Murky Vision, Bloodied Trees
By Najwa Shamun
Translated by Elena Pare
I’m in the void now, the void that grows and creates boundless orbs of questions, both delicate and profound: Why does one human kill another? Why do strangers occupy a land that does not belong to them, kill and devastate the life in it, and turn it into widespread death?
The questions never fall silent. Writing has become more urgent, to document the crimes and make attempts at restoration. Where am I now? This holds more than one meaning, more than one perspective—where am I now?
The sentence’s shortfall is a wound that requires a crutch to prop it up, an absence in need of a wall brought tumbling down by the continuous bombing in Gaza, and countless buildings writhing from the cries.
I left after seven months of war, fear, and vulnerability; I stepped out of war’s hellfire into the void and the unknown, where I try to write. There, a lot of meaning and only a little patience and reflection exist for me to plant a rose in a poem, or perceive a rose that withered while waiting for scarce water.
I am between pen and words, on the edge of the precipice—as if hunting in the woods, even if laws, prohibitions, and regulations govern the hunt where I am now. This place is not a space, and no amount of time will give me my home back, nor is my incomplete life a dance pirouetting on all the edges, to become a flower that sprouted by itself atop the roof of my house in the war.
I’ll write about war, about peace, for a woman who lifted a white flag and told her children, “Come, let’s climb the hill so that the strangers can see us and let us go far away from their malice… Come…”
She had not finished her sentence when their steps were suddenly staggered by successive shells.
“Coooooome children, let’s climb the hill’s northern face.”
The wind was light, the fear as slight as a stranger’s shawl, and they crossed into paradise, which took pity on the tide of their bleeding in the pile of limbs.
No one heard nor saw what remained of their cries; only the night caught a glimpse of a white flag billowing in the wind. They never saw a single body on the sand nor on the hill. We thus grasped the loss of war—in the madness of a woman, in a man’s grief for his wife and children. Again, they were butterflies, flying, returning toward the night to free the stars. But who trusts the words of a man made lonely by a shot?
I write because writing cures suffering; like this, I write onto the pain once, so it heals. Pain is paper expecting someone to save it from the pen, because the pen writes with utmost cruelty and no care. I am the one waiting cautiously for the paper to scream.
In the mind’s expanse, there is space for play, for jokes that seek our laughter, for spaces of compassion, for music. There is space for isolation and solitude, and a multitude of places dedicated to our dancing, to recover from the sickness of the military machine and its soldiers stained with shame. There are places for anger, for leaping over mountains of pain, where we rise anew, like larvae whose time has come to burst from their cocoons as butterflies. I stand on mountains of weakness, alone, pen in hand.
What I’ve lived through in the war requires years of healing and attempts to recover; it is impossible to distance oneself from what happened there in the war; it is impossible to disengage even once from its sounds, from the displaced in shelters, dispersed across the Gaza Strip.
My sister, a mother and grandmother, was martyred on March 3. She did not commit violence against anyone or anything—the neighbor’s house was bombed and shrapnel struck her in the brain, fractured her pelvis, skull, and hand. A mother of beautiful girls and grandchildren that circled around her like butterflies in harmony, with love and delight.
When you experience loss, your mind remains in an eternal state of denial. A while ago, the school next to their house was bombed, and its columns flew onto the second floor of their house.
The entirety of the Gaza Strip is a ground for hunting and sniping with all sorts of weapons that the occupier uses against civilians, children, and women. There are no laws to stop them, nor punishments for their crimes against humans, stones, and trees.
During the war, the horse standing in the street by the western market of Rafah was burdened by a load of things his owner had put into the horse-drawn cart. His bones protruded, eyes sunken into their sockets. Though shaped like a horse, it was not a horse; rather, it was a ghost pulling a cart, on the verge of collapse from exhaustion. The cats searching the empty cans on the side of the roads are trying to satisfy their hunger, but they find only the smell of meat in these empty containers, with no hope of being fed.
I try to dislodge the sound of war from my head and all my senses. Writing is now screaming for me to write in any space available to me, about those who killed people’s dreams and killed them, too.
Najwa Shamun is a poet and writer in Gaza who has worked in journalism. She has published a collection of poetry titled “كما ينبغي لي” (As I Should, 2005), “غزة – أجراس في عنق الريح” (Gaza: Bells in the Wind, 2021), and has a forthcoming collection of poems, “مكائد صنعت بهدوء” (Plots Crafted Quietly, 2025).
Elena Pare is a French-Swiss-British graduate of the University of Cambridge in Arabic and Persian and an emerging translator of fiction from French, German and Arabic into English and French.
Photo by Goerlitz Photography.