‘Where I Write Now’: Husam Maarouf

By Husam Maarouf

Translated by Wiam El-Tamami

I want to tell you this: I miss the cool surface of my bookcase at home. I would lean my back against it, feeling a slight tremor in my body as I picked out the book that would be my companion that evening. Maybe my passion for reading came from that cool sensation on my skin; as though reading would bring me the necessary warmth, that beautiful rush of nervous excitement that I’ve always sought out.

My home has been destroyed in this genocidal war. I am now in Deir al-Balah, feeling the distress of displacement in my body in every moment, as though my skin is constantly crawling with insects. There is no medicine that heals the body like home, and the privacy of a home.

After a year of this war, I feel almost numb. I don’t get worked up anymore. Maybe the doses of pain have become heavier than my body, until I have become completely submerged, shackled, weighed down like a rock in a riverbed. But my anger resurfaces when I think of writing. How can a poet and a journalist write, when he lives in the middle of a market? That’s how they feel, these spaces of mass displacement. Five families in one flat; each person a hive of frustration and anguish, ready to be unleashed on all the others. Privacy, my dear? What privacy, when you’re trapped in an ant colony?

I often start writing a poem or an article, only to be disturbed by the people I live with or the loud calls of a street hawker below my window. Then I stop writing and start cursing the hawker. And then I go on to curse writing, Israel, and the war. This period has made it very clear to me that a lot of writing is doomed to fail, with or without a reason. And that the only life we have ever known, here in this place, is also doomed to fail, if the generals and tyrants want it to.

Husam Maarouf is a poet from Gaza. He’s published two poetry collections, Death Smells Like Glass and The Barber Loyal To His Dead Clients and the novel Ram’s Chisel. Read more of his work at Passages through Genocide.