Samah Hasanain’s ‘Seven Moments in Gaza’

Seven Moments in Gaza

By Samah Hasanain

Translated by Enas Eltorky

* The missile scrapes my memory. I’ve already been struck by death, I die many times before my death. I’m amazed by the hope that still persists within me, I tell it firmly: “I’m dead.” It shakes its head in denial. I know I’m a liar, and that I have plenty of room to dream and live.

* I never imagined it hanging as a fabric partition between us and the neighbor’s tent. The childhood blanket that we used to hide under from the cold when we were ten years old: today, it’s become part of a fabric tent. Four blankets for four girls; My mother sewed them with her small needle months ago, and wove all our childhood memories into them, displaying them like a wall in front of us. In the war, our wall became a woven tapestry and a million stories.

* Suddenly, I smelled the scent of perfume. I raised my head, which was bent over a small notebook, and stole as much air as my lungs could draw in. God, how we need new smells besides blood and gunpowder.

* I have an hour dedicated to crying. Memory stores images throughout the day, image by image, before the final scene is formed, tinged with pain, the lines of men hunched in front of aid centers, the chaos of children on drinking-water carts, the sound of women suffocating inside their tents… There is no wall to support our fatigue, and no specific time for the end and salvation.

* Cold, cold, the weather eludes this city, laughs at the roof of the tent and challenges it, and bites my little boy’s finger at night, turning it blue. After we’re gone, who will it play with?

* I want to return to Rafah, to the amazing smell of mornings there, to my sad house stone by stone, to the wooden door of the house full of locks and keys, to the three steps leading to a large hall, and to my room on the right. I want to write a final novel about life there, before the military bulldozer smashes its walls and turns it into a pile of rubble and sand.

* My friend spoke in earnest:

I don’t know how to overcome my hunger and my children’s. In the afternoon, I heard the sound of a helicopter that seemed to be loaded with missiles. I took a pen and paper and went up to the roof and wrote, “There are resistance fighters in this house,” hoping they would drop a missile on us. But that didn’t happen; they are determined to starve us to death.

Samah Hasanain is a Palestinan novelist, born 1990, graduated from Alaqsa University in Gaza. Her debut novel, Maros, was shortlisted for the Bethlehem University literary prize in 2019.

Enas Eltorky graduated from the department of English language and literature at Ain Shams University, where she earned her PhD. She has published several translations and was shortlisted for the ArabLit Story Prize.