though it meant repeated pain that so many would encounter again and again. I have to confess that, as time passed, I came to agree with my teacher that history is always repeating itself, not necessarily in the same form, but it brings the same deformity to us.

  While taking the lives of my family one by one, death stood over my body and spared me. I did not want to pass. It was August and I wanted my body to melt over the breathing sand. Why did he let me go? Why did death not consider me a suspect and put me in jail? Why did it take Hayat and let me live instead?

  It was not a time of war when she died, but it was not a time of peace either. A shell killed my family, and a fatal disease took my Hayat. Illness, like a bullet, invaded her body. There were no goodbyes, only wonders of why everything had to happen that way.

  Every time I face trouble, I blame my scar. It’s like a curse. It made me marry a man with one hand and later tortured my children every time they looked at me. Nobody likes the deformed, except their Creator.

  My daughter’s disease was a declaration of war. Even before she was sick, she saw death everywhere.

  “A tree is moving. A tree is killing. I hate trees,” Hayat would say.

  I knew that she meant the soldiers she saw in the news and how they used their green uniform to hide among trees. I did not want my daughter to hate nature, yet she was stubborn and insisted her visions were true. “I saw trees killing; I am sure, Mom.”

  It all happened a long time ago. Now my beautiful, little girl has become ashes glittering in the depth of my heart. I could not explain why I keep seeing her face in lavender, years after her death. It is a reminder of my mother who used to love those flowers. Sadly, my daughter and my mother were gathered in the same frame of loss. They are now the same distance away from me.

  I did not know that the lavender was a sign. The lavender was a sign.

  After leaving my Salam’s room, I went to the florist’s in order to buy some lavender. I did not buy lavender that day; I only bought a small tree. When I put it next to Salam’s desk, I whispered to my daughter fully certain she was there, “See, Hayat, it does not move.”

  Home. This word suddenly rose in my mind as flashing fire. I felt colorless. I drank too much water until I became awfully united with my shadow. My shadow grew sadder and taller than me. My shadow never disappears, even in the midst of radiant light. Our home was lightly affected by a missile directed at a car passing our street. Only the windows shattered, and that was enough for history to repeat itself through a scar on Salam.

  When Salam and I left the hospital, we rented a new house, trying to make the best of the new situation and hoping that everything would be better. It was pale like a dead man, narrow like a grave. I wanted to take down all the mirrors before Salam had shouted, “No, leave them.”

  When he came closer to the mirror in the hall, he stood still like a palm tree. He never fell. His scar was more acceptable than mine. I brought a new small tree and put it in the new house. There I saw the troubled soul of my child. I whispered as I used to do since Hayat died, “See, it is still. No more killing.”

  “It is your birthday. Wish something for your coming years,” everybody shouted in one dense, unrecognized voice. I could only recognize that fading voice which came out of my son. I averted my eyes, looked around, and stumbled through all the faces in the room till they finally rested on his. He was standing like a scared bird, waving one wing and using the other to hide his scar. Both of us floated over the chaos, forming a separated world, like a bubble made up of light. I looked deeply into my son’s eyes. Only he and I knew the secret wish. Seconds later, I was released of that world and said loudly, “I wished it.”

  That night, I dreamed of Hayat holding a mirror for me. I was scarless. It was a hazy dream. When I got up, everything was dark except the moon, which looked like a radiant loaf of hope. For a moment, I imagined it falling. That upset me. I thought that I had forgotten that dream, yet unfortunately I did not. Things are recalled whenever they find the missing part.

  “All people have scars, I swear,” I told Salam one moonlit night.

  “Have they all been through wars, mum?”

  “Yes. Inner wars, darling.”

  He kept painting many drawings of people with scars. Some scars were on their hearts, others on their heads.

  “Who is this?” I asked him.

  “My father. You told me he did not have a hand.”

  “How did you lose your hand?” I had asked my husband.

  “I lost it. I was a little child spending a lot of time playing with other fellows. One day my arm was trapped in an opening made in some gate; behind it were hungry dogs. I did not know. I just wanted to open it; I couldn’t even hear any barking that moment. See how unlucky I am! They bit my hand, turning it into a rotten piece of flesh. Terrified, I left it and ran.”

  I liked how he dramatized things. I laughed. No one loses his arm that way, I thought. But I suddenly realized that I did not care about the truth.

  I passed Salam’s grave without uttering a word. It was August and the sun rose embracing the universe. I noticed the lavender growing dignifiedly over his grave. He died by a stray bullet that conquered his chest.

  Sometimes I am surprised by the faith I still keep in my heart after all that happened. Nevertheless, all I want is to have God’s forgiveness, for I really sometimes think that it was me who caused all of this for my beloved ones. It is said that the fire can destroy everything along its way for its own prosperity. Very often, I see a burning fire when I look at myself in the mirror, yet I do not want to believe that could be me.

  Salam was left here, a red flower in blossom lying over a desert. I bent and closed his body towards my chest, allowing my scar to embrace his. I remember how I suddenly stopped when I had seen a falling moon embodied within him. It is not another war, for the first war which took away my family many years ago never ceased. They say wars end, but in fact, they never do. Wars never end.

  “Why do you want to keep it? It is a large, ugly, dark photo of a refugee woman. I don’t even know why you insist on keeping it.” He was referring to a photograph that hung beside the front door of the bleak house as if in holy status. Images were all we had at that house. No cameras, no fields—only dim light.

  “It is a portrait from the Nakba, and we have to remember those people who went through so much agony. Furthermore, we have to pray that the coming generations can remember our agonies too, my son.”

  “What is there beyond the sky?” I asked my mother.

  “Paradise.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Like children’s dreams.”

  I was afraid of telling my mother that I rarely dreamed. She would have thought I was a strange girl. I had a scattered childhood, but now I am piecing the puzzle together.

  For some reason, I always imagined paradise like our green field, covered
with a golden sun and a blue sky.

  “What is massacre, Mom?” Salam asked when I first told him what happened to my family.

  “I do not know; maybe the survivors can never understand it. Only those who bled can answer you,” I answered dramatically.

  “But you bled too.”

  “All that I can tell you is that nothing can justify it, not even the most sacred ends in the world, not even peace itself, understand me?”

  “Yes, Mom. Nothing can justify our scars.”

  I could not explain why I saw death in my son’s eyes at that moment. The clouds came and attacked the moon later. No moon was seen in the heavens anymore.

  Now I am brought back home. I can still hear the echoes of my children everywhere I roam. The fields smell bloody and rotten, as if a hundred oxen were killed and thrown there. But they were not oxen. They were human bodies. It is war again which brought me back home, empty except for miserable memories.

  I am only carrying bags of dazzling stars. They are heavy but useless, because they are not hung in the vast sky. I put the picture of the three of us everywhere. They were many; intentionally I would turn my face to a fixed direction. No pictures of me and Salam alone at all.

  I kneeled in front of one of the big pictures in which we all looked happy and desolate at the same time. What a deceitful picture!

  They did not like my daughter’s name, and they took her to oppose its meaning. They were jealous of my son’s name and took him to further a real one, a real kind of peace.

  “You are smiling.”

  “Yes, I am okay.”

  The first time Salam truly smiled was when he was dying.

  This time there was no beautiful scene behind him, no more begging him to smile for the perfection of the scene, and no cameras. Nothing but a fading smile.

  The tree grew taller. Its leaves fell like devils’ faces. I missed my son and my daughter. When I went to the florist’s that day, I asked for some lavender.

  “How many do you want, ma’am?”

  “Many, so many please…. I want you to bring some to my home every day,” I told him trying to hide my scar. For a second, I felt it was getting smaller. It almost vanished.

  About the Writers

  Wafaa Abu Al-Qomboz

  Wafaa Abu Al-Qomboz is twenty-two years old and studying English at Islamic University in Gaza. She is a very proud Palestinian and Gazan. Since she was a young child, she used to hear many stories about Palestinian suffering due to the Israeli occupation, and stories about Israeli soldiers attacking houses, killing children and women, and working very hard to destroy everything related to the identity of Palestinians. Wafaa lived through the two wars on the Gaza Strip: Cast Lead and Pillar of Cloud. She says, “Those two wars affected me significantly. I will not forget the sight of children who were mercilessly killed.”

  Wafaa was raised on the Palestinian values of tenacity and resisting injustice. Therefore, she started to think of something to help her defend her country and to let her express her frustration and anger at the occupation and to show her love to her country: writing. When she was eleven years old, Wafaa started writing simple short stories about Palestine, and only recently was she encouraged to write in English. She is planning to continue writing in English.

  Refaat Alareer

  A Cast Lead survivor, Refaat Alareer is an academic who teaches at the Islamic University of Gaza. He finished his MA in Comparative Literature from the University College of London, and is currently doing his PhD in English Literature in Malaysia. Refaat has been teaching world literature, comparative literature, and creative writing since 2007.

  He is currently interested in emerging Palestinian writers and works very closely with many of them in order to develop their creative writing and critical skills. Refaat is also the editor of Gaza Writes Back.

  In his own words: Palestine was first occupied metaphorically, i.e. in words and stories and poems. So, we ought to write back, to use all efforts and pens, and promote our cause to educate both ourselves and all the peoples of the world about our cause. Telling our own tales is resistance—resistance to forgetfulness and to occupation. Resistance is making noise, and as Malcolm X put it, “If you want something, you had better make some noise.”

  Jehan Alfarra

  Jehan Alfarra is a twenty-four-year-old blogger and a multimedia activist from the Gaza Strip. Jehan advocates the Palestinian cause and the reality of life in Gaza through social media and various multi-media outlets, by collaborating with international and local organizations.

  Jehan was a Youth Council Member at the Mercy Corps’ GCC (Global Citizen Corps) program, where she joined her first blogging team, Beyond Our Borders. Jehan now runs her own blog and is one of the founding members of Diwan Ghazza, a cultural forum in Gaza. She was a member of the Palestinian Youth Advocacy Network (PYAN) at the House of Wisdom in Gaza, where she was also a member of the delegations’ reception protocol. Much of Jehan’s work with international and local organizations involves English language training, interpretation, and translation of both English and Arabic.

  Jehan is telling the story of Palestine, the story that stems from the world of tents and is marked by nights of hunger, darkness, and fear; the story of children; the story that lives on hopes of self-determination and has survived years and years of misery, agony, and tears, replacing them with echoing laughter and lively smiles; the story of episodes of pain repeated one day after another and yet faced with incredibly strong, light-spirited hearts; the story of a pen that never seems to run out of ink; the story of what F-16 Jets, Apaches, Merkava tanks, and machine guns do; the story of stones lying on the banks of the land; the story of an exceptional instinct for survival despite despair and ultimate injustice; the story of a place that used to be home, and in a matter of a few decades became “home” for others, as Palestinians became the outcast strangers.

  In her own words: As a young Palestinian girl, and a Gazan for that matter, I feel obliged to represent Palestinian life with its tragedies on the one hand and its joys on the other. And in light of the mounting instability of the situation on the Palestinian ground, particularly the siege on Gaza, it has become a compulsory responsibility for me to put into words and reflect the reality of our day-to-day lives, given the failure of the Western media in doing so.

  Sarah Ali

  Sarah Ali, a Palestinian born in Kuwait in 1991, is a resident of Gaza and grew up in Gaza City. In 2009, she joined the Faculty of Arts at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) and graduated in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature. Currently, Sarah works as an English language teacher and trainer. She is interested in many things, including literature, literary criticism, linguistics, art, nature, politics, religion, and interfaith studies. She specifically focuses on postcolonial literature, the relationship between the colonizers and the colonized, and the representation of the self and the other. Issues of identity and self-doubts are also of interest to her.

  Sarah started writing in Arabic at an early age, but only after the 2008−9 offensive Israel launched against the Gaza Strip has she started to write in English. Having majored in and studied literature, Sarah believes in the power of writing. To her, fighting and resisting occupation happen on different fronts, not least in areas of journalism and media.

  Furthermore, she thinks young bloggers/writers in Palestine and other occupied territories should have the opportunity to speak for themselves and to voice opinions long silenced or neglected. In Sarah’s view, challenging and ultimately changing stereotypical images circulated and accepted about who Palestinians are and what they stand for is part of Palestinian writers’ mission. Sarah supports Palestinian resistance in all its forms and advocates one state for its entire people, regardless of their race or religion.

  In her own words: Writing is both a way of self-expression and a way of spreading the word and revealing the truth about the injustice done to the Palestinian people.

  Youse
f Aljamal

  Yousef Aljamal is a twenty-four-year-old graduate from the Islamic University in Gaza and is currently doing his MA at the University of Malaya in Malaysia. In the past two years, Yousef translated hundreds of articles, studies, and reports on Palestine from Western media outlets. Yousef is a blogger committed to promoting the Palestinian narrative in the West through translation and recently co-translated The Prisoners’ Diaries, a compilation of twenty-two Palestinian prisoners’ experiences in Israeli jails.

  Yousef believes strongly in alternative media to reach the masses in the world, in a time when mainstream media is biased against Palestinians and very supportive of their oppressors.

  Yousef started writing in 2010, in a time when the siege imposed on Gaza was very tight. His first piece during the time of the siege got published, and he received encouragement from his classmates and teachers. For Yousef, to write is to exist.

  In his own words: In today’s world, words might be stronger than war machines and sharper than swords. To write is to tell the story, and stories make it now, eternal, and forever. To write is to re-own my story. To write is to keep memory fresh, lest we forget, lest details vanish as time passes.