The moment of words and the death of words

She would gaze at me with genuine admiration as I spoke. Her features exuded a great sense of pride. In those instances, I couldn’t help but surrender myself to the moment — let it sweep me away. 

These were the only moments where I felt as though I held life in my hands.

The moments I spent speaking with my mother and father were wondrous. I was young when I first grasped the significance of those moments and kept it as my own secret. As I grew up, these moments evolved into my game with them — a game I never revealed: words were the key and their expressions, the riddle.

I recall that intense confusion that preceded the game: What do I want from life? What is my role in it? What position am I after? And why am I consumed by fear? All that until the moment arrives — the moment of speaking with them. I rub my hands with joy. I remove the seal of enthusiasm from my lips and speak. And then I watch with excitement how their expressions soften the storm inside me into a gentle breeze. I close my eyes to feel life tuck its meaning into my pocket. Then I ask myself: Was this the hand of life or theirs? Now in a state of calm, I know who I am and I can move toward my dreams with pride: I am seeking to solve the riddle, the riddle that resides in the features of my parents.

In those moments of speaking to them was when life was truly revealed. They were the moments when you could feel a scream stirring beneath your skin, crawling toward your mouth: This is life, the life that I want. I have no life outside of these moments. I am immersed in an aura of profound fulfillment, an aura that made me forget the small mistakes that troubled me, and pruned the unruly growth of my fantasies to restore them to a shape of comforting innocence. Did they know what they were doing?

I speak to see — how their expressions changed, how a word imprints a smile, how a word encapsulates the bond between a son and his parents. What more could a person want? Nothing. I have never wished for anything in this life but to build a home in this moment and for the moment to become never-ending.

On the night of the news, a deafening silence rang in my head for the first time. I remember feeling something being cut off, a voice being silenced, something unforeseen that coursed through me like a gasp — something I had not experienced before in all the times I stood by them in our home. On the morning of November 21, I woke up to the phone ringing. It had been at least two weeks since I heard from my family, as voices were increasingly unable to make their way out of northern Gaza to reach the world. I answered. The hoarseness that consumed the voice of Nariman, my older sister, cut a wound into my heart.

I prepared myself: 

- Sis, are you all okay?

- Omar...

- I’m here, sis. Can you hear me?

- I need you to be strong...

Something flashed in my head and gripped my throat. In a trembling voice, I tried to understand.

- What's wrong, sis. Please tell me.

- My mother, father, sister Hend, and her children...

- What about them?

- They were martyred. The house was bombed, along with my uncle's and neighbors’ houses. The neighborhood was hit by a fire belt.

The call dropped, but I continued talking.

- What are you saying, sis? Please... Are you sure?

She did not answer. After about ten minutes, I was able to reach her again. We resumed talking, our words broken by the poor connection and the sobbing.

- Yes, brother. And Saja, we don't know where she is. Omar, they're all buried under the rubble. The house collapsed on them, and we don't know how to get them out.

The call dropped once again.

Is the screaming we hear in moments like this a loud attempt at denial?

The call did not reconnect. “I have to believe,” I thought to myself. But there were no bodies near me, in Lebanon. It was sunny and the sky was clear. The workers just meters away from me were clamoring, and the cleaning lady did not pause her work. No one screamed before me. I was the only one who froze as if my veins had dried up. Is this how death creeps in? Right from within a scene brimming with life.

I stared into the void, alone in a strange place. There were two voices in my head: one saying this can’t be right, and the other telling me it is the truth. What was all this screaming in my head? I stared at the phone and at the wall. What do I do, I asked myself. I remember something strange: I must apologize to all those hoarse voices that screamed in moments like this, but I put my fingers in my ears to shield myself from their screams. I apologize. I should have listened. Now I understand the meaning of that scream. It was an orphan’s cry — and that's why I screamed.

A thousand questions flooded my mind: Where is my little sister, Saja? Who exactly was martyred? What is the fate of the rest? Communications were cut off. Who can I ask? 

It was at this moment that the meanings of siege and occupation crystallized before me, how the Occupation wields power over existence, obliteration and erasure. 

After about half an hour, my sister was able to call again. I asked her some of the questions that were running through my head, but she couldn’t answer. No one was able to reach our home. Then she said, barely able to speak through her tears: “Saja wouldn’t leave my mother’s side, brother…”

How did this detail escape me in my questioning? Saja cannot leave my mother. She only eats when my mother eats with her, only drinks when my mother drinks with her. Saja suffered from severe hearing loss, and just as she was sometimes late in responding to me, I held onto hope that Saja would answer soon.

That same evening, my friend brought me the rest of the news:

"I'm sorry, Omar. Your mother, father, sister, her five children, and your little sister, all of them were martyred. Many people called out to them. No one survived under the rubble."

Was she alive under all those bricks and collapsed roofs, and her ears failed to help her hear the voices of people calling out?

Was that moment — when the deafening silence echoed in my head that night — the real moment of death? I knew that the moment of speaking, my game, my riddle had been veiled. But here was my friend revealing my secret without realizing it: We called out to them. No one answered. A response, a word, would have meant life. But, no one answered.

Human beings endure harsh lives and difficult living conditions, as long as they remain in the embrace of their mother, father, and loved ones. This explains our attachment to many places despite the bitterness of living in them. Oh God, what power is this? How were they able to do all these evils and atrocities in the name of humans?

I spent my entire life in Gaza. I know that surviving war each time was nothing but a coincidence. There is a great difference between Gaza in real life and Gaza in the news. This disparity has intensified horrifically in the Occupation’s genocidal war on Gaza. Geography —space — can give a loud interpretation of war. War in all its forms is cruel, but it becomes more brutal and atrocious and turns into an act of extermination when it is waged on a small area fenced in for over two decades with walls and barbed wire, a span of land not exceeding 356 square kilometers, which is at most 41 kilometers long with a width ranging from 6 to 12 kilometers. In this narrow strip, live about 2.3 million people who do not have the luxury of leaving. Can this space bear all this brutality?

Before the Occupation launched its genocidal war on Gaza, death in its ordinary form, as the final destination for all living things, was the harshest thought that could cross my mind when it drifted to the dark realities of life. This fear was nothing but a fear of the ordinary fates of people in life – an ordinary fear of the shape of ordinary death. Faced with the horror of the genocide scene in Gaza, I remember that I must hold onto this ordinary level of fear. It is imperative to be able to accurately describe the Occupation's acts and the brutality to which we are subjected — a description that does not diminish our humanity, and, at the same time, exposes the brutality of the perpetrator. The complex fear that exceeds all possible limits to endure it should not creep into my mind, as it represents a habituation and normalization of abnormal and unnatural fear — a submission to the criminal. Being killed by the Occupation is not fated. It is a crime. And the crime must remain as it is: something not to be accounted for, beyond our normal fears. And if being killed by the Occupation infiltrates our minds and becomes part of our normal fears in life, this acceptance carries within it a submission to power and a deification of injustice. 

Therefore, I had feared receiving the news — if it happened — while alone. Even though I found myself surrounded by many friends, an overwhelming feeling of insignificance, loneliness, and bitter cold enveloped me. My head spun and I almost screamed: I'm scared and I want my mother. I’m thirsty, about to collapse, and I want my father. But hands hovered around me in fear that I would fall. Was this consolation, then? To turn a river of grief into a cup of water in your hand? Then you are led to speak, and, for the first time, you experience stammering you have never known before. Nevertheless, someone listens. And one time, your legs lead you to the sea, and there you stand, your eyes fixed on the harbor. You see the harbor as a body, and the waves embody the grief, crashing within the confines of the harbor, within the boundaries of the body. As much as there is pain, somewhere in me a sense of wonder is ignited — that wonder that illuminates our childhood and fades as we grow older, returns to us when we become sorrowful.

The genocidal war changed our approach to things we never imagined existed in the first place if not for the inconceivable Israeli brutality. One week after the news, I managed to contact my sister, who informed me that they had not been able to retrieve the bodies of my family and the other martyrs from under the rubble. They had contacted the owner of the only excavator working in northern Gaza, whose task it was to move from house to house to retrieve the bodies of the martyrs. We had to wait for our turn. What does that mean? What mind can comprehend the horror of what is happening? What should I do? My days passed, and the images of corpses and rubble haunted my mind. I slept and woke knowing that the bodies of my family were stuck under the rubble.

I feel that sitting to write and attempting to contemplate what happened is a luxury. I know that it is a privilege to be sitting under a safe sky because fate has taken me to another place, while the rest of my family and the people in Gaza are living through unimaginable horrors. 

Some of them are able to sneak under the shells and missiles, making their way back to a demolished house. And then they will return to their places of displacement disappointed, hungry and thirsty, beset with nightmares of death and loss. But they will carry with them also a measure of comfort in their hearts because they were able to remove some of the rubble with their bare hands. 

And then, more than 70 days after the massacre, they were able to retrieve the martyrs’ bodies and bury them in a mass grave.

I remember when my sister called me, her voice a mix of joy and profound sadness:

- Omar. We buried them. Alhamdulillah, brother.

- Oh God. Alhamdulillah, sis. Alhamdulillah.

What was the thing that had been gripping my neck that my sister pushed away with her voice? It’s the extent that Israeli brutality can reach. How can dreadful news like this carry a sense of reassurance with it?

And because their light still illuminates my path and has not been extinguished by the bombs, I ask: why was my family killed? What is the political significance of killing them? What is my duty in the face of what happened?

Since the first day of the Occupation’s genocidal war on Gaza, I have stood before the structure of killing — not the act of killing itself — in an attempt to understand the legacy of pain and heartbreak that the Occupation molds in its hand like clay, molding the new Gazan human — the deterred human.

The house is bombed, its destruction a resounding expression of the desire for obliteration. With the first brick that falls, the meanings of home are buried in our minds, home that place that gives direction to our lives like a station: from there, we depart, and to there, we return, the first and last destination and our ultimate goal in life. Then comes the killing of its inhabitants. For Israel, killing is not the end of it. Murder is only the first stage in punishment. Next comes the brutality against the body.

But Israel's command is not a divine command, as it derives its power to manipulate people's destinies only from the weapons it holds to hand. And because what is to hand may betray intent, there are survivors. And because the survivors are still under pursuit and threat, they leave. Forced out, they postpone their grief, carrying the debris of their mourning rituals and the memory of how their home turned into a grave for their family, and walk to another place, dragging their feet like prisoners. How terrible is it to be held captive by grief in this genocide? It is horrifying to feel that sense of captivity within the throes of genocide.

In the face of all this, I hurl questions at myself. Though the inquiry may sting like fire, it helps us examine a crucial point: how do we dismantle the gruesome structure of killing perpetuated by the Occupation against us, to strip it of its meaning? How do we comprehend that moment when a home turns into a grave? Beyond being a horrific explication of the meaning of genocide, it also defines Gaza, defines who the people in Gaza are after all these long years of apartheid and siege — a place separated from its surroundings for decades by walls and barbed wire, until its ties with the outside world were severed, and the edges of its social fabric pruned, turning into a place that belongs only to itself with very limited connections to its surroundings. Each time a new wall is built, whether it be to the south with Egypt or to the north and east with the occupied territories, connections further diminish, be they close relations or mere acquaintances. Many in Gaza are unknown beyond the confines of their neighborhood or the boundaries of Gaza. They disappeared as if they had never existed. This is the extent to which the Occupation has gone in its extermination of this place because it resisted apartheid and siege with its home and flesh. 

What is required of me in the face of a moment as grand as this? To resist the Israeli structure of killing and genocide, to strive to empty it of its force. How do I do that? By redefining my relationship with the body and the corpse without detracting from the form of resistance or submission that this relationship can entail, by employing the perplexing question as a field of resistance — the question of the soul — and to try to understand what happened: silence pervading the body, but who was speaking with me? The soul. And here it is, liberated and inhabiting another place, and I feel it. I feel its presence that has taken on a different form.