This essay, written by poet Nasir Abdullah in the fall of 2024, carves out the difficulties of being separated from family during genocide.
A Bird with Wings of Fire
By Nasir Abdullah
Translated by Jenny Steel
It was a year ago that I last gazed into my children’s eyes, when I was with them again after more than twenty days, that day when I took up my small suitcase and headed out, on my way to Syria for a cultural conference. I was supposed to spend just two weeks there, in the course of which I was going to visit my family, whom I had left back in 1994.
I left my family behind to realize a lifelong dream of returning to Palestine. It was permitted under the Oslo Accords, because I’m a Palestinian born in exile in Damascus to parents displaced from Jaffa in 1948, after Palestine was occupied and the state of Israel was created. I know full well what it means for a person to live without a homeland, and to be brought up a stranger, with fewer rights in education and residency, but full of ambitions and hopes to overcome any circumstances.
Today marks a year since I was forced to stay behind in Cairo, the Egyptian capital. I haven’t been able to return to Gaza because of the ongoing war, a war of horror like a huge fiery abyss that surrounds millions of people, whose only fault is to be located in this oppressed geographical spot. Here, houses and streets are destroyed, trees are cut down and gardens die off, and life has become unlivable, unable to limp on, even on crutches. Everything has lost its value here, everything beautiful has disappeared under mounds of smoke, dunes of destruction, and even memories have self-destructed under the pain, the mountains of suffering. I have not been living the wretched life my family has been living for the last year because I failed to return to Gaza; because my children wanted me to do them a service, which was to get them out of the hell that is Gaza. Since my return would serve as a death blow, I respected their decision and tried my best to extract them from the war, but with the occupation of the land crossing at Rafah, my children’s hopes were killed off, and my efforts went up in smoke. We descended into the tides of blood and mass destruction in a state of waiting, in which we struggle on like wounded horses through a wilderness.
The distance between Cairo and Gaza is just 350 kilometers, a four-hour flight; Gaza is closer to Cairo than its own cities of Luxor, Aswan, or Marsa Matrouh. Yet the distance cannot be measured in kilometers. It’s measured in international treaties, and a cursed occupation that renders places far away that are really close at hand. Yes, I’ve been living apart from my family for a year, and living without them means total paralysis in every sense, low spirits, clouded thoughts, an inability to engage in reading or writing, a forced absence of knowledge, a wrongful repression of new discoveries. The state of waiting means a medium-sized screen in front of me as I follow the news from moment to moment. It means locking the door to the apartment in which I’m living, which consists of a small bedroom, a modest living room, a kitchen with just a small stove and gas cylinder to be used at need, and a tiny bathroom, in keeping with the financial straits which have redoubled the psychological pressure already imposed by worry and stress about my family, who are living in harsh conditions in a worn-out tent by the sea at Khan Younis, surrounded by death, hunger, and oppression. Here in Cairo, I’m hanging by the edges of my soul, nailed through by newsflashes that pierce through my body and mind.
I live without any sleep worth the name, or food worth the eating, and my mind runs on like a lame deer in a forest, starving, pursued by predators. I cannot be in constant contact with my family because of the disruptions of communications. I hear from them every few days. Just to receive a message on my mobile from my wife or one of my children eases my mind.
This year, I forgot about finishing Marquez’ book One Hundred Years of Solitude. I hid my books away under the sofa, and I tried instead to write some poetry to express myself. I got together a number of poems about the war and wrote various things for the literary soirees I was invited to here in Cairo and in Baghdad, and when they had matured, I gathered them together and published them, urgently, in a book.
This year, I was forced to give up the everyday routine I had lived by in Gaza, under more amenable circumstances. I no longer get up at six in the morning to walk for an hour, and come back to my desk to write, and I no longer drink my coffee at eight, reading the book whose turn has come in my monthly list. Day merges with night, and moments of sleep are snatched from the whirlpool of hours, like dust rising from a forgotten carpet.
Everything has become unfamiliar, and no one in the war is all right, and neither are those who are far away and have family there. When the fires of war are lit, they burn up the green spaces of the soul before they render it barren, and that’s why I’ve been dreaming, for a year now, of shooting down a bird with wings of fire, and burying it deep in a cave, so that peace may reign in my homeland, and I may return to my children.
Nasir Abdullah is a Palestinian poet based in Gaza.
Jenny Steel is an Athens-based writer and translator of Arabic, Farsi, French and Greek to English