Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  Atef also felt compelled to tell stories that the journalists sent to cover the war refused to tell. “I wanted to get out the humanity which war wants you to lose,” he said. Atef describes how his family endured the fifty days of fighting and struggled to observe Gaza’s Ramadan traditions during the bombings. He writes about how his son just wanted to go to the internet café to play soccer video games, and about a distraught man living in a UN-run shelter who begged for a few minutes of privacy to make love to his wife. In the media, Gazans appear as mere pieces of news. Atef wants to make them pieces of literature. That way they last forever.

  In the footnotes of Drone, Atef gives the full names and ages of those killed in the fighting. The long list of victims, often members of the same family, challenges the sterile statistics of conventional war reporting. This was another of Atef’s intentions: to honor those lives that, through their ending, have been reduced to numbers. Atef writes:

  When a human being is made into a number, his or her story disappears. Every number is a tale; every martyr is a tale, a life lost. . . . The Kawareh family—from Khan Younis, whom the drone decided to prevent from enjoying a meal on the roof of their small building under the moonlight—they were not just “SIX.” They were six infinitely rich, infinitely unknowable stories that came to a stop when a dumb missile fell from a drone and tore their bodies apart. Six novels that Mahfouz, Dickens, or Márquez could not have written satisfactorily. Novels that would have needed a miracle, a genius, to find the structure and poetry they deserved. Instead, they are tales that have cascaded into the news as numbers: moments of lust; onslaughts of pain; days of happiness; dreams that were postponed; looks, glances, feelings, secrets. . . . Every number is a world in itself.

  Atef does not write about Hamas in Drone, nor about the rockets they sent over the border into Israel, which many observers blamed for the Israeli airstrikes. I asked him if this was a deliberate omission. “I am not reporting on the war,” Atef said. “I am writing from the perspective of a family. A family that is besieged and being attacked. Feeling that they might die suddenly. Feeling like they don’t belong to the minute. Things happen out of their control, and they want to bring order to their little world. Their little living room. Their little kitchen. The rockets are always in the background, but it’s not me who can write about them.”

  The Drone Eats with Me is something of a departure for Atef. He is best known as a writer of short stories, a genre particularly associated with Gaza’s unique geopolitical history. Many of Gaza’s writers fled after the 1967 war, and the literary scene collapsed under the weight of occupation. Israeli authorities shut down all the printing presses in Gaza to cripple communication between Palestinian resistance groups. Gazan novelists had no way to publish their work. Young writers, not to be defeated, started to write short stories and novellas, which were more easily hand copied and smuggled to Jerusalem, where they could be published. According to Atef, Palestinian literary circles once knew Gaza as “the exporter of oranges and short stories.” Few oranges leave the territory these days, and Gaza now boasts a wealth of writers in all genres, but the short story remains a Gazan specialty.

  Atef’s parents and grandparents fled their home and orange orchards in Jaffa in 1948 and settled in Gaza City’s Jabaliya refugee camp. Atef was born in the camp in 1973. By then the camp, like all Palestinian refugee camps, had grown from a collection of tents into a crowded ghetto of cinder block buildings. Atef always longed for Jaffa, even as a boy, and named his daughter after the city his family was forced to abandon. “For Palestinians, Jaffa is the lost dream,” Atef said. “When Palestinians talk about the Nakba, they talk about Jaffa, because it was one of the biggest Arab cities at the time. It was the second most important cultural hub after Cairo.” Before 1948, Jaffa’s newspapers were published throughout the Arab world, and the city hosted the second-largest Arab radio channel. “If you were a big singer, you had to come to Jaffa to sing.”

  Atef learned about Jaffa from his blind grandmother, Aisha. “She lost her ability to see because she cried too much for her son, who died in the war,” he said. When he was a boy, Atef used to sit with his grandmother and listen to her endless stories—many about her “beautiful youth” spent in Jaffa. Atef believed that she would have been a great novelist. “She could take your heart for five hours,” Atef said. “Her way of telling stories was brilliant, and I hope by the end of my life I can manage to tell stories like she used to.”

  When he was ten years old, Atef started writing his grandmother’s stories down. Once the First Intifada began in 1987, he began to write his own. “I was a very naughty boy at that time,” Atef said. He and his friends used to hurl stones at Israeli soldiers at the military checkpoints. During one of these clashes, an IDF soldier shot Atef in the face with a rubber bullet. The wounds were severe. “I was supposed to die,” he said. “My family even dug a grave for me.” Atef continued his actions against the IDF at the checkpoints after he recovered. He was eventually arrested and jailed for three months in an Israeli prison in the Negev Desert.

  Atef realizes that many of his readers, both in Palestine and abroad, expect his work to be overtly political. “People are not ready to listen to you if you are not talking about wars or Hamas,” he said. But for Atef, who was born in Gaza and still lives in Jabaliya’s narrow alleyways with his wife and children, Gaza is no metaphor. “Gaza is not only a place that produces news. It produces life as well.” Gazans don’t want to read shouted refrains of resistance or vows to survive in the face of the siege. They want to read stories.

  In addition to The Drone Eats with Me, Atef has published five novels and two books of short stories along with several books of political writing. He also edited and contributed to an anthology of Gazan short stories called The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction. Atef’s last novel, A Suspended Life, was shortlisted for the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, a prestigious award dubbed the Arab Booker. Atef wanted to attend the award ceremony in Casablanca, but Hamas authorities stopped him at the Erez checkpoint and denied him an exit permit. In response, Atef penned a long screed against Hamas. He accused the authority of silencing artistic expression and contributing nothing to cultural life in Gaza since coming to power in 2007. “How many books has Hamas printed?” Atef wrote. “How many literary festivals has it sponsored and organized? . . . How much talent was nurtured? How many cinemas have been built? How many literary competitions were held to strengthen the contemporary literary scene?” Public support for Atef compelled Hamas to relent, but not in time. He never made it to Casablanca.

  The award itself meant little to Atef. “I don’t need anyone to clap for me,” he said. The only audience Atef cares about is his storytelling grandmother Aisha. “One of my dreams is that I write a novel so good that my grandmother will come from out of her grave to enjoy it.”

  In his 2008 diaries, A River Dies of Thirst, Mahmoud Darwish wrote about destroyed houses, and the objects they contain, as victims of war. “The house as a casualty is also mass murder, even if it is empty of its inhabitants,” Darwish wrote.

  In every object there is a being in pain—a memory of fingers, of a smell, an image. And houses are killed just like their inhabitants. And the memory of objects is killed: stone, wood, glass, iron, cement are scattered in broken fragments like living beings. And cotton, silk, linen, papers, books are torn to pieces like proscribed words. Plates, spoons, toys, records, taps, pipes, door handles, fridges, washing machines, flower vases, jars of olives and pickles, tinned food all break just like their owners. . . . Rent agreements, marriage documents, birth certificates, water and electricity bills, identity cards, passports, love letters are torn to shreds like their owners’ hearts. . . . All these things are a memory of the people who no longer have them and of the objects that no longer have the people—destroyed in a minute. Our things die like us, but they aren’t buried with us.

  More than twenty thousand houses were casualties
of Operation Protective Edge. The fighting destroyed nearly every home in Khuza’a, a town in southern Gaza near the Egyptian border. International donors provided Khuza’a’s residents converted shipping containers to live in. More than a year had passed since the war ended, but most of these people were still living in the “caravans.” Haneen needed to interview the caravan residents for the NGO she worked for, and she invited me to come along.

  Aside from a few demolished buildings, I hadn’t seen much evidence of the 2014 war in Gaza City. Much of the rubble had been cleared in the year since the bombing stopped. But the remnants of war littered the road to Khuza’a. We passed buildings with concrete roofs that sagged, almost comically, on the broken bodies of houses. Chunks of concrete hung suspended on dangling rebar like nightmarish necklaces. Salvage crews had sorted the wreckage into tidy heaps of pipe, smashed cinder block, and twisted metal the size of the atomized homes they’d originally come from. Enormous tangles of rebar resembled the nests of something giant and demonic. I saw a freakish pile of bicycle wheels. Bullet holes spread over walls like a pox.

  The caravans seemed cheerful in the midst of this destruction. Dozens were assembled into little neighborhoods divided by dirt roads where women hung laundry and young boys kicked soccer balls. A woman shelling beans outside one of the caravans greeted Haneen and me, introduced herself as Fadda, and invited us inside. Fadda lived in the caravan with her sons and their families. Nine people in all shared the two bedrooms, single bathroom, and sitting room. After their homes were destroyed in the war’s early days, the families waited out the bombings in one of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) schools that had been repurposed into a shelter. When the war ended, the family lived in tents for three months while waiting for the caravans to be set up. They had been living in the caravan for over a year.

  The family had expanded the caravan during that time, adding a larger kitchen space and a sitting area laid with rugs. A television stood in one corner of the room while posters of martyred men hung on the walls. A cluster of dates dangled from the ceiling in the middle of the kitchen next to a fridge and a pair of gas burners. A set of shelves strained under enough cookware and dishes to supply a small restaurant.

  Food itself, though, was scarce. UNRWA hands out food coupons for staples such as rice, cooking oil, and powdered milk—though not nearly enough, Fadda said. Her husband cannot work, and her sons are all unemployed. The family earns a little money in the fall helping local farmers with the olive harvest, but only enough to buy vegetables, dry beans, and perhaps a weekly chicken. Sometimes they receive lamb when somebody performs aqiqah—a religious tradition in which a family who has been blessed with a new child pays their good fortune forward to the poor. If a woman gives birth to a boy, her family will slaughter two sheep and distribute the meat to the poor. A baby girl warrants only a single sheep.

  Cooking no longer brings Fadda and her daughters any pleasure. She told me she lost the emotional connection to food she had when she cooked in her home instead of a temporary shelter and slaughtered the goats and chickens she raised herself. “We don’t have the same soul,” Fadda said, “and we can’t be as generous as we were before.” Still, Fadda offered to heat up some of the pumpkin stew she’d made for lunch that day.

  Haneen and I left Fadda and her daughters to visit another cluster of caravans next to the crater where Khuza’a’s mosque once stood. In the precarious shadow of the leaning minaret—the only part of the mosque left standing—a team of salvage workers straightened tangles of twisted rebar from the rubble. En route to the caravans, we passed a makeshift kitchen assembled out of plastic tarps, broken cinder blocks, and sheets of corrugated steel. Inside, a woman baked bread in a clay oven. She waved us in.

  The woman knelt in front of the squat oven between a basket of flattened dough and a pile of hot pita. An olive branch protruded out of the side of the oven, its one end burning red inside. Two eggplants softened atop the oven next to a bubbling pot of lentil stew. The eggplant would be for dinner, the woman said, the lentils for lunch. She would line a tray with torn pieces of fresh pita and top it with the stew. Her family would eat this with lemon, olives, and slices of raw onion—a healthy but meatless meal typical in Gaza’s poorer households. The woman put down the wire rod she was using to turn the bread and, without looking up, scooped me a wooden spoonful of lentils. “Have some,” she said. “Does it need salt?”

  Gazans have long prepared meals in such a way. Clay ovens are as old as Gaza itself. But their resurgence has the blockade to thank. With cooking gas expensive and often inaccessible, many Gazans cook in the clay ovens their grandmothers used to use. The wood-fired ovens are a practical return to an ancient routine. I wondered, though, where Gazans found the firewood. Gaza boasts no forests, after all. The woman told me that firewood is plentiful these days. Gazans fuel their wood-burning ovens with the carcasses of fruit and olive trees the Israeli army bulldozed in the last war.

  I traveled to Bayt Lahiya, a village just south from the Erez Crossing, to meet Nedal and his family for a Friday lunch. His mother roasted a chicken for us, which we ate with a mound of yellow rice in her cool kitchen. Afterward, Nedal flagged down a car, and we drove into the orchards outside the village where his family grows citrus near the border. They keep a small shack on the edge of the property, but Nedal couldn’t find where his father had hidden the key. We dragged our fingers along the top of every window ledge and probed every space between the stones until we gave up. Instead, we sat outside and ate oranges off the trees. A heap of peels had formed at my feet by the time Nedal’s father arrived to pluck the key from its hiding place—hanging on a tiny nail on a fence post we’d failed to examine.

  Bayt Lahiya is better known for its strawberries than its oranges. Everyone agrees that Palestine’s best strawberries grow in the rich and sandy soil here. At least they used to. Before the blockade, Bayt Lahiya’s farmers exported their sweet berries as far afield as the Netherlands. Now few strawberries leave Gaza at all. Restrictions on the import of herbicides and irrigation equipment and the rising cost of fuel used to power the water pumps mean that many farmers have decided to grow less water-intensive crops.

  Nedal fetched a kettle and burner from inside the shack and brewed tea. As the water boiled, I heard gunfire nearby and saw black smoke rising from near the border fence. Nedal pretended not to notice until I asked him if there were clashes. I’d read a story the previous day about Gazan youth burning tires at the border to provide cover for their attempts to breach the security fence. Nedal said no. He said the smoke and gunshots came from military exercises being held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iran-inspired militant organization devoted to the destruction of Israel. The PIJ operated a training facility and firing range nearby. Nedal pointed to its watchtower and black and yellow flag, brazenly within both the sight and range of the Israeli outposts on the other side of the border fence. I wasn’t sure I believed Nedal about the exercises. I suspected my initial hesitation entering Gaza convinced Nedal I was easily spooked, and I wondered if he was downplaying the clashes so I wouldn’t worry.

  Another farmer came up the dirt path to greet us. Nedal introduced me to him, and the farmer insisted I see his trees. I followed him into his orchards and filled my pockets with lemons and kumquats he plucked for me—I would crush them into lemonade in my apartment the next day. When we reached a grapefruit tree, its branches sagging with the weight of ripe fruit, the man invited me to choose a grapefruit for myself. He nodded at my selection, as if I’d picked a good one. We used the man’s knife to tear away the peels and ate our grapefruits beneath the tree that bore them. When we were finished, fingers sticky with juice, the man gave me a pomelo nearly the size of my head as a final gift.

  Nedal and I returned to the shack, and he prepared another pot of tea. As we lounged, Nedal told me that unlike most Gazans, he’d rather spend time in these orchards than on the beach. “I hate the sea,” he said. “The s
ea is only for dark things.” He told me how Israeli sailors shoot at fishing boats, and how their naval vessels shell Gaza during the war. And the sea brings nothing to Gaza. No escape. No life. Nedal harbors no affection for long blue Mediterranean views. “My color is green,” he said. He gestured to the citrus trees that surrounded us. For Nedal, the trees represent the hard work of people trying to provide for their families under the pressure of the blockade. “This is what I love,” he said. “I want to see rows of trees. One after the other.” Especially, he said, in the winter when the oranges grow cold on their branches. “I sit beneath them and drink tea and smoke nargileh.” Huddled in his family’s orchards, Nedal cannot see the horizon, but there is nothing for him in the distance anyway. “Everything I need is here.”

  Lara, my soft-voiced translator, was one of the few people I knew in Gaza who was not descended from refugees. Her family were true Ghazzawis who lived in Gaza long before the Nakba. At twenty-three years old, she is already a professor of war. Lara can identify Israeli ordnance by the different ways the ground shakes after each explosion.

  I joined Lara and her husband, Jehad, frequently at their apartment or at the garden café nearby, where we’d pull long drags on nargileh pipes. I met no Palestinian who smoked as much nargileh as Lara. I recall one of these nights in Lara and Jehad’s flat. We were listening to music, drinking tea, and discussing our favorite movies when the power in the apartment suddenly went out. Jehad stopped talking in mid-sentence, looked up at the darkened lamp in the corner, and said to no one in particular, “They always have to remind us where we are.”