New Writing from Gaza: Living a Half-Life in a Place that is Half-Death

The Man with the Black Hat

By Dr. Hassan Al-Qatrawi

Translated by Elete Nelson-Fearon

I sit alone, next to my remote tent, in one of the places here that is made for half-humans. Every night, since the first day of my displacement, is the same, and I feel as though I live among graves. In displacement, tents are mass graves. So I just try to live a half-life, in this place where life itself is half-death. I sit alone to escape the heat of the tent and my fear of the dark. Well, that’s not actually why I do it. I do it to try and protect my children from the jets’ hunger for little bodies, because I don’t think the pilot of the killer jet will become a kind person overnight. All our previous experiences with him have been bad; time and again, the pilot has proven himself to be a natural, insatiable killer. How could I believe that, this time, he could be tamed? Nonsense. Not once has he bothered to avoid slaughtering women and children. He has always betrayed them; always turned their bodies into fragments, parts, pieces. Although—get that idea out of your head, my friend. Beautiful things are still happening. I’ll tell you about them.

I’m usually alone, with no other people around, but I have lots of friends from other worlds. A few old rodents hover around me, roaming around and glancing at me in disgust, watching this strange man taking up space and living on their land. It angers them, just like I am angered by the people who have occupied my land and expelled me from my home. The rodents have barely accepted my presence, but in the past few days they’ve changed their ways: they’ve been calmer with me, not getting angry with me as they did before. They’ve gotten to know me, grown familiar with my appearance. The rodents are not particularly treacherous. We recently made a tacit agreement: they trust me if I trust them. A temporary pause on killing each other, a truce, a break from the wars of nature. We accept each other.

When I sit in front of my tent, I see some strange things happen. A blind old lady and her only son live across from me. They were the only two survivors from their family after a killer jet bombed their home. Everyone is gone, except for the old lady and her son. Last week he died, too, while he was buying some food at the market. Where he was, where he was existing—that was the target of a missile. So, he was the first to swiftly follow the rest of his family, and such was the end of that family in this world. Now, no one is left, except for this old lady. It’s as if she has been orphaned again. Not from her parents—this woman has been orphaned from all her children.

Sadness pervades. The blind old lady is alone now, in a place where you need everyone. We agree to take care of her without telling her about her son’s passing. This was suggested to us by someone we didn’t know—it was the first time he’d sat among us, the first time we’d seen his face. He wore a black hat, like a hunter’s cap. But every time we bring her food, she refuses it, saying her son doesn’t want anyone giving her anything. We laugh, we laugh out of sheer sadness, and leave. She doesn’t know that her son died last week, and that we are the ones taking care of her.

One night, as I sit alone in front of my tent as always, I see a man wearing a black hat entering the tent carrying a lot of bags. He sits there until the old lady falls asleep, then, quietly, he sneaks out. He does this every night without fail. My face was nearly eaten up with surprise as I wondered: Who is this man who comes to do this every day? Perhaps he was the same man who suggested we hide her son’s death from the old lady. Maybe it’s him!

The old lady returned to Allah yesterday. At her wake, I saw the man with the black hat, so I asked him about what he’d been doing. He told me he was a close friend of her late son, and that he’d taken it upon himself to take care of her without telling her of her son’s passing until he, or she, died.

 Dr. Hassan Al-Qatrawi is a writer in Gaza, Palestine.

Elete Nelson-Fearon is a translator, editor and educator working between Arabic, Spanish and English. Elete is the 2024-25 editorial fellow at Words Without Borders and is currently completing the Foreign Affairs theatre translation mentorship, where she is translating a Palestinian-Chilean play. In 2023, Elete completed the CASA fellowship in advanced Arabic at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and, consolidating her experience as a secondary school teacher, has presented her research into Arabic pedagogy for heritage speakers at the International TAFL Conference held at AUC. Elete has translated, and facilitated workshops around, plays from Mexico, Egypt, Cuba, Palestine and Spain. She is an alumna of the Soho Writers’ Lab, and independently writes theatre reviews at elete.substack.com.