‘Prison in a Burning Tank’

Prison in a Burning Tank

By Aya Massri

Translated by Alaa Alqaisi

These are the worst days. I don’t know why I’ve been using superlatives so much lately, or saying “for the first time,” as though my mind were instantly classifying every experience against prior facts or illusions. Perhaps it would be enough to say they’re terrible days, without comparing them to other dark ones.

The heat: six straight hours of headache that reaches its peak around one in the afternoon, then eases gradually from four until sunset. A fixed, unmoving span. Unrelenting. Those two hours before and after sundown are the only moments I feel the chains fall from my wrists, my head finally free, before night sets in, before the bombing intensifies, before I drift off to sleep, my body collapsing at last despite all efforts to stay awake, to cling to any sliver of sunless time.

In those promised hours, I sit on a chair we brought from a school-turned-shelter in Rafah, now finishing its disaster-riddled life under a canvas canopy outside the tent. Its frame is rusted, its skin peeling. I loosen my hair and stretch my ten fingers into the air, trying to calm the churning water inside me. Before the red dusk, the gentler face of cruelty, and the most beautiful thing Khan Younis left in my soul, I forget the sun’s bite still etched on my skin and think that maybe mercy hasn’t vanished from every hour of the day.

In this war, the idea of prison has haunted my mind in many forms, from shelters to water lines to famine, and now, to heat. A forced burial of desire. That sense of something slipping past you, and you can’t hold on to it for reasons so flimsy they feel unreal. I even asked a question I haven’t been able to forget: Is the literature that emerges from shelters, tents, or anywhere in Gaza—does it count as prison literature?

After the third week of war, I craved the book My Escape to Freedom. I’d left it among the collection I gathered during and after university, my future library, my dream, now buried under the rubble of our family home on Gaza’s eastern edge in Beit Hanoun. I saw myself by the window of a Rafah shelter, more entangled than ever in Ali Izetbegović’s experience. I thought rereading might help me gather the thoughts dissolving in my grasp, might help soften a rage I had never before known so sharply. But when I finally had the chance to download and read it again, I didn’t. I forgot. I had drunk the prison dry until it settled inside me.

I remember the Gilboa Prison escapees, especially Mohammed al-Arida, who said, “We fed on the sabr, the patience fruit of this land,” while fleeing across the homeland he had dreamed of, just before his re-arrest with his comrades. I imagine their feelings in that moment with such clarity that I grow closer to every prisoner’s story, however different, however various the forms of prisons we humans invent. I understand the overwhelming hunger for freedom after it’s been gone too long. But I do not understand those who say they wouldn’t know what to do with their freedom if they had it. Me—I might fumble at first, but I know exactly what I’d do. I know it well.

Now I understand why dozens of administrative detainees go on hunger strike in Israeli prisons. Humans can’t bear to be jailed without a known end. There has to be a defined time, a final period. As Ward said in the Syrian TV series Lipstick (Qalam Hamra), “Let them sentence us, transfer us… ten years, twenty, say anything, even execution.” That “say anything” is what made people genuinely wish for death. What holds a person upright but their faith, the thing that’s braced their spine for so long? And if that meaning disappears, what remains but nothingness?

In the long scorch of daytime, I fear the hours that don’t move. I try to think calmly, artificially, about what I can do, though I repeat the same acts each day. I bargain with the sun: I’ll train my body and mind to endure this burning tank. I’ll distract myself with two back-to-back films on my phone, or I’ll talk to the children, or the elders, it doesn’t matter, as long as I tell familiar stories in an unfamiliar way. I might wash a whole tub of filthy clothes just to murder the time. But the sun shows no mercy; she doesn’t turn her face even slightly, and sometimes she sticks out her tongue at me. So I sit, silence my final refuge, swallowing my fury, telling myself it’s a small tantrum from a creature unmoved by the prayers of melting bodies. And that, by day’s end, she’ll make it up to my eyes, with the majestic red dusk.

Aya Massri (@ayagmassri) is a teacher and writer from Gaza.

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities. Read more of her work here at ArabLit.