Standing Tall Like Trees
By Hedaya Shamun
Translated by Nael Hijjo
A snowstorm was quick to greet me as I took the roads from Middletown, Connecticut to Ottawa, Canada. I was charmed by the trees, standing tall and defiant along the endless road that stretched for more than seven hours. I stared out into the white expanse—everything saturated with whiteness—and whenever the car stopped, I felt the frost slipping into my bones. Yet it could not extinguish the flames that had been burning inside me for more than two years. It was a blazing fire that seemed only to grow as the long road before me grew longer.
Everything was still until those white snowflakes came drifting down, like cotton slipping from the sea of sky above us. The flakes thickened little by little, and I stared at them, looking into the unknown. I did not know them. There was no intimacy between me and those cottony drops clinging to the asphalt and turning it into a white carpet. The scene was beautiful, but my heart wasn’t used to it. I did not feel beauty; I felt estrangement, as I was thousands of miles away from my burning city. As though the ashes of my burning home had come to me in the form of white mist—but without its scent. It felt like I was struggling vainly to preserve my calm and composure.
The road stretched on, curved and twisted. Yet the trees stood tall and proud, covered by snow. I wondered: Do trees feel cold?
I found my own question strange and tried not to burden myself with the cascade of questions falling through my head while my heart burned and my soul wandered. Then I asked my travel companion: “Oliver, do you think the trees feel cold right now?”
He smiled as he gazed at the trees, as though seeing them for the first time.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
I was overcome with an urgent desire to embrace them. “I want to shake the snow off them.”
I had done that once, when the snow fell heavily for the first time during my stay in Middletown, Connecticut. I stayed awake all night. It was the ceasefire we had waited for so long. Every news outlet said the war in Gaza had stopped. That night, I literally did not sleep.
Some friends went to the al-Janina neighborhood in Rafah, where I had spent a third of my life. They went despite the danger still there, and they sent me a video of my house.
I could not sleep the night the snow fell. The horizon was a bright white, as though it were eight in the morning rather than four. I saw my favorite sofa turned into black ash, while my bookshelf was shattered, books blown away, my notebooks scattered everywhere. The place looked as though a tank had crushed it from the entrance inward: no fence, no walls. Half the front steps had been pulverized, and the face of the house had been ripped open, revealing what it had endured alone.
Blackness stared out from every corner of the house that had been blown apart, while the remaining walls had turned a pitch-black color that made your heart ache from imagining what those walls had suffered alone, abandoned except for the occupying strangers.
That day I walked through the thick snow. I did not feel cold. I plunged my feet into the snow around the house, trying to extinguish the fires raging in my heart and soul. This house—the one I had worked my whole life to make into a dream home for myself and my children.
Then I saw the tree, the one whose name I still do not know. In spring it had bloomed lavishly, but now it was bowed beneath the snow. My God, I could not bear the sight. I shook its branches until the snow came tumbling down, and the tree seemed almost bewildered by the presence of a stranger.
I was in pain: far from my home when it needed me most.
What if I could have embraced it one last time while it still stood beautiful as always? What if I had been there? Maybe I could have saved it. Maybe I could have patted its shoulder. Maybe it would not have suffered alone.
Had I betrayed it by traveling before the war? But how could I have known the war would become a genocide, burning our lives, dreams, and future, turning everything upside down?
Oliver’s voice came firmly, as he drove, after a long thoughtful silence.
“I don’t think trees feel cold. If you came in another season, you’d still find them here. Trees survive somehow.”
I whispered in Arabic: “But I did not survive. I wish I were a tree, so I could survive the snow, survive the genocide, survive the loss and pain.”
The questions returned, weighing down my soul, while I felt as though the trees had hands stretching toward me, as though they were telling me secrets unknown to others.
What if trees were uprooted from the soil where they were born? Would they live elsewhere and survive?
I had always believed that trees feel us, hear our secrets, understand us even if we do not speak to them. But I wondered: Do trees tell their own secrets? Do trees even have secrets?
I do not think they would tell them to the snow. I never felt they were companions. The trees merely endure patiently, allowing the snow to rest upon their leaves and branches. Yet the snow cannot survive the sunlight. Life returns to the trees, and they carry life back to us.
In my country, they cut down all the trees. They killed and crushed them, just as they crushed homes and children. They destroyed everything, even the memories. It makes us cling to any memory, anything that reminds us of the life we once lived in Gaza.
I carried my old clothes with me from Egypt to America and then to Canada. I no longer wear them. Their color has faded and they are no longer wearable, but I could not abandon them in foreign lands. They carried the scent of my city—the scent I wanted to preserve. And that little notebook in which I had written only a few numbers—I carried it across distant countries because I had bought it in Rafah.
Oh, Rafah.
There was once a beautiful city overflowing with love and roses called Rafah. It was my city, where I was born, where I spent my childhood and young adulthood, where I gave birth to my children. And now it’s destroyed, turned into soft sand. Even the rubble has been removed, while some draw up plans to turn it into a resort—as though it were a land without people!
My mother’s and father’s graves are there.
I stood for a long time in a shop in Ottawa, in front of a shelf holding tall leather boots. I stared at them and drifted into my own memories. I once had the same boots, but red. I could not have been older than ten. I wore them while my friends and I went out on rainy days searching for puddles formed by the heavy rains—and there were so many in Al-Shaboura camp in Rafah.
We would jump into the puddles while rain poured down from the sky, our laughter echoing beyond the alley where we lived, reaching nearby camps.
I never imagined that my innocent laughter, my joy in those red boots beside my friends, would one day appear before me after so many years in a city thousands of miles away. I did not realize then that they would become all that remained of my alley, my city, my memories.
How do trees survive when fall strips them of their green leaves, and snow suffocates them, turning them into rigid white ghosts that frighten birds and leave no room to breathe?
Do trees ever wish they could walk? Just as I now wish I had wings to fly back to my country and look upon what remains of me there?
A great heaviness settles on my chest whenever I hear whispers. I imagine they have come from the thousands of trees accompanying me through this anxious journey from one country to another, from one city to the next.
When I arrived at the border terminal, I was distressed and lost. How could I begin again after losing so much over the past two and a half years? There was nothing left worth building far away from the self I once knew.
But I brushed my worries and sorrows aside and felt the trees following me, although they were now behind me. They walk without feet. They travel without borders. They hear my whispers though I speak to no one.
Then a simple question caught me off guard:
“Why are you here?”
The feeling of estrangement tore through my soul while my body remained fixed to the ground. My eyes stared at the polite officer who waited patiently for my answer.
I stammered:
“Honestly, I don’t know why the cities we love are destroyed, why the homes we built with the sweat of our brows are crushed, why children are killed without guilt, or why the survivors are now left to die of hunger and disease… I truly do not know how to answer you… Dreams were crushed along with the houses. The ringing laughter that once defined me has been lost somewhere among these vast countries. And my soul still wanders, searching for one final refuge from myself and my nightmares.”
May 2026
Ottawa, Canada
The original article was published in Arabic on Scene 48 on May 1, 2026.
A note from the author: ‘Standing Tall like Trees’ is a phrase from a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, later performed as a song by the Syrian singer Samih Shuqair.
Hedaya Shamoun is a Palestinian writer and journalist from Rafah, Gaza. She holds a Master’s degree in Media Studies from Cairo, Egypt, and has published a number of studies and research papers on gender, youth, media, and governance. She is the author of the blog ‘The Gaza in My Mind’ and also writes a newer blog in English. She recently served as a visiting scholar in residence at the Shapiro Center for Critical Studies at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, USA. She is currently based in Ottawa, Ontario.
Nael Hijjo is a Palestinian educator and translator based in the United States, where he teaches Arabic and Intercultural Communication. He holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies and has served as a Mellon Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Global Centers.