Coming back to Cairo from Gaza is a strange and difficult experience. For five days the Palestine Festival of Literature – a collection of Arab artists from inside and outside the Arab world – lived in Gaza City. Now we have left.
The lights, the noise, the traffic of Cairo. The contrast is overwhelming.
Gaza, our neighbour, our sister: how close we are, have always been. And how hard she struggles now, alone.
But Gaza is not defeated.
Sarajevo wears her scars with defiance– memorializing history’s lessons for the next generation. Beirut paints hers over with malls and make-up – choosing to forget, to live for today. New York pushes herself further into the heavens – challenging the future. But Gaza, Gaza rebuilds and rebuilds and rebuilds again. It takes everything she has to continue to exist. She can neither cement her history nor secure her future. She exists firmly in the present: rebuilding, rebuilding, resisting.
In Gaza your daily life is consumed by fundamentals – water, electricity, petrol. All in short supply, all arriving and disappearing according to the designs of foreign hands.
In Gaza the only free breath you can take is looking out to sea. But when the sun sets the water is illuminated with prison floodlights – a perfect unmovable line of lights that cuts short the horizon, erases the possibility of the unknown.
In Gaza people know you’re foreign when you jump at the explosion of a sonic boom; still not yet numbed to the jailor’s torments.
In Gaza you exist between the past and the future, suffering colonial barbarities unleashed by robots in the air.
In Gaza I was greeted with a friendliness I have never felt before. I saw a resilience that should not have to be possible. And I had the honour of meeting a people who are keeping alive – against all odds – the values we prize as humans: compassion, community, patience. That they have been so abandoned should make every one of us question what little humanity we have left . And do everything we can to hold on to it.
one thing struck me ... thing that maybe is very obvious... that such places, impossible situations that rise only immediate rage and sense of fundamental injustice give you at the same time very strong sense of humanity. by contrast maybe. pure humanity of people who oppose the "evil" - humanity that is that difficult to grasp (existent at all?) in a "normal" daily life. These places, your narrative of them, are always more yours than descriptions of other ones... And that is very interesting.
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