Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  A couple of weeks before I sat with Mayy, a newly assigned deputy minister of culture called her and demanded a meeting. She tried to ignore him, but the deputy minister persisted. Mayy finally relented. In his office, the deputy told her he wanted her to relocate the salon from its current venue to a room at the ministry itself. Mayy refused. “I told him that we’ve been operating without any relationship to the government and that I want to keep it that way.”

  “Either you hold the salon under our wing or we close you down,” the official said.

  “But you have no wings,” Mayy responded. “You’ve only had this job for two months. We’ve been here for fourteen years.”

  “Then we will send someone to the salon to see what you are doing.”

  “You can send anyone you want. We don’t talk about politics. We talk about culture.”

  “Culture is very powerful,” he said. “We want to know what you are talking about.” Then the deputy told Mayy that the ministry had published a book of poetry written by four young Gazan women. “If we gave you the book, would you invite the poets to the salon?”

  “If the poems are by women, then yes,” Mayy told him. “I don’t care if the poets are Hamas or Fatah. If they are women, then they are welcome. We can talk about the poems, and people who are listening can say whether they like the poems or not.” The official agreed.

  “And how were the Hamas poems?” I wondered.

  Mayy shrugged. “They were all nationalist poems. They were not bad.”

  Mayy’s acceptance of the government-sanctioned poets earned Nuun a reprieve from the ministry, but I wondered if Mayy feared for Nuun’s future. She didn’t. “They keep changing the minister,” she said. “And they keep forgetting about us.” She figures that even if this particular deputy remains suspicious of the salon, he and the minister of culture will be reassigned before they have the chance to shut Nuun down. Still, Mayy holds no illusions. She knows that the government could, if they really wanted to, kill the salon. “And maybe not just Nuun,” Mayy said. “Maybe every cultural meeting place. Remember what they did to Gallery Café.”

  In her roles both as a scholar of Arab literature and as the fourteen-year salonnière of Nuun, Mayy has borne witness to the changes in Gaza’s literary culture—especially in regard to women’s writing. She told me that while many male poets still adhere to the strict poetic forms indigenous to the Islamic world, like ghazals and qasidas, female poets have embraced new poetry styles that more resemble prose. They have grown bored of the complicated verse structures of the venerable Arab masters, most of whom were men. “The old style is heavy,” Mayy said.

  Female writers in the Arab world have embraced free verse because it allows them to express themselves outside the restraints of traditional forms. They can break the rules of rhythm the old masculine structures imposed. The new poetry styles offer a freedom on the page that Palestinian women, especially in Gaza, often do not enjoy in their own society. Restricted by both politics and patriarchy, the female poets of Gaza snatch at freedom wherever they can, granting their pens an emancipation their bodies are too often denied.

  Sumaiya al-Susi lived an accelerated girlhood. She started school when she was only four years old because one of her relatives was a teacher who allowed Sumaiya to register early. She enrolled in an education degree program after graduating from high school. She didn’t want to be a teacher, but the Islamic University of Gaza had been closed due to First Intifada violence, and Sumaiya’s sole option for a post-secondary education was at the newly opened al-Azhar University, which only offered degrees in education at the time. By the time Sumaiya finished university, she was married and the mother of a one-year-old daughter.

  For a year after graduation, Sumaiya lived at home and cared for her daughter, but she bristled at the idea of remaining a stay-at-home mom. She found work teaching English at a secondary school in Deir al-Balah, but she didn’t like this, either. Her teaching career lasted three days. “I spent the first two days doing some games and songs in English, but when the real work started, I said no.” She found work in a Fatah government planning office a few months later and still works there now.

  Sumaiya started writing short fiction and poetry in her mid-teens and continued writing while in university. She entered one of her short stories in a writing contest and won the opportunity to attend a women’s writing workshop. Sumaiya and the other writers were supposed to meet with workshop mentors, Khaled Juma among them, twice a week for about four months. But Khaled lived in southern Gaza and frequent military curfews often hindered his commute. What was supposed to be a four-month workshop took nearly two years to complete. “It was good for us,” Sumaiya said. “We grew up like a family.” Each time Khaled published a new book he would bring copies to the workshop participants. Khaled and the other mentors introduced Sumaiya to the life and writings of other Palestinian writers, especially Mahmoud Darwish, whom she’d heard of but hardly read.

  Sumaiya’s husband did not support her poetry at first. “It is hard to be a woman and a writer in Gaza,” Sumaiya said. Her family members saw little value in poetry and feared ridicule from friends and neighbors who considered writing a waste of time. Working as a writer also meant attending conferences and festivals abroad, and conservative families refused to let their daughters travel. Sumaiya found an ally in her mother-in-law. She was a keen reader who gave Sumaiya books to read and encouraged her to keep writing. Eventually she finished writing a book of poems she’d started in university.

  Sumaiya writes what she calls “prose poetry,” which resembles long descriptive essays rather than structured verse. In them, she reveals a particularly Gazan brand of ennui I’d witnessed over and over during my time in the Strip. Before my travels, I’d only ever thought of Gaza when something dramatic happened there. But my weeks living in Gaza revealed that often nothing happens at all. Israel’s blockade and Hamas’s oppressive rule have robbed Gazan society of forward momentum. Sumaiya’s poetry reveals the weariness and tedium of life in Gaza—a tragedy less acute than the blood and bombs of war, but continual and all encompassing. Sumaiya writes:

  In Gaza, there is a great surplus of time, which you must know how to use up, how to get rid of, in every possible way, as there are no important appointments binding you to your schedule, and no particularly sacred or respected times. Everything is possible at any time, and it’s up to you to kill time as you see fit. So you either remain a prisoner in your own home, workplace, or wherever it is that you know and that knows you, or you think of other ways to kill time. Whatever you do will lead you to the same result in the end: you will make it as far as your pillow, at night, with a sense of absolute futility.

  The vast killing fields of time—online chatrooms and Facebook walls—are as authentically Gazan locales as Nedal’s citrus fields and the wobbly tabletops at Karawan. The internet is another Palestinian territory. Gazans live online, especially during the blacked-out hours of night when the wireless router’s flickering lights, powered by battery, stand in for stars. The internet also grants Palestinian writers, many of whom lack access to traditional publishing houses, a space to share their work. Blogs often take the place of books.

  But I wondered if the internet, for all the virtual escapes it offers to these shackled citizens, is just another type of prison. Gazans are trapped in an online illusion of freedom, the confines of digital artifice. Is the internet just another jailer? In Sumaiya’s work, this virtual space “teems with bored friends” and offers little respite. In a poem called “Night, Net, Gaza,” Sumaiya writes of a typical late-night gathering of the faceless avatars on her screen:

  You observe them all, so as to add new details of relationships that only you believe in to your imprecise and sparse memory. You begin keeping track of who enters when, connecting times and people, searching for what relationships (illusionary ones, of course) lie behind the green icons on the screen. You are also here to discover whether one or a
nother of your friends have taken advantage of your departure from the forum to start a slanderous new discussion thread, along with the other people there, of course, about you. You might even be thinking about deleting them from your contact list, for failure to uphold the Microsoft Messenger terms of use—which no one ever signs.

  In her poem “The City,” Sumaiya insists that in order to live in Gaza, Palestinians must create their own “secret world,” a place hidden from disapproving eyes. “My secret world is my family,” she said. Sumaiya had two daughters by her early twenties. Then, eleven years later, she started having children again. In addition to her two adult daughters, Sumaiya now has a seven-year-old daughter, a five-year-old son, and a five-month-old baby girl. “My eldest daughter and I were pregnant at the same time,” Sumaiya said, laughing. She credits her second wave of motherhood for easing the darkness of Gaza’s recent history. Her meetings with other writers at places like Gallery Café inevitably led to depressing conversations about being denied exit visas or the abuses of Hamas. Her children gave her an excuse to avoid such conversations. “When I had those small children, I didn’t have to go out and meet people. I can create my own mood at home with my children,” she said. “It creates balance for me somehow.”

  For Sumaiya, being a mother often means having to protect her youngest children from what they learn in kindergarten. She fears her kids are being taught to venerate Hamas and celebrate the actions of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. “They have the idea of war instead of the idea of peace. They don’t think about Palestinian independence at all.” I was surprised children that age were taught such things. “There are kindergartens for Hamas and for Islamic Jihad,” Sumaiya said. “You can imagine what they are teaching the children. If you are a girl, you cannot sit next to a boy.” These children will also learn to judge everyone by the depth of their faith. “They will learn to ask, ‘Are you a Muslim or an infidel?’”

  Sumaiya does her best to counter what her children learn in school, but she cannot shield them from war. Her daughter was four and her son three during the war in 2008. Sumaiya told them the bombs were fireworks, but by 2014 they would not be fooled. Her children knew the clamor of drones and bombs and fighter jets. They could tell the difference between a Qassam rocket and an Israeli missile by the sound each one made. In this curriculum of violence, Gazan children develop an ear for bomb blasts. They become unwitting connoisseurs of shock waves and weaponry. This horrible education conducts an interrogation in reverse: forcing these children, through violence, to learn what they don’t want to know.

  “I don’t know what will happen, but at least I can teach my children a sense of how to deal with everything,” Sumaiya said. “How to deal with war. To deal with peace. How to deal with each other. And to let them be strong. Somehow, they should be strong. This society does not allow weak people to continue.”

  My friend Haneen insisted I meet her mother, Um Abdallah, and urged me to join her family’s regular Thursday gathering at her mother’s home. I was the only male invited—the men were smoking and watching television elsewhere—and I had to wait behind a curtain in a darkened room until all the women fetched their headscarves. Someone drew the curtain back, and I entered a room filled with smiling women. Um Abdallah welcomed me with typical Palestinian warmth. As is the custom of devout Muslim women, she did not shake my hand but patted the couch next to her to invite me to sit. She occasionally tapped me on the leg as she spoke, and I appreciated this casual and tactile intimacy. The innocent subversion of traditional decorum felt like another sort of welcome.

  Um Abdallah’s daughters, granddaughters, and daughters-in-law continued to arrive until women and girls occupied every chair and cushion. Each woman kissed Um Abdallah’s hand as she arrived before joining the others as they passed around glasses of Orange Fanta, date-stuffed pastries, crackers, coffee, and fruit. “This comes from the tree in my garden,” Um Abdallah said of a plate of sliced guava as she tapped my leg again. One of the women had just preserved a batch of red chilies and handed out jars to her sisters.

  All of Um Abdallah’s daughters are well educated and do important work for women’s organizations in Gaza that engage with issues such as women’s health, women’s agriculture, and domestic abuse. At seventy-four years old, Um Abdallah is as busy as any of her daughters. She rises at four each morning to pray before tending to her garden. She volunteers with the elderly in her community and teaches religion at the neighborhood mosque. “Not doctrine,” she is quick to clarify, “but the role of faith in everyday life.” She rarely returns home before seven o’clock. Thursday is her only free night, hence the weekly gathering, but the women all know to call ahead just in case she is busy. Several times during my visit, Um Abdallah lifted her cell phone from the table to check her Facebook page.

  The women talked about how much they missed my friend Hadeel, Haneen’s sister, since she moved to Canada, and how their children love speaking to her on Skype. They told me about a sister-in-law, absent that night, whom everyone likes. “In Gaza, we don’t usually like the sisters-in-law,” someone said. (This made me smile; I’d already learned about warring female in-laws from Sharif Kanaana’s book of folktales.) I showed photos of my wife and son on my cell phone and scandalized Um Abdallah when I told her we would not have another child. She has ten children and forty-six grandchildren already and is not yet satisfied.

  Before I left Um Abdallah’s salon, we all took group pictures with our cell phones. The image of me surrounded by a dozen beaming hijabis is my favorite photo from Gaza. Then Haneen drove me back to my flat. Wedding musicians played in the back of pickup trucks that plied up and down the beachfront road. In each, a lone videographer pointed a camera back at the bride and groom following in the car behind them. Wedding guests jammed the sidewalks in front of each hotel and wedding hall. Street vendors sold brined lupin beans and paper bowls of chili-dusted corn kernels. “People are happy,” Haneen said as we drove past the melee. “There is power tonight, and the streetlights are on.”

  Like teenagers everywhere, Rana Mourtaja always has her earphones on. And like parents everywhere, hers warn she’ll lose her hearing if she doesn’t turn the volume down. “That day is coming soon,” Rana admits. I found her SoundCloud page online. Her playlist includes scratchy recordings of Arab singers from the 1950s and ’60s, beat-heavy contemporary Lebanese pop, and a few sugary Western love songs—including an unforgivable Nickelback ballad. Rana told me she listened to these songs during the 2014 war. She drowned out the buzzing drones, bomb blasts, and gruesome news reports with the music she loves.

  But Rana felt guilty listening to her favorite music “as if nothing was going on.” In an essay published during the war by New Internationalist magazine, Rana wrote:

  An undertaker on the radio won’t stop ranting about the rising number of martyrs, each one adding insult to injury. I wonder what would happen if I listened to music instead of accompanying him in this endless counting of martyrs, airstrikes, aircrafts, prayers of the elderly, screams of infants. Would turning him off make me a traitor? . . . I hope the devil knows that, in this, I do not betray those who booked their tickets to God, or those awaiting their turn in the long line. I only betray the war.

  Rana titled the essay “Is 53 Seconds Long Enough to Gather My Soul?” in reference to the IDF’s practice of “roof knocking.” During all three Gaza wars, Israeli aircraft dropped small explosive charges onto the rooftops of buildings the IDF suspected were used by militants. The charges were often strong enough to shatter windows and rattle walls, but not usually powerful enough to cause severe damage. Residents knew this was only a prelude—a cordial message from the IDF that fire would soon come down from the sky. After the roof knock, panicked residents had a short amount of time to flee the building before a missile struck. Gazan families devised intricate escape plans. An eldest daughter would be assigned to gather the passports and family jewelry, say, and the sisters-in-law would
rouse the children from their beds. A pair of brothers might be tasked to carry an infirm grandmother out on a mattress. Many Gazans I met told me they keep a bag containing money, important documents, and their most treasured family photos ready near their doors.

  Residents usually had ten or fifteen minutes to leave their homes before the missile came, but in 2014 a family in Rana’s neighborhood had only fifty-three seconds to flee before the airstrike demolished their home. Rana wrote:

  At the beginning of the war, I packed up a few of my favorite clothes, plus a few books that I initially struggled to pick out (finally selecting only those that contained signatures and personalized dedications, plus a few other “must-reads”). I didn’t forget to pack my certificates of excellence from school, minor awards for minor accomplishments, and the keffiyeh I was given by my friend in Jerusalem on my sole visit to that city. Nor did I forget the souvenir my friend Rima gave me a few days before her departure, notes I exchanged with my classmates, and a few letters from other friends. After quite a tussle my bag managed to accommodate these, plus some greeting cards, photo albums and other presents. . . . I try not to think about the fact that I might not be able to gather up my soul from all the places it’s scattered in this spacious universe, should I be struck by a missile in the midst of fleeing, or if the pilot decides not to pause for his usual 53 seconds between the “warning missile” and my one.