Compiled and edited by Rania Jawad, translated by Malaka Shwaikh

On March 2, 2024 Nima Hasan wrote:

I believe there is some secret in the elements of Gaza that makes us cling to a life that was never a life. I have always tried to keep an eye on death, making plans to distract it, to make it wait, so that it would get bored and leave what remains of me, my remains. We are all remains here. It is only the angle from which the photograph is taken that determines whether we are above the rubble or under it.

Hasan speaks with an intimacy as she documents mass torture by a contemporary world order that sanctions the extermination of a people. It’s an intimacy that invites us to see what she sees and inhabit the spaces she creates through her words. It’s an intimacy that, seemingly, temporarily defies the weight of the genocidal violence and its documentary coverage. It’s an intimacy I believe that we must hold on to so that the slaughter and engineered mass torture does not become the lasting narration of Gaza and contemporary Palestinian experience, so that we continue to bind ourselves not to the camera lens nor to the words that reach us but to the lives that are brutally being erased.

The different modes of Hasan’s writings, while collected here in a chronological timeline, show that the genocide and war experience is not a single, ongoing event but an accumulation of seconds, days, months, and years of lives. And these are lives that Zionist warfare has always meant to disrupt, when seen through the longer trajectory across generations of Palestinians and lands occupied by the Zionist regime in its settler colonial project of ethnic cleansing. Hasan gives us the image of a young woman, waiting long hours in line for bread amid Israeli bombings and manufactured famine, who is trying to recall her femininity. In another moment following months of Israeli targeted destruction, Hasan writes: “we wanted to liberate the homeland, but now O grandmother, we cannot even find a street at its end.” And in another, she likens her body stiffened by lying on the damp concrete floor of a shelter to a utility pole struggling to stand upright in the darkness to “cast a shadow to prove it exists.” Hers is not a timeline of death and torture, but of intimate moments that are narrated with spontaneity and incisiveness, under indescribable circumstances. 

The following is a compilation of writings that Hasan shared publicly via social media over the course of the sixth month of Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians that has now entered its twenty-first month. A combination of critique, poetry, captured dialogues, recollections, and real-time testimonial, they were written by Hasan—a mother and single caretaker of seven children, a writer, poet, and social worker from Rafah—from her forced displacement in a shelter and then a tent camp in Mawasi Khan Younis in the Gaza Strip in March 2024. I first began to collect her shared writings as part of a broader initiative to document women’s articulations from Gaza as a way of listening, which has been visceral as it has been about accountability. Although Hasan did not intend for these writings to be compiled and republished, with her permission, we offer them here, for she has given us a lens through which to see (and not forget) a glimpse of the world of March 2024. It is a lens that does not reductively stand in for one woman, or for the literary legacy of a writer, or for a depiction of the genocide. Nor are her words to be taken as evidence to declaim what we already know. Her words are situated simultaneously within the confines of a displacement tent at the ends of the besieged homeland during the sixth month of a genocide and in an intimacy that expands beyond the mechanics of confinement and obliteration.

As I write now in July 2025, today is not the world of March 2024. Not for Rania Abu Anza, whose husband and five-month old twins Wissam and Naeem were murdered in an Israeli airstrike on the home of their extended family in Rafah; the twins who were born at the start of the war on October 13, 2023 and were conceived after ten years of trying should now have been approaching their second birthday. Today is not the world when packages were being airdropped on a starved, besieged, and bombed population—airdrops that killed at least five Palestinians in their execution; deficient packages of declared “aid” that kill and humiliate during the month of Ramadan. Today is not the world when reports of Israeli soldiers using sexual torture as a form of warfare was at the very least being minimally reported. Today is not the world when civilians were used as human shields by an occupying settler army to invade Al-Shifa Hospital. Today is not the world when the US military was preparing to install a floating pier in Gaza’s sea in the name of a “humanitarianism” that was later revealed to enable a military incursion and massacre of Palestinians—a constructed pier emerging from the rubble and blood of bombed homes when the bodies of 8,000 Palestinian martyrs were still buried under the debris. Today is not the world when the Israeli army murders and takes hostage the bodies of Palestinian children. Today is not the world when UNICEF’s spokesperson said, “the depth of the horror surpasses our ability to describe it.” Today is a world that has exceeded that horror surpassing expression, that has exceeded the bruteness and barbarity of March 2024. 

The following English translation was produced by Gazan scholar Malaka Shwaikh. I want to thank Tony Alessandrini for his editorial eye on the translation and Hadeel Abu Arqoub for helping to compile Hasan’s writings over the course of a year. This work has been supported by a Palestinian American Research Center (PARC) grant. To Nima Hasan, she knows this is one of the many letters I am writing to and for her. A book publication of Hasan’s compiled writings over the first year of the genocidal war will be published in Arabic in 2025. An English translation by Malaka Shwaikh of the book is in the works.

—Rania Jawad, Assistant Professor of English, Birzeit University

“When the roads are blocked, draw a new map. Become Rome. Be Gaza.”

—Nima Hasan, March 26, 2024, 8:18 a.m.

March 2024

by Nima Hasan
translated from the Arabic by Malaka Shwaikh

March 1

12:40 p.m.

If you want passionate speeches
to satisfy your desire for heroism, go read novels
or watch the evening news

I write what we’re living through here: not much to entertain you, my heroic reader!

5:55 p.m.

In the line
waiting for the wheat to rest
the smile of the man dusted with flour
the loaf of bread falling freely on the battlefield

In the line
a young woman tries to recall the meaning of her femininity
a man sings to the oven
another tries to understand the screams of the burning street
I stand in the middle of the story
gathering birds in my head
fearing the flight of the trees

In the line
an old woman curses the fields and the ears of grain
as she lists the names of the great cities for you
She sews the rope of hunger
to make a large sack of flour
enough for the guards of the tents

In the line
you and I
a child bites her nails
a man spits on the war
a woman applies lipstick under her veil
No water in this city to wash away our sins
but we’ll defy hell to produce a fresh loaf of bread
a moment before death

March 2

7:41 a.m.

Don’t speak of victory or boast of glory before someone starving to death.

4:17 p.m. 

No streets
No houses
No walls
No trees
In this stricken country
where can we lean our exhausted bodies?

4:37 p.m. 

I am Nima Hasan from Gaza.

I keep putting off writing my will. I believe death is watching all of us here; I wait for my final confession to rush toward me. I have never tried to avoid confronting it out of fear, but that is just my own way of surviving.

It may sound strange amid all this crying and sorrow, but I savor the sweet taste of Gaza in my mouth. It makes me yearn for life with more of its salt, the salt that has become so precious here. As the old woman says: Salt is now sold in bride’s boxes. All of Gaza is now sold in a box buried under the rubble, and the bride has no voice, for they killed her in her white dress.

I believe there is some secret in the elements of Gaza that makes us cling to a life that was never a life. I have always tried to keep an eye on death, making plans to distract it, to make it wait, so that it would get bored and leave what remains of me, my remains. We are all remains here. It is only the angle from which the photograph is taken that determines whether we are above the rubble or under it.

I have learned from wars that in Gaza, everyone waits for everything. I may never reach the front of the line to get my share, but I have learned to stay in line so my children might get theirs. Now that we have to get in line to die, my turn will inevitably come. I have never tried to change my place in line, but I cannot just stand quietly. This damn system: I am a woman who does not believe in standing still to survive, so I am forced to scream, and I am forced to shut up. My children are pulling at my skirts so that I might find a way to live, while death insistently pushes me forward, toward it. 

I resist.

I hate death. I hate the system. I hate the line. I love life, but the dust from the fighter jets obscures my view.

My mother once told me how my grandmother was forced with her children to leave the homeland. She said: my mother dug a hole and put me and my sisters in it and then lay on top of us to protect us from death. The fighter jets have now made many holes in Gaza. But I cannot find a place to hide my children where death cannot reach them.

I forgot what I was going to say about my will.

I just want my children and I to experience life. I want to live like other people without fear of tomorrow. But tomorrow is a prisoner here, and every time it raises its head the war kills it. I do not know when wheat learned how to become a gun. I do not know how the world came to believe that we are all dead here. But I know very well that my children and I know how to live, and I will not leave a final image for the world to cry over and then forget. No: I will follow the spotlight wherever it goes and keep smiling for the camera.

Ever since I was little, I have loved hide-and-seek. I want my children to play hide-and-seek, but when they open their eyes, I want them to be able to find their friends without shrouds. I often sit and stare at my children’s fingers, at how long and elegant and beautiful they are. I never thought to write their names on their hands so that death wouldn’t notice them. Let death leave these limbs whole: I know them by heart.

I have always dreamed of sitting in a café on the other side of our homeland, hidden from the streetlight, smoking a cigarette. In my madness I might be driven to flirt with a strange man here where love is forbidden. So I bequeath a pack of cigarettes, to be distributed as alms for my soul. And I request a handsome man to lead my funeral prayer, and let no insinuations be made by those passing by.

I have never seen anything but warplanes in our skies. How pure the world must look from an airplane window, for a woman with the luxury to travel to satisfy her passion for adventure. I want my daughter to be able to travel so she can enjoy collecting souvenirs and sending them to homes that will not be destroyed in a moment of war. My youngest is learning to design clothes. What if there were a fashion show on al-Rimal Street that did not feature the fabric of shrouds? Or if the World Cup could be held in Gaza, a world event for all the amputated legs, the only ones that know the map of the country?

I hear the chorus in the square now, without the sound of drones. It is the homeland in all its finery preparing for the funeral.

I bequeath life to you.
For we die without life knowing us.
This is how I remain without fearing the gun,
And maybe I will learn to become one.

March 3

8:01 p.m.

The Abu Anza twins Wissam and Naim.
It took their parents eleven years to conceive them.
Rafah’s martyrs.

8:29 p.m.

Fighter jets accompany aid being airdropped.
Be well.

“No streets
No houses
No walls
No trees
In this stricken country
where can we lean our exhausted bodies?”

—Nima Hasan, March 2, 2024, 4:17 p.m.

March 4

7:30 a.m.

5 months
150 days
3,605 hours
216,300 minutes
standing in line for death

9:20 a.m.

There are women making do with some straw
to fool their little ones
as they sew sadness
into bulletproof suits
that no one buys

There are lovers waiting beneath the walls
a forbidden song
a lover who has died
and a street with no name
He was preparing for a rendezvous
I stare at the empty pictures

There are men who drink cheap wine
swallowing ripe anger
One jumps into a bombed-out café
another searches for his lost limbs
No one finds their favorite drink
No use trying to make the dead laugh

There are doors without holes
a nightclub behind them
fields that yield hunger
a railroad track
and a whistle that lost its sound
At departure time
the city won’t leave us here

Fear was created for us all
but it’s the trick of survival
convincing us not to confess
or not to die 

6:50 p.m.

I have always tried to emphasize the social aspect of our lives as Palestinians in my writing. I write about women in my novels, living their lives with all their psychological, material, and social crises—loving, hurting, and getting angry; betraying, cursing, and feeling weak; longing, neglecting, and killing.

I have wanted to say: we are human. We die as you do. We suffer as you do. 
We are impatient.
We are not superheroes who bare our chests to die.
We cannot just be guns, even on the battlefield.
We are not used to death, and we will not get used to it just so you can applaud us for our artificial fortitude.
We are human. Do not forget: heroes also die.

11:01 p.m.

They starved to death in 2024.
Record: I am from Gaza
and strike the world from the record.

March 5

8:27 a.m.

The war did not abate . . . We are the ones abased.

7:23 p.m.

Everything is negotiable except death.

7:54 p.m.

The poor stand in line for food rations
and by the time their turn comes
the distance they’ve traveled devours them.

March 7

11:53 a.m.

We watch prices rise in Egypt in lockstep with what’s happening here.
The blockade and the imports of outrageously priced commercial goods through Rafah will lead to an economic disaster for both Egyptians and Palestinians in Gaza alike.

12:52 p.m.

Not even a thousand wars can change you if you were not human from the start.
Humanity is always a constant within us. All that changes is how we deal with it all.

5:16 p.m.

The rest of the world prepares for Ramadan.
Here we prepare for the invasion of Rafah.
Be well.

11:55 p.m.

Biden announcing the opening of a waterway from Cyprus to Gaza signals the beginning of many years of war and displacement.
The road to war now opened will not soon be closed.

March 8

6:39 a.m.

On International Women’s Day:
O the pain of mothers! Avenge them.

8:01 a.m.

Gantz says: In order to get Khamas out of power, we  need to have periods of chaos in the Gaza Strip. This has already occurred, of course, and it’s escalating, making Gaza a very dangerous place. Gangs have begun to take charge and lawlessness is eating away at what’s left of people’s ability to survive. Cheap weapons are offered for sale on social media and brazenly available in the markets, contributing to the formation of gangs that spread chaos and theft. Drugs are spreading at a frightening rate and are cheaper than cigarettes, so people swap one out for the other. Quarrels between extended families are being escalated, and weapons are being used indiscriminately to kill and cause chaos. The people are being driven to genocide from all sides.

4:17 p.m.

Five martyrs killed by food airdrops dropped upon them from the sky.
May the “humanitarian” waterway not drown what’s left of Gaza!

5:13 p.m.

God seems to have decided to endow the women of Palestine with steadfastness. In this place, it’s not clear if that’s a blessing or a curse. Either we are beings who have the capacity to adapt to any environment—mind you, I do not believe anyone can really coexist with death, although I agree that’s what life here is now—or we are made from a different clay than other women, so that we can be molded according to the condition of our homeland.

As a woman from Gaza, here at the southernmost part of Palestine, I have had to become a seven-headed woman. In fact, I might have to grow more heads as a precaution for whatever in life might yet confront me.

Daily life, with all its ups and downs, is something women throughout the world have in common. Emotions, the sense of yourself as female, mood swings, down to the menstrual cycle and all its symptoms: common to us all. Love, abandonment, depression, rebellion, even suicide: surely these are fully human traits.

Now: let me explain what it means to be a Palestinian woman in Gaza today.

Your daily life consists of knowing how to recognize the sound of fighter jets and drones in our sky. To be a woman is to know whose house is about to be bombed, which direction the missile will come from. Conversations with my temporary neighbor here in our temporary shelter are about the date of the next ceasefire and how to find paper and wood to make a fire. We do not sit together over a cup of coffee; there is no coffee in this stricken country, nor time to sit. Standing is the perpetual state here for women who must be ready at every moment to receive death.

You do not talk about invitations to lunch with family or friends; you ask instead about how long the bread line is, or whether you can find a handful of flour to make a loaf of bread. You cannot speak reassuringly about your family’s whereabouts; you have no news, there’s no telecommunications in this stricken country that will let you hear a beloved voice saying: it is okay, I am fine.

You do not talk about brand names of the clothes and makeup you bought or discuss beauty or elegance or such concerns; you worry instead about how to get your hands on a small bottle of water so you can stand in a line for the bathroom along with two hundred women and children. Standing in the narrow corridor at the shelter, you wonder if there will be anything left to wash your hands with after you urinate.

You sleep fully clothed, and in a prayer garment to cover yourself—this is very important—to be prepared for death. That is, if you can get any sleep amid the sound of falling bombs. You do not brag to your neighbor about the great discount you got on your kids’ clothes and toys; there are no clothes to buy in a country completely burned out from bombing. So instead, you find yourself awash with pain, watching your child shiver right in front of you.

Your children invent a game: writing on their arms and legs. They compete to see who can write their name more beautifully. It is so their limbs won’t get lost when they die.

Have you bought a car recently? Here, I walk three hours a day, back and forth, to get what I need for my children. There is no transportation left in this stricken country. If I am lucky, I can catch a ride in the trunk of a car or on a donkey cart to take me part of the way.

Do you complain about your husband’s neglect? You feel that you are neglected, abandoned, unlucky when he doesn’t get you a bottle of perfume or flowers for your anniversary? Here, the husbands of Gaza don’t return from the war. They are swallowed up in bombed houses or while waiting in a line. Did your lover cheat on you with another woman? Here, the ultimate betrayal is when your loved ones die and you survive without saying goodbye. Another betrayal comes when you stubbornly sleep apart from your loved ones after a quarrel, while the missile comes speeding down upon you, oblivious to all in its path.

You cannot go for a walk to try and lift your spirits, to walk off the despair and abandonment. Why? There are no streets left in my city, no place left to meet loved ones. Your mood swings are a luxury you can’t afford. In fact, the only luxury left here, the only thing that might change a woman’s mood, is the chance to have a warm bath in private every two weeks. Singing in the shower is out of the question, and even warm water and privacy are a fantasy except for those with money and power; I have neither. And singing is a miracle here, not a luxury.

The idea of mood swings when you have your period, that those around you have to tolerate you and your hormones: that’s meaningless here. Women have no sanitary pads when they need them. There aren’t even extra clothes or rags to tear up in their place. My dear, the women here have to make do with torn pieces of tent flaps when the time comes.

Even when you give birth, there’s nothing to absorb your blood, nothing to dress your baby in. Your labor cries make you ashamed: the pain is nothing, after all, when death is all around you. You give birth in the middle of a landscape full of corpses; a new life in the midst of all this death. You feel ashamed to bring more pain to the scene. You look at your newborn for a long time, fearing that this first meeting will be the last.

The feeling of abandonment here is reserved for death, to not finding shelter for you and your children, to the cold that gnaws at your bones, to the sleep that abandons you; there are no blankets to cover your anxiety and fear. And suicide is a luxury. You may laugh, but this is what war’s jurisprudence has taught me. Suicide is a luxury, a sign of overindulgence in life. We never own our lives: death has full power here and there is no room for negotiation.

“On International Women’s Day:
O the pain of mothers! Avenge them.”

—Nima Hasan, March 8, 2024, 6:39 a.m.

March 9

8:56 a.m.

The waterway will be under US-Israeli control; aid will be under Israeli control; all to further humiliate Gaza. Israel spreads lawlessness and chaos and finds fertile ground in the starving and wounded Gaza Strip; it will exploit this chaos to its full measure in order to become the ruling power in Gaza. This makes it look like the Americans are the “humanitarians” working to control lawlessness and chaos in the eyes of the world, the US aiming to improve its image before the upcoming elections. There is an American-Zionist plan: destroy and empty Gaza by any means necessary, and then emerge as both the victim and the hero at once.

9:12 a.m.

We no longer speak about ourselves.
Just stuttering mixed with hunger and death.

March 10

10:39 a.m.

All my life I have envisioned owning a house with a backyard, a garden with a small bed of mint where truffles secretly grew. I would tend to a small olive tree out back, having the luxury of harvesting olives one by one as they ripened and the time to design the garden before planting.

I have known many houses but have never owned one. There was one I thought I owned, near the Egyptian border. But in the days before the Occupation forces withdrew their settlements from Gaza, whenever tanks approached, we would have to flee, leaving the house to face the enemy on its own. We moved around like Bedouins, but without tents. Once the tanks got tired of playing that game, they tore through its walls and parked in the middle of our living room. We were forced to exit barefoot with a white flag that announced our final departure.

That was when I came to understand: houses have to migrate when their owners do. I never had a fixed address again. I moved from one house to the next or to whatever resembles a home. Then the war brought me to this refugee shelter because I couldn’t even find a tent to make it through the rainy season. Longing for a home has become a habit for me. I remember a warm doll from my childhood that I still seem to hold in my arms as I turn over on the shelter’s damp floor, trying to console my bones that are stiff with cold. The cold straightens them, like a utility pole stubbornly struggling to stand upright in the dark street, trying to cast a shadow to prove it exists. 

8:12 p.m.

No mastery of rhetoric or declaiming of verses will feed the hungry or free the homeland.

March 12

10:55 a.m.

Dialysis in a time of war.
There was already a shortage of machines for those who needed them. Now most are no longer working; the kidney patient stands in a long line, one of many lines of death in my city.
He asks me: did you hear that they want to bring in new medical equipment along with the aid? 
O God, the line is long.

And my neighbor, Morsi Khalifa, reached the end, leaving a long line behind him, waiting.
May God have mercy on his soul.

March 13

3:46 a.m.

Did the boy eat the apple?
A sentence whose elements are death, no grammar to parse.
What’s the reward for fasting?
A bale of hay.
Do you love me?
I’m hungry.

3:30 p.m.

I write novels, but I do not believe in the myth of the hero who will save us all in the end.

8:53 p.m.

Sing to me to expand the world
make a path between the waves
and save the city from drowning like a prophet
Don’t grieve alone
Take me as an idea
a witness
or a guide
and open your arms
closing the wound with an embrace
The names of lovers all wiped out:
no walls
no trees
to prove that love exists
just the birds inside your head
retelling the tale

March 14

9:28 p.m.

It’s ironic that the most enduring moments
are those of annihilation or departure.

March 16

8:18 a.m.

When the roads are blocked, draw a new map. Become Rome. Be Gaza.

4:12 p.m.

We wanted to liberate the homeland
but now, O grandmother, we cannot even find a street at its end.

March 19

10:35 a.m.

When you’re surrounded by death, you don’t think about the end. Trying to survive, you drown, watching the brazenness of the cowards floating above you.

11:02 a.m.

Wind, rain, cold air, and tents that do not know the meaning of sumud.
Judge them for their betrayal.

11:28 a.m.

Final nap. 
Fathers alone can lull death with silent pain.

“When you’re surrounded by death, you don’t think about the end. Trying to survive, you drown, watching the brazenness of the cowards floating above you.”

—Nima Hasan, March 19, 2024, 10:35 a.m.

March 21

9:49 a.m.

They say the homeland is lost and we its mawawil
hyenas chasing hyenas
death is coming for you, for him
O mother, if time is cruel to the homeland
we have men to carry it when it is wounded
If you find the free man hungry
he has no one but God to complain to
The martyr sleeps in his grave
with only his mother to pray for him

1:00 p.m.

My mother was a homeland. The homeland does not die.

4:59 p.m.

Hunger is a verse
Displacement is a verse
The world does not bless
a tent made of cans

March 22

7:08 p.m.

At some point in your life, you come to understand that you are alone. Nothing and no one around you will be able to understand who you are. All the accumulations left behind by those who have passed through your life create a wall that grows by the year, cutting you off from making choices. I don’t see this as a psychological barrier that reflects a flaw, a failure in your responses to others. Rather, it’s a sign of maturity born out of your experiences and your ability to transcend them. You will encounter moments that are painful before you overcome them. You will inevitably return to them, but you will always know that you must persevere. It is ok to look back from time to time. We’re human beings who can be overcome by emotions even when we’re able to control them. Even if experience has led you to believe that you can’t build relationships with others, there is nothing wrong with you. Perhaps you simply expected reciprocity for your generosity and cannot just stand by when none is forthcoming.

The other is just an illusion at the beginning of the tale, so you can create yourself for your own story. You are the only truth, and even if you are surrounded by illusions, it is okay to be alone. Loneliness here is uniqueness, not helplessness.

March 23

5:49 p.m.

You have to believe in a god for the idea of rebellion to work inside you. We do not rebel against nothingness. An individual who does not rebel against the chemistry of the universe, even at the level of simple feelings, is a pale and sickly human being.

9:56 p.m.

Day (x) of war.
Waking up early here doesn’t mean you’re an energetic person ready to take in the fresh morning air with your arms outstretched to the coming day; it’s not the luxury of getting an early start that gives you the strength to rise. Tonight, the wind is so strong it seems determined to punish the tents for being in the middle of the street. My cold bed makes me check my children’s temperatures to see if they’re as cold as I am. Their faces are all turned toward me, their bodies curled into a close circle with me at the center, waiting for me to signal a new movement, as though I’m the leading dancer here. Perhaps it is their breath that makes the music. And the sound of a drone is put there by the director to attract the audience’s attention.

Mahmoud, my eldest son, starts a new job today. He’ll make pastries and sell them to those in the tents and the school shelters. Aid has started to come in and flour is a bit cheaper, so now it’s possible to buy some. Just days ago, we were searching for flour like miners, but yesterday, the city was carrying bags of wheat rather than the bodies of martyrs. This is a day that must be written about, but I won’t; I fear the flour seller stumbling, the city returning to where it was, without a loaf of bread to be found. At three in the morning, Mahmoud’s friends tap lightly on the door of the shelter to wake him up for work. They don’t realize that everyone is awake; we just pretend to sleep as a distraction from the darkness all around us. He goes out with his friends, a strange vigor in his step. I hear his jaw shaking from the cold as he walks out the door. I smile, knowing how he likes to exaggerate to make a hero out of himself. But there’s also a twinge of pain inside me that makes me face the darkness with open eyes.

The intermittent naps are over. No more conversations with anxiety: I have to get up. I have no space around me to stretch, to extend my arms, or even to lean on a hand to help me up. I hop up like a rabbit out of its cage. I dread the thought of finding a bathroom to use, so I’ll wait until it’s light enough to go to a relative’s house: I can’t compete with a hundred women and children for one bathroom. And as long as I have the luxury of an outhouse, it’s like having a golden ticket to the opera. I take my three little girls to do what’s natural in an unnatural way, walking through the cold to a far-off stranger’s door, carrying our water bottles like precious treasures, checking our grip upon them at each step. I do not care about the disapproving glances. It is my right to live. Access to a usable restroom: I will not relinquish that right.

Going back to wash our faces requires more water. The boys can handle themselves, although I know they’re more embarrassed than I am; still, they are men in a time of war. I made them each a water bottle for the bathroom and wrote their names on them. They laughed when we first walked down the street with bottles of water inscribed with our names, begging to enter a bathroom that we might find vacant somewhere. I spoil them by squeezing half a lemon into the bottles as a substitute for the soap that can no longer be found. We use one small bottle of water to wash all our faces, catching the water in a wide bowl so that we don’t waste a drop: we have to recycle it to wash our feet. We surround our meager space in the shelter with school desks and some old curtains that we’ve found for a bit of privacy.

To prepare breakfast for the children, I have to collect some small sticks that can light quickly. It’s sheer joy when the wood catches fire, like the joy of a child receiving a bag of chips as UNRWA’s generous gift to displaced children. I’ve been waiting to receive some biscuits. There’s a silent excitement I feel inside at the thought of a small piece of biscuit, a luxury that is not available even to those with money: money no longer has that power here. A lot of blank paper is needed to light a fire under a pot of water to make tea, and money won’t buy you the ingredients for that cup of tea in a city empty of everything except death. 

Water is also a luxury. I no longer remember the flow of water from a tap. The joyful sound of water clinking as it’s poured into a plastic bottle overshadows any image of civilization I have ever experienced. The line for water is a test of your fortitude. You have to stay on your feet without taking a step back or looking up at the sky, even if you are tempted by curiosity at the sound of the death drone, wanting to observe its movement. You have to keep your eyes on the water hose stretched out before you. It’s your connection to life.

Lunchtime
I forget we have lost the meaning of time; our appointments now stand in the line with us
Bread line
water line
fear line
time line
line of death
True steadfastness is returning from all these lines with every part of your body intact
Your soul is of course damaged. That’s okay.

In the line
waiting for the wheat to rest
the smile of the man dusted with flour
the loaf of bread falling freely on the battlefield

In the line
a young woman tries to recall the meaning of her femininity
a man sings to the oven
another tries to understand the screams of the burning street
I stand in the middle of the story
gathering birds in my head
fearing the flight of the trees

In the line
an old woman curses the fields and the ears of grain
as she lists the names of the great cities for you
She sews the rope of hunger
to make a large sack of flour
enough for the guards of the tents

In the line
you and I
a child bites her nails
a man spits on the war
a woman applies lipstick under her veil
No water in this city to wash away our sins
but we’ll defy hell to produce a fresh loaf of bread
a moment before death

Now strip all that away and start to understand the language of darkness, your companion for the hours to come. You have many tales to hear or to tell, depending on the mood of the fighter jets above you, the bombs always threatening to fall.

“You have to believe in a god for the idea of rebellion to work inside you. We do not rebel against nothingness. An individual who does not rebel against the chemistry of the universe, even at the level of simple feelings, is a pale and sickly human being.”

—Nima Hasan, March 23, 2024, 5:49 p.m.

March 24

8:29 a.m.

170 days of our lives gone as we wait for death in Rafah.
In Khan Yunis the shelling has not stopped since suhoor and the Nasser Hospital neighborhood is being burned by fire belts.
The genocide in Al-Shifa Hospital has lasted a week (a genocide on repeat).
Nuseirat is being bombarded by fighter jets and artillery.
The North is being starved to death.
We are fine.
Thanks for asking.
Be well.

11:57 a.m.

The void:
a rendezvous for our disappointments
Laughter:
a defining moment that will not be duplicated
Sleep:
a chance for silence
Reading:
a good excuse for obesity
Crying:
a moment of defeat
Song:
strangers sharing a heart
Love:
a translation of our true selves
Homeland:
a blank phone screen

2:00 p.m.

The thought of home is the warmest thing humankind has ever found.
All of Gaza trembles.

March 25

11:26 p.m.

A poet
paints an ear of wheat on his dead tree each day. The birds believe it.

March 26

9:24 a.m.

My daughter woke up asking:
How long will the war last?
I really miss our home.
I dreamt we returned.
She cried and I cried.

March 27

6:28 p.m.

Tell sorrow that we pardon it—ask it to release us!

March 28

10:35 a.m.

I once had a mute cat that came to me whenever it was hungry or wanted to relieve itself. With a movement of her head, she would move her food dish or scratch on the door to be let out. She did not jab me with a paw or rub herself against me when she wanted me to wake up; instead, she would stand by my head and stare intently at my sleeping face until I felt I was being watched. And I would get up and do what she wanted. Her unique way of expressing herself by just glancing at me made me feel like she was a part of me. I felt free with her, sharing a language that connected us.

The circle has closed around me like a cat forced into silence, scratching to try and reach a false sense of freedom. It has made my view of wars different from the prevailing ones. Some see me as disloyal to the resistance in a country that is forbidden to speak; others question my patriotism. You might be a traitor, a friend told me, while she drank cappuccino in front of her TV screen, watching the news and crying with great “integrity.”

I am trying to tell my story without jabbing you with a paw or clinging to anyone. I am just declaring my needs clearly and firmly, remaining myself, without meowing about it.

March 29

2:25 p.m.

We are not well.
We aren’t strong enough to see death, to wait for it day after day without having breakdown after breakdown. It is okay to reveal our weakness and to cry. Stubbornness in the face of sorrow and oppression is not a form of resistance but a denial of our humanity. That is why we are traumatized and collapse at the slightest glimpse of the future. The pictures and videos and news bulletins we see depict what we are living through, and they send a mixed message: we are all potential martyrs, and at the same time, we have to endure with patience until our turn comes and then welcome it with pride. I do not think our inner strength will be enough to welcome death, even if we can accept it. True steadfastness comes from expressing your feelings exactly as they are. Then you will never reach the point of collapse; you will keep a balance between the reality of your feelings and the reality of what you are facing. Talk to yourself, even to your mirror, and don’t be afraid of the fear you find there.

March 30

1:42 a.m.

At school

I want to hear the school bell ring
draw a line on an empty bread bag
clap loudly for the morning whistle

Put “water” in a sentence
before it runs out:
that’s what the teacher told us

Recite: Mawtini
though chanting can’t be heard in the tent

I have no books
I wanted to make a pot of tea
before winter comes
Words stir the fire’s embers

Where is my mother?
I’m old enough now 
to look for her in the rubble
That’s the first lesson

Stand up. Sit down.
Record: I am from Gaza
and strike the world from the record.

8:22 p.m.

Isaac Mukhaimir, a father and true leader, is dead.
When he came to the signing of my novel, he read it that same day.
He called me that evening to tell me: 
I am so proud: you are a true daughter of the camp. I have never read anyone who captures the realities of the camp, and its secrets, as you have. 

Nima Hasan, a mother and single caretaker of seven children, is a writer, poet, and social worker from Rafah. Her published works in Arabic include the novels Where the Flames Danced and It Was Not a Death and the book Letters from a Perpetrator. Her poetry has been published and translated widely in print and online publications. She was awarded the Samira al-Khalil Prize in 2024 and a selection of her writings during the genocide were published bilingually, in Arabic and French translation by Souad Labbize, titled Be Gaza (Les Lisières, January 2025).

Rania Jawad is an assistant professor in the Department of English Literature at Birzeit University, Palestine. Her recent publications and work focus on women’s writings from Gaza during the genocide, and the production and politics of testimonial writing.

Malaka Shwaikh is a scholar from Gaza. She is a lecturer in international relations at the University of St Andrews. She coauthored Prison Hunger Strikes in Palestine: A Strategic Perspective (2023) with Rebecca Ruth Gould and has published articles and book chapters on the limitations of resilience and the question of Palestine, narratives of displacement, gendered realities of incarceration, and translation politics in Gaza.

The post “I Bequeath Life to You, for We Die without Life Knowing Us”—Nima Hasan Writing from the Ends of the Homeland appeared first on Mizna.

Essayist Farah Abdessamad contemplates the layering of history atop history in a small Tunisian town on the Mediterranean coast, and the poetics of how memory and recollection sediment to become the future of the past—what we call our present. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2, Futurities, link to purchase HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects.

—Farah Abdessamad

Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision

Twelve miles south of Tunis, I inspect the graffiti on the decrepit house. Spray painted in black against a wall the color of young apricots, are the words “Naro” next to “H-Lif”—an abbreviation for the town of Hammam Lif. In capital letters these two words float. Naro, Hammam-Lif’s Carthaginian past; Hammam Lif, Naro’s Tunisian future. In a shadowless street off the polluted beach, they exist simultaneously and become something else: a world-image and a new spatial realm. These two names won’t leave me alone.

Unlike more elaborate mural art, this graffiti contained no signature and no date. The unknown artist strolled, stopped, and appraised the abandoned house’s surface in near collapse under the weight of bygone halcyon days. Everything here is in a state of near-collapse. It must have happened at nighttime, when the beach’s laughter, made of discreet courtship near the wave breakers and hard liquor drunk by the bottle, subsided. Lulled by the rolling waves, the young man—let’s assume a young man—looked around. Silence. Next, he took his can of spray paint and gave it a vigorous shake, muffled by a second-hand sweater he wrapped around it. Without much thought, he tattooed the names of his town. Hammam Lif first, then Naro, a spontaneous but necessary addition as if one couldn’t be inscribed without the other. A quick outburst. Intentionally or not, he mapped a sensory grid: that of the living and the dead. I stare at the evocation, just like he did. As quiet as a cat, he left the scene toward the train station and farther west, joining the towering shadow of Jebel Boukornine. 

Graffiti is a public language; it captures a visual and symbolic mood when not a scream. Yet “[l]anguage is never simply a language, a tool, it is a reservoir of a people’s soul,” wrote Albert Memmi in The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon (1973); this prompts recognition. The young man who spray painted the words Naro and Hammam Lif didn’t do so to show off his drawing skills or compete with others over matters of style or engage in obvious social activism. H-Lif and Naro, by their two-word minimalism—the drawing holding the finality of a signature—conveyed something of a different order. It brought to mind another mural I had noticed two years ago at Hammam Lif’s train station after a decade-long absence. That one shows a teenager with headphones listening to a cassette that reads “please don’t kill yourself” in English. Nurturing and supportive slogans on this anti-suicide campaign include “Stay 4 the strangers that will love you” and “Life is always worth it.” A loving whisper to counter a desperate, silent scream. It hurts to think that for some young people the train linking Tunis to its southern banlieue might be an attractive final destination, a relief to end a painful existence. The mood of inevitable capitulation is challenged in this anti-suicide graffiti by the station that appeared after the Revolution, commissioned by a local youth organization. I wondered why they elected to write these messages in English as opposed to our dialect if the intended audience was local youth. The image carried a distinctive American feel with its textisms and Walkman from the 1980s and 90s, which brought to mind a third graffiti by the beach promenade depicting the American hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur on the sides of a run-down kiosk. English is a social language, an elsewhere, an abstract country, a narrative landscape, much like Naro is to Hammam Lif. A Hammam Lif graffiti resurrects Naro like others vow to avenge the death of Tupac: these alternative spaces exist only in our subjective longing, but their entanglement doesn’t end there. More than a mass of archaeological fragments, Naro is the site of powerful dreamscapes, upon which a graffiti artist extends the affective urge to hold onto the memory of the dead through time. Naro and Hammam Lif etched like the romantic blanket protecting  a lover’s embrace; I got pulled in to examine what kind of longing they conjure.

It’s hard to chart with precision Naro’s timeline. The village and its people were part of Carthage’s expanding empire, which Rome razed to the ground in 146 BCE after three devastating wars. This genocidal campaign brutally erased most traces of Carthaginian culture, literature, and lifestyle, a sprawling civilization that stretched across the central Mediterranean for centuries. Victorious Rome incorporated and administered the territory as a province. The country, to which the Amazigh people are indigenous, changed hands countless times until being ruled by the Ottoman Empire and France before gaining independence in 1956. Hammam Lif, famous for its hot spring reputed to cure nasal ailments, sits where ancient Naro was and has grown from a modest fishermen’s village to a town of more than 40,000 people. At what point did the city cease to be Carthaginian, Arab, Ottoman, Vandals, or French to become something else entirely in our imagination?

Jebel Boukornine, the mountain of “two horns” in Tunisian Arabic, looms over Hammam Lif as it did over Naro. The twin peaks crown the Gulf of Tunis, belonging to the topographical memory of Tunisois today, of Carthaginians yesterday. In the times of Naro, Boukornine’s limestone gave a pink hue to syncretic statues prized by Punic and Roman patrons. On its western peak, where animals were sacrificed and votive stelae placed to honor the gods and commemorate the animal offerings, rested a sanctuary consecrated to the cult of Punic divinity Baal, later assimilated to the Roman god Saturn. There, worshippers overlooked Carthage and the small villages around it. I imagine them, not more than five or six climbing the mountain with their loads to visit the temple’s attendants. Upon reaching Boukornine’s western summit, they rested on small benches made of wood and rocks. The breeze cooled their burning cheeks. The supplicants shared a piece of bread between them before washing their hands to proceed with the rituals. And when nighttime descended, they lit terracotta lamps and stargazed, huddling against the shadows. 

I wandered near Jebel Boukornine one winter day. I went to visit the green and red painted sufi shrine of local saint Sidi Bouriga. A fire destroyed part of the building a few years ago. The zaouia had been renovated since, but it was closed that day. I followed the path leading to the mountain’s slopes that remain green despite the abundance of concrete and dust everywhere around it. The incessant car traffic muted; I paused to admire the expanse of the sea’s changing blue—a blush so warm and tranquil. Amid piles of plastic trash and unpleasant smells, I carried on the forested slopes until confronted with several young men who immediately hid their hands in their pockets when they spotted me. The mountain’s new guardians, I thought. I turned my feet and left visiting the old sanctuary for another day. 

Like the graffiti artist’s infatuation, I too have often thought of Hammam Lif and Naro. I could not roam Hammam Lif without roaming Naro and this spatial collision created an illusion of permanence, the existence of a vague continuum giving way to a love of legends and a mythological resonance. Several months after my walk to Boukornine I encountered ancient Naro when I least expected it in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum opened a show devoted to medieval Africa. Among the exhibition’s stunning objects were Jewish mosaics from Naro excavated in the late 19th century. They testified from a place where multiple faiths coexisted from the 3rd to the 6th century. The floor mosaics represented several potent images including a menorah, a lion framed by floral motifs, and a large-scale date palm tree. I came to know that they had been unearthed in 1883 by Ernest de Prudhomme, a French Army Captain who proverbially dug his backyard and found a treasure: the most complete evidence of ancient synagogues in Roman Africa. Men under his orders unfortunately damaged many pieces due to inadequate excavation techniques and handling. The Brooklyn Museum acquired these historical objects in 1905, around the same year of the Young Tunisians’ founding, a decisive political movement mobilizing indigènes, promoting Tunisian emancipation and equal political consideration under the French protectorate. 

In New York, I admired these vestiges and noted their familiarity despite not sharing the faith for which they were designed. I recognized in the lion the tales of the extinct North African Lion which once populated Tunisia’s forests and mountains up until independence. I visualized the many date palm trees lining the beachfront promenade of today’s Hammam Lif in their various states of desiccation, and in the mosaics the colorful tiles of our family home as well as the ostraca of a surviving past that pokes and gasps through the ripples of time.

That de Prudhomme found the remains of the Naro synagogue in his garden is rather uncanny. It emphasizes that soil is a stratum holding infinite secrets. History’s layers often mingle and argue like the daily pensioners glued to their plastic chairs in smoky, idle cafes amplified by the noise of a TV playing somewhere. These deposits sediment and superimpose, elbowing eras and events out of sight until they stubbornly spring back to view. 

The ancients distinguished between memory and recollection. In the same way, we differentiate History from collective and mythological narratives, and all of these from personal histories. According to Saint Augustine, born in Romanized North Africa, “the time present of things past is memory.” In other words, memory is the present of the past. Recollection, on the other hand, entails the act of piecing together fragments, a determination that leads to a form of realization. Collective and primordial memories may not concern our existence directly but they frame a mental geography. I, as the embodied form of the present, was not present during the birth of oceans and the sky, nor during those cataclysmic events—plagues, wars, natural disasters, famines—that still haunt the collective human consciousness. Yet as a historical being, I live through my personal memories in addition to those I have inherited, what German scholar Reinhart Koselleck referred to in Sediments of Time as a tension between “experiential space” and “expectation horizon”. And crucially, memory cannot be apprehended without forgetfulness and erasure. 

Little has survived Roman wrath to teach us about how Carthaginians philosophized history and human existence. They believed that the soul survived from its physical incarnation. In other societies not too distant from Naro, the dead underwent trials to be accepted into an afterlife; a moment often recounted as a voyage, a crossing of rivers. Forgetfulness grants passage to a new life in exchange for the past: the dead must relinquish the memory of those that attach them to the material world. Historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote in Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting that “the dead are those who have lost their memories”—or, perhaps more accurately, traded. While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects. 

* * * 

After encountering the laconic graffiti signage of H-Lif and Naro, I head back to the beach. The sea is calm and the scent of rotten garbage tickles my throat. Public benches have been smashed into pieces. Sea-facing restaurants and kiosks have shut, except for one with an empty freezer placed like it were part of a garage sale. Wild grass and trash have covered the area where sand used to be. I tiptoe between shards of glass and plastic bottles, baby clothes and broken toys, and dry balls of Posidonia oceanica, a common underwater seagrass, rejected by the sea. Famished flea-infested dogs and litters of emaciated cats haul leftovers of leftovers. Sand was harvested to embellish touristic beaches south, as if this place’s constitutive components were destined to elect one of two imposed choices: to leave or surrender. Following a heavy storm in 1981, ill-advised authorities installed large wave breakers which trapped marine currents, occasionally turning the sea a dangerous tint of green. Stagnating waters have mixed with sewage; it is too toxic to swim there now. When I was little during summer visits, my family rushed to secure a spot on the beach before it got crowded. This was before the sea turned into an irreversible poisonous pond where harassed and beaten-up asylum seekers go to die, trading their own memories for a one-way passage. At night, we would gather on white plastic chairs sinking into the cold sand, drinking sodas drunk on our stupid happiness. 

From the beach on a clear day, I can make out the Byrsa Hill of old Carthage and the elevated village of Sidi Bou Said, the Tunisia of social media influencers and hashtags, a vista that often feels like it belongs to a different country. Located north, both of these spots twinkle at night. Wish you were here, they tout to me, from my there on the other side of the Gulf of Tunis. Large ships anchor in the port of La Goulette—to France, Italy—they pass by until they make a turn and disappear in the far distance. Sometimes I think the ships and their passengers might pity this neglected town and its people who dream of visas they can’t obtain to travel abroad and escape (is visa-fantasizing an early form of memory-trading?). Work, lack of work, life is ghali—expensive. The Tunisia I know, the one of Hammam Lif, is left to old people, kids, and women, to it-was-better-before and look-at-these-young-women-now (always young women). A dirty dot, a stain on the polluted coastline along with Rades’ eyesore of an industrial zone. The old casino is collapsing despite multiple renovation announcements. The empty mansions have stayed behind while patrician families have opted to live elsewhere. The Bey’s winter residence is crumbling, the site reeks of urine. Cinema Oriental closed a while ago and the bakeries are sometimes half empty amid cyclical flour shortages, which have worsened in recent years. And not just flour: lines of caffeine-deprived people in front of the few shops selling ground coffee. But there’s fricasses, pizza, lablebi, and more and we’ve blessed a new dictator to replace the one we had deposed. The town’s characters ignore that they live on borrowed time as each new day starts following the same musical score. The streets bask in nostalgia, a dangerous affliction that infects people sitting, waiting, queuing in between a constitutional coup, an economic crisis, and news of arbitrary arrests. Those working in Europe and Canada front their exchange rate-enabled wealth. They don’t share stories of racism and hardships beneath their hard-won euros and dollars. 

“A remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present,” noted French intellectual Maurice Halbwachs in The Social Frameworks of Memory. I find this helpful to approach Naro’s shape-shifting nature. Naro’s ability to stimulate a reflection on the concept of time—both a physical place and a delineated periodicity—and the poetics of time. Naro has become a salve to soothe daily humiliations, an incantation to fight the static of the present. Naro is not a door for cultural supremacy or racist genetic theories. Rather, it is a revolution in the sense of circling back to a rumination—a poking question mark that gives way to mysterious ellipses. 

In our mind, the graffiti artist’s and mine, Naro is enveloped in a magnetic aroma of fresh fish, baking ovens, and a sticky, generous sea. The village enjoys stillness during napping hours once men have returned to shore with their morning loads of tuna, octopus, and cuttlefish. Children play on the beach and admire the boats going and leaving the port of Carthage. They dream of trading across the Mediterranean Sea one day in these agile ships, of encountering different lands, of worshiping Melqart in the various temples dedicated to him in Gades and Malta. Borders are malleable here. A grandmother scolds a child, who dirtied their cotton robe when drawing fish on the wet sand with his friends. A little girl shrieks and runs away from bees. 

Naro means “fire” in the old and extinct language of the Carthaginians, a connection also found in Arabic today. Fire is light, an emergency signal, a symbol of arrivals and homecomings at sea. It brightens crevices, fear, and human ignorance while projecting diffused shadows against the walls of our caves. Fire is a sun, a raging luminosity, an abundant summer and the warmth of a home during winter. Uncontrolled and unchecked, fire turns aggressive, tempestuous, and incandescent. As such, its cathartic release produces alchemical alterations. Intimate fire nourishes the feeble glow of candles one brings to vigils to remember the dead, to honor their memory, and to stay alive, together, through the night.

Gaston Bachelard had warned about fire’s magnetic allure and dangers in Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938). “In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away.” But fire is an avatar of Tunisian pleasure and pain; we feel it in the burning of our tongue induced by our spicy cuisine and acknowledge its presence in the combustion that killed fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, which has since left us feeling a little lost. Maybe it can guide us out of our maze. 

On the pale apricot wall, the unknown artist—a warm presence by now—drew an invisible bridge between Naro and Hammam Lif, two interconnected worlds that exist within and for each other’s eyes. The gesture might be brushed off as an insignificant spasm, yet the suggestion of this portal is the mark of someone who longs, dissents, and resists. The beach’s sand glimmers under the sun, the trees stretch their opulent palm leaves, parasols dot the vista with wondrous colors. Every able-bodied resident has donated a day annually to clean the city. Giggles rise from the emerald sea. Fresh seafood grills on the promenade and ice cold citronade refreshments. A ferry bound for Carthage, Sidi Bou Said, and La Marsa arrives at the pier. Those who disembark head for the casino, where children and adults listen to a captivating old storyteller. They will spend the rest of the day at the new spa at the bottom of Boukornine. In the city center, cinemas show the latest arthouse and experimental films in the mornings. Art galleries opened in two of the old seaside mansions. One of them, Africa House, specializes in contemporary art from the continent, offering year-long residencies to African artists who play chess and dominoes with residents during lazy afternoon hours. During winter, a fashion show takes place inside the casino with a dedicated prize awarded to the best fripes. Secondhand clothes sellers pick their models long in advance and compete for the best tailors in town. The bells of church Sainte-Marie sound on Sundays. The synagogue that was transformed into a children’s library has reverted to its former status and the children’s library has moved to a large annex. The children gather there, then volunteer on the public farm to take care of the horses, donkeys, and sheep. They tease the plump cats on their way. The trains come on time and service Tunis and other destinations every seven minutes. One season follows another—marked by scents of geranium, jasmine, orange blossom, roses, and verbena. Herbalists have set up kiosks near the spa. The market is buzzing with gossip and well-wishes. Couples cruise the sea in sail boats while others hike Boukornine for a more panoramic view. There’s a concert later tonight. I stand by the pale apricot wall and strike three knocks against the house’s blue door. 

Farah Abdessamad is a French Tunisian essayist and critic writing at the intersection of art, heritage, and identity.

The post Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision appeared first on Mizna.

The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Over the past eighteen months, the genocide in Gaza has laid bare the state of world, showing us the true brutality of neoliberal values and institutions, and the unadulterated depravity of settler colonialism. While much of the world has persisted in a state of complicit blindness, a blindness that tolerates the erasure and ghostification of Gaza, students, artists, writers, filmmakers, cultural workers, have been on the front lines of speaking out against genocide and imagining new forms of resistance and solidarity.

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, invokes formal and conceptual notions of ghosts, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus, specifically the country’s historic and current geopolitical role in the Levant region and in the genocide on Gaza. The artworks in this exhibition show us how ghost can be properly attended to and examined in order to develop a new sensory mode and thus a new way of engaging with the world around us. It was my pleasure to interact with and review this complex exhibition as my own form of digital ghost.

— Lamia Abukhadra, Art and Communications Director

Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

—Lamia Abukhadra

On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost? The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

My notification doesn’t go off as planned; I log in to the Instagram live tour fifteen minutes late. By the time I am able to join, I have missed the explanation of the exterior of the space as well as much of the first room. No matter, a record of the tour is saved and uploaded later, acting as a trace of the last days of the exhibition. Apart from a detailed press kit and the virtual conversations I had with some of the artists, this is the only way I encountered On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

My initial meeting with some of the artists who collectively conceived, produced, and invigilated the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion—comprised of the Lower Levant Company (Peter Eramian and Emiddio Vasquez), Haig Aivazian, and the Endrosia Collective (Andreas Andronikou, Marina Ashioti, Niki Charalambous, Doris Mari Demetriadou, Irini Khenkin, Rafailia Tsiridou, and Alexandros Xenophontos)—took place on Zoom a few days before the exhibition was set to close. During our discussion, Andreas Andronikou mentioned that as the artists explored the varying intensities and materializations of the ghost in the machine, a key theme throughout the exhibition, the question “On which side of the screen lies the ghost?” was pivotal in conceiving the pavilion’s conceptual framework. Defined by the artists as the persistent, excessive presence of that which is repressed while paradoxically and simultaneously actively withdrawing, ghosts become the material in which speculative forms or methodologies can emerge. Within these alternative modes, that which has been repressed can be properly attended to and examined; a new sensory mode is developed. Through the process of “vigilance,” or the act of keeping vigil, the ghost in its many manifestations becomes a collaborator in sensing, imagining, and building new worlds from the one currently crumbling around us. 

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… invokes notions of ghosts, ghosting, and haunting through several formal and conceptual approaches, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus. The exhibition title is extracted from the opening lines of a 2019 Forbes article¹ which details a Cyprus-based spyware operation run by Israeli tech millionaire Tal Dilian and the Intellexa consortium. The article describes a wildflower-lined street in Larnaca where an unassuming black van is parked, inside of which exists an arsenal of technology capable of hacking into nearby smartphones with the purpose of gleaning and intercepting all of the private correspondences within. The Intellexa consortium as well as other companies associated with or owned by Dilian were found to be involved in several scandals, including the selling of spyware to the oppressive regime in Egypt and a paramilitary group in Sudan, mass unregulated internet surveillance in Nigeria, the surveillance of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, and, most recently, receiving US Treasury sanctions for “developing, operating, and distributing commercial spyware technology that presents a significant threat to the national security of the United States.”² In referencing the black van scandal, the artists critically engage with the larger positionality of the nation of Cyprus as a covert or complicit ghostly presence in relation to the Levant region both historically and recently; a thoroughfare in which European, American, and Levantine geopolitical interests and dynamics meet. A mere 45-minute plane ride from the Levantine coast, Cyprus has long been a site for British and American military surveillance posts. The Treaty of Establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, signed in 1960 to grant Cyprus its independence from British colonial rule, includes several clauses granting the British government the right to maintain sovereign military bases in Akrotiri and Dhekelia, both of which remain active. More recently, Cyprus’ proximity to the Levant manifested through Cypriot residents hearing the 2020 Beirut Port explosion;³ in June 2024, the now-deceased Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened the nation, saying that it would be considered “part of the war” if it allowed the Israeli military to use its air or maritime spaces;⁴ and in January 2025, a report from the British Palestinian Committee laid out the extent of British military involvement in the genocidal war on Gaza, specifically mentioning the use of British RAF bases on the island of Cyprus for cargo transport to Israel and nightly surveillance flights over Gaza.⁵ Digging into the fantastical anecdote of the black van and the geopolitical associations it invokes, the artists collectively decided to create a framework for the entire exhibition to be the site of a speculative agency, Forever Informed. The aims of this agency, whose slogan is “smart solutions to weak signals” are left intentionally vague, but we are told that they gather information. The framing of the entire exhibition space as a parafictional surveillance company in disarray, in between setting up (appearance) and abandonment (disappearance), creates a space ripe for haunting. Each individual artwork is a complex examination of Cyprus’ geopolitical position that doubles as an exploration of this mysterious organization’s mythologies and imaginaries. The space itself existed as a satellite exhibition outside of the Biennale’s Giardini, an unassuming yet proximate presence haunting the main space of the 2024 Biennale. Rather than hiring the traditional gallery watchers to monitor and police the space, the artists themselves as well as invited residents took part in the practice of invigilation, drawing from the British use of the word invigilator: Those who look after a space. The practice of invigilation meant that the artists themselves stayed with their works and welcomed people into the space. Residents who took part in the Vigil Workspace were invited to perform and create discourse in relation to the exhibition as they sat vigil. Key to the practice of invigilation was the tours that the artists regularly gave of the space, thoroughly explaining the conceptual framework of the exhibition and the significance of each artwork in their own ways. 

Below is an abbreviated description of my experience attending a virtual walkthrough of the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion, partially embellished with additional information available in the pavilion’s press kit. 

**** 

I am sitting on one side of the screen, about to watch the tour of On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… on Instagram Live, facilitated by the Lower Levant Company. 

The phone camera is fixed on a view of an LED screen mounted vertically, like a phone screen, inside the facade of the Cyprus Pavilion. For a few minutes, we watch as the video looping on the LED monitor appears to glitch, fragmenting clips from a 2019 Forbes documentary which contains footage granted by the spyware dealer Tal Dilian of his black van conducting surveillance on a wildflower-lined street. The ambient noise of footsteps—assumed to belong to exhibition viewers drawn in by the screen’s alluring advertisement-like brightness—continue around the camera holder. In the darkness of early evening, the LED screen emanates light so strongly that it is the only thing the camera is able to capture, the surrounding environment is too dark and thus underexposed. 

The camera-holder, Peter Eramian, a member of the artist duo Lower Levant Company, backs up and Emiddio Vazquez, the other LLC member, appears in-frame and welcomes us to “the last ever tour” of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

In addition to LED Screen (by Forever Informed), Vazquez points us to the other piece of the pavilion installed along the canal, Organ (by Rafailia Tsiridou and Emiddio Vasquez), a network of bright orange pipes which could be mistaken as part of the building’s infrastructure. As they come into contact with the vibrations created by the canal and its surrounding environment, the six PVC pipes create a feedback network of amplification and transmission. Organ is an eavesdropper or a spy, turning the sounds of the canal and the conditions of its surroundings into harvestable information. Rather than record or analyze data points, Organ simply transmits the vibrations that it encounters, feeding them into other pieces inside the space as live, unreproducible material, calling into question the purpose of the fabulated company Forever Informed. I recall the common cliché of when horror film characters first begin to suspect that a place is haunted, reassuring themselves that the strange noise they heard was “just the wind.” In this case, the wind and other natural or man-made elements create a haunting, gathering environmental elements to create an excessive force in which the tensions between information gathering and art are brought together. Yet, Organ does not gather, store, or organize any information, instead leaving us with purely sonic experiences available to us only in the present. On camera, the tour guides tell us that this particular artwork received a lot of attention and curiosity while it was being installed. 

We are led inside and after explaining the conceptual premise of the exhibition, Vazquez turns our attention to the first room which he describes as the “reception room” for Forever Informed. Among the pieces we are shown in this room, all of which engage with histories and materialities of information gathering and transmission, are Tyre Track by Lower Levant Company and Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian. Sitting on the middle of the cement reception room floor is Tyre Track, a low rectangular mound of concrete with stones, gravel, seashells, and other detritus embedded within it. The indentation of a car tire track has been left diagonally across the rectangle. We learn that this trace was made by Forever Informed’s own surveillance van which has eerily similar capabilities as Tal Dilian’s infamous black van. The mesh peeking out from the edges of the object gives us the impression that this mound was not extracted from another location but cast. Upon closer inspection, the tracks appear to be a negative imprint, suggesting that the object itself may be a false or implanted trace of this covert operation. While holding the camera, Eramian adds that the dubious and archeological qualities of the piece leads one to question what other traces have been left on the island of Cyprus, especially those of a ghostly or clandestine nature. 

Nearby, hanging on a wall is Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian, a Lebanese artist invited to contribute to the Cyprus Pavilion. Eramian tells us that recently Aivazian has been working on the dualities of light and darkness; light always associated with truth and enlightenment, as well as the Promethean myth where light and thus knowledge was passed on to humans, and darkness associated with criminality and unproductiveness. For Aivazian, we are told, this duality is not as clear as we may think, as the rise of modernity and neoliberal capitalism has meant that the materialities of light have been used or involved in the extraction of resources, policing and control of movement, and surveillance, while darkness could serve as a generative, fugitive space outside the watchful gaze of power. In this diptych of etched copper plates, Aivazian works with found etchings of torch bearers, which one could assume originate from representations of revolution or freedom, but are actually sourced from images of colonial expedition. As the camera approaches the etchings, Vazquez and Eramian as well as some of the other artworks in the space are reflected back. While the plate on the right consists of a small, isolated etching of a hand holding a torch surrounded by negative space, we are told that the plate on the left is a closeup of the texture of smoke from that a lit torch emits. In engaging with the analogue printing process, Aivazian invokes the mechanism of information and image circulation at the height of European colonization—where foreign lands, bodies, and ecologies were often imagined, represented, and reproduced through the medium of etching and lithography. But Aivazian edits this methodology of circulation, showing us only the matrix; the possibility of producing a large number of prints lingers as a ghostly suggestion. Copper itself, a resource in which Cyprus is rich, is an essential material in the contemporary battle over control, progress, and information, extracted for use in computing, electric conductivity, and signal transmission. The choice of cropping and zooming in creates an obfuscation. What could the texture of smoke hide? Are the torch-bearers leading the masses towards freedom or, as colonial entities, will they use their torches as a tool for mass destruction? 

As we move into the second room, we see AVRION PROIN EN NA DEIS, which translates to “TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL SEE,” a sculptural work by Alexandros Xenophontos, member of the Endrosia collective. Sixteen tiles—three of which emit fluorescent white light that never turns off and one of which is missing—constitute a drop ceiling in the center of the space. In lieu of the missing tile, a subsea cable, usually used to transmit telecommunication signals across large stretches of ocean, descends and begins to make its way across the floor. As the phone approaches the severed end of the cable, a low, ominous, and irregular droning can be heard. We are told it is the sound of the activity of and around the canal being transmitted from the outdoor sculpture, Organ. The cable is wrapped in several tight fitting leather corsets, contrasting with the corporate office aesthetic of the ceiling and referring to the fetishistic nature of information ownership and transmission. As the phone is pointed into the opening in the ceiling, we notice a light flashing or glitching rhythmically. Perhaps this is the same flickering light one would see in the event of a haunting, or perhaps it is an infrastructural malfunction. We learn that the light is flashing the message “tomorrow morning you will see” in morse code, inspired by the message of a found telegram sent from Cyprus to Alexandria in 1955. Informed by the geopolitical history of Cyprus as a thoroughfare for telecommunications in the Mediterranean as well as a neocolonial command point within the Levant, the sculpture creates a foreboding atmosphere. In transmitting this message to us, is Forever Informed promising us enlightenment, or are they communicating a threat? 

Just outside of the second room is an enclosed courtyard where the sound installation Crossover Frequency Spectrum by Lower Levant Company also transmits some of the vibrations from Organ. Other sounds broadcasted through the six mounted Iwata horns include local bat chirps, whistles and cracks from the ionosphere near military antennae, and field recordings taken near the UK airbase in Akrotiri, all of which constitute sounds that Vazquez says are “very loud” but usually go ignored as we are not attuned to them. Atop a bedding of black copper slag, the mouth-like horns—some functional and mounted on a truss emerging from the slag, and others ceramic replicas placed directly on the black substrate—amplify and draw viewers to attend to new frequencies, thus imploring us to develop a new sensory mode.

Unintelligible sounds leak out from the room just ahead, named SOUNDR* after a codename for a joint British/American surveillance station in Cyprus exposed as a key site for surveillance in the Middle East. Darker in tone and in lighting, this last room in On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… is populated by video installations by Lower Levant Company, Haig Aivazian, and some members of Endrosia and serves as a cross section of the relationship between Cyprus and Lebanon. Their sounds overlapping, the three animation-focused video works in SOUNDR* explore the ghostification of cities through gentrification and real estate speculation, haunting and ghost hunting through digital materialities, and the generative, insurgent possibilities that spaces of darkness, often inhabited by ghosts, can have. 

The tour closes with a brief explanation of the practice of invigilation which took place throughout the duration of the Biennale and the multilingual publication produced in tandem with the exhibition. 

Vazquez and Eramian thank us for watching, the live video ends. Like a ghost, I rewatch the tour a few more times, retracing its path, attempting to glean as much as I can from it. 

*** 

I am on one side of the screen. 

On the other side, the acceleration of ethnic cleansing of Palestine through the eighteen month-long live-streamed genocide in Gaza. I am on one side of the screen of my phone witnessing unimaginable atrocities. On the other side, Gaza is living it. My notification goes off on January 18, 2024 and Bisan Owda is wearing a press vest, live streaming through the night of the Israeli siege and bombardment at the Nasser Hospital. My notification goes off October 13, 2024 and Saleh Aljafrawi is unable to describe the scene as he films Shaban al-Dalou burning to death in a tent in the Al Aqsa hospital courtyard after Israel committed one of many “tent massacres.” For months, Anas Al Sharif is on camera giving us tour after tour of the ruins and conditions of life in the besieged Jabalia refugee camp, unrecognizable from its pre-war photos. On one side of the screen, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people through bombing, sniping, blockade of all food, water, and medical supplies, besieging and destroying all medical infrastructure as well as entire neighborhoods; Israel’s attempt to exterminate all life in Gaza, to make it withdraw. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly turned into martyrs, into ghosts. 

Often, as a civilian or a journalist would film an instance of forced displacement, the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a home, a car, or a group of tents, the influx of injuries or martyrs in a barely functioning hospital, someone looks into the camera and screams, “Who are you filming for?!” 

I am on the other side of the screen.

On my side of the screen, life goes on, and the genocide continues; we go to protests, we boycott, we occupy university property, we try to raise funds for mutual aid; concrete, political action is often stymied; international law is ignored. Every institution is complicit: From international human rights organizations and legal bodies, to western democracies and electoral politics, higher education, and to art institutions, we witnessed an expansion of fascism, an unwillingness to act justly in the face of extreme violence, an unwillingness to divest from systems of surveillance and arms manufacturing, an increase in policing of students, censorship of artists, and dismissal of professionals across all fields. Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

The ghost of the world has also exposed the hypocrisy of neoliberal institutions and their values. The 2024 Venice Biennale, unfortunately, was one of them, preferring to maintain its conventional format rather than acknowledge the genocide in Gaza in any meaningful way. It was artists and cultural workers, notably the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), who took the initiative to “haunt” the Biennale and center the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine. For much of the Biennale, the alliance staged several interventions and protests in order to disrupt business-as-usual while calling to exclude the Israeli Pavilion from participation. The group also co-hosted or brought attention to several satellite exhibitions and events featuring Palestinian art and literature.⁶ This form of haunting, which took place within the Biennale, around the city of Venice, and through various digital campaigns, aimed at recalibrating the sensory attunement of one of the largest global art institutions and events, and create an alternative experience for artists, attendees, and cultural workers in extraordinary times. 

While ANGA intervened in the Venice Biennale’s actual and ethical positionality, the artists in the Cyprus Pavilion engaged with the ghost of the world on a formal and conceptual level, critically immersing themselves in all aspects of “representing” a country actively yet covertly engaged in the genocide in Gaza and the surveillance of the surrounding region. While Gaza shows the world for what it is, the artists at the Cyprus Pavilion present us with formal and discursive interventions—ghosts—which allow us to engage with our surroundings and to imagine worlds anew.

1. Thomas Brewster, “A Multimillionaire Surveillance Dealer Steps out of the Shadows . . . and His $9 Million WhatsApp Hacking Van.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 March 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/08/05/a-multimillionaire-surveillance-dealer-steps-out-of-the-shadows-and-his-9-million-whatsapp-hacking-van/. ︎
2. David Kenner, “Notorious ‘predator’ Spyware Firm Intellexa Hit with New US Sanctions – ICIJ.” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 24 Sept. 2024, www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/notorious-predator-spyware-firm-intellexa-hit-with-new-us-sanctions/.  ︎
3. “Beirut Explosion: What We Know So Far.” BBC News, BBC, 11 Aug. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53668493. ︎
4. Paul Raymond, “Hezbollah’s Threat Caught Cyprus off Guard, What Are the Issues at Stake?” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 25 June 2024, aje.io/hrf0tx.  ︎
5. Oscar Rickett, “New Report Lays out Full Extent of UK-Israel Military Partnership in Gaza.” Middle East Eye, 28 Jan. 2025, www.middleeasteye.net/news/new-report-lays-out-full-extent-uk-israel-military-partnership-gaza. ︎
6.  A list of which can be found here: https://anga.live/venice.html ︎

Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist currently based in Beirut and Chicago.

Her practice studies how disasters can resurrect and generate new forms of perception, collectivity, and resistance, often using the Palestinian context as an urgent microcosm. Within her drawings, prints, sculptures, texts, and installations, she embeds speculative frameworks which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.

Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. She is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021–2022 Jan van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, Chicago, Beirut, and Berlin. Lamia is a 2018–2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE and the University of Michigan’s Daring Dances initiative, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Abukhadra is also a cultural worker and currently holds the position of Art and Communications Director at Mizna (St. Paul, MN).

The post On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost?  appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Nour Jaljuli & Aiya Sakr

It was April of 2024 that Mizna first published Diaa Wadi’s essay “Autobiography of Gaza”. Back then, executive editor George Abraham reflected that “‘ceasefire’—a bare minimum demand back in October—has come to lose all meaning as the horrors of Al-Shifa Hospital and other Zionist massacres unravel before our eyes . . .” Now, in January of 2025, we find ourselves yet again grappling with what it means to cross that threshold marked by whatever it is a term like “ceasefire” could ever hope to signify some 460 days and tens of thousands of casualties of zionist genocide later. We again urge all readers to consider donating to Diaa Wadi’s campaign to evacuate his family to safety.

—Nour Eldin H., Mizna assistant editor

Should I tell you a secret?

I’m afraid of the anguish I hold within me. Do people fear their own anguish?

—Diaa Wadi (trans. Nour Jaljuli & Aiya Sakr)

On the Edge of a Volcano, a Rip through a Gazan’s Heart

This grief is larger than anything I can bear. My eyes shatter from what I witness and my brain withers with the endless thoughts and storms of my own imagination.

I write these words while my heart rings like an alarm with fear and anxiety. I write as the Occupation’s artillery shells and war missiles drop on my family. But now, people see these bombs as raindrops, not tons of explosives and fires eating at Gazan bodies, souls, and buildings.

It is the worst of times. People are being slaughtered—mounds of flesh fill the streets and homes. People in the south of Gaza have turned into the new object of slaughter, while in the north, slaughter joins starvation and thirst.  Monumental exhaustion weighs down my tongue.

I imagine them now, spread across the corners of the tent with burnt edges. An empty tent with only gravel and stone. Each of them holding onto their suitcases, their documents, and their few belongings. They stare at each other. Fear sits with them as they wait for the end with each minute. They remember the moments they shared with their beloved martyrs, every person who left to the sky. They remember the warm family gatherings, loud laughter, daily bickering. They wonder, “Will the day ever come when we argue again, and storm out of our home?” But there’s no home left, no fights, it’s all rubble and ruin—ruin beyond anybody’s description.

I am now reading through reports and searching the faces of survivors and the names of martyrs from al-Shuja‘iyya neighborhood to find out what has become of my uncle, his wife, and their children after connection has been lost. I look for them so I don’t come across their pictures and names by accident as I had before with my martyred aunts and uncle.

Can you understand? You can’t understand and you will never know.

Death came near a few days ago. All of my senses were heightened. Except sight. I didn’t need my ears to hear, the voices were coming from inside of me and from the outside too. I spent my life trying to adjust, to heal from the torments of previous wars. I thought they would face no pain after I left them. Didn’t I do it for their sake? To protect them from harm and need? Did I not suffer distance, rejection, and lonely laboring to provide them with all their wishes?

Now, evil is growing. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide, a policy for organized mass killing. This is terrorism and ethnic cleansing. This is organized state terrorism. And my family is there. They are there with all of my people of Gaza suffering through wounds that can swallow a world whole. Fifty thousand martyrs. Life itself will end before we’re able to adequately mourn each and every one of them. The wounded are in every street, remnants strewn across rocks and trees, dogs are gnawing at the living and the dead, and helplessness is amputating every living part inside of us.

This is the truth that beats at us: that this unlawful attack is a mere tool to erode our very sense of self, to plow out of us every concept, idea, and belief; it is the  complete disregard of all useless laws laid out in ink on paper. What is happening in Gaza singles us out, a dignified people kneaded with death, a people whose fate is folded in with facing tragedy alone. This is nothing new in our cycle of setbacks. We don’t know fear and we don’t surrender to any weakness, even if it was the color of blood.

As for you, living outside the borders of these bombs, know that there is no room for a middle ground. You are either a person of honor defending against our pain with your blood, words, voice, and arms, or you are stuffed with filth, apathy, and so-called neutrality.

The greatest agonies in a person’s life happen during childhood and adolescence—not because of their relative weakness at that age, but because the concepts that may aid them to bear these pains have not yet formed and taken root within. So pain shapes and mutilates their thoughts as it wishes. My life in Gaza was filled with anguish of many forms and shapes. The war of 2008, another one in 2012, 2014, 2021, and now this war—a war a thousand times more violent than anything that has ever preceded even though I am not there.

Helplessness, grief, and loss mold a weapon that stabs at my soul, my heart, and my stamina. This weapon reshapes itself, again and again. It pounds at me until I am debilitated. Every day I grow more certain that what was taken from Gazans cannot be retrieved—this is at the heart of our journey. And the ugly truth is that this sorrow is invisible. No eyes can track it. No one can gauge the size of the blow or how deep the wound runs.

Baraa, my brother, let’s play a game.

I will let you go to bed late, and I won’t worry over you swimming long laps in the sea. I will give you hours to play and I won’t smother you with advice. I will get you the phone you want. I won’t tell mom about some of your grades, and I will hide your shenanigans from the family—keep it all in my heart like a gentle breeze. You can have all you want and more. Under one condition, brother: that you don’t leave on my behalf.

“They cannot expel us unless they transfer our corpses to Sinai. This idea they have of us walking there is a fantasy.” This is what my father tells me before the internet and all communications with them are cut off. We will not leave, we will not have a tent in Sinai, and we will not look back at Gaza longingly from behind a fence. Death smells good in the face of the hell our souls are now subjected to.

An international call comes through.

To be honest, I fear nothing more than an international call with a Palestinian code. He says, “Another Baptist Massacre, Diaa.” He cries and hangs up.

Oh God, give us our old fear back. The one that vanishes when we see family and friends.

Give us our old sorrows and normal life. Give us everything that was and forgive us for complaining.

Give us normal fear just like all people. Oh God, only give us what is mundane.

My mother tells me that some of the women cut off their hair due to the lack of shampoo and cleaning supplies. They’ve been off the shelves for ages. Some have even cropped their children’s hair for fear of lice and parasites. They want to maintain their personal hygiene even if by the bare minimum.

What an unremarkable piece of news. No one will care. It doesn’t have the word “massacre.”

Take this advice from a bereaved soul—pray to God more because you have your children with you; hug your mothers more and sleep at their hands; take photos with your siblings and forgive them for their mistakes; hug your fathers, touch their faces and heads, and ask for their blessings; give your thanks to God that your mothers are nearby and safe and that your family is well. Others have had their hearts eaten by sorrow and the world tested them with what  they hold dearest. I am others.

All of us are like this, with no exceptions. We each got our share of suffering, having to watch our families in tents, friends in hospitals, and their remains gathered in death bags.

Gazans have suffered every kind of torment there is. They’ve tried them all in order and they never stopped paying a dear and outrageous price the rest of the world cannot fathom. We pay with each passing second, literally, a hefty price no one in this time has ever paid. What falls on the heads of Gazans are lava balls of hatred, resentment, and a wish for our extermination. It’s a terrifying state that was never before experienced by anyone other than us in this modern day. Allah is almighty.

“Triers of pain,” that’s what Gazans are. We try pain, pain tries us, Gazan pain—what do you think? Are these titles catchy enough? Are they good enough for your fancy publications? Choose the most emotive descriptions and choose carefully. Take your time. This is not human blood. These are not real scenes. Stay neutral and don’t bother providing a single drop to those drinking filthy sewage water.

May whomever is standing on neutral ground fall. May they fall, those who didn’t give their money, or lend their voice, pen, tears, and prayers. 

We are humans and we know sorrow. But this feeling isn’t sorrow, anguish, nor pain. This thing doesn’t have a name. Today, on the phone with my uncle, he responded with a single sentence, “We’re hungry.” I hung up immediately. I couldn’t bear it.

What does the world want? We will die of anguish!

Should I tell you a secret?

I’m afraid of the anguish I hold within me. Do people fear their own anguish?

They must fear their own anguish and resentment when there’s no way to relieve it, to dispose of it, or deal with it. A sort of anguish that repeats daily in larger and larger doses. An anguish that cuts the strings of my heart and now seeps into my very features and behaviors. An anguish that, if placed on a mountain, would shake it or even force it to collapse.

“Stockpiling crisis,” this is the state in which Gazans are living now. They remain steadfast in their homes despite all that has happened and happens every day.

Gazans are stockpiling their crises and sorrows, so that once this war ends, another can begin. A war no news channel will cover, a war uncapturable without bombardment. A war of trying to eat without ash, now a permanent resident in our mouths. A war of going out to the street without conjuring amputated limbs and heads split open. From the war of tanks and weapons is born another war to build a new life.

“Israel commits a new massacre in al-Nuseirat.”

“Israel targets an UNRWA school sheltering refugees.”

“Israel buries children alive under the school rubble.”

“Israel kills entire displaced families inside the school.”

The world must understand that Palestinians, even when they carry weapons, are always the righteous ones, and that Israelis, even if they are lounging on the beaches of Haifa, are always guilty.

They have barely entered life’s threshold; they don’t have passports. They know the world only through screens. They know nothing outside of the wall. No trains, no civil planes, no mall escalators. They don’t know a boat or the sea without siege. They don’t know.

Baha, Alaa, Bara, and Mohammad, my brothers, don’t know.

After the war on Gaza, mothers will ask about their children’s graves.

If a mother wishes to sit by her son’s grave, “Where’s my son buried?” I don’t know. All I know is that this is a mass grave. Perhaps your son is here or there, or perhaps his parts are bagged together in a different mass grave.

You don’t know the meaning of anguish. You cannot understand what it means for your family to sleep on sand in a tent on the coldest and hottest days of the year. You cannot understand what it means to not find a bathroom to go to when you need it. You don’t understand the meaning of all of this. If we place all of this sorrow in a basket over your head none of you will be able to bear it.

This basket of sorrows is too heavy.

My brother Mohammad tells me that at the beginning of the war he only missed home, but now he misses opening the fridge door, sleeping in his own bed, and turning the lock on our front door.

He tells me about his discoveries in this war, “The thing is, you will long first for the main thing—our home. But then you start thinking about details that never crossed your mind, like opening the fridge.”

Mohammad, let’s play a game.

When we hear the bombs, we run.

Whoever gets tired loses the game.

I never imagined being on the outside of the war; the war that never left us. Loss and helplessness increase with the distance. Keeping up with the war through windows and streets would have been easier than constantly flipping between screens, news channels, images of martyrs, tracking neighborhoods, and endless phone calls, one after the other.

All that I do these days is try to find a way to describe how I feel. At least that way I will be able to hold the keys of knowledge and understand, even just a little, how my mind and heart can settle.

Choice turns into a daily hardship. Especially with the tremendous number of choices we must face in every moment of our lives.

But the choices this time are not only confusing, they’re deadly. Either your flesh is shattered to pieces, or you escape your home with no guarantee that you’ll even survive. You either suffer starvation and fear in the north, or the anguish of living in a tent with its unbearable heat in the south.

But the world did its best to aid us. The world was too generous and offered us a long list of choices: to be killed, or displaced. 

Oh Gazan, what do you think? Should you die by a missile that will turn you into pieces no larger than a finger, or do you want to die with your limbs amputated by a bomb?

No, you still have another choice, a lucky choice: to die whole. What do you say if a bullet should hit you between your shoulders, ripping through your body?

Language has changed, and words mean different things now. Children know school as a place of learning, boring math lessons, and a yard where they can run and play. But now school has become a shelter, a place where you sleep surrounded by carpet bombings and shelling. Mohammad tells me he won’t be able to go to school after the war. The only thing he’ll be able to see are images of him running between bombs to reach shelter in the same school he had once loved and studied in. This is the trauma that children won’t be able to escape.

There are moments when one is forced to question their own sanity. How did I endure all of this harm, my soul as clean as a bird’s? You are shocked by your own ability to endure, and are afraid you will suddenly collapse for no reason after having to bear all of this.

They peeled away all of my loved ones. I remain naked and alone, pretending that “strength” is the only life raft available to me.

After once shivering at the thought of us turning into mere numbers, shame has led us to see the genocide as some sort of victory because the Occupation failed to achieve its goals.

I am as silent as a lamb. I only speak when necessary, or I nod my head. I don’t talk much, and I wait for the night to look for them in my dreams. Last night, I saw them walking to the west, carrying their things. With every kilometer they walked, they would cry all at once to lighten the load. Off they went, no one knows where they are now. Perhaps they were killed or maybe they’re still walking. I don’t know if they have enough tears to see the journey through.

Humans have always been more brutal than animals. Even preying animals only eat because they’re hungry. But what is wrong with humans? Are they even humans, or monsters cast upon us?

I don’t know what to tell you about Gaza now. But the road to heaven is crowded in Gaza.

The great poet Al-Muari once wrote upon losing a dear one, “My sadness over his departure is like the blessings of the people of heaven, it’s born anew every time it runs out.”

The tears that fall by accident are the voices of loved ones preserved in our bodies after they leave us. They fall whenever the heart longs to hear their voice and has no other way to find it.

They disperse between bombs. Some survive and leave elsewhere. Death by scorched earth policies, families exterminated by every kind of weapon and tool, from missiles to vicious dogs, each dies according to their own fate.

Perhaps in heaven when martyrs come together, they will tell each other about how they died.

“How did I pass? By a missile.” Another says, “I was killed by a bomb,” and a child responds “Uncle, a sniper shot me.”

Diaa Wadi is a Palestinian writer and blogger. He studied mechanical engineering and has traveled to many countries speaking for the Palestinian cause at international events. Wadi believes in literature and writing as an effective tool of resistance against the Occupation. He writes about the life of Gazans and the details which are often overlooked by the camera. As Refaat Al-Areer said, “If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story.” Diaa writes on behalf of all those who left us, to honor the martyrs and send them eternal love—for the martyr Refaat Al-Areer, now more than ever. Diaa tweets @diaawadi2.

Nour Jaljuli is a translator and poet traversing between the worlds of Arabic and English. She holds an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia and is the Arabic translator of Rana Dajani’s Five Scarves. Her translations have appeared in ArabLit, Middle East Eye, Jummar, and the 2022 UEA MALT Anthology for which she was also coeditor. You can find out more about her work on nourjaljuli.wordpress.com.

Aiya Sakr (she/they) is a Palestinian-American poet and artist. They are the author of Her Bones Catch the Sun (The Poet’s Haven, 2018). A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Foglifter, Mizna, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is a co-organizer for In Water and Light, a regular community building space and reading series for Palestine. She is also a Winter 2023 Tin House Fellow, and has served as Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University. She collects buttons, and is enthusiastic about birds.

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The post On the Edge of a Volcano, a Rip through a Gazan’s Heart appeared first on Mizna.

Leila Mansouri’s brilliant short story, “Flashbang,” inhabits the many scales of catastrophe that inhere in the word. Originally published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe. Link to order here.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

—Leila Mansouri

Flashbang

What you need to understand is this: when the link opened, everything flashed over.

Before I could form a thought, before my eyes could resolve the pixels into dark, taut nipples, hot, bright shock raced through me and spread—out through my nerves, out into the dorm room, out and out into every corner of my world. Understanding was for later. Lungs, fear, air, shame—all for later. My cursor blinked, unmoved, in the reply box as my eyes traced and retraced the subject line.

“You?” the email asked.

I had no answer. I glowed hot, white hot, engulfed.

Behind each nipple, a breast. That much was clear even when everything was still too bright to breathe. There were two of them, the breasts, and skin, and ribs. A torso.

Also sometimes a shoulder. But not always.

The parts, they moved and moved and refused to stay still. Fingers curled. Hands grasped. Now two, now three, now two again. And at the grainy edge, a slack jaw dipped in and out, in and out.

I couldn’t have spoken then, not even if my irradiated brain had had the power to think in words. My fat slug of a tongue sat leaden between my molars, and my parched lips clung fast to my gums. In my silence, the slick, weird image of a mouth parted wide, wider, into a wild, toothy moan, and I understood nothing. Heard nothing. The only noise in me was my own blood. And no matter how hard my eyes strained, no matter how long my fingers hovered ready at the keyboard, adamant that they could save me by shooting Jeff the speedy right answer, the moving parts refused to make a person.

Was I really somewhere in those pixels?

I didn’t know — and also didn’t want to know—or wanted to know only if the answer was one I could live with—one I’d survive. So it was a relief, the beginning of a hot exhale, when, after how long with that video on a loop I don’t know, I admitted—or maybe I decided—that I couldn’t make out anyone except the little stuffed bear—a bear like the one my parents had bought me from the student store the day they’d moved me in, a bear whose neck was ringed with the stethoscope I’d resented nightly as I did my chemistry sets and conjugated Farsi verbs and daydreamed about the other me: the me who had aggressively blue hair and took experimental poetry classes, the me who wanted to jolt you, to make you gasp and say, “this changed my life.”

That me was the real me, I was sure. Or it was going to be.

I would become her just as soon as I finally gathered the courage to tell my parents that I was dropping orgo—that instead of labs and study groups I’d be making mixed media installations, that I’d already made one, in fact, a simorgh lit with kerosene, and that I wasn’t pre-med anymore—I’d never been, actually, not in the way they’d wished for—not really.

The bear, though, was unmistakable.

It was my own Agha Bear, or one just like him. That was obvious even in the bad resolution and dim light. And the desk, too, was familiar. Its dull sheen and thick wooden shelves could have come from any dorm on campus. Which meant the parts in the video could be anyone’s.

Even mine.

So I did the only thing that felt possible from inside my bright hot shock-wave—the only thing I could live with—that felt like it had any hope of being survivable.

I deleted the email, broke up with Bijan, dropped the Farsi class I had with Jeff, and became a doctor.

* * *

“It made sense at the time,” I insisted to my therapist, years later, when we met behind the privacy curtain on the far side of the hospital cafeteria.

The sex tape wasn’t what we were supposed to be talking about. We were supposed to be talking about the victims whose wrists I’d spent half a horrible day tagging yellow or red or green.

The explosion at the refinery had been so massive, all the breaking news segments had ended with ominous questions: Could this be sabotage? Who did the terrorists hate? Were there more explosions to come?

But by afternoon, the story had resolved itself into something more ordinary: a bad safety valve and corporate greed. After that, no one was scared anymore, just filled tight with unleachable anger—the kind that makes your fingers swell and comes out in unfunny jokes about conversion rates between corporate bonus dollars and reattached limbs.

My residency was in oncology, but I’d been paged to the emergency room for triage. I’d gone from body to moaning body checking pupils and asking if anyone felt a sense of impending doom.

No one did, not even the sanitation worker with the metal bolt in his skull. He was the cheeriest of everyone, in fact.

As I rushed him to surgery, he grabbed my hand and said, “Can’t you leave it in, doc? I pick up radio waves now.”

Then he asked where I was from.

And how I liked Michigan.

And if I had kids, or a husband, or a boyfriend, and if I wanted them.

When I said I was moving back to California, his face fell.

“My parents are there,” I apologized. “Plus, I miss the fruit. The nectarines, the apricots.”

Right then, the time Jeff pulled dates from his rucksack flashed back through me. We’d been doing Farsi homework in my dorm room, and I’d looked up from my alif’s and be’s, and there they were, three fat dates. Jeff insisted I try one even though I wasn’t hungry. “Have you ever had a fresh date?” he demanded. “I mean a really fresh one?”

The man with the bolt in his head waved away my apology. Then he said “California,” too slow, his voice bending strangely.

So, I looked again behind his earlobe.

The thread was still buried deep. You could hardly see anything.

That was how I’d almost missed it when I triaged him.

His wound had barely even oozed.

I wanted to say something comforting—to reassure the man that I liked Michigan, too.

But before I could, we were surrounded by the surgical team.

“You should try the sherries,” he told me as my hand slipped from his.

I nodded, not understanding.

“The sherries,” he said. “Promise.”

Then he was gone, and the hallway was bright and not at all quiet, and by the time I realized he was slurring cherries, it was days too late to warn anyone.

The hospital mandated trauma screening for all residents, and I was assigned to Farah. Or, that’s what she told me to call her. I couldn’t, though. Not when her hair was neatly covered, and she sat so prim and straight on her plastic chair.

“Doctor Al Masry,” I tried.

She laughed. She wasn’t even an MD, just a family counselor in training.

I wouldn’t take it back though. “Dr. Al Masry,” I repeated.

“Really? Are we going to pretend we’re our parents?”

I shrugged.

For days, I’d been telling the other residents that these screenings were a waste. My plan was to lie my way through—to run out the clock. I’d even made up a story about a man who’d watched his warehouse collapse. He survived because he had forgotten to turn his headlights off, I was going to say—that’s why he’d been in the parking lot. He’d remembered an hour into his shift and ran back out into the Michigan cold.

Then, boom.

All of a sudden, no building left to speak of.

The clincher was going to be my own story, or really my aunt’s. The one she’d told years ago, in St. Louis, as we circled the Gateway Arch.

One night, my uncle had come home from his pharmacy shift to find their Tehran apartment in rubble. A missile had hit—“a dumb Scud,” my aunt said, as we puttered up I-44 in my parents’ rusty Volvo.

My mother was annoyed. “Look!” she switched loudly to English. “There is arch!”

But my aunt talked over her, sticking to Persian. “Night sounded like this,” my aunt told us, puckering her mouth and spitting out explosions.

That year was endless. Boring, murderous nights, my aunt explained. Again and again, there were blasts and waiting. Then, mostly, nothing. Night after night of it. Loud, distant, terrifying nothings. To the sound of these nothings, my aunt made tea and dreamed of redecorating. She wrote long letters to my mother in America. She set elaborate dinners, and, as my uncle ate, gossiped to him about the neighbor-couples, whose private fights she heard through the walls. My uncle never gossiped back, though, or gave opinions on rugs and pillows. He asked my aunt little about her days. His concerns about her parents’ health were perfunctory. My aunt didn’t understand—not at first. When they’d courted, he’d been chatty and charming. He’d made her believe every word of hers was precious to him. Once he became a husband, though, he turned stubbornly inward. Most evenings all he seemed to want to do was eat and snore. My aunt’s questions about his work at the hospital got only bland, empty answers. Her pleas for a new vase or tea set met with irritable grunts. And when she asked what news the neighbor-husbands had shared when my uncle passed them in the building hallways, he looked at her like she was an irksome child. “Do you think I have time to remember who Mr. Hashemi is angry with today?” he’d shake his head. “Do you not see that I work constantly? Did you forget there is a war?”

For a while, my aunt blamed his stress on bad management at the hospital pharmacy. He’d come to his senses once the shelves were restocked, she told herself. But as the year of booming nothings dragged on, her patience steadily curdled, first into resentment, then into disgust. Soon, every sound my uncle made became repulsive to her. His sighs made her want to scrub his breath from her skin. His snorts made her nauseated. But it was the revolting grooming habits he no longer bothered to hide that became the focus of her fury. The night a missile fell on a busy bread factory, she’d found my uncle’s nose hair clippings in the sink and thrown the soap at him. A month later—the same night a family her cousin’s friend’s brother knew from university was obliterated—she’d lain awake enraged because right next to her in bed my uncle had picked dead skin from his foot calluses.

“Roya-joon, remember this.” She turned to face me in the back seat, her expression so serious I was sure I was in trouble. “If a man cleans his toes in bed, he does not love you.”

“Ani!” my mom screeched, but my aunt waved her off.

“Promise you will remember, Roya-joon.”

I didn’t understand, so I nodded solemnly, and my aunt settled back into the passenger seat.

It was months of this nonsense, she continued, ignoring the arch’s fat, shiny footings. Months of my uncle’s flaking skin in the bed sheets. Months of his soapy hairs in every crevice of the bathroom and his toenail clippings working their way into the living room rug.

Then out of nowhere came the direct hit.

There was no air raid siren—not that night, my aunt insisted. All the neighbors swore it, too—there’d been only the usual nothing right up until the horrible boom.

The building next door was stripped naked, its shattered windows gaping onto disarranged kitchens and bedrooms. My aunt’s building was leveled entirely.

“Pow,” she said, flattening the air between her hands.

By chance, she wasn’t inside. She was visiting a neighbor—but my uncle hadn’t known that. He’d seen the building, or what was left of it, and been certain she was under the rubble—certain her lifeless body would soon be unburied, still sheathed in her white nightgown. He was out of his mind when she spotted him, tearing at the debris with his fingernails. “God forgive me, God forgive me,” he kept saying. “God, God, what have I done?”

As she watched her husband clawing at the wreckage, my aunt’s heart sofened for the first time since the missiles reached Tehran. Maybe she’d judged him too harshly, she considered. Maybe what she’d taken for his disdain was something else. Pride pickled in fear, possibly? At the very least, he seemed genuinely distraught.

She approached where he was kneeling and put a hand on his heaving shoulder. Gently, she raised his dusty face to hers, anticipating he’d collapse with relief.

But, to her shock, the sight of her only seemed to make him wilder.

“Am I possessed?” he cried, stumbling backward. “Have you returned to curse me? Am I so guilty I deserve to be forever tormented?”

That was how his affair came out, my aunt explained.

Or she tried to.

But my mother wouldn’t let her.

“Ani-jan, tell Roya about the beautiful seashore,” my mother jumped in, repeating herself louder and louder, until my stubborn aunt was forced to yield. After that, it was, “Ani-jan, do you remember how we always stop along the road to buy oranges?” We’d driven halfway home by then, but we were still on the freeway, near the Woolworths.

Once my aunt finished discussing roadside fruit, my mother turned to me at a stoplight. “In the mountains, I get always carsick. Do you know that once I throw up on your Khaleh Ani’s favorite shoes?”

“Not only mountains,” my aunt confirmed bitterly. “At home. At school. On my favorite dress. On so many things I can’t list them.” But then she tried to list them, anyway, which bought my mother another five minutes.

And for the rest of the drive home, and that evening, and every remaining day of my aunt’s three-month visit, my mother was relentless. Whenever Khaleh Ani tried to speak about the missiles or my uncle in front of me, my mom would goad her. “I always feel bad for your khaleh, you know, because I am our madarbozorg’s favorite,” she would tell me. Or, “do you know, Roya-joon, that I was best student in school? Top marks. All the teachers say I am genius.”

Khaleh Ani took the bait every time.

“I was the genius,” she’d say. “I was the favorite.”

She spent the summer furious with my mother, the story of my uncle’s affair always cut off just a few words in. That’s why I didn’t find out how she got her revenge until a decade later. By then, we’d moved to California and left the arch far behind us.

Those first years in Gilroy, all my parents did was save and work. They’d bought a gas station out by the produce warehouses. During the day, my mother rang up farmworkers and semi drivers. At night, my father barred the windows, and meth heads skulked at the floodlights’ edge.

This was all for the future, they promised. Only the future mattered, not the farm smell, not the bulletproof glass screening the register. In their future, I would go to medical school. In their future, my aunt would come and stay for good.

By then, we’d been waiting years on my aunt’s visa. My parents had filed the paperwork back in St. Louis, and ever since, every three months, they’d called to remind the lawyer who they were.

Do you have our address?

Can we do anything else?

Will you let us know soon?

But when their application finally made it to the top of the government pile, my aunt balked. She refused to fill out more forms. She declined her Dubai interview. There was no point, she announced, because she’d never move. She had her house, her garden, her tea, and no interest in uprooting herself—especially not to live in her arrogant sister’s half-renovated garage.

My mother told me the news as she was picking me up from my shift at In-N-Out: “Your aunt killed your uncle and now she is killing me!”

I gulped my chocolate shake. The cold turned my tongue thick and numb.

According to my mom, my aunt began this slow murder the night the missile fell on their apartment. My uncle had been having an affair with a pretty nurse. That’s what had sealed his fate. Each Tuesday and Friday, he met this nurse in the hospital supply room, and after, as she basked in their illicit glow, he’d detail his private unhappiness. My aunt henpecked him constantly, he’d complain. Some days all she talked about, it seemed, was their small apartment and noisy neighbors. And even when she was quiet, their hand-me-down furniture silently taunted him. He resented every last scrap of it—every last fussy table and dusty rug. It reminded him of just how much else his in-laws had given him all the other things he could neither repay nor afford to give up. Money for his father’s doctors. Tuition to finish pharmacy school. Proper suits. A respectable watch. Without their generosity, he’d have ended up a poor and friendless orphan. Now, he was trapped by his modest comforts and was determined never to forgive them for it.

“Let’s run away to America,” he begged this nurse every Friday. “We’ll buy a ranch in Montana. We’ll eat nothing but Big Macs. We’ll grow happy and fat.”

Usually, the nurse ignored him. “Saeed, you talk too much,” she’d shush. Or, “Saeed, can you move your elbow? It’s on my chador.”

But the Friday of the Scud missile strike, she’d at last given a tepid, “Do you really mean it? Could we really go? Just the two of us?”

“Yes,” he’d told her. “Yes yes. We can. We will. I promise.”

So, when my uncle came home to the flattened apartment building, he’d concluded that this must be God’s punishment. He had been unfaithful and now he’d lose everything, even the dishes and rugs he’d hated, even the nagging wife whose wealthy parents he’d been ungrateful for.

That’s when, like a hellish miracle, my aunt had appeared before him. And at the sight of her, he admitted it all, weeping in the dust at her feet.

To my aunt, the affair was unsurprising. Weeks before, she’d smelled perfume on his collar and guessed another woman—guessed it was a nurse, even, and felt so little besides disgust for him that she’d washed his shirt and let it go.

But, ever keen, she sensed power in my uncle’s public confession.

God was merciful and she could be too, she told him. But, she added, loud enough to be sure the neighbor gossips heard, she had her honor to think of, and her family’s honor, too. So, her faithless husband would have to make it up to her.

And he could do that with a house.

A nice one. One with a garden and tall walls. A fountain, too, maybe. Not here. North, by the mountains. In a better neighborhood.

My uncle knew this mercy was a death sentence. He could not afford such a house, not even with her parents’ help. His job at the government hospital didn’t pay well, so to get the money he’d need a second job, then a third. He’d have to take midnight house calls. He’d have to work straight through Friday prayers. He’d probably also need to start smuggling. Western eye creams, maybe. Or, more likely, wine and European spirits. Hash, too. “Medicine,” his records would say. “For palsy. And insomnia.” But every client, every supplier, would know the truth. And even if the smugglers didn’t kill him, even if he stayed out of jail and managed to keep his dealings quiet, he’d never get to linger in his own prized garden—he’d hardly ever see its blooms by daylight. No, he’d have to work and work until even his bones were exhausted, his too-brief dreams stalked by men who could ruin him. He’d work until his liver groaned, until his heart gave out. He’d work until he labored himself into an early grave.

Still, how could he say no to my aunt with all the neighbors watching? How would he ever face them, and his in-laws, too, if he refused?

I took a hungry swallow of chocolate shake.

“So? What did he do?”

My mother shook her head.

“What could he do? He said, ‘Yes, my beloved. Yes, of course. Anything. Anything for your forgiveness. I’m at your service.’”

The cruelest part, my mom told me, was that my khaleh Ani, too, had been having an affair—hers was with a dissident poet. For weeks before the missile strike, she’d been sneaking her secret lover into the apartment on nights my uncle worked late. Barely an hour before the missile hit, this poet had left my aunt dozing in her marriage bed. He’d given her two soft kisses, then departed by the back stairs, leaving behind only her pining sighs and a dozen whispered promises to die for her, should she ever want that.

Once my aunt heard the door close after him, she’d risen, like always, to brew some sumac tea. She needed it to settle her stomach—despite the poet’s flattering reassurances, her guilt over the affair was gut-twisting.

But she’d found the tin empty—that afternoon, my uncle, unbeknownst to her, had had a guilty stomachache of his own.

So, she’d gone to beg more sumac from a friend three blocks over. She was returning home, pockets bulging, when she found my uncle digging at the rubble.

My mother’s eyes burned, mean and gleeful, as she spoke.

She took my shake and sucked in a long drag.

“Your uncle is fool,” she went on. “He works until his eyes bleed. He works so much his bones ache. Then he dies, less than one year after he finally gets your aunt this house, and—do you know—she weeps not for him but for her poet.”

I reached for the shake, but my mom didn’t give it back to me, didn’t even seem to see me.

“Now your aunt will die in her garden,” she said. “She will die drinking tea, all alone. And this poet, they put him in Evin prison. He is still in there, you know.”

When I tell my aunt’s story, Americans rarely ask if I saw her again. They don’t wonder much about my uncle, either—not if I liked him or what he died of. Not even whether he ever learned about my aunt’s secret love. If they want to know anything, it’s about how he made his money. Or about the pretty nurse and her chador. Or maybe, if they’re humanitarian types, what the jailed poet is in prison for. That’s why I was going to tell my aunt’s story to the cafeteria therapist. I could tell it and not tell much else, I figured. It would fill our half-hour well enough.

But I never got the chance to.

After Dr. Al Masry explained what she was screening for, she asked what I’d been doing right before the refinery explosion. And I was so thrown I’d told the truth.

I’d been Instagram stalking my ex-boyfriend’s wife. “Instagram stalking?”

“It’s stupid, Dr. Al Masry.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid, Roya.”

“It is. I mean, I’m a doctor.”

“You’re saying doctors can’t be human also?”

That’s how I ended up explaining about the cakes. Cupcakes. Cheesecakes.

Chocolate cakes. Spice cakes. Marbled mirror glazes.

“She just keeps posting them,” I told Dr. Al Masry.

And other things, too. Their redecorated townhome. The themed birthdays she put on for their two love dumplings, now five and eighteen months. But mostly it was the cakes that kept me coming back to the Instagram of the girl that Bijan, my college boyfriend, was married to now, I explained. “Or, woman,” I corrected myself, the bleach smell thick at my nostrils. “The half-Cambodian optometrist from Reseda Bijan started dating three and a half months after I’d called things off and blocked him on Facebook.”

“This man, Bijan—you two were serious? And you broke things off ?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There was a video.”

“A video?”

“A sex thing. I didn’t know what to do.”

When I said those words, I was in four places at once. In the cafeteria chair.

And also at my dorm room desk, with Jeff ’s link. And in the redwood grove, too, as Bijan’s face twisted and soured. And in my Farsi class, with Jeff, the day he sent the video.

But before he sent it. When we were learning food words. Sobhkhaneh. Sabzijat. Gojeh farangi. Miveh. Angur.

Jeff had searched me out that day, as usual. The whole semester he’d been relentless. He asked about my weekends. He asked what sports I followed. He asked whether I’d tried the dates he’d left. He asked if I’d ever dated a Marine. But the day of the video was different. He didn’t ask anything. He just looked. At me. Like I was a pit. Stripped and sucked clean.

And right after class, he sent it.

“The video of you?” Dr. Al Masry asked.

“I don’t know if it was me.”

“What?”

“In the video. I don’t know who it was. It could have been me. But I wasn’t sure, and I deleted it.”

“You didn’t try to find out?”

I blinked, confused that she was confused. “How could I? It would’ve blown everything up.”

I felt sure that would settle it.

But she asked, “What do you mean?”

So, I changed the subject to the refinery explosion.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to the man with the bolt in his head.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to Evin prison. Did she know there were poets jailed there right now? I demanded.

But she changed it back.

So, finally, I said, “You, of all people, should know there would have been no good answer. I mean, let’s say it wasn’t me. Maybe the video was a fake, or someone else’s porn. So, what then? I go to Bijan and try to explain it to him? What could I say? That a guy, an older military guy in my Farsi class, was sending me this stuff? Porn that looked like me? Porn that had my Agha Bear in it? And that I’d done a whole class project with this man, and he’d insisted I eat his dates? How would Bijan see me, then? What if he thought I’d cheated on him? What if he told his parents? Or mine? No matter what, he’d still probably break up with me. And if he didn’t, how would anything be okay? How would we go back to watching movies and playing foosball?”

“I get it. I do,” said Dr. Al Masry. “I mean, I’m from Dearborn. But are you sure it would have been that bad? He doesn’t exactly sound like the traditional type.”

I shook my head. She only half understood. “But what if it was me?”

“What, then?”

“Then, I was with Bijan. There hadn’t been anyone else. So, did that mean Bijan had filmed it without telling me? Probably, right? That’s the only reasonable conclusion. So, then what? I tell the school? I show the video to some sweaty administrator and file a case? And what if Bijan went and told his parents? They knew people who knew mine, you know. I didn’t want to be that person, the one everyone whispered about when they saw my mom in the grocery store. I didn’t want to live with that. I didn’t want my mom to live with that. So, I said nothing.”

Dr. Al Masry took a deep breath and smoothed her long skirt. There was something in her face I couldn’t read. “OK, but what about a friend or a roommate?” she asked, softly, hesitant. She took a breath, then another. “Did you at least tell someone?”

I wanted to lie and tell her I had. I wanted her to believe I had my shit together. I could have told someone back then, if I’d thought to. It’s not as if I had been friendless. Plenty of people would’ve listened. Plenty would have hugged me and let me cry. But I had never tried. I had kept it in. Staying quiet had seemed so natural, I had made the decision without realizing I’d chosen it.

I shook my head slowly. “Everyone assumed it was a normal breakup. I never told them the rest.”

Dr. Al Masry leaned forward. “And if you had? What would you have said?”

That’s how I discovered the thing that had been buried so deep I hadn’t known it was there, the thing that had been lodged in me all these years—the thing that had held everything in place even when I hadn’t known there was anything to hold. What I really believed—believed even though it made no sense, believed even though I was sure it meant I was crazy—was that it was me and Bjian on the tape, and it was somehow Jeff who filmed it.

“But that’s too far-fetched,” I said. “I mean, yes, Jeff could have planted something. A camera. The day he was in my room for our class project. It was absurd but not completely impossible. He was military after all. A Marine. He could have figured out the tech. But how could I look anyone in the eye and say that that was what I suspected? That I was sure of it to my core even though it sounded like a conspiracy? No one would have believed me. They shouldn’t have believed me. The story didn’t hold together. Some guy in my Farsi class films a secret sex tape after I refused to eat his dates? Who would listen? Who could take that seriously? It was easier to say nothing and forget.”

Dr. Al Masry was quiet for a while. Across the cafeteria, someone sneezed. Bleached air burned in my throat.

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me, though,” she said, finally.

“What?”

“Really. I’m not saying it’s true. But I’m saying I could believe it.”

I was sure she was mocking me and couldn’t say so. Not when she’d been so patient. Not when I’d been calling her Dr. Al Masry all this time.

I wrinkled my nose and raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

She looked away, toward the privacy curtain.

“My mother was born in Ein el-Hilweh—that’s a camp in southern Lebanon,” she said. “My mother grew up around guards and soldiers. And what she always told me was to watch out most for the friendly ones—the ones that offer help and candy. They were the most dangerous.”

I reminded her that this wasn’t Lebanon—that I’d been in college, not a refugee camp.

I had missed the point, she told me.

“Listen, when I was a kid, one year my mom took me to the state fair. Me and my brothers. We’d been asking, I guess. Maybe someone at school went. My mom had her hair covered and people were staring, but she didn’t care. She took us to the Ferris wheel. She got us fried ice cream. She even let us pet the goats. She wanted us to enjoy it—to feel like we were normal. And we did. We rode the rides and played those whack-the-whatever games. I won a stuffed shark. My brother won a stuffed donkey. The whole day was great, perfect, really, until we got in line for the spinning teacup ride. That’s when this guy started talking to us. To me, mostly. He had a woman with him, too, but she didn’t say anything, not at first. And he kept asking me things, like what was my favorite subject, and what kind of ice cream did I like, and did I want to be a pop star or a movie actress when I grew up. He hardly spoke to my brothers and wouldn’t even look at my mom. And he kept bringing up that he was a soldier—that he’d met girls like me before, in Iraq. He fought for those girls, he kept saying. Little ones. Some that didn’t go to school. Some that didn’t have toys or electricity or shoes. I didn’t like him and didn’t like his stupid questions and really didn’t like how white curls peeled up all over his sunburned nose. So, I was relieved when the line moved, and my brothers and I got in our teacup, and the man didn’t get on with us. He disappeared while our teacups spun. I thought it was over. I forgot about him. But after the ride, he found us. He had ice cream cones now, for me and my brothers. I didn’t want one, I was sick from the spinning and the heat and the elephant ears. But I thought I had to eat. When someone offers you food, you take it—that’s what my mom had always insisted. So, I reached my hand out and felt the cone in my fingers. And then, all of a sudden, my mother slapped it away. It fell and splattered. The ice cream went everywhere. The ground. My brother’s shoes. My ankles. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I’d done. I started crying. It was my fault, I was sure. I couldn’t see how, but that didn’t matter. And then the girlfriend started ranting about how my mom was a bitch, and we were all ungrateful. We should be sent back, she screamed over and over. We hated America. We hated freedom and God. My mom was walking us away by then, walking us out of the fair, but all I could hear was the girlfriend. ‘That’s right,’ she screamed after us. ‘Go back to where you came from.’ And when I turned to look behind me, the soldier was just standing there, staring at us, like he didn’t know what to say—like he didn’t understand what had happened either. I stared back at the ice cream cones in his fists, at the two he hadn’t given me—the ones he got for my brothers. They were melting already. They were losing their shape in the sun. I remember watching as they dripped, watching as the white ran down his knuckles. My mom waited until we were out of the parking lot to start yelling. ‘You don’t let these people give you things,’ she shouted over and over. ‘Never. You don’t take anything from them. Not money, not ice cream. Nothing.’ Back then I didn’t understand. My mom must be a little crazy, I thought. I mean, it was just ice cream. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Now, though, I think she was right. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. I think she understood more than she knew how to tell us.”

I took a slow breath.

“So, you’re saying I was right to suspect Jeff?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he was dangerous. Maybe Bijan was, too. What I’m saying is, you didn’t know. You still don’t.”

“So?”

Dr. Al Masry looked like she wanted to shake me—like she wanted to grab me by the shoulders and rattle something loose. “So, why didn’t you ask for help? Why did you try to handle it all on your own?”

The question landed in me like a mortar shell. “It would have killed my parents,” I said. “They came all this way for me. I couldn’t let them find out it was dangerous here, also.”

Dr. Al Masry looked at me so kindly that I hated her. “Did you ever think they might already know that?

I never saw Dr. Al Masry again. Twice, she called to set a follow-up, and twice, I ignored her voicemails. The third time she begged me to talk to someone even if it wasn’t her. “You can’t start rebuilding until you clear the rubble,” she said.

But I didn’t answer that voicemail, either. I needed to get on with my life. Or that’s what I told myself.

So, I finished my residency and moved back to California.

I went to work at the hospital, got groceries, had bad dates.

I didn’t tell anyone else about the video. Not boyfriends. Not roommates. Not my mom, either. Not even after she found Agha Bear and tried to give him back. That day, I’d driven to Gilroy with my aunt’s chemo pills. I’d been trading the hospital pharmacist for them. A month of chemo for a legal benzo script. The pharmacist gave her pills to her undocumented brother. I gave mine to my parents. Then my parents packed them into film canisters. They shipped the canisters inside thermoses wrapped with sweatshirts.

The chemo wasn’t working, though. All that effort and still Khaleh Ani’s cancer had grown. And now, she was refusing to travel for more intensive treatment, my mom explained as the tea brewed—refusing, once again, to fill out the visa paperwork.

“She wants to die in her garden,” my mom sighed. “The one my uncle got her?”

“What?”

“At her house? The one he worked himself to death for while she pined for the dissident poet?”

I was just asking—just thinking out loud, really, too tired and hungry to catch myself.

But my mom was furious. “This is how you talk of your khaleh?” she demanded. “Is this how you speak of me when I’m dead also?”

I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to point out I’d only repeated what she’d told me back in high school. Besides, I’d risked my medical license to get Khaleh Ani better cancer drugs. Shouldn’t that count for something? I wanted to say. Couldn’t I get a little slack for once?

I didn’t, though. My mom’s eyes were wet at the corners. I didn’t want to make it worse. I didn’t want her to start crying.

So I mumbled an apology.

Then, I went to the living room.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

Apricots. Cherries. Nectarines. Plums.

She and Baba had stopped on the way back from the gas station, she said. It was an apology, I knew.

I took a nectarine slice, and she took one also.

Then, as more explosions flashed, my mom ran through the usual questions. Was I seeing anyone? Did I know her friend’s son was single? Did I want her to set me up?

No, I sighed. No, no.

But that day she was persistent. She asked about what had happened to that nice boy from college, the engineer whose parents lived in San Jose.

“Bijan,” I said, as the living room fractured in the white light. “He was Bijan. He’s married now. Two kids.”

A blast threw her frown into relief. Still, she didn’t give up. I should find someone like him, she said. Kind. Thoughtful. Like Baba.

She grabbed my hand. “I want you to be happy, Roya-joon.”

I was annoyed. “I thought you wanted me to be a doctor.”

On TV, bullets flew.

I expected a fight. I was ready for one.

But instead my mom got up and left—and when she came back, she had my Agha Bear.

“Look what I find! He hid in your closet! All these years!”

She placed him on the coffee table, next to the dates and nectarine slices. His white coat brushed against the cherry bowl. His stethoscope puffed out proudly.

I blinked.

He was still there.

I touched his fur. It felt different than I remembered.

“You love Agha Bear,” Maman said, looking at me.

I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question.

I could have told her then that Agha Bear was never lost, just hidden away.

I hadn’t been able to look at him after the video, but I couldn’t throw him out either, not when he’d been a gift from Baba. Not when none of this was his fault.

So, I’d put him in my old closet.

He’d been there this whole time, wearing his useless stethoscope.

All these years I’d known exactly where he was.

I didn’t know how to say so, though. Not when my aunt was still dying. Not after I’d said nothing for so long.

So, instead, I told Maman about the man with the bolt in his head.

From the refinery, in Michigan.

I explained how I’d held his hand until his surgery. How he’d told me to try the cherries. How I’d forgotten his name—or maybe never learned it—and never found out what happened to him.

“What is bolt?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to explain it.

“It joins two things,” I tried.

But this confused her.

“It’s metal,” I said. “You twist it.”

But she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I looked up “bolt” on my phone.

But the word the translation app showed didn’t make sense to her either.

Finally, I reached under the coffee table.

I’d guessed right. Bolts held its legs on.

The cold nub of one protruded beyond its nut.

I took my mother’s hand and guided her fingertip to the thread.

“This,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled, saying the Persian back to me.

I smiled, too.

Then, I pointed behind my earlobe.

“No,” she gasped. “In his head? And he is alive?”

I nodded.

“He was,” I said. “Before his surgery. I was talking to him.”

On TV a fighter jet flew by, low and hot.

In a flash, my mom understood.

Her eyes got wet again. She covered my hand with hers. She looked at me, her face very serious.

“You are good doctor, Roya-joon. He is okay now. You help him then. I believe this.”

“I hope so,” I said.

Then she ate more fruit.

And I ate more fruit.

And, together, we watched more of the war, the light of faraway explosions slicing through us.

Leila Mansouri is an Iranian-American fiction writer, essays, and literary critic. Her creative work focuses on the Iranian-American and SWANA-American diasporas and has appeared in the Offing, The Believer, Rowayat, Nowruz, and elsewhere.

The post Flashbang appeared first on Mizna.

trans. Sara Elkamel

November 12, 2023—Farah Barqawi’s written account of the early embodiments of witnessing the genocide on Gaza dates some eight months before Mizna’s publication of her text. It suffices to say that it could have been written yesterday—as if time itself refuses to look away. Free Palestine.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

The massacre has reinstated a school-like system, where my mother is the teacher and I am the only student. I await her daily dispatches so I can edit and publish them. I get this homework done quickly, afraid any tardiness would disappoint the teacher.

—Farah Barqawi, trans. Sara Elkamel

New Habits

November 12, 2023

My mother was not the only one to pick up new habits as a massacre unfolded in Gaza, her beloved city, over the past month. I too was forced to acclimate to new activities in my distant exile in New York City. First: daily acrobatic leaps between two time zones, separated by seven long hours. Sleep is restless, and waking hours are tinged with sleep: I exist in limbo. Nothing but her survival, and the survival of those sheltering with her, will allow me to escape. No light can enter this void until the sun rises where she is. Only then can I fasten my eyes, briefly, before waking back up to be with her.  

Second: disarray and destruction. In other words: a clear lack of demarcation between where I eat and where I sleep, between my outside and inside clothes, and a deliberate carelessness towards the state of my room, my closet, my kitchen, and my backpack. The destruction I witness across the screen, and which continues to assault my mind and heart, has prompted a newfound apathy towards any and all appointments, plans, and details.

Third: a new morning routine. The massacre has reinstated a school-like system, where my mother is the teacher and I am the only student. I await her daily dispatches so I can edit and publish them. I get this homework done quickly, afraid any tardiness would disappoint the teacher. When I complete the task, I eagerly await a gold star on my forehead, or a “God bless you,” or “Bravo, onwards!” inscribed in my notebook. 

But on days like today, when there is no contact or communication—no writing, no editing, no homework, no gold stars—I am overcome with the nagging feeling that I must have forgotten to do my homework. If only my mother could cover for me; keep the teacher from knocking off any marks. To console myself, I remind myself that it is the weekend, and that the teacher is my mother. Once she returns to the classroom, there is no doubt that she will assign me more homework, which I will break my neck to deliver by the deadline.

برزخ

١٢ نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني ٢٠٢٣

بقلم: فرح برقاوي

ليست أمّي وحدها من ربّت عاداتٍ جديدةً في شهرٍ وأكثر من المجزرة في مدينتها العزيزة غزّة. مثلها أنا، اضطررت إلى اعتياد أشياءٍ جديدة في منفاي البعيد في نيويورك. أولها القفز البهلواني بين توقيتين تفصلهما سبع ساعاتٍ طوال، فلا يكون النوم نومًا ولا الصحو صحوًا، بل أعيش في برزخٍ؛ لا خروجَ منه إلا بنجاتها هي ومن معها، ولا ضوءَ فيه إلا عندما تشرقُ الشمسُ عندها، فأغمضُ عينيّ قليلًا قبل أن أواصلَ الصحوَ معها

ثانيها كان الكركبة والدمار؛ فالدمارُ الذي أراه على الشاشة، هو ذاتُ الدمار الذي يضرب ذهني وقلبي، ليخرجَ منّي بعدمِ اكتراثٍ مفاجئ لأيٍّ من المواعيد والخطط والتفاصيل، وبإهمالٍ مُتعمّد لمواضعِ الأشياء في غرفتي وخزانتي ومطبخي وحقيبتي، وخلطٍ واضحٍ بين مكان النوم والأكل، وثياب المنزل والخروج

ثالثها روتين الوظيفة الصباحية. أعادتني المجزرة إلى نظامٍ مدرسيّ، أمّي فيه المعلّمة وأنا التلميذة. أنتظر رسالتها اليومية – وظيفتي اليومية – لأحرِّرها، وأسرع في حلّ الواجب حتى لا أتأخّر فأخيّبَ ظنّها، وحين أنتهي أنتظرُ منها نجمة ذهبيّةً على جبيني، و “رعاكِ الله” أو “برافو، إلى الأمام” على دفتري لأتأكد من تفوُّقي

لكن أيّامًا مثل هذا اليوم، حيث لا اتّصال ولا تواصل، ولا كتابة ولا تحرير، ولا وظائف مدرسية وأنجُم ذهبية، أشعر بأنني لا بدّ نسيت واجبي اليومي وأريد من أمّي أن تشفع لي عند معلّمتي كي لا أخسر بعض العلامات، ومن ثم أقول لنفسي بأنه الجمعة، يوم العطلة الأسبوعية، وأتذكر بأنّ معلّمتي ذاتها أمّي، وأنه لا بدّ وأن أتلقّى مهمّةً جديدةً حين تدخل إلى الفصل مجدّدًا، وأنني سأحاول قدر المستطاع أن أسلّمها بحلول الموعد النهائي

Farah Barqawi is a Palestinian writer, educator, performer, and feminist organizer. Her work has appeared in multiple languages, both online and in print. She holds a master’s degree in public policy from University of Chicago and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from New York University. Farah lives between New York City and Berlin.

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, and is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (APBF & Akashic Books, 2021).

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The post New Habits appeared first on Mizna.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of reading at a People’s Night of Poetry and Music for Palestine event, co-organized by Jess X Snow, Denice Frohman, and the lovely folks at La La Lil Jidar—a Philadelphia-based artist collective and archival project documenting the Zionist apartheid wall for over twenty years. At our reading, some activists in La La Lil Jidar’s collective brought the work of one of their young Gazan community members, Huda Soboh, into the space. I witnessed how Soboh’s words stunned the whole room into silence. Afterward, with the more than 250 people in attendance, I participated in the recording of a video message of gratitude to Soboh. It is a deep honor to be publishing her work, in the form of a dispatch from Gaza that she wrote herself in English.

—George Abraham, Mizna executive editor

Each morning, as the first rays of sunlight pierce through the darkness, I find myself drawn to the window, searching for that familiar sight. And when I see them—those vibrant kites painted against the backdrop of the azure sky—my heart swells with a sense of hope that defies the despair that threatens to consume us.

—Huda Soboh

Dispatch from Gaza

by Huda Soboh

In Rafah, the heart of Gaza, where the echoes of war reverberate through the streets, and the air is thick with grief, uncertainty, and fear of hunger, there exist some glimmers of hope that dance across the sky each day—kites. From the window of my shelter, where the walls bear witness to the agonizing suffering of displacement and the nights are haunted by the sounds of constant air strikes, the sight of these colorful kites brings a sense of solace.

The war in Gaza is a harsh reality that we live and breathe every day. It is the constant fear of airstrikes and bombings.We think it is also the agonizing wait for our return home. Then we are informed of our home, reduced to rubble in an instant. It is the relentless cycle of violence that tears families apart and leaves scars that may never fully heal.

Amid this turmoil, the sight of kites soaring high in the sky serves as a reminder that, even in this destruction, there is still light to be found that can heal our wounds. Each morning, as the first rays of sunlight pierce through the darkness, I find myself drawn to the window, searching for that familiar sight. And when I see them—those vibrant kites painted against the backdrop of the azure sky—my heart swells with a sense of hope that defies the despair that threatens to consume us.

But there are days when the kites do not appear, when the sky remains empty and the weight of the last 143 days hangs heavy in the air. Those are the days when the horrors of the night before linger like a dark cloud, casting a shadow over our hopes and dreams. It means that the spirit of the kids—who still find the urge to live a childhood and play with kites between the rubble—was either scared to death that night, or faced death itself. It is on those days that we are reminded of the fragility of hope, how easily it can be extinguished by this cold-blooded world.

Rafah
March 2, 2024

Huda Soboh is a nineteen-year-old Palestinian residing in Gaza and currently displaced in Rafah. She thinks of writing as her way of resilience—a sanctuary so that the devastation does not consume her spirit. She is a digital economics student who is planning to continue her studies abroad due to the destruction of universities in Gaza.

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trans. by Sarah Aziza

Today, we are honored to feature Sarah Aziza’s literary translation of a letter from her cousin, Nabil S., who is currently writing to her from Gaza. As I read over this exchange, I think of the ways love is baked into every aspect of the form: the love implicit to a letter exchange with a family member in the midst of catastrophe, the love implicit to this caring and generous translation. Nabil always wanted to be a writer, Sarah texted me in preparation for this piece, attempting to translate a moment of potential excitement from within a catastrophe that has murdered and more than triply displaced her family members abroad. Here I am reminded that the genocidal wounds we are witnessing from Gaza cannot be conceptualized by figures such as over 1% of civil society murdered, or over 360,000 residential buildings destroyed, according to Al Jazeera’s latest numbers. How can we even begin to conceptualize the psychological wounds for Gaza’s coming generations? What future do any of us have to look toward? And what better way to hold these hope/less tensions, these impossible acts of witness, than the time capsule of a letter? I am lucky enough to have had my own letter exchange with Sarah recently, and am grateful for her thoughts and contributions to our thinking on witness at this moment. I am grateful to her for bringing Nabil into these conversations via her translation, alongside photos he was able to take these past few months.

—George Abraham, Mizna executive editor

Regretfully, I had to leave all my books behind. I couldn’t bear to make the choice between my beloveds, so I left them all.

Give them back. Give us back our beds. Give us back our offices. And give us back our books.

—Nabil S. (trans. Sarah Aziza)

It was all songs

Our talking—it was all songs, a bit of poetry, letters made of kisses, the eagerness of a lover, and a torment of longing. The talk was hope and the talk was life. It was hours on the phone, and friends always nearby, and coffee—my darling, there was coffee! And when we drank, we sipped it—truly, we sipped. But if any coffee remains, it is by sheer coincidence. Even this precious, scarce coffee, this bon¹ is overshadowed by another word—ton. A ton of explosives, a ton of lies about “aid,” and where is the watan, the homeland?

My dear life, I’m still searching, little by little, for shelter, or what they call a “tent.” And in the midst of searching for hope for this human soul, all forms of humanity are falling away from us. Yet humanity is within us. And inside us, there is a dignity we can choose—this is how we were raised. But everything has fallen. We have been forced out, and what they call “displacement” is another lie and another atrocity.

And all that we left behind—our homes, and the smell of our rooms, and the sounds of our walls, and the talk of our neighbors, and the birds of sunrise, and the rooster of dawn—this is not displacement, but the breaking up of hearts.

So let us rephrase our situation and look clear-eyed at ourselves to see this is not a dream or nightmare but reality, a ghastly and disgraced reality.

The memories brought up on your smartphone return you for a moment to your past life, to its atmosphere of ease and the embrace of friends. It is as if this forgotten life now presses itself upon us against our will—for these pictures are all that remain of our family and loved ones. Only photos, for us to weep and lament over, for we locked the doors tightly when we left our homes. We left with the keys in our hands.

Sixty years from now, will the media show us, still holding our keys? But we were lied to. They lied when they acted as if it would be an easy thing to leave, and we’d be along for the ride. But will the price of potatoes ever go back to one shekel? For years, we have dedicated ourselves to our work, toiling patiently, hoping that great love would deliver us and quench us with the sweetness of life.

Now, we hope tomorrow will bring us what we need—a safe apartment, a bed to hold us, if only for a little while. All we worked for has gone to dust, and all that remained of the “sweat of our brows” has been spent on bottles of water, some tomatoes, cheese, and canned goods. All this could have been gold² in the hands of those we love, instead of being gone, never to return. A small difference in grammar can negate meaning entirely.

Before this, my father looked young despite his age. His hair was dusted with gray, but he shone. He was beautiful. Now, he is written all over with worry—three months of suffering have done to him more than all his years. What do you imagine he will do, if the gray hairs begin to show in us?

No one can hasten or delay their own death. But we hustle in the queues for the bathroom, for water, for the distribution of aid—we must hustle for the crumbs of life. I write, and my mind fills with good memories—how our lives used to begin at midnight. And now, our lives begin at the cusp of dawn and end at the last grave to the unknown martyr—why?

He is someone who was martyred, but among those who know him, he is the one who has gone and never returned. He is the one whom his son is waiting for, or one awaited by his father or sweetheart. But he has gone and has not returned. He is the one fate and the moon will weep for. His family will live boxed inside doubt, asking even the dust if it has seen him passing by. No, he is not unknown, he is the furthest thing from that. He is his family’s great calamity, he is the bitterness of loss, the hope of his father, and the companion of the Prophet. 

I remember well, during the last truce, how I went back to my bedroom. It was still undisturbed. All the books I loved to read were still safe. My pictures, well, they had some dust on them, but they were still beautiful. Everything deserved an embrace—every thing. I tidied up my office, cleaned my bedroom, and slept in it the seven nights of the seven-day truce. It was like a remedy, bringing me back to life.

Regretfully, I had to leave all my books behind. I couldn’t bear to make the choice between my beloveds, so I left them all.

Give them back. Give us back our beds. Give us back our offices. And give us back our books.
Then someone asks me, What do you want?
I want an espresso.
He looks at me and asks, what?
Nothing. How much is the cheese today?

Nabil S. (translated by Sarah Aziza)
Nuseirat Refugee Camp & Khan Younis

January 4, 2023

 الحديث كله اغنية وسطرين شعر وحروف من القُبل ولهفة محب وعذاب مشتاق

كان الحديث امل وكان الحديث حياة ، اتصال بالساعات واصحاب بالجوار

وقهوة يا عزيزي كان هناك قهوة ، كنا نحتسي القهوة كان فعلا اسمها احتساء ، ما تبقى من بن هو محض مصادفة عائمة لا تلامس الحقيقة من شيء ، هذا البن في شحه غلبته كلمة اخرى “طن” طن من المتفجرات وطن من اكذوبة المساعدات ، واين الوطن ؟ 

عزيزتي الحياة ، ما زلت اسعى شيئا فشيئا لمأوى او ما يسمى خيمة ومع كل بحث عن امن لهذه النفس البشرية تتساقط منا  كل انواع الانسانية ، ان الانسانية في داخلنا طابع وكرامتنا في داخلنا اختيار ، لقد سقط كل شيء ،لقد هُجرنا قصرا وما يسمى بالنزوح فهو اكذوبة اخرى او فظاعة اخرى ، ما تُرك من بيوتنا ورائحة غرفنا وصوت حوائطنا وحديث جيراننا وعصافير الشروق وديك الفجر ليس نزوح بل تقطيع للقلوب ، اذن فلنعيد صياغة واقعنا ولنبدو محقين اتجاه انفسنا ان هذا ليس حلم او كابوس انه واقع وهو فعلا واقع ودنيء، ان اختلاف الذكريات التي تنشئها هذه الجوالات الذكية يعيد لك للحظة حياتك السابقة جوها العفوي واحضان الرفاق وكأننا نسيناها وكأن تطبعنا رغما عنا ، ان ما تبقى منا ايها الاهل ايها الاحبة بعض صور نبكي ونتباكى عليها ، لقد اقفلنا الابواب جيدا عند خروجنا اخذنا المفاتيح ، لا اعلم ان كانت القنوات ستنقل بعد ستون عاما اخرى تمسكنا بالمفاتيح ، لقد كُذب علينا بأنها ستهون وستمضي بنا الركوب ، ولكن من يعيد سعر البطاطا الى شيكل ؟ 

لقد تفانينا بعملنا ولقد افنينا اعوامنا نعمل ونكد ونلعق الصبر مرارا املين بحب كبير يأخذنا من تحت الذراع ويسقينا حلاوة الحياة ، نأمل بغد وفير وشقة مؤمنة وسرير يحملنا ولو لقليل ، ان ما جنيناه ذهب تحت التراب وما تبقى من “عرق جبينا” ذهب على زجاجات الماء وبعض البندورة والجبنة والمعلبات ، وكان من الممكن ان يكون كل ذلك دهبا في ايدي من نحب وليس ذهب ولم يعد، اختلاف نقطة تلغي المعنى ، لقد كان ابي يبدو يافعا رغم كبر عمره ، كان يبدو عليه الشيب قليلا ولكنه كان براقا جميلا ، ان ابي الان رأيته للحظة كهلا يكسوه الهم ما لم تفعله به السنين كلها فعلته به ثلاث شهور من المعاناة، ماذا تراه يفعل ان كان الشيب بدا بالظهور فينا ، لا احد يستبق موته او يأخره ولكن علينا ان نستبق طابور الحمام وطابور الماء وتسليم المساعدات ، علينا ان نستبق بعض من فتات الحياة ، اني اكتب وامري كله مملوء بالذكريات الطيبة ، لقد كانت تبدأ حياتنا في منتصف الليل واصبح تبدأ حياتنا عند حدود الفجر وتنتهي عند آخر مقام لشهيد مجهول الهوية ؟ 

هو شخص استشهد ، ولكنه بين عوام اهله شخص ذهب ولم يعد ، شخص انتظره ابنه او والده او حبيبته ولكنه لم يعد شخص سيبكي عليه القدر ويبكي عليه القمر ، وسيعيش اهله مستطيل من الشك وسيسألون التراب ان مر بها ، انه ليس مجهول الهوية انه ابعد من ذلك بكثير انه مصيبة الاهل ومرارة الفقد وامل والدة ورفيق الرسول

اذكر جيدا في فترة الهدنة الاخيرة عدت لغرفتي ، وكانت ما تزال بخير ، كتبي التي احب بقيت جيدة بعض صوري عليها الغبار ولكنها صوري انها جميلة ، كان كل شيء يستحق العناق كل شيء ، رتبت مكتبي ونظفت غرفتي ونمت بها سبع ليالٍ بسبع ايام هدنة ،،لقد كان الامر اشبه بترياق للحياة ، لقد اضطررت اسفا ان اترك جميع كتبي ، لم ارغب ان اقع باختيار قاسي بين الكتب احبتي فتركتها جميعها ،اعيدوا لنا اسرتنا ومكاتبنا وكتبنا

ثم يسأل احدهم ماذا تريد 

-اريد الاسبريسو 

نظر الي وقال ماذا ؟ 

-لا شيء “بكم الجبنة اليوم”

1. 1. The original Arabic term for coffee used in this line is البن, transliterated as “bon.” ︎
2. 2. Another play on words, as the word “gold” and “gone” in Arabic are homonyms, and “hands” and “return” are off-rhymes. ︎

Nabil S. was born and raised in Gaza, and is a trained pharmacist. His family was forcibly displaced from their home in Nuseirat in December, 2023. On January 6, he shared: “I was always busy in the pharmacy, and now they have made me unemployed and my job will be to show the barbarity of this occupier and the beauty of our people despite the suffering.” He is the second of eight siblings.

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. Her essays, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, NPR, and the Nation, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Books and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her forthcoming book is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

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The post It was All Songs: A Letter from Gaza appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Mizna features two prose texts composed by Palestinian writer Anees Ghanima, who is currently in Gaza, displaced from his home. In the context of a media environment underscored by institutional complicity toward—indeed, at times active participation in—the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and in light of the open adoption of multiple mediatic techniques designed to misguide, obfuscate, and propagandize on behalf of colonization, the movement for Palestinian liberation has found critical sustenance and stability in radical acts of witnessing. We note, as others have done, that the Arabic word for martyr (shaheed) and witness (shaahid) share a common root. In the two texts that follow—“Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are in Gaza” as well as “Searching for a Chocolate Bar in Gaza During the War”— Ghanima joins Motaz Azaiza, Plestia Alaqad, and Bisan Owda, among others, in enacting testimonial resistance by circumvention. Bypassing the transnational media conglomerate, the newscaster, and the editor-in-chief, Anees’s voice testifies to us directly, inviting us to follow him, to witness Gaza as he witnesses it, to watch him search for chocolate, to believe the evidence of our own eyes and ears. 

—Nour Eldin H., Mizna editor

The shopkeeper’s eyebrows were raised—not so much in disbelief, it was just the way he looked, the way God made him.

People are dying and you’re here looking for a chocolate bar. You’re weird.

No, you don’t understand, sir. Come close, let me explain: I want it for my mom, and I want it bitter, too.

—Anees Ghanima

I. Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are in Gaza

Come scream with me!

My voice is wounded.

Hello from Gaza, Gaza which cannot be enchained no matter how strong the shackles. This is a message from between piles of corpses. This is a rushed message, because we don’t have much time, even though we’re not doing anything.

Today, a month and a half will have passed—we no longer count the days—since the decision to execute this good and defiant city, simply because someone yelled loud enough to be heard, and awakened all the devils in hell. Someone in the market informs me, today is the 45^th day that we’ve been under the whip of the greatest live-streamed war crime in history. Despite words’ capacity to convey cruelty, all our vocabularies are insufficient to express the enormity of what is taking place: we are all dead, even if we escape, from one day to the next, among the corpses,in a grave that cannot fit us all.

This vocabulary is also crushed, maybe to go along with the general state of public shame, wherein facts are turned upside down and the situation is reduced to its most limited outline: a humanitarian crisis—just provide them with food and medicine.

To borrow Albert Einstein’s saying: the world will not be destroyed by those who do the work of devils, but by those who sit by and watch and do not intervene.

Hey, World! We aren’t just hungry. We want to stop this genocide as well! This is our first demand. We have a right to say we don’t want to be killed. And we have a right to say that the world toying with us is a waste of time. More than seventy years is enough time for anyone to understand.

The days that have passed are as crushing as the ones that remain ahead of us, and I think an overwrought description like a knife unsheathed and slaughtering is more precise than any other description. To lean into excess, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the hours of a single day feel like an entire year.

Today I took my usual walk in Maghazi refugee camp, and my feet led me to the camp market, where there are few people and even fewer things to buy. I walked until I reached Salahedin Street, the main artery that connects all the cities of the Gaza Strip, and which has been bisected by Israeli Merkava tanks commandeered by recruited mercenaries. Enormous tanks that most people are seeing for the first time, but ultimately they are part of the Israeli war machine, and to use a Gazan phrase, the asphalt of the roads won’t tolerate them.

To the right of where I stood, beneath Gaza’s sky, is my house that was bombed by warplanes, and my father’s house, and my sister’s house, and the homes of friends, neighbors, and relatives. There, where black clouds clog up the sky day and night, it looked like someone lit a flame that would never burn out, while plumes of smoke stood frozen by the horror of the scene.

On the first day of the war, we received news that one of our cousins had been killed. It was sad that we couldn’t find a way to bid him farewell. Two days later, another cousin was killed at the civil service headquarters in Tal Al Hawa. It was painful that we didn’t even find out until a few days after his burial. And two little girls, our relatives’ daughters, were killed as well. We only learned about them on the news, because we couldn’t reach anyone when communications were cut off.

Daily, we receive news of the loss of someone we know. Either they are killed, or they are trapped under rubble, waiting as death slowly drags its feet toward them. This could be someone with whom you laughed or argued—you know they are in their final moments, and in their final moments perhaps they remember you too: your laughter together, your arguments. We lose people this close to us, people too close for death to reach, and yet death arrives a few days later even as the civil defense forces finally, miraculously, pull them out from beneath the rubble.

Someone leaves and you remain. He’s hurt no one, just like you. Someone you worked with and who has confided in you many times that he can’t even stand up to anyone, his boss for example. He’s an introverted and kind person, someone who was born to be loved, someone who could cause great harm, but only to himself. He doesn’t even have the courage to look you in the eye. Do you wonder how he looked death in the eye when it arrived?

Let’s speak up together. Let’s be loud. Let’s be angry.

Together, we can be angry.

Here we are, a month and half without electricity, potable water, clean water for bathing, without enough food—the most basic of needs, is that not so? A month and half without communications or internet access, things that aren’t luxuries, they help to save lives, do you understand? A single message might be the reason someone lives. 

A month and a half away from the home you know, a month and half of losing friends and family and neighbors, a month and a half, day and night, warplanes overhead with their endless bombardment, and tanks on the ground, not far away, they might reach you any minute. A month and a half of this waiting.

You wait to understand, not to die. Can it be that after all these years, you won’t even find a brother to bury you? And why, after all these years, do you find your brother’s pickaxe in your killer’s hand?

In the first days of the war, I was in the Remal neighborhood, in my family home where we all gather during times of war—frequent as they are. In the first days, I thought my home in Shejaiyya was the most dangerous place in the world, based on how things usually go. That’s where the revenge sorties usually fall, on the most defiant of all neighborhoods in the world, the neighborhood that makes war criminals salivate. But it was different this time. On the first day they bombed Palestine Towers, not far from where we are, and on the second day, without warning, they bombed the building next door to ours, and we were all terrorized as window glass shattered over our heads and shrapnel flew into our home while we were having lunch. Covered in dust, the violent bombing led us to drag our bodies outside and run between plumes of black smoke. Some of us made it to the car and headed to Maghazi camp, and the rest of us, myself among them, returned to the house to spend the night there. It was not a good night, and the barbarity of the bombings intensified.

The next day, most of our neighbors joined the displaced and began to move toward the south, because of the frequency of the bombings in western Gaza, and we went along as well. We left our doors open and took very little with us. We moved to Meghraqa for a few days, then for a few more days to Maghazi camp, including the day of the Massacre of the Displaced, and we were minutes away from being wiped out.

We returned to Gaza again, because we missed the warmth of our home. We stayed for three days; they were absolutely not good days because the ground invasion had begun and the bombardment intensified and the missiles were nearer to us. In the early morning hours of that day, we moved toward the camp again, and on to Salaheddin Street where the tanks had truly shut down the road. A family had been killed there. So we took the longer route to the camp, from Rashid Street, or the beach road. In our family car, we didn’t pass a single person on the long road, and to the right of us we saw the warships. I kept expecting a missile to hit us—I have a phobia of ships—and some of us expected a tank to suddenly attack. As for those who remained, they were sure it would be a warplane.

In the end, by a miracle of God, we arrived. At the entrance of Nuseirat camp, it felt like the whole escapade was unbelievable. I can honestly say it was the most terrifying of the days we’ve lived so far, even worse than the day of the massacre on the street behind our, in the first days we arrived at the camp, which took the lives of one hundred people.

After this journey of displacement, as we move from house to house trying to outrun the devils unleashed in Gaza now, as they have left Hell empty, I want to say that we are, every day since the day we were born, being exterminated. But let the world remember: we do not die.

II. Searching for a Chocolate Bar in Gaza During the War

My mom keeps an empty old tin of chocolates in her bedroom because she likes the way it looks. She cleans it periodically. It brings back a flood of memories and images. A big part of Palestinian women’s memories is nostalgia. It includes her old home before displacement, and her grandmother’s recipes, and the first tree in the school yard, and certainly, the first time she tasted chocolate. Trust me when I tell you, in daily conversation, it is no less than her prayers for ceasefire.

I ran around for two weeks in search of a particular dark chocolate bar with simple specifications: 60% bitterness or greater, so as not to contradict the bitterness of war in Gaza. Preferably, it would be elegant enough to offer to foreign guests. What else would we offer them? Tea and biscuits? That won’t work, son.

At vendor Q’s—a cheerful fellow—I helped to open up his shop. Good Morning—the good ones are gone and the wicked remain! We rubbed the sleep out of our eyes and went scavenging for the lost chocolate bar in a pile of merchandise that had formed as a result of nearby bombings. It wasn’t strange in the first days, for most things were still available, except my mother’s 60% bar. The man was cheerful, as I said, and he made different offers, all potentially very convincing, and he teased, How about you take two 30% chocolate bars? Funny, but also embarrassing, and I laughed with him. He unwrapped a bar and offered it to me, Please, have a taste.

We didn’t find what we wanted there, despite his best efforts, but I paid dearly for all we tasted. As they say: a bird in the hand, and ten others fly away. Delightful!

There is no rest in war, securing any needs requires days of searching. We all woke up too late to the realization that nothing is available. A few days later, guests visited us, and we didn’t offer them my mother’s favorite chocolate. They informed us that they do not drink tea. The conversation was limited to, God will compensate us. May we return. And then they left. I stopped by the coffee roastery. I had glimpsed a man there with a chocolate bar. At one point, he stood next to me, but he left in a hurry like he was running off with hidden treasure. Should I chase after him? I called out, but it was my turn in line. Where would I find him now? Anyway, he didn’t hear me. Just great.

The shopkeeper’s eyebrows were raised—not so much in disbelief, it was just the way he looked, the way God made him.

People are dying and you’re here looking for a chocolate bar. You’re weird.

No, you don’t understand, sir. Come close, let me explain: I want it for my mom, and I want it bitter, too.

I don’t understand your request!

During the war, when you ask for chocolate, don’t ask for yourself, ask on your mother’s behalf. During the war, when you ask for chocolate, ask for the bitter kind. These are important lessons that soften the blow of I just sold the last bar a few minutes ago.

I guess I was saved from an old song “The Hero Is Martyred” and received by another one “Look What He Brought With Him.” Coffee is a treasure here, too. For so many people, it is a precious treasure to which nothing in existence compares. And coffee needs a companion, especially for coffee drinkers who don’t smoke, and—you guessed it—the best companion is dark chocolate, 60% bitterness or more, so as not to contradict the bitterness of war in Gaza. Preferably, it would be elegant enough to offer to foreign guests

I went to the market in another town based on some recommendations. There were coffee shops that were open there, shops where people were buying and selling gold, and ice cream shops. It was strange. It was also uplifting. Certainly, our special request will be there, as well. The first store was empty. The second closed, the tenth . . . I was so tired. At vendor A’s store, a tall shopkeeper hovered over his shadow, his mustache thick enough for an airplane to land on. I walked around his little place, picked out some things I definitely didn’t need, and then, shyly, I asked him.

He looked down his mustache at me and said some words, words I didn’t understand. 

Go on home, son. I don’t understand what you want. Actually, I don’t have what you want.

I picked out a few more unnecessary things, paid, and withdrew from the scene.

These aren’t just hard days, they are impossible. But they aren’t days for despair. They are days for hope. We ask. We beseech. We pray. We recite. We sing incantations. We resist. We butt heads. We get along. Most importantly, we act.

Next to our rental house, there’s a corner store that was open for the first time in a while. When I got home, I decided to ask there.

The shopkeeper: My son has been martyred.

I found the chocolate bar, sitting demurely on the counter. Exactly 60% bitterness. I didn’t have much to say. I set the money down and left. I gave the chocolate to my mother. I didn’t tell her the story and she has yet to unwrap the chocolate bar.

Born in Gaza City, Anees Ghanima is a poet and web programmer. He is the CEO of NormX Group for Software and enterprise resource planning and in 2017 received first place in the Young Writer of the Year Award in the Field of Poetry from the A. M. Qattan Foundation.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, translator, and teaching artist. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books,the Nation, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mizna, and Poetry among others. She is the author of three books, Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award; Kaan and Her Sisters (Trio House, 2023); and Something About Living, (University of Akron, 2024), winner of the 2022 Akron Prize. Tuffaha was the curator and translator of the 2022 series Poems from Palestine in the Baffler magazine. She is the recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s John Frederick Nims Prize for her translations from Arabic of the poems of Zakaria Mohammed. You can learn more about her work at lenakhalaftuffaha.com

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The post Hell Is Empty and All the Devils Are in Gaza and Other Reflections appeared first on Mizna.