‘Israel’s army tanks are here. We are facing imminent death in Gaza City’
Mothers in Gaza, Ne'ma Hassan
“Gaza City – As I look out of the window this morning, the Israeli army’s tanks are just a few hundred metres away. They have apparently reached deep into the centre of Gaza City during the night.
My two-year-old has only just fallen asleep beneath the window. Up all night and terrified by the sound of the gunfire, he has been living off powdered milk and cereal for the past four days – his lips are dry.”
- Mohammed R Mhawish, Aljazeera (‘In his last report before contact was lost on Monday, an Al Jazeera writer describes the terror on the ground.’)
‘Israel’s army tanks are here. We are facing imminent death in Gaza City’
These past few weeks, like you, I have been reading the news, seeing reports about the bombings, and the Israeli siege of Gaza. The journey to unstring catastrophe from catastrophe is a complex and fragmented activity. How does one come to terms with the distance of experience. I am apart from those who have been suffering, those for whom “Fear and deprivation have been.. constant companions”. I read these as words on a page, and even though this testimony smarts with the urban sensorium of war, I can feel it truly only as a witness, once removed.
I have been thinking of the extended geography of terror, and the “diameter” of pain and power, in the modern connected world. I borrow this crutch from a poem by the celebrated Israeli poet - Yehuda Amichai. While this poem has been used in the past by others to convey the devastating effects of war on the Palestinian people, I feel it is contentious that I use the work of this writer in the beginning. While some write of his “apolitical” stance as a Jewish poet who wrote about war -
“…Amichai ignores the fact that the unethical results of the 1948 war still inhere in the Israeli state’s refusal to grant equal citizenship rights to all Palestinians, by recognizing their right of return.…the way in which Jewish sovereignty is constructed in the novel” .
Other accounts, put him on the same footing as Mahmoud Darwish:
As much as they dreamed of peace, both Darwish and Amichai rejected the sterile language of the peace treaty, playing with the paper-white terms of conventions and constitutions, converting them into something touchable and everyday. In Wildpeace, Amichai's vision of peace is not the technical "peace of a cease-fire", but a living thing:
"Let it come
like wildflowers
suddenly, because the field
must have it: wildpeace."
The journey between text and political reality is a complex one, and I do not have the ethical artillery to undertake it yet. But I can think critically about this distance, and I cite Amichai’s poem below, because it has been one of the poems that has returned to me often in the last few weeks while trying to make sense of mass violence happening on one side of the world, while I sit here thousands of kilometres away, safe - simply a witness. I had curated this poem in the past here - The Diameter of the Bomb
While reading Mhawish’s testimony of fear and worry, I could feel my heartbeat rising. I could sense this “circle with no end and no God”. Virality has brought on an intimate public, that is often theorised in the language of long-distance lonely comradeship that struggles to retain ties of affinity and solidarity, while being “alone together” (televised wars, fake news, twitter revolutions). Witness transforms into connection in this matrix only through the exchange and sharing of information - specific details, even. It is the reverberating honesty of experience, carved out as a “blocks of sensation”, whose art lies in pure description that produces fragments of emotional knowledge about distant events, turning them into the here and now, the present. It is a kind of love that makes tells the real story of testimony. This kind of engagement with material reality is different from (but related to) the assessment of policy, the intellectual commitment to humanist rhetoric, and the politics of activism, resistance and protest. While it is firmly entrenched within the realm of vulnerability, the narrative potential of art allows for a vehicle that simultaneously parses truth, imagination, and felt experience in a patchwork of affective currents. This is a potent force, and a framework to process grief, pain and anger at such a mass scale, within the confines of the “everyday” and the “routine”.
At times the absurdist theatre that we are living in comes home to me suddenly. There are many facets to this, and I share the alluded curations that I have revisited here, so that you, like me can go back and think, through poetry, about what we are witnessing today - a fragmented pursuit of scarred memory in the archive. Darwish and Barghouti ask, for instance, What does it mean to laugh in a wasteland ridden by the insistent tinnitus of death? I have cited before, in this context, Berghouti’s I was Born There, I Was Born Here as a hard-hitting text that commits the Israeli occupation of Palestine to paper in unflinching terms. You can find it here. When Israeli forces stormed the Al Aqsa mosque in 2021, I had shared 3 Palestinian poems that helped me makes sense of the attack, and the circumstances - they can be found here. I revisited Berger’s “Seven Levels of Despair” an essay about Palestine - a truly transformative piece of writing - along with Fady Joudah’s “Remove”, another powerful poem, and his essay “My Palestinian Poem that the New Yorker wouldn’t publish”.
I see meaning and hope in this cumulative trigonometry of expression. It is the slowly gathering rubble of testimony that leaps across space and time, with the lethal electricity of emotion, triangulating individuals and persons within the non-human architecture of urban warfare and global politics. In such a context, the work of the archivist is emotional, stitching together experience with a commitment towards truth. Witnessing transforms to resistance. News travels, and the diameter of the bomb grows, enlarging the circle considerably.
I share with you today, a poem cited from such an archive - This is Gaza, that is curating poems read by Palestinian artists, with hope amidst the everyday horrors of war, far too intense to encompass, or comprehend. It is testimony to the fact of this “diameter” of terror that I found this archive through another friend’s sharing of the same poem on their social media page.
I share below their manifesto.
What can an artist or a writer do in the face of a massacre? How can they, and us, defend themselves, and their families against one of the strongest armies in the world? Should we wait for the killing to stop so that we can bury and mourn our dead? Should we just try to send food and medical aid that does not provide more than 1% of what the people in Gaza need? Should we document this heinous crime to make sure that it will not be forgotten and that the perpetrators will be prosecuted? Should we cry? Should we scream in anger? Should we ask the world to help stop the massacre?
We are doing all of this, but the most important thing to do in the face of massive killing is to appreciate life and celebrate it. Two and a half million people live in Gaza; farmers, engineers, doctors, teachers, businessmen, students, workers, academics, and housewives. And also, naturally, writers, musicians, theater and visual artists, and filmmakers. All these people are Gaza’s life that will remain and will continue, despite the massacre. The least we, who live outside Gaza, can do is to become a voice for those who live there, especially the voices of writers and artists writing about life in the face of death.
“This is Gaza” is a series of short videos, initiated by Action for Hope with Seen Films, in cooperation with Al Manassa and Raseef 22, that present literary texts written, as a sign of life, under the Israeli bombardment of Gaza by Gazan poets, novelists, and playwrights during the weeks after 8 October 2023. The literary texts are read by well-known artists, media professionals and writers from the Arab region and beyond.
The poem I share has multiple translations, I am sharing a version put together from two different sources which I feel conveys its beating pulse with appropriate, and envisioned effect.
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