How War Transformed My Literary Taste

How War Transformed My Literary Taste

By Husam Maarouf

Life before the genocide wasn’t dazzling. It wasn’t extraordinary. It was ordinary—even dull—so routine that it quieted down only to pick up again, like a long, uneventful film.

I often felt boredom clawing at my spirit. I can’t deny it. I wished that everything would vanish in one fell swoop and that the world and all its noise would end. But I pruned my nihilism. I tamed it through reading and writing, through art and through music.

Books were my refuge after long days of fatigue and physical exhaustion. I would escape into them like a lukewarm bath at the end of a grueling day.

Back then, reading was a way to find myself, a ritual of uncovering hidden truths—discovering a supple branch on which to sit. I longed for a place in this world where I could feel a little more at ease because I was tired of aligning with reality and its standards.

For more than twenty years, I read constantly. I churned thoughts within myself. My skin would shiver with delight when I found wonder in the simplest things, like for instance an ant making it home without being crushed by an ungraceful foot.

Books made me a fragile man, chasing my own voice and conversing with everything. I used all of my senses to bring laughter to others and to tread gently within myself so as not to disturb the soil.

Falling through a trapdoor

In the time before genocide, one book that taught me to embrace this heightened sense was The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. It pulled me into hidden dimensions and urged me to block out ordinary people’s noise so I could claim my own space.

I had been surrounded by chatterboxes who chewed through time just to avoid confronting the void.

I left their emptiness behind and turned to reading to fill myself up. In books, I broke from my need to talk excessively.

Pessoa wrote: “I’m falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall.“

Then the war came. With it came the noise of missiles and the screams of people trapped under rubble. A strange voice emerged from my gut: “I’m tired of this emptiness.”

The war collapsed all distance and destroyed all privacy. My inner space was invaded by a whole people shouting in my ears: “Stop the war! Stop the hunger. This is war. This is genocide.” It was invaded by Gaza being erased from the map out of pure malice. By those who support this, who stay silent, who are complicit.

In the time before, I used to read Mahmoud Darwish daily. I’d tell him, “You came to poetry through every door and left us no way to enter. So where do we go?”

I’d echo the title “Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done,” repeating it to remind Darwish that he approached life differently, leaving me stunned in an endless aesthetic orbit.

Poetry was my curse. I was obsessed with unraveling it and sinking into it. That rich, mischievous language poured thrilling fatigue onto my heart. I chased love like a bird with a broken wing—hurt not by injury, but by others’ stares.

Time didn’t pass for me in minutes. I read Darwish to find a different kind of time hidden in the next paragraph. My feet twitched in anticipation—I had seen beauty in a line that spoke of the future.

Back then, never once did I feel emotionally cold. I left my resting place and lit my senses with matches so that I wouldn’t lose the wonder of my thirteen-year-old self.

From Darwish: “Tomorrow we will love life. / When tomorrow comes, life will be something to adore”

Wonder buried in rubble

When the war arrived, the child I had hidden in my chest suddenly grew up. He leapt out at the sound of explosions and the collapse of buildings. That old sense of wonder is now buried under the rubble, and Gaza has no tools to dig it out.

And so I shifted toward reading reality, turning away from the chair of imagination.

I broke like stone. I tried to stand again. But over time, the rubble piled higher than I could climb.

Over time, those who read political books lose their hearts.

I read A Place Under the Sun by Benjamin Netanyahu, the warlord and face of evil. He, too, writes and publishes. At first, I was bewildered. How could a man who reads and writes also command bombs and warplanes?

His language is coarse, like a rough hand. His thoughts drip with cruelty and a terrifying impulse to erase others.

I read his words and saw blood. He provokes the desire to end the world, like a dying man lashing out.

His pragmatism, pettiness, and narcissistic brutality are the true face of politics. He was the one who dragged me back to reality. This is war.

“Allowing the return of Palestinian refugees would destroy Israel demographically. That is something we will never permit.”

He wants us exiled forever so that he and his people can remain. He’s shattering us just to collect the shards of his own bottle.

This is lunacy. It’s the denial of others. It’s the documented crime of ethnic cleansing.

Comparisons, contradictions

War made comparisons the core of my existence. I compare my imagination, once warm and fresh like bread from the oven, with my current reality: fetching salty, contaminated water; carrying it up five floors; searching for flour to make blood-drenched bread; searching for a sugar cube to sweeten life again, now that all candy has vanished under the Israeli siege.

My once rich imagination, filled with love and pain, is now useless. Entering it feels dangerous. In war, we expect the worst with every passing day.

Between the covers of a novel, time used to soften. The rigid outlines of my responsibilities dissolved, and I could finally breathe without the weight of expectation pressing on my chest. Each sentence felt like a small kindness, each chapter a respite from the demands of the outside world. In those quiet hours, I didn’t have to be useful—I just had to be present, turning page after page.

Reading Netanyahu in wartime reveals the absurdity of existence and the pettiness of mankind—how easily a person invents a crime for his own interests. Is it some form of mental illness?

I have no doubt that the history of Israeli militarism is bloody and opposes human existence and the civilized voice is found in imaginary dialogues in books, however dark they may be.

In a televised interview, Netanyahu offered advice to a Jewish child: “Read without stopping.”

I was stunned. How could the world be so grotesque? Could the reader also be the killer—or vice versa?

Reading is supposed to mean peace, wisdom, and justice.

Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. Language will tell you everything; it is the queen of existence.

Love and language in a burning world

In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, war never arrives. But love, born of metaphor, shakes the body.

There’s a chasm between Kundera’s playful language and Netanyahu’s prison of words.

Stepping on rose petals is not like stepping on burning coals.

This is how I shift between imagination and reality, love and evil.

War resets every standard.

How can you read about the intimacy of touch in war?

How can you feel tenderness when fire licks your skin?

I fled my home, leaving my metaphors among the furniture, alone and facing the bombs.

Now, I read about politics and the statements of Israeli war ministers.

Love has become a rarity in wartime. All feelings lean toward blood, loss, sorrow, and catastrophe.

I miss my old pain—the day a beautiful woman passed by, not returning my gaze or gifting me a metaphor from her eyes.

Kundera once wrote:“Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.”

A brutal truth

So I left the art of metaphor behind and turned to The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Sun Tzu shows that the world runs on deception. Victory means killing and advancing. Don’t hesitate. That’s the truth.

We all know it, but literature prettifies the monstrous nature of humanity until we invent cinema, theater, songs, and novels, calling them culture, identity, and civilization.

But it’s all just documentation of crime. Even love either precedes or follows a crime.

Tzu wrote:”All warfare is based on deception.”

Perhaps he meant: “All of life is based on deception.”

Yes, my reading identity has changed. War erased my beliefs about life. Beauty can be erased at any moment. Ask Israel how it finds the energy to wipe out entire cities. How can people who wipe out cities find time for love or building? When destruction becomes the essence of identity?

A life without roses

My writing identity has also changed. For two years, I haven’t written about love. I haven’t dared to write “my beloved” in anything I’ve penned.

I live in a world that doesn’t recognize love. I am a hostage in the grip of Israel—a country that has embraced hatred and gives the world nothing but this one word.

I’m a hostage.

I am forbidden from leaving Gaza.

I can’t buy a rose, even though Israel has killed all the roses here. Roses have lost all meaning. Like imagination, they’re now considered frivolous.

I study politics and its deceit. I expose liars among world leaders and Israeli officials, and their cursed language sounds like stones cracking in the night.

Husam Maarouf is a poet from Gaza and the co-founder of Gaza Publications. He’s published two poetry collections, Death Smells Like Glass and The Barber Loyal To His Dead Clients and the novel Ram’s Chisel. You can support his fledgling publishing house here.

Also by Husam Maarouf:

Hunger That Defeats Language

Laughter Without Joy: Between Gaza’s Reality and Beckett’s Stage

What Do Gazans Read During War?

Image: Looted library in Jerusalem, 1929, Library of Congress.