When your house is completely demolished, all your belongings burned – your certificates, your awards and gifts, mementos you have been collecting for years, your books, everything that has more emotional value than all the money in the world – gone with a single missile fired by the occupation; when your loved ones are brutally killed; when you are forcibly displaced; when all the schools you attended house the displaced before they were targeted — what do you have left but memories?
Aversion to Memories
On Friday, Oct. 13, we were forcibly displaced to a UNRWA school near al-Sharqiyyah gate, the entrance to east Khan Younis, around four kilometers away from our house. I had two sets of clothes, and my backpack containing my laptop, kindle, mobile phone, a few pens, and a journal.
At the time, I stopped writing about anything and everything. What could you possibly write about, when your memory was on hiatus? I was living the horror of genocide many missiles at a time, countless news headlines at a time. I was barely able to think beyond the genocide.
The displaced from Bani Suhaila, including my sisters, often went back to their houses to cook lunch and do laundry. They usually got back to their assigned rooms at the school before sunset. My family tried to take me to Bani Suhaila – where I was born, where I lived for fourteen years, where all my sisters live – but I kept refusing, except twice when I independently decided to go take a “proper” shower. I kept telling my family that my abstract home is my family, and they were displaced with me; and my tangible home is where I have my belongings, which I could not even visit in Abasan al-Kabira. So, what was the point of going anywhere else?
Even in my mind’s eye, I rarely visited home. I couldn’t give my imagination free rein.
But displacement is a cauldron, brewing a lineup of recollections from suppressed memories.
Memories hovered relentlessly at my shoulders, peeking forward in futile attempts to hold my attention. I kept shrugging them off. The mental exertion of dismissing memory proved strenuous when I faced inquisitive questions from distant relatives, whom I was meeting because of our shared displacement, and eventually, with reluctance, I had to allow some restrained reminiscence.
Snippets rushed out, and I granted permission only to those memories that did not come near my home. I trapped any memories that ventured into the territory of my room.
I have attachment issues. It’s hard for me to get rid of things I own, even when they stop serving their purpose and it’s silly to hold on. It was a survival tactic not to think about what was left for me back home.
Setting foot into my home during the temporary truce in November felt indefinable, like an out-of-body experience. When I stood before my wardrobe and took a good look at everything I had, I understood why I had exercised a memory block. I remember thinking, “I have all of this. I could have lost all of this and all the memories they evoke. So, all of this was at stake. I could have lost all of this with the explosion of one missile.” I still can.
The fragility of the precarious truce lent home an odd sense of instability. I was seized with a feeling of foreboding, so I spent the days at home and the nights at my sister’s house in Bani Suhaila, a house that was recently completely demolished, a house where my sisters used to gather almost every evening.
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On Dec. 5, we were forcibly displaced from Khan Younis entirely. The increased distance from home sharpened our wretchedness. Only then did we realize that even in displacement, our previous proximity to home gave us a sense of assurance, now snatched from us. While displaced to a tent in Tal al-Sultan, west of Rafah, I rarely looked at photos on my phone, and I did not make a conscious effort to remember much about life before the genocidal war. My past memories seemed to belong to a life far behind. Sometimes, it feels like we’ve been living through genocide forever. Other times, it feels like living through a nightmare we will eventually wake up from.
If you asked me about anything related to my “former” life while we were displaced, I would need a few seconds to recall any specifics. I remembered my life in big, broad pictures. In retrospect, it seems I was rationing my intake of memories like food and water — an act that protected my sanity.
For a while, the specter of the past was not my concern. For a while, I succeeded in escaping its snare, only to be hooked again into the future’s inescapable net. I found myself planning what I would do when all of this was over: a long shower to scrub and scrape it all away, and a deep slumber to move on. It threw me off balance. It gave me hope. I was often engrossed in daydreaming.
The Flow of Memory
Over four months later, occupation forces withdrew from Khan Younis. The city’s displaced inhabitants started going back in the mornings, to see whether or not the IOF had demolished their homes yet. On Apr. 11, the second day of Eid al-Fitr, Mama went home and brought me back my favorite plant, basil, from our garden. The sweet fragrance was a warm hug to my senses that flared my nostalgia for home to an even greater depth, and I decided to visit home four days later with my mother and sister. We stayed for around seven hours before returning to the tent in Rafah. Seeing our home and the streets, houses, and roundabouts in Khan Younis was surreal. It was not the same city we were forcibly displaced from – these were not the same streets. What lay before my eyes was total annihilation. I was shaken to my core. Images of the city I knew and recognized flashed in my mind in a discordant clash with what I saw before my eyes. The past was interrogating me, straining for validation and to restore its authority.
With the return to home on day 200 of the genocide, memory gets the better of me, flowing at its own whim.
Surviving on Memories
Palestinians in Gaza are living on memories of family and friends, and of their favorite places. Most of us keep scrolling through our phone’s photo gallery to cherish the lost times, and to remind ourselves what our now destroyed favorite places used to look like.
After my first return home, I shared “Before” and “After” photos of streets, roundabouts, and houses, to show the scale of destruction.
It never crossed my mind that the “Before” images imparted a wonderful impression of Gaza to people. If the images were special to me, it’s due to my emotional attachment to specific spaces.
Romanticizing life in Gaza is a grave injustice to our suffering — to the disfigured reality we have been trapped in for decades. However, you cannot fault Palestinians from Gaza who share photos and videos on social media of a prettier, safer reality which might give the impression that all was fab and dope! Compared to what we are attempting to survive, life in the besieged, poverty-stricken Gaza was tremendously better. Anything comes off well when compared to genocide.
Only in June did I begin to share pictures of those memories – mostly solitary moments, some with family, and of course the beach, always the beach — memories of tentative beauty, grievously snatched from us. I do not share photos of many places from Before. Life in Gaza has never been easy. Poverty, unemployment, and polluted water were just some of the tools of oppression designed to kill us slowly. Gaza has 8 official refugee camps and a population of approximately 2.1 million people, crammed in tight, uninhabitable spaces.
Without contextualizing what they see Palestinians in Gaza share on social media, non-Gazans tend to get the wrong impression about life before the ongoing genocidal war.
I urge you to bear this in mind – to stop for a moment and contextualize what you see shared online. Do not be quick to judge. If this is our way of coping with the atrocities, the fear, the anxiety, the anger, the grief, and all the emotions we are feeling — if this is the way we are dealing with genocide — let it be. You cannot deny us our memories, or the comfort we might find in them.
Memories As Armour
Surviving on memories seems to be a common coping mechanism, a shared act preserving our collective memory of a better time and space. Remembrance, combined with the tendency to glorify what was lost, is engraved in our nature as human beings.
For me, I share details of moments that used to make life in besieged Gaza tolerable. We do not share our memories for you to call us steadfast or beautiful, or to tell you that we had a life before the genocide or, God forbid, to prove our humanity. We document snippets of our past to keep their memory alive – or maybe to reassure ourselves all of that, which seems so far away, was real.
Sharing our memories is a documentation of our stories. It is a way of letting others know you, and of knowing each other. That is how some of the displaced bond; they exchange anecdotes from memory that, one way or another, form a collective consciousness. This act of narration is a perpetuation of memory, particularly collective memory and collective consciousness. It protects our identity, manifests shared experiences, and represents belonging to the land.
Every documentation of our existence is important. It is an act of resistance. Isn’t part of what the IOF is doing, erasing our individual and collective memories? Erasing our identities?
Above all, sharing memories of our martyrs keeps them alive. Reading about the lives our martyrs led, and the memories they made and left behind is both inspiring and soul-shattering.
This makes memory a gateway to vulnerability, as much as it is a continuity of our perseverance.
Reclaiming my Memory
Sometimes I find myself thinking, what’s a person without memories? What’s a place without its memories? And I want to remember everything, to make every moment of my existence matter, to make stories of every experience.
In the second week of July, I began to help my father with tilling and planting seedlings of basil and Madagascar periwinkle. One that day I began to take part in an ancient ritual, a ritual of nourishment I reveled in ever since my father bought our piece of land in 2006.
Every day as I kneel in the garden, I nourish my memory. As I use the adze to uproot grass, I dig up half-buried habits. As I touch the trees, I clean up dimmed details. As I water the soil with a bucket instead of a hose, I pour into my memory new plans and dreams.
Steadily, I get back a piece of myself. One memory at a time.
