by Zahra Hankir
A friend put me in touch with a relative of hers who was a deputy in the department. He apologized for my detention, and even invited me to his nearby home for dinner. I initially refused—I was worried he would take me to a torture cell, not to his home—but my friend advised me to go. He did, thankfully, take me to his home just as he had promised, which was within walking distance of the investigations department. There, I met his sick mother and his beautiful young wife. She seemed suspicious of me, but she served me a falafel sandwich and orange juice all the same. The woman eventually opened up, confiding in me that she had fought with her husband earlier that day and that she had no one to talk to. I spent the night at the deputy’s house but could not sleep. I was terrified about what would happen if I had to go to court.
The following morning, the officer took me back to the investigations department. On our way there, I ran to my car and retrieved my camera, laptop, and external hard drives, even though I wasn’t allowed to. The police shouted at me as I hurried away. I took the items back to the house of the officer, gave them to his wife, and said, “Hide these bags, even from your husband. These items contain my livelihood; without them, I have no future.”
She listened to me carefully and promised to hide them for me. I realized that I had become friends with this woman, literally overnight. I was finally released without charge. But my colleagues were not as lucky; one of them was tortured before his release. All this because I wanted to take photos of flowers at the jasmine farms.
* * *
—
After that incident, I continued on my journey to Hodeidah to move closer to the types of stories I wanted to cover. I had been thinking about the move for a long while, but had to build up the courage to see it through. Yemeni women rarely live alone, so I struggled to find a place to stay. For weeks, I stayed with a friend in the city as I searched for a landlord who would accept a single female tenant, without any success. But then, unexpectedly, the wife of the officer whose home I had stayed at while in detention—the woman who had become my friend—called me, asking me how I was and if I had found a place to live. When I told her I was still looking, she said her family in Hodeidah had an extra room in their home that her parents could temporarily rent out to me. I was touched by her offer, and agreed. We’d barely had time together, but the woman wanted to help me, despite the knowledge that my lifestyle is somewhat unorthodox by Yemeni standards.
Today I am living in Al-Hoseiniya, in a health clinic with a friend of mine who is a dentist. Although I do not live with my family, and am able to focus primarily on my work, I would not say I feel independent. This town is particularly closed-minded, more so than the average Yemeni town. Women can’t drive cars or go to the market on their own. Because this is a rebel-held area, there are ongoing clashes nearby. But I have still managed to take beautiful photographs of women and children and of daily life, and for that reason, I am content.
I have hope in this darkness. We can’t bring back the dead, or restore the disabled, the disfigured, and the limbless. We can’t bring back the ruins of ancient Yemen, our historical Paradise Lost. But we can hope and we can fight. Yemen will one day once again be known for its cinema, its mocha coffee, its clothes, its Jewish musicians, its islands, and its caves. It will be a tourist destination. The youth who have fled the country with their families will return.
I haven’t yet come to terms with how the war has affected me personally, but I know that while it has killed so many innocent people, it has galvanized me to tell unexpected, heartwarming stories. I am committed to being the best photographer I can be. Whenever I think of giving up—I have indeed thought of giving up—I remember I cannot because many girls are relying on me to show the world what fighting spirits they are.
Exile
Between the Explosions
Asmaa al-Ghoul
“Our memory is far from an ideal instrument;
it is not only arbitrary and capricious, it is also chained to time, like a dog.”
—SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH
There’s one question that always seems to nag at me, whether I’m cooking for my children, walking home in the freezing French winter after dropping my daughter, Zeina, off at school, or even buying a baguette: Is this what I want? Do I really want to be the “ordinary mother” I dreamed of being all those years while I was working as a journalist in the Gaza Strip?
I won’t deny that when I come across pictures of former colleagues on social media, I feel a rush of nostalgia for the breaking news, the interviews, the travels, and the conferences that are part of a journalist’s life. Occasionally, I yearn to be back on the field and in the editing room. But then I’ll remember what I endured during those long years when my job as a journalist took priority over the literary career I longed for and over raising my son and daughter. I feel guilty about never having written down all the short stories and novels I constructed in my head, as journalism had stripped me of language and feelings, and for having missed my son’s childhood because I was so focused on my career. I’m keen to avoid repeating the mistake with my daughter.
My ex-husband worked in the same field as me. I often wonder if our marriage would have survived had I dedicated myself to our life together, rather than focusing solely on my journalistic ambitions. I increasingly felt useless, and the gap between us grew larger. As it did, other problems started to emerge.
What has journalism done to me? I’m thirty-five, twice divorced, and a single mother of two. I willingly left behind all my journalistic achievements in Gaza, my hometown, and came to a foreign country to start anew. What and who am I here?
In the middle of war, you investigate and you write story after story after story. But you lose your own story in between the explosions. Somewhere amid the reporting, the rapid political changes, and the writing, you find yourself in an existence you never chose, an existence dictated by the political situation around you. Even if you find strength and success in that existence, you can never choose what you truly want.
* * *
—
In 2003, I got married for the first time, leaving my journalistic career in Palestine behind to move to the United Arab Emirates with my husband. In the hopes that I would continue my career in the UAE, I sent my CV to media outlets all over the country, but to no avail. I chose instead to immerse myself in literature.
In fact, I had first entered the world of writing through literature, not journalism: as a young girl and aspiring author, I wrote poetry and short stories. I was enamored with literature. I had also come to discover that journalism drains your energy, while literature can save your soul. In the UAE, I found myself resorting to literature as a distraction from my pain and loneliness.
My husband had a large and rich library filled with books and DVDs that he hardly ever touched. That space became my life, so much so that each book I read or film I watched haunted me. After watching the film The Others, I spent the night terrified. After reading Perfume by Patrick Süskind, I felt depressed (even more depressed than I already was). And after reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, I felt like my heart was skipping with joy, even though I was cooped up in a small apartment in an Abu Dhabi high-rise that I barely ever left.
Sometimes I paced the apartment, which in reality was no more than a prison. One day I opened the front door, walked out, and never came back. I got a divorce and took my clipped wings and my son back home to Gaza in 2005, having realized that I couldn’t truly fly anywhere but there.
I eventually found work as a reporter for the Palestinian newspaper Al-Ayyam. I’d been wanting to work there since high school, so this was nothing short of a dream for me. I also volunteered for a human rights organization, helping them launch their own magazine. The work, though unpaid, energized me and allowed me to visit areas all over the Gaza Strip. The time I spent at Al-Ayyam helped me hone my journalistic and linguistic skills.
St
ill, I very much felt that literature was an entire body of language, while journalism was just the leftovers. Literature and writing nourished me, while journalism was a sacrifice. Every time I wrote as a journalist, I felt like I was losing my ability to write literary prose. Journalism also caused me to lose my sense of self, as I was focused on external things—people and wartime—instead of internal ones.
I tried to merge the two worlds. One of the first pieces I wrote for Al-Ayyam was a review of Gate of the Sun, a film based on a book by novelist Elias Khoury, which was published in the arts section of the newspaper. I was proud of it, but shortly thereafter, the editor on the local desk delivered a message to me from the editor in chief of the newspaper: he needed journalists, not critics.
Despite the obstacles, I continued pursuing my literary ambitions. Soon after I joined Al-Ayyam in 2005, I was awarded grants from external organizations for my writing. Thanks to these grants, I traveled to the United States twice and to South Korea once. Each time I traveled, Al-Ayyam froze my salary, even though I wrote cultural dispatches for them from wherever I was.
My editors did not approve of how long it took me to write and research stories. I didn’t want to rush, but they wanted me to file articles daily. Some of them seemed to measure news by quantity and word count, not by quality.
This was my depressing world, but I learned to carve my own niche. For example, if my editors asked me to report on an ordinary conference, I would find an extraordinary moment in that conference to write about.
* * *
—
By the time Israel invaded northern Gaza in 2006, I had put my literary writing on hold and become a full-fledged conflict reporter.
I went straight to the front lines, where bullets whizzed by my ears, without a bulletproof vest or any other form of protection afforded to foreign news crews. Nothing would deter me. There were moments of sheer terror, but there were also moments of liberation: I enjoyed the fact that I was finally at the front lines, just like my peers who worked for foreign news outlets.
Those of us covering the events were all cheating death, or playing with it. I played that game multiple times during my reporting career out of my own free will, until I learned what real fear was. Looking back, it’s hard for me to internalize how courageous I was with my pen. It was as if I were a different woman. It’s unclear where I left that particular self. At which door, in which city, with which war?
I was, of course, scared for my child. But I never felt for a moment that I had to sacrifice my job because of my role as a mother. Why should women have to make those kinds of choices? I behaved like any career-focused journalist would. And during war, there is no time to think about whether or not you love your job. You simply do what you have to do, fueled by a desire to tell the truth. Perhaps this sounds like a cliché, but in reality, it is dangerously true.
Just over two years later, I feared for my child again when war broke out in Gaza; it was as if the gates of hell had opened. The situation was so chaotic at the beginning that it took us a few days to gauge what was actually happening.
On the first day of the war, a huge explosion rocked the city at 11:15 a.m. My first instinct was to rush to my son’s school in the Tal Al-Hawa neighborhood. People everywhere were running and screaming. The area was engulfed in smoke, buildings had been destroyed, and I could hear a series of explosions in the distance. A car stopped for me and the driver gave me a lift to the school.
As soon as I arrived, I rushed to my son’s classroom and saw shards of glass on his seat. I panicked and looked for him among the crying children. He was sitting on the floor with the others, but he wasn’t crying, just flushed. I took him home.
Others were not as lucky. People everywhere were desperately looking for their children or siblings. All of the schools were in the Tal Al-Hawa district in central Gaza, not too far from the security headquarters run by Hamas—most of which were bombed out by Israel. One of the bombs struck an officers’ graduation ceremony; several dozen were martyred. During the first two days of the war, no one left their homes. We hadn’t truly experienced war before then—this kind of terror was new to us. It wasn’t an invasion, or an isolated incident of shelling, or an assassination. It was all-out war: planes, tanks, and warships, all striking Gaza at the same time.
I wrote about the events as they happened for Al-Ayyam while also writing about the dangers journalists were facing and violations against freedom of speech for the SKeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom, an institution founded in 2007 following the assassination of Lebanese journalist and historian Samir Kassir. On top of that, I was also freelancing for Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a London-based newspaper run by Palestinian expats.
Throughout the war, danger kept us company. Every minute of every day was terrifying. I was playing with death on one hand and defending my womanhood to society on the other, trying to prove that women can cover a war alongside men while keeping their so-called honor intact. I sometimes felt as though danger and death were very distant and my strength would protect me. I got so used to writing about death that I felt it could not possibly make me its victim.
I resigned from Al-Ayyam in 2009, after it became clear that I would no longer be allowed to remain neutral in my reporting. Divisions between Fatah and Hamas, the two main Palestinian political parties, had started to emerge. Hamas had swept to victory in the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council, drawing the ire of Western powers and Israel, who imposed sanctions on the Palestinian territories in response. Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip in a civil war in 2007, while Fatah kept control of the West Bank, effectively splitting Palestinian territory into two. There have been flare-ups between the parties for years.
Not one newspaper or broadcaster, including Al-Ayyam, escaped the polarization. My pen was expected to take sides. Amid those divisions, Hamas started a campaign to Islamize the Gaza Strip. In July 2009, I had my own confrontation with them while I was at the beach. I was sitting with friends at a public café when an armed group of men in civilian clothing began hurling insults and untruths at us, claiming that we were “partying” and going swimming in indecent clothing. We defended ourselves with words and reason. It was a conflict over virtue. Who had the moral high ground? What did it mean to be honorable? Imposing morals with the force of arms, or giving people the freedom to choose?
The Hamas operatives arrested the young men who were with us that evening, but I refused to go along with them, so they seized my passport. When they asked if I had a mahram with me, I said I was in my late twenties—why would I need one? They continued to exert pressure on me, so I called my father, who told them he knew exactly where I was. After one of the Hamas men received several calls demanding he back down, he reluctantly returned the passport to me. As he left, he warned me: “I’ll be following you.”
“And I, you,” I replied.
The following day, the story of what happened to me and my friends at the beach reached various media outlets and human rights organizations. Islamists tend to count on the fact that incidents having to do with women and their reputation or “honor” get swept under the rug. But my brave friends and I wouldn’t let that happen. The war between the truth and so-called virtue lasted all summer. Rumors started circling about the event, twisting the reality of what happened; some people implied that we were caught in some sort of a “shameful” situation.
When my friends were released, they told us they were asked all sorts of absurd questions during the investigation, among them: “Have you slept with X?” “How would you feel if your sister hung out with your friends?” “Would you approve if your sister had a relationship with a friend of yours?” What a terrifying perception of sexuality. Male promiscuity is allowed, for a man’s honor is untouchable.
This is how a group of fellow activists and I came to form the youth movements Is-ha (wake up) and the Secular Youth Congregation. We
started organizing protests and issuing press releases that challenged how Islam and Gaza were portrayed. We protested the closure of Sharik, a youth organization. We organized our first sit-in during the election period of 2010, just before the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia (the elections never actually transpired).
I had stepped away from both journalism and literature, becoming instead a political activist. I stopped working for the printed press, but stayed on as a reporter with SKeyes, and also began a blog about current events that was soon frequented by thousands of visitors. I took to the streets to demand change because I didn’t want to simply champion certain values from an ivory tower, leaving the people to bear the brunt of carrying out those demands. I wanted to be honest. I didn’t want my words to contradict my actions.
* * *
—
Just over a year later, the Arab Spring was upon us. We started to believe in our ability to inspire change. The toppling of Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali lifted our hopes further. The events galvanized newly formed youth movements across the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Activists organized protests in solidarity with the revolutionaries in Egypt.
But there were certainly moments when I was engaging in this sort of political activism that I started to miss journalism and its objectivity. I grew tired of the constant confrontation, of having to fight to defend our dreams. I was arrested in the midst of these protests, on January 31, 2011. It was a difficult experience. I was beaten, insulted, and intimidated by both male and female members of Hamas. And of course, we also had to deal with infiltrators—people who were planted into our youth movements by political parties.
Still, the majority of us had only one motive: liberating Gaza from its prison and its pain. We didn’t think the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, was a viable solution. His movement, Fatah, was guilty of bastardizing the Palestinian cause, turning it into an investment opportunity and benefiting only a small group of brokers whose homeland was money, not the land itself. We wanted unity among Palestinians.
