New Writing from Gaza: Dunya al-Amal Ismail’s ‘The Thing’
The Thing
By Dunya al-Amal Ismail
Translated by Elena Pare
Eyes open, gazing at the sky, I lie in the darkness that envelops the camp from all sides. I hear the sea surging and the wind howling across the Chouf, shaking my tent and those of my displaced neighbors. More or less everyone is asleep, except for a few scattered voices here and there. A mother rocks her baby to sleep; perhaps he did not find anything to sate his body and soul in the breast she offered him and expressed discontent in this manner. The dogs’ barks are weak and disjointed, unlike any sound that’s known to our ears.
The wind whistles more fiercely and the tent shakes more forcefully, left and right. It teeters on our pains and in our blood, so we prop it up with our bodies and blood, lest it fall onto our heads, which are haunted by the buzz of the drones and quadcopters that have accompanied our migratory procession from one place to another.
Our tent sits on the beach, very close to the sea. We sometimes struggle to differentiate between the roar of the sea and that of the planes above us. Over time, we’ve deluded ourselves that what we hear is the sound of the sea shielding our sleep from the deadly nighttime planes. We conjure this tale to endure the calamities that have befallen us.
The tent quakes ever harder; our souls sit on a seesaw of time and expectation, waiting to hear that what we’re undergoing or dreaming is a prolonged nightmare that will come to an end; we will return to our former course without war, without death, without waiting on life. But none of this happens, nothing happens at all. Our days multiply, only ever more bitter, cruel, and painful. The numbers of displaced people, martyrs, and ruined houses increase; hunger, thirst, and desperation grow; the wait swells until it turns into a monster that eats the soul, the body, a lifetime.
No one wakes from their slumber. Everyone here has gotten used to the dangers, which have become an intimate companion through this intense coexistence. Nothing scares them anymore, but this thing, when it happens, breaks their hearts. Everyone is transformed, from an ice block melting quickly in the heat of feelings just awakened from the depths of oblivion and suffering, into a pool of tears and sighs.
Alone, I confide in my solitude and my sorrows. I think about where we’ve ended up. It’s as if we were in a film with a well-crafted script and direction, and we are the new actors, ignorant of what goes on behind the scenes.
My children are sleeping. I gaze into their faces and nearly cry, but I don’t. One of them might be awake, feigning sleep so as not to worry me or add to my burdens. I do not know who is supporting whom, oh fragments of my soul, sleeping beside me and within my heart.
Seawater flowed into the tent. I was about to block its infiltration as I’d learned from warfare; I fetched the sand socks I had prepared in advance, socks I’d mended time and time again last winter to use in the absence of any alternative. The markets are empty, there is precious little money, and all hope for life is gone, so here they are today, once again useful despite their many holes, which are nevertheless and in any case preferable to the holes gnawing away at politicians’ minds.
I lay down a front line of socks, mine and the kids’, filled with sea-sand, to defend my world contained within the tent.
The wind still rages fiercely. I don’t know if it’s storming outside or within my soul. Everything appears to me to be whirling in the darkness; up and down, to the left and to the right. The gust persists in upsetting the lingering stillness of our tent and heart’s silence. No one from the outside world takes notice of us, as if the sounds of the universe had all died down, except for the wind and that abominable plane stalking the sky’s fabric, its eye grinning at our suffering, at our subjugation that’s bred between the wind and the tent’s sands.
Voices are shrieking inside me, but I do not cry out. My lips utter a muffled sigh that can’t change a thing about this reality. I try to get up. I feel immensely exhausted and stiff in my joints, which I hear crackling like a hammer against the body’s wall. I overcome the pain and walk toward the sea, surrounded by darkness and anxieties; the sky and its breath enveloping me, as the low-flying quadcopter marvels at a fifty-year-old woman overflowing with courage while the men in the tent sleep.
Dunya al-Amal Ismail is a writer in Gaza.
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.