I prefer to write about my personal experience under occupation, for it relates more to people outside. Owning and reclaiming Palestinian narrative by Palestinians is my top priority for the next period of time. “Until Lions have their own historian, the history of the hunt will glorify the hunter,” as Chenua Achebe put it.
Nour Al-Sousi
Nour Al-Sousi has survived a loss of a country, two wars, and some twenty-five years. Nour finished her BA in English Language and Literature from the Islamic University of Gaza. Reading and writing were Nour’s passion since she was a young child. Since then, writing became second nature, something like breathing. The composition classes were her favorite, and nothing has ever pleased her more than that look of admiration in the teachers’ eyes after reading a piece or a story she had written.
Nour won an online contest for a short story she wrote early in her writing career and thus was encouraged by many to start her own blog.
Living in Palestine, particularly in Gaza, is Nour’s source of inspiration, and her writings mainly express what Palestinians experience in their daily life. Being a Gazan Palestinian has taught her that one can resist not only by guns, but also by words. Now, Nour is an English teacher. She tries to teach her students the power of words.
In her own words: As the second Intifada broke out in September 2000, I started to understand how our life, as Palestinians, is a struggle. In such a struggle, I had nothing but my pen to hold, so I wrote several short stories about martyrs who were my age.
Shahd Awadallah
Shahd Awadallah is a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza, English Department. Shahd works as an English teacher in an UNRWA school in Gaza. Since she started reading at the age of seven, fiction has become her passionate interest. Her journey with writing started at the age of eighteen, when she was a secondary school student. Writing was Shahd’s enjoyable pastime and her way of relaxing.
Shahd writes about people whose smiles and tears tell a lot about their lives and circumstances. In addition, living in a country under occupation, Palestine, affected what and how she writes.
In her own words: Expressing my own experiences and others’ stories, exposing what I go through as unseen stories or crimes created or committed by the Israeli occupier, all of this helped me know more, be stronger, be more aware of my own case and convey these images and realities to the rest of the world by writing short stories.
Nour El Borno
Nour El Borno is twenty years old. She studies English Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. Nour is addicted to writing, movies, and reading, and she wishes to become an English teacher. Nour started writing English poetry when she was in high school. Poetry, for her, is the oxygen she breathes, her way out.
In her own words: The difference between the old me and the new me is the source of inspiration. I used to be inspired by friends and family. However, now I am mainly inspired by nature. I started to believe that if a person can write effectively, it is his or her duty to get up, write, and help change this world to something better, and that’s what I am doing or trying to do.
I hope one day this world will be safe and better for all generations. I do believe that my cause, full of wars and suffering, could be assisted by writing. Maybe one day, our writings will be a path for our freedom. Therefore, I decided that if my writing will affect only one person, then that’s a huge thing.
Sameeha Elwan
Sameeha Elwan, twenty-five years old, is an MA graduate of Cultural Studies from Durham University, United Kingdom, and an English Literature graduate from the Islamic University of Gaza. Sameeha started her own blog several years ago after the end of the Gaza war, also known as Operation Cast Lead (2008−9). Her entrapment in an intense situation of life and death reflected how imprisoned she was in a whole national struggle to which individual and collective identity was already objectified and fixed. Sameeha writes because of the inevitability of writing back to a discourse that dehumanized Palestinians’ whole existence and a victim narrative that subjected them to the interpretations of what their life should look like and how it should be presented. She faced that with her own voice, a Palestinian voice.
For Sameeha, every experience lived is an experience worth recording, and each of those now “told” tales—whether they stem from a genuine experience, the representation of experiences of others, or those experiences enshrined in Palestinians by the virtue of being Palestinians, like displacement and return—are worth remembering and telling. Memory in itself is the only thing that is left of their comprehension of home and identity. Both the word and the virtual space that made them both readable and accessible have been their “soft weapons.”
In her own words: Speaking of the “I” that is “myself” and reflecting on my own individual situation was the main reason why I started my blog. And I uttered my voice through the pages of virtual space where the fragmentation of home and identity found a unifying space in which my voice was not restricted by the conventions of autobiographical writing as a classic genre, but was rather liberated by the voice of the “I” and the genuine experience lived under occupied fragmented spaces.
Hanan Habashi
Hanan Habashi was born in Gaza in 1990. She studied English Literature at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) and currently works as an English Language trainer and a translator. Hanan is interested in music, languages, literature, and folklore of all kinds. Hanan believes that the Palestinian youth are capable of fighting for their just cause against the Israeli occupation on all fronts. She believes in the constructive power of the spoken and written word. The first writing she did was when she started a diary on the fourth day of the Cast Lead Operation (2008) in the form of a death note, in what first sounded to her as a desperate scream down an empty street. By writing her first short story, “L for Life,” Hanan had her first empowering writing experience. She later came to the belief that Palestine—the land, the people, and the memories—must not be funneled through the narrow concept of a “conflict between two.”
Writing Palestine, Hanan thinks, is the responsibility of Palestinians—nobody else’s. Being the stateless, dispossessed people they are, telling the story of the land is the first step for Palestinians on their road to self-determination. Ghassan Kanafani is Hanan’s writing role model. Some more intellectual people like Kanafani might not set Palestine free, but they will absolutely “knock the walls of the tank.”
In her own words: Because many people around the world think they have the right to speak on their behalf, Palestinians are suffering two opposing stereotypical images that are equally disturbing and doing the just cause injustice: the Palestinian as a helpless victim, a mere object of sympathy, or as a bloodthirsty savage. Palestinians are neither.
Tasnim Hammouda
Tasnim Hammouda is a nineteen-year-old Palestinian student living in Gaza City. A lot of her passion for the English language is derived from her mother, who was her English teacher. Born to a dedicated mother who would always support her children to do their best, Tasnim quickly found herself on the right path to improve her English skills. “The future belongs to those who prepare for it now,” her favorite quote of Malcolm X, would always come as an answer to what her life motto is. She believes in it and has her mind and heart set on a plan where her academic life and English major come first.
When she was fourteen, Tasnim joined an advanced English language course. It was everything a life-changing experience can be. Surrounded by the right teacher and opportunities, she started writing in English. Then the first war on Gaza took place. Along with many Gazans, it took Tasnim a while to pull herself together and go on after such a painful time, when she almost lost her parents and house to an Israeli bomb. Tasnim, more decisive than ever before, insisted to be a more tangible presence in her community. One thing the war has taught her to do was to see her society as a whole of which she is an essential part. She grew up and so did her dreams. Her latest endeavor t
o learn more was on June 20th, 2013, when she traveled to the United States as part of a leadership program. During her six-week-long stay there, she was exposed to new writing styles, and she got a step closer to achieving her future goals.
In her own words: Only then [during the advanced English course] did I realize that mastering English could be much more than just a future major. It was an expressive way to be more creative in a world where words are significantly mighty.
Elham Hilles
Born in 1988, Elham Hilles is a Palestinian inhabitant of Gaza City. She finished high school in 2006 and then joined the Islamic University of Gaza to study English Literature, which she had dreamed of since she was young. Elham is married and is a full-time homemaker. Elham’s main interests are translation, Arabic and Russian literature, comparative literature, and politics. Before writing in English, she wrote many Arabic satirical topics and short stories for online forums from 2007 to 2009.
Elham considers writing as a means of escape, a way to contemplate the world around her and to create something out of nothing through words.
In her own words: Writing is a way of resistance through which I attempt to highlight the distress and agony of the Palestinian refugees in the wretched camps around my city.
Aya Rabah
Aya Rabah is a twenty-year-old medical student at Al-Azhar University in Gaza. She frequently does volunteer work with the Medical Students’ Association, yet nothing seems sufficient for someone who wants to spend her life working for others. To Aya, writing is the most brilliant thing that makes her feel accomplished and provides her with more reasons to carry on. Aya reacted to the scenes of death in the second Palestinian Intifada by writing, and she reacted to the Cast Lead war on Gaza by even more writing.
The first things that provoked Aya to write were the bittersweet memories about Palestine and Palestinian heroes. Like many Palestinians, Aya was haunted, and equally inspired, by the prisoners, the martyrs, the several generations of refugees, and images of stolen lands, wars, death, and destruction Israel brought on Palestine.
In her own words: Studying medicine in Gaza, I could see half of my dream coming true, while the rest is kept so far and embodied in the bodies of patients whom I am going to heal or even in the words I am going to write. I came to realize that writing is the most magnificent meaning of freedom…. I found my way out through writing. When I write, I feel my life is devoted to greater goals and when I do so, I feel I am the person I want to be. Writing keeps me in a struggle for existence and is a meaningful justification to survive.
Mohammed Suliman
Mohammed Suliman is a Gaza-based writer and human rights worker. He obtained a master’s degree in human rights from the London School of Economics. His writing has appeared on different online publications, including Al Jazeera English, Open Democracy, the Electronic Intifada, and Mondoweiss.
Because he has lived most of his life in a region characterized by political turbulence, instability, and violence, resulting from the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian people and their land, Mohammed found himself obliged to record his views, experiences, and diaries as he witnesses them firsthand. Mohammed created a blog so that people can read and become more familiar with the lives of Palestinians away from the illusively complex political speeches and enigmatic media analyses. People who have never been to Gaza mostly form an image of life in Palestine, in Gaza particularly, as full of misery and suffering where there is no room for a peaceful moment to live. Mohammed’s blog, however, talks of peace as well as war, of hope as well as despair, of displacement as well as the inevitability of return. Mohammed writes about, for, and to Gaza and its people.
In his own words: The very word [Gaza] is evocative of a whole lot of irreconcilable senses: of life and death, of delight and misery, of excitement and wretchedness, of hopefulness and despair, of Hamas and Fateh. Gaza, the word, by its own nature, and upon the mere pronunciation of it, automatically conjures up two images deeply inculcated in the memory of every Gazan: one of Fares Oda, unflinchingly facing a tank and throwing a stone at it, and the other of Mohammed El-Dorra, embraced by his father, and crying for his life. The word, although light as it seems, weighs heavily upon the heart of its enemies.
Rawan Yaghi
Rawan Yaghi is a twenty-year-old Palestinian from Gaza. Rawan started as an English Literature student at the Islamic University of Gaza, then transferred to the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. In addition to writing, Rawan also likes to draw. She started writing in English after the 2008−9 offensive on Gaza. In her narratives, Rawan mainly chooses children’s points of views, because she feels their voices are often more powerful in conveying Gazans’ plight and hopes. Rawan’s stories are drawn from real stories that take place every time an Israeli plane drops heavy bombs, because every time there is an attack there is a child who gets trapped under rubble. Every time a pilot, following orders, presses his or her button to direct a high-tech rocket, a child is traumatized, another is killed, a third is left lonely, and another is turned into a disfigured pound of flesh.
Rawan writes to tell the stories of these children because she does not want to see them go through more pain. When people feel their pain, efforts can be done to stop it. Rawan longs for freedom, as much of a cliché as this sounds. Born as a refugee and feeling displaced ever since she could remember, she has missed a land and a feeling that she has never been allowed to have or experience.
In her own words: I believe in literature’s power to cross borders and walls. I have experienced fiction’s ability to erase mental boundaries of nationalities and prejudices, and its ability to reach the human core of people, so I hope my works will make others feel the same experience.
Sometimes, I feel I own something through my writings. I experience a sort of freedom that I allow myself to have and which I have the ability to allow no one else to violate. And although my writings are surrounded by walls and are set in wars, they make me feel free, because I choose to write them, refusing to keep silent.
Acknowledgments
The input many people put into this book is deeply appreciated. I would like to thank Helena Cobban, Kimberly MacVaugh, and the rest of the team at Just World Books for making this book a reality. A thank-you is due to Annie Robbins for her support of many of the promising writers. Yousef Aljamal, a contributor to this book, also helped with the logistics at the Center for Political and Development Studies in Gaza City and Sameeha Elwan did a great job reading texts. Two people have done this book the best favor: Sarah Ali, herself a contributor to the book and who was there from day one, suggested texts, read them, and worked with me and the writers to give the stories the form and shape they now have; and Diana Ghazzawi of Wordreams Editing and Design, whose sharp eye and editing skills polished the stories.
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