Mohammad al-Zaqzouq: ‘Where I Write Now’

Where I Write Now

By Mohammad al-Zaqzouq

Translated by Wiam El-Tamami

I remember—a distant childhood memory—a time when we were at the beach. It was one of the few times that we were allowed to actually go into the water. I remember that we approached the sea with fear and apprehension, and that, every time a wave came, my grandmother would dip our heads into the water. That strange ritual, known as “the seven waves,” seemed to me imbued with wonder, with the secrets of the sea. My grandmother would dip our heads into every wave, for seven consecutive waves. This repeated immersion in the waves is believed to help release anguish and distress, to melt away any clouds of sorrow trapped in the body. The waves ebb and flow, each one carrying away some of the sadness and pain, some of the dark sediment that has built up in the soul. Wave after wave, the darkness begins to dissolve, to be carried far away into the vastness of the sea.

Now, as I stood watching people, young and old, dipping their heads into the waves, I wondered: what sea can melt away all this sorrow? The war was raging with full force; death was knocking down doors and breaking into every home. We were drowning in the ocean of our loss, in an unprecedented path of bereavement and mutilation. What sea can possibly swallow up all of these moans, all of this pain, all of these atrocities?

As I watched people appearing and disappearing among the waves, a desire grew in me to immerse my body in the sea. My body that had become saturated with fear, contorted with tension, after long nights of terror—nights trapped in the darkness of this moment that has made the lines of life and death converge in this insane circle of war.

I walked toward the sea, the wind pushing against my face, my forehead. As soon as the water touched my feet, a chill rippled through my body. And then, in a second, I threw this exhausted body into the salty water. A body that had become heavy, weighed down with burdens, was now being made lighter by the water. Pushed up, carried, with eyes closed and ears receiving the sound of the sea. As the water held me, lifted me, I gazed up at a sky that was blue and empty of airplanes, and a long silence fell — as though it was not just a sea.

Mohammed Zaqzooq is a researcher born in Khan Younis in 1990. He studied Arabic language and literature at Al-Aqsa University and is a contributor to various Palestinian and Arab platforms. Mohammed is an active member in literary and cultural organizations shaping Gaza’s cultural landscape and the former general coordinator of the “Utopia for Knowledge” assembly. Currently, he coordinates community library and youth teams at the Tamer Foundation for Community Education. His poetry collection The Soothsayers of Khanun won the Khalili Poetry Award at the First Palestinian Cultural Forum for Creative Writers in 2018.