At another café on Omar al-Mukhtar Street, Asmaa told me she was born to parents who didn’t want her. Her mother and father, both from Rafah refugee camp, had married while they were studying at a university in Alexandria. Her mother became pregnant soon afterward, but her father did not have a salary and could hardly afford a child. Asmaa’s father brought his wife to a doctor for an abortion, but they had waited too long. “The baby is strong inside the mother,” the doctor told them. Asmaa was born six months later, the first of nine children.
Asmaa started to read at a young age, discovering her father’s library when she was six years old. By the time she was ten, every birthday brought a new stack of books from her father. She also began to write, and a local literary journal published some of her childhood poems. Asmaa placed her first article in a newspaper called Women’s Voice when she was a teenager, and was awarded the Palestine Youth Literature Award in 2000 for a short story she’d written. After high school, Asmaa studied journalism at a university in Gaza then worked as a reporter for Al-Ayyam—the same newspaper where Ghassan Zaqtan worked as culture editor. In 2003, Asmaa met and married an Egyptian poet and moved to Abu Dhabi, where they had a son, Naser. The marriage lasted only eighteen months. Asmaa and Naser returned to Gaza after the divorce and moved into her parents’ home in Gaza City. She published her first book of short stories in 2006.
Asmaa’s blue jeans, uncovered head, and affection for Henry Miller novels drew criticism from her extended family, who are renowned Hamas supporters. The friction between Asmaa and the conservative members of her family peaked in 2007 when, while taking a journalism class in South Korea, Asmaa published an article titled “Dear Uncle, Is This the Homeland We Want?” Asmaa addressed the story to one of her own uncles, a senior Hamas military operative, and recalled how he used to interrogate and torture Fatah activists in the Rafah house she grew up in. The story savaged the Hamas government for inflicting their oppressive religious rules on the people of Gaza. Her uncle was enraged. He disowned Asmaa and threatened to kill her if she ever came back to Gaza. Asmaa was unbowed and returned. Gaza was her home, after all. The uncle never made good on his threats.
In 2009, three policemen accosted Asmaa for walking along the beach with male friends who were not relatives. The officers took Asmaa’s ID card and demanded she go with them to the police station. Asmaa refused, but her male friends were detained and beaten. Two years later, police roughed up Asmaa herself after arresting her at a rally encouraging reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. She was arrested again at another demonstration expressing solidarity with the Egyptian protestors in Tahrir Square. “I cannot be just a writer and sit at home. I cannot be a hypocrite. So I went to protest in the street.” In addition to problems with the authorities, Asmaa’s actions both on and off the page spawned a wave of cruel criticism online. Few Palestinian writers have endured as much social media abuse and as many death threats.
Asmaa married again, in 2011, to another Egyptian poet. They had a child, a daughter named Zeina, but were divorced three years later. (When I joked that she needs to stay away from poets, Asmaa replied, “Yes. And also Egyptians.”) The marriage collapsed just before 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, and Asmaa found herself mourning her personal loss in the midst of the communal trauma inflicted by the war. “I felt like all the funerals in Gaza were not just for the people who died in the war, but for my own wounds.” She diluted her singular grief in the wash of Gaza’s shared suffering. In a strange and perverse way, the horrors of the 2014 war aided her recovery. “The sadness was bigger than me. I forgot all the things inside me.”
I’d long admired the craft and sensitivity of Asmaa’s journalism from the 2014 war. They were the stories that first compelled me to seek her out. During the fighting, Asmaa accompanied a group of New York Times journalists to a hospital morgue in Rafah. Asmaa watched a doctor bring in one-year-old Riziq Abu Taher. His was the smallest body in the morgue, and clad in pink trousers. Asmaa wrote about Riziq in a story for Al-Monitor:
I observed him at length. He looked alive. One could see that he had been playing when he died, dressed in his pink pants. How could he be at such peace? The bodies of war victims look so different from how they appear on television. They are so real, so substantial, suddenly there before you, without any newscast introductions, music or slogans.
When Asmaa and the other journalists exited the room, a frantic woman rushed up to them and asked if her son was among the dead. She described her boy to Asmaa, and when she mentioned his pink pants, Asmaa said, “Yes, I saw him.” The woman shrieked. She gripped Asmaa’s throat with one hand and thrust her other hand down the front of her own dress. She grabbed at her breast, full of milk for Riziq. “Who will drink my milk now?” she cried. Doctors pulled the two women apart and dragged Asmaa away. The other journalists scolded Asmaa for telling the mother about her dead son. “I should have kept silent,” she said.
Rafah was under siege at the time, and the IDF warned that they would shoot at anyone in the street. Asmaa did not fear the Israeli guns. “I knew in that moment nothing would happen to me,” she said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I was a bad person for what I’d done. For saying what I’d said to the mother. And bad people do not die in war.”
Asmaa didn’t die, but many in her family did. The next day, two missiles struck the household in Rafah refugee camp where Asmaa grew up—the same house Asmaa had written about in her notorious open letter to her uncle seven years earlier. The blasts killed nine members of Asmaa’s family: three men, three women, and three children. Among them was Mustafa, who had been born alongside his identical twin brother, Ibrahim, the day before. “Who identified them when their father died and their mother lay wounded in intensive care?” Asmaa later wrote in a painfully personal story about the attack. “Who was Mustafa, and who was Ibrahim? It was as if they had merged upon one twin’s death.”
Asmaa insisted that while none of the nine dead were militants, their death and the death of other innocents in Gaza would create millions of Hamas loyalists. “For we all become Hamas if Hamas, to you, is women, children, and innocent families. If Hamas, in your eyes, is ordinary civilians and families, then I am Hamas, they are Hamas, and we are all Hamas.” Asmaa ended her story with the sentence: “Never ask me about peace again.”
In the wake of the deaths of her family in Rafah, as the war continued to boom around her, Asmaa stood in brief solidarity with the militants who launched attacks against Israel. “When you are under the war for fifty-one days, and you’ve lost children, you will be with the rockets,” she told me. I’d heard this from other Gazans, too: While they resent and reject Hamas’s peacetime excesses, they will support the resistance in times of war, regardless of which flag they fight under. But this feeling passes, just as it did for Asmaa, who believes that, in the end, a writer cannot advocate war or violence. Regardless of the horrors one endures, a true writer always values humanity over revenge and peace over war. “If a writer says that he wants to kill others, then he is not a writer,” Asmaa said.
Asmaa finds Gaza difficult to write about. She believes Gazan writers too often end up trapped in their collective experience and become part of what she calls “the factory.” Instead of writing intimate fiction that examines the humanity of an individual, writers trade in external symbols. Gaza’s “issues”—war, occupation, women’s rights, Hamas—all wrest control of a writer’s narratives like hijackers. “Gaza is stronger than us,” Asmaa said. “Nobody can write Gaza.”
The international media celebrates Asmaa as a feminist and a secularist. Even a right-wing Israeli newspaper lauded her for being “a thorn in the side of Hamas,” and organizations around the world have praised her advocacy for human rights. In 2010, Human Rights Watch awarded Asmaa the Hellman/Hammett Grant for her “commitment to free expression and courage in the face of political prosecution.” Two years later, she won the Courage in Journalism Award from
the International Women’s Media Foundation. Regardless of these accolades—which mean nothing to her, she says—Asmaa is a reluctant activist. “I always wanted to be a writer. And now I am known as a fighter. I don’t want to be a fighter. I don’t want to be a political woman. I never wanted that at all.”
I didn’t believe her. Everything I’d read by and about Asmaa suggested she relished challenging oppressive structures in Gaza. I reminded her about the time in 2010 when she rode a bicycle with an American journalist and three Italian human rights workers. While not strictly illegal, it is not socially acceptable for a woman to ride a bicycle in Gaza, especially not in the face of Hamas’s fierce grip on female behavior. Asmaa flouted this rule and rode for thirty kilometers up the beach road from Rafah to Gaza City—almost the entire length of the Strip.
“Surely you knew, when you got on that bicycle with those foreign activists, that it was a political action,” I said.
Asmaa glared at me. “No. It was a human action. It was the action of someone who has not been on a bike since she was fourteen,” she said. “But the world gives names for everything. This is activism. This is politics. This is feminism. But I am not a feminist. I am not political. I am doing what I feel I want to do.” The memory loosened her scowl, and her eyes cast downward. “I felt like I was flying,” she said. “It was the first time since I was fourteen years old that I had the wind in my face.” Then she looked back up at me. Her face hardened again. “I want to be a writer,” she said. “I don’t want to be a topic.”
I learned long ago that the easiest way to procure a dinner invitation in the Arab world is to feign ignorance about the local cuisine. So when my friend Haneen asked me if I’d ever eaten maftoul, I shrugged. Thirty-six hours later, Haneen picked me up to bring me to her apartment for dinner. Her four-year-old daughter, Habiba, slept in the backseat. “I have a surprise for you,” Haneen said. “I cooked the maftoul, but my neighbor Wisam has prepared the rest of the meal. And she is famous.” Haneen told me Wisam hosts a weekly cooking show on one of the local television stations and is one of Gaza’s celebrity chefs.
I followed Haneen, her daughters Habiba and Hala, and her son, Omar, into Wisam’s apartment. Wisam was clearly thrilled to host us. A string of tiny Christmas lights hung on the wall of her dining room, and the table had already been set. Each plate bore a serving of musakhan, sumac-spiced chicken on a bed of thin taboon bread and baked onions. The rest of the table was crowded with cured black olives shining in a shallow dish of oil, bowls of garlicky yogurt, and a plate of fresh arugula leaves. At the center of the table sat a platter of Haneen’s promised maftoul: Palestinian couscous flavored with the typically Gazan marriage of hot peppers and dill seed.
Wisam’s daughter, Wadees, joined us at the table, but neither Haneen’s nor Wisam’s husband was there. “Don’t worry,” Haneen said. “We asked our husbands’ permission for you to come over.” I feigned relief. Then we ate. Wisam lifted olives from their oil and onto my plate. I cooled the unexpected scorch of the maftoul with spoonfuls of yogurt. After Haneen scolded me for using my fork to eat the musakhan, I pulled at the chicken with my fingers and followed Haneen and Wisam’s lead by chasing each bite with a pinch of arugula. “This is good for men,” Haneen said. “You know what I mean? For sex.” She relayed a bit of Palestinian folk wisdom that says a wife should keep arugula under her pillow for her husband. I blushed each time I took another leaf.
After dinner, I scandalized the women when I rose to help clear the table. Haneen and Wisam bellowed at me to stop and ordered me into the salon, where they served sage tea, tiny cups of coffee, and a chocolate ice cream cake, which, Wisam explained, had partially melted due to a power cut earlier in the day.
“Now the children will perform for you,” Haneen said. Hala and Wadees pulled Palestinian embroidered dresses over their clothes. Hala hung a key around her neck, the symbol of the Palestinian demand for the right of return, and gave a fiery nationalist speech she wrote. “The whole world knows Palestine,” she insisted. She recited a poem after the speech, and then she and Wadees performed a Palestinian folk dance. Afterward, Omar heaved his heavy Arab dulcimer onto his lap to play the Palestinian national anthem and a couple of other songs while Hala and Wadees changed back into their regular clothes. The girls danced again, this time to some contemporary Arab pop music. Hala, serious and self-assured, led the dancing while Wadees tried to mimic her steps. Little Habiba, feeling left out of the show, did somersaults on the couch.
After the performance, Haneen and Wisam told me their neighborhood, Tel al-Hawa, was the scene of fierce fighting during both the 2008 and 2014 wars. Haneen’s kitchen was the safest place on the floor, since it was the farthest room from any street-facing windows and the least vulnerable to tank shells and gunfire. During the burning summer of 2014, all the families on Haneen and Wisam’s floor, thirty-five people in all, crowded into Haneen’s kitchen. They huddled together in the dark on the linoleum for two days, without power or water, and waited out the fighting raging in the streets outside.
The women told me, too, how they stockpile foodstuffs in preparation for future wars. Sacks of dried beans and peas, jars of olives, and packets of dried pasta stand ready in cupboards for when bullets and bombs keep the families trapped at home. “We eat a lot of mujadara during the war,” she said, referring to the popular Arab dish of rice, lentils, and fried onions. The women also stock emergency supplies of gasoline and cooking gas to deal with shortages and curfews.
What saddened me the most was how Haneen and Wisam spoke of war the way Canadians speak of winter storms. We never know exactly when they will arrive, but we are certain they will, so we’d best be ready. Gazans know the fighter jets will return to carve the sky like blades, and this place will blister again into war. Preparing for inevitable conflict is as much a part of Gaza’s culture as short stories, dill seed, and chilies.
Mayy Ziyadeh was an Arab feminist when there was no such thing. Born in Nazareth in 1886 to a Palestinian mother and Lebanese father, Mayy attended a French convent school in Lebanon before emigrating to Cairo with her parents in 1911. She published her first of more than fifteen books that same year: a volume of French poetry written under the fabulous pseudonym of Isis Copia. Ziyadeh lived in a time and place that regarded notions of women’s identity and liberation as an outrage, but she became a compelling voice for Arab women’s emancipation nonetheless. “We should free the woman, so that her children won’t grow up to become slaves,” Ziyadeh wrote. “And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a greater meaning to life.”
Mayy fell in love with Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, though she would never meet him. Their romance endured for nineteen years, sustained solely through the love letters they sent back and forth from Cairo to New York, where Gibran lived. This was the most literary love affair I’d ever heard of. His death in 1931 shattered her.
Mayy ran the most famous and one of the most enduring literary salons in the Arab world. Beginning in 1913 and continuing every Tuesday evening for twenty-three years, she welcomed leading writers, activists, and intellectuals—men and women both—into the warmth of her father’s apartment, where they debated culture and politics over cups of tea and rosewater. Mayy’s salon became known as a place of serious learning, friendly but not frivolous. She expected her guests to arrive on time, and those invitees who dared to miss a gathering were obligated to apologize by phone or in writing. From her salon blossomed the ideas that fueled the Arab Nahdah, or awakening, a renaissance movement that challenged the then prevailing traditions of literature, gender, language, and culture.
In 2002, more than sixty years after her death in 1941, Mayy Ziyadeh’s famed Tuesday salon inspired another Mayy, Mayy Nayef, to create her own literary salon in Gaza. Mayy named the salon Nuun after the letter in the Arabic alphabet that indicates the feminine. On the fifteenth of each month,
between fifty and a hundred people gather in a meeting room in central Gaza City to “examine culture from a woman’s point of view.” They discuss the work of female writers and artists, the portrayal of women in the arts, and women’s contributions to Palestinian cultural life. Men are welcome to attend, Mayy says, as long as they know they are there to talk about women.
“At first, we had to go to the authors and invite them to come and speak about their books,” Mayy told me in the leafy courtyard of Gaza’s Marna House Hotel. “Now they come to us.” Authors plead with Mayy to include them in Nuun’s program.
For writers living under blockade, the salon provides a rare opportunity to meet with an audience of engaged and intelligent readers. Nearly all of Gaza’s writers, male and female both, have been invited to speak at Nuun. So have authors visiting from the West Bank and abroad. Professors from the English department in Gaza’s universities have given talks about female writers from the United Kingdom, the United States, and Africa. The salon hosts musicians and visual artists, too, who come to speak about their work.
But they don’t talk about politics. This is Mayy’s rule. “We talk only about books and about culture. I think culture is more powerful than anything anyway.” Because politics invades the daily life of Gazans in so many pervasive ways, Nuun’s attendees appreciate the rare reprieve the salon offers. “We are very proud of this,” Mayy said.
Nuun may avoid politics, but politics does not avoid Nuun. The Ministry of Culture has started to notice the salon since the Hamas takeover. Nuun never had links to government agencies, and Hamas’s conservative officials tend to distrust any organization they do not oversee. Nuun’s independence, this unmonitored exchange of ideas, worries the ministry. They also don’t like women and men gathering together, especially to discuss women’s issues. “They think we are dangerous,” Mayy said. “We talk about freedom at Nuun. We try to open minds. This is terrible to them.”
Pay No Heed to the Rockets Page 25
