The earth is a Palestinian woman and she is wailing

Note from the author: I wrote this essay, or more like splayed it out, during the second year of the genocide against my people. Suspended in grief and mourning, no words felt enough and I couldn’t bear to share it with the world. 

Since last October, this world has been doing dirty, bloody maths. 421 days, more than a year later, not a line of humanity or morality left to cross. All documented on our screens, fragmented bodies and souls, pixelated screams. 3 thousand. 5 thousand. 10 thousand. 30 thousand. 40 thousand. 40 thousand. 40 thousand. 40 thousand. 40 thousand. 40 thousand. The screams multiply, destruction tears at my people and their land, and the number doesn’t change. 40 thousand. 40 thousand. 40 thousand. The number hasn’t changed for months. 200,000. 200,000. Who — is left to count the dead? is left to count? is left? Who counts? Who decides who counts? Who counts and who is left to pick up the flesh pieces? Who is human and who is not? Who is not? Who decides? Who decides?

How many — limbs? Hearts? Bloodcurdling wails? Prayers? How many more apocalyptic days? Never-ending nights? Flour massacres? Hospital massacres? How many orphans? Elders? Pleas to Allah (SWT)? Mass graves? Shrouds and plastic bags? Funerals with nothing left to bury? How many torn from their land? Tents built to be burnt? How much bloodied rubble and rubbled bodies? How many martyrs? How many more to mourn? How to mourn? How to mourn? How to mourn?

When I see the footage of the genocide of my people, when I see the bombing of Beirut, all I can think about is how many people are involved in enacting this terror. How many soldiers and politicians? How many lawmakers and settlers? How many companies and factories? How many journalists and war criminals? How many more fascists armed to the teeth? How many nodes in this death machine?

I lament and I mourn and I grieve. This lump in my throat begs me to speak but I freeze. What gives me the right to write about the genocide from the (dis)comfort of imperial Europe? As Asmaa Azaizeh wrote, “Do not believe me if I talked to you of war, because when I spoke of blood, I was drinking coffee, when I spoke of graves, I was picking yellow daisies in Marj Ibn Amer, when I described the murderers, I was listening to my friends’ giggles, and when I wrote about a burnt theatre in Aleppo, I was standing before you in an air-conditioned one”.

Sometimes, my dreams form a portal and I can finally breathe. In these dreams, I am in Gaza. The dreams are but simple moments I can never get back. A game with my sister in our first ever home, on the second floor. Our room was carpeted and usually sun-drenched. Nestled in Al Rimal neighbourhood, our go-to kiosk was called Haboush. Sometimes my mom would get her hair done across the street at Hala’s Salon and take us with her. If you walk the other way and make a left, you would see Al Deira in all its earthy red glory. 

A long summer night spent in my grandparents’ veranda. Everywhere I look around me, different iterations of me. My grandparents, my mother, her siblings, my mother’s cousins, all the grandchildren, forming a cacophony of laughter. The smell of the jasmine bush, always so strong at night. My cousins and I fight over who has to make the next shisha head. Jokes are thrown back and forth, a lot of them going straight over our heads. There is a pile of bizir (watermelon seeds) in a plastic tray on the table, growing bigger and bigger with the conversation. 

A drive along the beach with our family friends, Auntie Dina and her children Siham and Taleed. We stop for some grilled corn from a stand right on the sand. The sea is to my right. The sun is setting. We (my sister Salma and I, Siham and Taleed, our parallel pair) sit in the backseat of her green car (maybe it was blue), as our mothers beam in the frontseat. We beg Auntie Dina to do the trick, do the trick, do the trick. She steers the wheel to the left and right, left and right, left and right, and the car dances to and fro, our giggling ever-growing.

Yesterday morning, a close friend of mine (Meg) messaged me saying “I had a dream last night that me and you were in Palestine together and you had a gorgeous house with an amazing green sofa and you lived near to your parents and we had coffee and drove around in an amazing roofless car and we were both so happy!”. It nearly brought me to my knees. If it can be dreamt, it can be lived, I remind myself. 

Sometimes I come to, in the middle of the night, barely awake, and for those few seconds before my soul registers it is in this world, the genocide is nonexistent. Gaza is still the Gaza I remember. Bustling and alive, colourful and oh so green. My grandparents sleep soundly in their home. My home still stands, overlooking the Mediterranean, embraces of wind caressing it. Then consciousness forms and I remember, the weight of this reality as heavy as a sky sitting on my chest. Breath escapes me, crawling and kicking, looking for something to hold on to. Begging for faith. I can not comprehend. In my warm bed in Germany, with water running from the tap when I will it, all the buildings around me still standing, I can not breathe, can not comprehend; they lived this apocalypse for a year. More than a year.

How to keep going?

I draw strength from my people, their lives reduced to 42 million tons of rubble, and still able to bear a smile. To comfort a child. To get married. To withstand the indescribable. To pray. To pray. To pray. I wish the world would stop taking their resilience for granted. I draw strength from my mother and her siblings. Every time they meet, they remember the dead. Who else is gone from their neighbourhood? They update the list. They tell their stories. My uncle pulls out a picture of Bani Suheila, a million shades of grey and brown in dimensions that should not exist, buildings in shapes the eye can barely process. He points out every single house, who it belonged to, where they think they might be now. They tell their stories, tell some anecdotes, remembering, recounting, reliving, weaving a tapestry of the neighbourhood they grew up in.

I draw strength from my grandparents, now refugees in Cairo, my grandparents who for months and months refused to flee the life they built. My sido (grandpa), still classy as ever, cracking jokes with us and smoking his cigarette ever so slowly, an assertion that he’s got all the time in the world. My teta (grandma) whose first act of service after she physically recovered from the trauma of leaving everything behind, knitted a whole blanket for my little sister. I draw strength from all my uncles, who put their lives on the line day in and day out to provide for their families. I draw strength from my cousins, who told me that if you can hear the bomb coming, you’re okay, that means it’s far enough away for the sound to travel, that the real trouble is if you don’t hear the bomb coming, and in the same breath discuss what our plans for the evening are.

I draw strength from my little sister, who grieves in stanzas and couplets, who, at such a young age, stands her ground in the face of anti-Palestinian racism. I draw strength from my older sister, who is much braver than I, fearless and fiery in the face of uniformed agents of the state. I draw strength from my flatmate and the home we built, a cocoon of comfort and warmth against a loveless world. I draw strength from the comrades around me, the ones who have put everything else aside, organising and mobilising day in and day out, always finding warmth in their open arms. I draw strength from the love of my life. His heart is always as heavy as mine, sometimes more, but he still finds ways to make me smile. I remind myself that there are more people like him out there, whose hearts have not hardened. One time, he said he’s so disgusted with this world, he wants to peel his skin off. I never heard it put so succinctly. 

I know we can all resonate with this. I know you are sick to your core, helpless, scrambling, spiralling. Our souls are frozen because we know that everyday, by participating in business-as-usual, we consent to this. Not willingly, coercively. There are jobs to go to and health insurance to pay off. Do you remember that video of the Palestinian woman shouting that the whole world is occupied and only the Palestinians are free? Let us not be numbed again by everyday routine. Palestinians pulled the veil of any semblance of humanity in this system. Let us not be frozen in our grief.

Do not mince your words. Do not capitulate.  The West has shown us time and time again what they truly are. Let us believe them. What else can we expect from a system that for centuries has plundered and looted, extracted and exploited, massacred and necrotised? The more we pay attention, the less theatrical the end of times seems. The more we pay attention, the less abstract the apocalypse becomes. The West has enforced apocalyptic conditions across the Global South, floods and droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves, oil spills and plagues. Do not fall back into the numbness of everyday routine. These are symptoms of a dying empire, I remind myself. We have not been humans for a long time. We are only labourers or consumers. This is where our power lies. The earth demands that we use it.

Every morning, I wake up and try to build myself back up. I see my grief reflected in the eyes of my friends, of my community. In their eyes, I also see awe for my strength. I know they admire this quality of mine, how I am everywhere and doing so much. I wish I could say it is because of some inner willpower, I wish I could say it is something that comes from within. But the truth is, I have no other choice. If I stop now, I don’t know how I can ever get back up. No matter the grief, if I stop, they win. Everyday I wake up and participate in this world, I do it to resist my own non-existence in this fascist state.

None of our actions are isolated or individual. The fact of the matter is, Palestinians have no other choice. One chooses resilience as much as one chooses to suffer. One chooses resistance as much as one chooses to be colonised. What is the alternative? To kneel over and accept our own extermination? Whenever the forces of empire and capital converge to annihilate us, we will always choose life. And still, Gaza stands. And still, Jenin stands. And still, Tulkarem stands. The horror and terror enacted unto my people is only a sign of the enemy’s weakness, I remind myself. And I pray and I believe that it will destroy them before it ever touches our will to liberation and our belonging to the land.

How to grieve but not despair? How to mourn without an end? Some days, I turn to the trees. Ask them if there’s nothing they can do. Most nights, I beg the sky, where is the light? Where is the light? Bring them light. Bring them victory. Bring them light. I hate the world, hate the world, hate the world, but I refuse to let go of it. This world is more ours than it is theirs. As long as our hearts beat, as long as this grief amplifies, as long as this rage burns. I hate the world, hate the world, hate the world, but I refuse to let go of it. Listen closely. The earth is a Palestinian woman and she is wailing, forever wailing. The old world is dying. The new world is dying to be born. Help it, nurse it, fight for it.