The Saudi king flew Mo’men and other injured Gazans to Riyadh for treatment. There he met Deema Aydieh, a young journalist and Palestinian refugee living in Saudi Arabia who was sent to interview Mo’men in the hospital. Deema wore a niqab and Mo’men never saw her face, but he was drawn to her obvious intelligence and education. They were married a month later and returned to Gaza together. Now they have two daughters.
Mo’men’s disability has hardly slowed his work. His photography, especially his compelling and often beautiful images of Gaza’s children, appears in newspapers and on media websites around the Middle East and Europe. The sight of Mo’men wheeling his chair through Gaza’s shattered streets, perched on a folded keffiyeh with his camera on his lap, has made him a celebrity. But Mo’men winced when I mentioned I’d like to write about him. He doesn’t want to be pitied. Besides, he’d rather tell his own stories of Gaza through his photography than be a foreign writer’s subject.
Mo’men picked Lara and me up in a modified SUV with hand levers rigged to the brake and gas pedals. We drove south along the seaside road toward the Nuseirat refugee camp. Just before we reached the point along the shoreline where a sewage outlet pipe dumps raw filth into the sea, Mo’men signaled I should roll up my windows. Then he squirted cologne from a small glass bottle onto the dashboard air vents to mask the stench coming from the outside. The sewage smeared a great brown stain in the seawater that stretched to the horizon. Mo’men told me that a fishmonger once sold him a fish caught in the polluted water. When Mo’men cut into it he found it was black on the inside. Once we safely passed through the stench, Mo’men asked me to roll down the windows again.
We pulled off the highway and into the camp. Mo’men drove to the site of the Farouk Mosque, which had been destroyed by an air strike during the 2014 war. “I photographed the girl here,” he said. By now, most of the rubble had been cleared. Only a couple of concrete pillars and a clot of twisted rebar stood where the mosque used to be.
Mo’men parked in front of a nearby shop and summoned the shopkeeper to the driver’s side window. I showed him the photos of the girl on my phone. The man did not recognize her. We moved ahead to a barbershop, but the barber did not know her, either. We kept driving, from shop to shop, showing the photos to shopkeepers and customers until one young man in a chin-strap beard said he recognized the girl and knew her neighborhood. He got into the SUV with us and guided Mo’men to the street where he thought the girl’s family lived. While our chin-strapped friend knocked on a few doors, Mo’men waved to a young girl in a black dress and a frilly white collar. When he showed her the photos, the girl said, “She goes to my school, but I don’t know where she lives.”
Chin-strap returned with another man. Mo’men held out my phone to him. “Do you know this girl?” he asked.
“Is she a martyr?” the man asked reflexively. Then he looked closer and said, “I know her. She is my cousin.” He led us to a house a little farther down the street.
We knocked on the door. The girl answered. Our arrival must have startled her—she could not have expected a visit from a foreign man, a young Gazan woman, and a legless photographer in a wheelchair. Yet her wide greenish-brown eyes, the same eyes that first drew Mo’men’s camera lens, betrayed no alarm. She called for her mother, who quickly welcomed us into her home while a group of young men rushed to set up some plastic chairs for us to sit on. Another man brought coffee. In the commotion, the girl went inside to doff her headscarf and change into a blue floral-print shirt. She’d seen Mo’men’s camera and wanted to wear something pretty.
Her name is Maram. She is twelve years old and the youngest of nine children. Like most Gazans her age, Maram is a third-generation refugee. In 1948, her family fled Joolis, a village in the southern district of Palestine—a different village than the Joolis where Abu Ahmed settled after fleeing al-Birwa. Maram’s family sought safety in central Gaza, where a former British military prison was set up to house refugees. UNRWA soon formed the Nuseirat refugee camp nearby. The camp’s population swelled over the years, and Maram’s family now lives among sixty-six thousand registered refugees.
Maram told me about the books in the photographs. She had taken advantage of one of the cease-fires during the 2014 war to finally leave her house and go for a walk. She noticed torn book pages blowing on the street. “I saw they were from the Holy Koran,” she said. Some young boys were stepping on the pages as they played in the road, so Maram decided to gather them up. She followed the trail of pages, stooping to collect each one, until she reached the ruins of the mosque where she found the rest of the tattered Koran. Then she climbed the pile of rubble that once stood as the mosque’s library and rescued whatever books she could pull from beneath the broken concrete.
“I loved going to the library,” Maram said. “My mother does not read very well. She would take me there so I could help her read and memorize verses from the Koran.” Maram used to visit the library by herself, too, to study the Koran and read other books. Sometimes a local sheikha taught biology and English classes there. “I also want to be a sheikha,” she said. “To sit and talk to people.”
Near the end of our visit, just before she posed beside me for Mo’men’s camera, Maram recited a few lines of poetry. In a self-assured voice and rolling cadence, Maram said:
Beloved Palestine, how can I live
Far away from your plains and hills?
The mountain slopes, red with anemones, call out to me
And traces of the hills on the horizon.
The lines come from a famous poem by Abu Salma called “We Shall Return,” written in the years following 1948. Elsewhere in the poem, Abu Salma asks, then answers, the central question for Palestinians:
Will there be a return, my comrades ask,
A return after such long absence?
Yes, we’ll return and kiss the moist ground,
love flowering on our lips.
Maram’s family will never return to Joolis. Nothing is left to return to; the Israeli army reduced the village to stones after 1948. But the end of Joolis is not the end of Maram’s Nakba story. For Palestinians, the Nakba is not a historical event that happened seventy years ago. In 2008, three months before he died, Darwish wrote: “The Nakba is not a memory, it is a continuous uprooting that makes Palestinians more worried about their existence. The Nakba continues because the occupation continues. Continuing occupation means the continuation of the war.” The Nakba is an unfinished novel—three generations long, and counting, with no denouement. It is the poem that never ends, persisting and pressing forward. Of all the things I learned in Palestine, this felt among the most important.
During my time among the readers and writers of Palestine, I found no life undarkened by the Nakba and the conflict it continues to bear. Yet I found no life wholly defined by the conflict, either. Palestinians may long for a justice long denied them, but they also long to marry, and to see their children marry. Palestinians want to see Paris. Teenagers blast their ears with pop music. Boys kick footballs on beaches with their cousins and try to catch the eye of the pretty girl in their Arabic literature class. Palestinians star in cell phone commercials and on cooking shows. They coach basketball. Sometimes they write poems. The Palestinians live complete lives in their disputed space, regardless of all they’ve lost and continue to lose.
I also learned that beauty flashes brighter in the blackness of this loss. Cruelty’s shadow amplifies Palestinian humanity, like the green of a girl’s dress against a background of gray. As I left Gaza—and Palestine—by passing back through Erez’s cold steel, I thought about how much I will miss the brightened beauty of this place. The way the fragrance of jasmine intensifies at dusk. The bloodred sunsets. The green neon on the minarets, and the calls to prayer they radiate over the hills. The smell of sage in every cup of tea. The way every Palestinian who enters the café bids everyone inside As-salaam-alaikum—“Peace be unto you.” The wedding bands that play from t
he back of moving flatbed trucks. Falafel for breakfast. Walking beneath the mulberry trees and mashing the fruit beneath my sandals. Za’atar and labneh and paying a single shekel for six warm rounds of pita. The gratitude Palestinians express for my willingness to come and see this place for myself.
I found a story in every crack of this place. Stories about how taxi drivers who ply the Ramallah–Jericho road die young. They spend years traveling back and forth from the heights of Palestine’s hills to the depths of the Jordan Rift Valley near the Dead Sea, and the constant altitude change stresses their hearts. About professors in a Gazan medical college who began to worry when too many students were recognizing the cadavers provided for their anatomy classes. The college arranged for the students to study anatomy at a school in Cairo, where they were less likely to face their own relatives on the dissecting table. About a cobbler in Hebron who adds a pinch of dirt from the nearby hills to the soles of the shoes he makes. That way, no matter where his customers go, they will always walk upon the soil of their homeland.
READING LIST
The following is a partial list of books, journals, and online sources where English-translated material from the writers I profile can be found, organized alphabetically by author.
A selection of Maya Abu-Alhayyat’s poems, including “Children,” translated by Liz Lochhead, can be found in A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, edited by Henry Bell and Sarah Irving (Glasgow: Freight Books, 2014). “Secrets,” a chapter from her forthcoming novel, Bloodtype, appeared in the magazine Banipal 45 (Winter 2012), translated by Nancy Roberts.
I referred to Gish Amit’s article “Salvage or Plunder? Israel’s ‘Collection’ of Private Palestinian Libraries in West Jerusalem,” Journal of Palestinian Studies 40 (4) (Summer 2011).
Atef Abu Saif’s memoir is The Drone Eats with Me: Diaries from a City Under Fire (Manchester: Comma Press, 2015).
Mona Abu Sharekh’s short story “When I Cut Off Gaza’s Head,” translated by Katharine Halls, appears in The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, edited by Atef Abu Saif (Manchester: Comma Press, 2014).
Asmaa al-Ghul’s short story “You and I,” translated by Alexa Firat, appears in The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, edited by Atef Abu Saif (Manchester: Comma Press, 2014).
Gharib Asqalani’s short story “A White Flower for David” appears in The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, edited by Atef Abu Saif (Manchester: Comma Press, 2014).
Najlaa Ataallah’s short story “The Whore of Gaza,” translated by Sarah Irving, appears in The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, edited by Atef Abu Saif (Manchester: Comma Press, 2014). “Midnight,” translated by Alice Guthrie, can be found in Transcript 33 at www.transcript-review.org/en/issue/transcript-33-gaza/najlaa-ataallah. Ataallah’s writings from Operation Protection Edge appear in the July and August 2014 postings on her blog, nataallh.wordpress.com.
Asmaa Azaizeh’s poem “Do Not Believe Me If I Talked to You of War,” translated by Sani Meo, can be found in the March 2017 issue of This Week in Palestine.
A selection of poems by Moheeb Barghouti, translated by John Peate, can be found in Banipal 45 (Winter 2012).
Mourid Barghouti’s books in translation include I Saw Ramallah, translated by Ahdaf Soueif (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, translated by Humphrey Davies (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011).
Raji Bathish’s short story “Nakba Lite,” translated by Suneela Mubayi, can be found in Banipal 45 (Winter 2012).
I referred to the following books by Mahmoud Darwish: Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, foreword by Sinan Antoon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems, translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); A River Dies of Thirst, translated by Catherine Cobham (London: Saqi Books, 2009); Journal of an Ordinary Grief, translated by Ibrahim Muhawi (New York: Archipelago Books, 2010); In the Presence of Absence, translated by Sinan Antoon (New York: Archipelago Books, 2011). Interviews with Darwish include one in Bomb 81 (Fall 2002) and one by Maya Jaggi, “Poet of the Arab world,” Guardian, June 8, 2002, www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/08/featuresreviews.guardianreview19.
I referred to Salha Hamdeen’s fairy tale Hantoush, illustrated by Ahmed al-Khalidi (Ramallah: Tamer Institute for Community Education, 2014).
Ala Hlehel’s essay “I Would Like to Apologize to the World,” translated by Iyad Maalouf, can be found on his blog at hlehel.blogspot.ca/2014/07/i-would-like-to-apologize-to-world.html.
Khaled Juma’s “Oh Rascal Children of Gaza” can be found at Nerdalicious, nerdalicious.com.au/poets-stage/khaled-juma-oh-rascal-children-of-gaza. “Unseen Aspects of War,” translated by Kevin Moore, can be found on the Edinburgh Arabic Initiative at edinburgharabicinitiative.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/unseen-aspects-of-war-by-khaled-juma. Juma’s website, www.khaledjuma.net, contains English translations of some of his poems.
I referred to Sharif Kanaana’s collection Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales, co-authored by Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Ghassan Kanafani’s books include Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999), and Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, translated by Barbara Harlow and Karen E. Riley (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1999).
Walid Khalidi edited the book All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992).
I referred to khulud khamis’s novel Haifa Fragments (Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2015).
Much of Mohammed el-Kurd’s writing can be found online at his Medium page medium.com/@mohammedelkurd.
“Is 53 Seconds Long Enough to Gather My Soul?” by Rana Mourtaja, translated by Ibtihal Mahmood, appears in New Internationalist, newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2014/08/26/gaza-53-seconds. The story “The Bus Mirror” appears in Novell Gaza: Ten Short Stories from the Youth of Gaza (Sweden: Novell Gaza, 2013).
Wisam Rafeedi’s letters from prison and testimony from his mother can be found in Homeland: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians, edited by Staughton Lynd, Sam Bahour, and Alice Lynd (New York: Olive Branch Press, 1994).
I referred to Sandrine Dumas Roy’s children’s book Jour de vote à Sabana (the original French edition of Election Day in the Savanna), illustrated by Bruno Robert (Nice: Les Editions du Ricochet, 2006).
Raja Shehadeh’s books include: Strangers in the House (London: Profile Books, 2002); Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (London: Profile Books, 2007); Occupation Diaries (London: Profile Books, 2012); and Language of War, Language of Peace: Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justice (London: Profile Books, 2015).
Translations of Sumaiya al-Susi’s poems can be found online at the English PEN World Atlas website penatlas.blogspot.ca/search/label/Soumaya%20Susi. The poems “Night, Net, Gaza” and “The Art of Living in Gaza,” translated by Alice Guthrie, can be found in Transcript 33 at www.transcript-review.org/en/issue/transcript-33-gaza/somaya-el-sousi. A selection of poems, translated by Charlotte Runcie, are included in A Bird Is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry, edited by Henry Bell and Sarah Irving (Glasgow: Freight Books, 2014).
I referred to the following works by Ghassan Zaqtan: Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems, translated by Fady Joudah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012); The Silence That Remains: Selected Poems, translated by Fady Joudah (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017); and his essay “We Were Born in the Houses of Storytellers,” translated by Sam Wilder, World Literature Today, March 2016, www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2016/march/we-were-born-houses-storytellers-ghassan-zaqtan.
ACKNOWLED
GMENTS
I am grateful to everyone everywhere who supported this book in any way—either by generously sharing their stories, by helping me navigate the complicated logistics of such a project, by extending welcome to a traveling Canadian, or by simply offering encouragement and friendship. They are:
In the West Bank: Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Maya Abu-Alhayyat, Moheeb Barghouti, Ghassan Zaqtan, Abbad Yahya, Murad Sudani, Raja Shehadeh, Penny Johnson, Salha Hamdeen, Mohammed Hamdeen, Wisam Rafeedi, Sharif Kanaana, Khaled Juma, Beesan and Zeina Ramadan, Morgan Cooper and the staff at Café La Vie, the A. M. Qattan Foundation, Haya Naja, the Palestine Writing Workshop, Omar Robert Hamilton, Nora Lester Murad, Ruba Totah, Ibtisam Alzoghayyer, the Ghirass Cultural Center, Suhail Hijazi, Nabil Al Raee, and Yara Saqfalhait.
In Gaza: Atef Abu Saif, Dr. Refaat Alareer, Wisam Shath and her daughter Wadees, Newrose Qarmout, Othman Hussein, Ziyad Fahed Bakr, Abdusalam al-Manasrah, Gharib Asqalani, the Tamer Institute for Community Education, Jamal Abu al-Qumsan, Mona Abu Sharekh, Asmaa al-Ghul, Mayy Nayef, Donia Al Amal Ismail and her family, Sumaiya al-Susi, Rana Mourtaja, Salim al-Nafar, Najlaa Ataallah and her husband, Raghab, Mo’men Faiz, Ahmed Shehada, and Maram Al-Assar.
In Jerusalem: Mahmoud Muna, Rachel Ukeles, Gish Amit, Mohammed El-Kurd, Ali Jiddah, Haifa and Asem Khalidi, and David Ehrlich.
In Israel: Abu Ahmed Sa’ad, Mohammed Kaial, Najwan Darwish, Ala Hlehel, Raji Bathish, Zochrot (especially Raneen Jeries), Bashar Murkus, khulud khamis, Usama Mohammed Ali, Asmaa Azaizeh, Jennifer Attallah, and Evan Fallenberg.
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