I had arranged with a friend of mine to catch up for breakfast and was waiting outside a row of basement shops, typical in Denmark. I had just returned to Copenhagen from Gaza after an assignment for a Danish NGO. I turned around to what was a seafood shop, leaned forward and peered in—for no particular reason other than moving around on the spot. The fishmonger was talking to a customer behind the counter which was neatly organized. There was a basket with lemons, each one tied with red curling ribbon, fish spices stacked, the register with all the keys covered by a silicone hood, and a pile of newspapers next to a pile of wrapping sheets. When the fishmonger moved away, I saw it. Right there, spread on the top of the newspaper pile was the feature I’d written that had been published two days earlier: It is only in Gaza you die twice.
On the outskirts of Shuja’iyya in Gaza, I had met twelve-year-old Sara and her family. Their house had been hit in an Israeli air strike. Maybe the pilot had a spare bomb, maybe he was bored or even having that wager with his mates when he put his hand over his eyes and pushed the button. A warped game the Israeli operators are rumored to play. Or maybe someone, somewhere else, had to give an order before returning home to his family. All that remained of Sara’s home were pillars of concrete; most of their belongings were below the rubble.
War on the screen is so detached from reality. In reality, there are no heroes and no glory, only worlds that collapse and dreams that shatter.
What remained was life, love, hopes and dreams. Sara didn’t want to talk to me about the war. She wanted to talk to me about what she loved the most: hanging out with her friends and going to school. But the school had for no apparent reason, also been turned to rubble. And Sara, like most children denied education, dream about one thing: learning.
“I will put on my school uniform and you will take my picture!”
“Why?”
“So my friends can see how much I miss them.”
Sara was luckier than some of her friends. In the Shifa morgue in Rimal (North Gaza) a few days before, I watched as parents wailed, searching through children’s bodies, parts of bodies, looking for their own. That day stayed with me, leaving a deep cut in my soul, one that I doubt will ever heal. When Sara asked me to take her picture, the nausea was as strong as in the morgue, and in my shame I realized the absurdity of my presence, of being there as a witness to her collapsed world. And I was able to leave, whereas she and her family and every other single human being who calls Gaza home, is trapped in what is effectively the world’s largest open air prison.
Before I knew it, Sara had dressed up in her school uniform. She took my hand and led me to where she wanted me to take her picture. Afterwards, Sara stuck her head in front of the camera as I flicked through the shots. “That one!” and she chose the picture you see. Then she grabbed my hand once again and asked me to photograph her with her friends. “These are my friends who are still alive.”
In the Muslim faith your body is buried as soon as possible after your passing. Sara’s friends had already been buried so I asked if we should go and say a prayer for them to which Sara sternly replied. “We can’t. The occupation killed them, again!” The Israelis bombed the cemetery where her friends were buried, leaving body parts and bones scattered for relatives to collect like a puzzle. Sara paused and then went on with a smile: “It’s only in Gaza you die twice!”
At the seafood store, I fell to thinking about Sara, only to be stirred by the fish monger coming up to the window display. She grabbed the Atlantic Cod by its head, poking her fingers into its eyes like a handle. She took the few steps back to the counter and slapped the fish onto the feature story.
Sara’s world had gone past its due date. And mine was turned upside down. The hustle and bustle around me went silent and I drifted back to Gaza. I remembered Sara’s soft hand dragging me along. I remembered the frantic pleading of a father to his brother, to the heavens and the earth, that burying his own son surely couldn’t be happening as he was certain the decapitated body was still alive. The father’s tears drew a strong pain across my chest, as if dragging a knife point across a steel bench.
That day, I knew something had to change. Call it an epiphany—In that moment I saw Sara’s word on the newspaper being curled up for good, I knew I had failed. One part of the world digests the news of the other world the news is happening to. But I wanted to write to change the world, and in the back of my head my world and Sara’s world were similar.
My experience of growing up Arab in Denmark, faced with being reduced to a caricature, being called a terrorist and my name compared to the namesake leaders of my time. If it was Hussein, I was called Saddam. Don’t even get me started on Mohammed.
My childhood school in Denmark hadn’t been turned to rubble but into an emotional battlefield, a psychological groundhog’s day of explosive arguments, violent brawls—and brief, fragile truces that always shattered when the home bell rung. My school years passed in a sliding door moment, and all there was to behold in that frame was a young man who had to physically fight to be allowed to be someone else—himself.
I grew up fighting Hollywood’s love affair with the Arab oil sheikh, the subhuman and untrustworthy character so unmistakably evident in Tintin. When I was twelve, I remember it as the most popular comic of that time. Even my teachers would say: Arab boys are treated like princes and girls like servants. My sister was the top achieving student at our school who was both beautiful and with an attitude that left boys wishing they knew how to command their own mother tongue. It made no difference. Over the years, it made sense to me that the arrogance of my Danish peers was mirrored in the wider world. My Arabic world. This mindset somehow holds that only Westerners are viewed as ‘true human beings.’
I realized that the only way of keeping my soul whole is to write the whole story, even if I’m writing what we call fiction.
A long story short, both Sara and I were (and still are) seen as ideas of ourselves, born from a Western moral imperative to dominate.
Not long after the fish monger day I thought about how I relived the stories of people I’d met, followed or seen, in some way or another, often with tears or in nightmares—as if I were living their lives. I wanted to share them because I knew I would never see these stories on late night television. When had I last seen a movie about a Palestinian girl who dreams about going to school? Had I ever seen it on the landing page of any streaming service? Were book covers at airports in any way representative of our diverse humanity?
The power of our stories, all of our shared stories, doesn’t charge our hearts as information in a newspaper article. For them to make sense, you the reader need to be able to relate to them. Hollywood is unmatched in its propaganda. Most books published in the west features a careful selection of story. They fit the narrative: We hold the moral high ground. They are the enemy who wants us dead. Despite the fact that it’s We who have been doing the killing for the last half millennia. And it’s this story most people in the west are served daily. For breakfast, lunch and dinner.
War on the screen is so detached from reality. In reality, there are no heroes and no glory, only worlds that collapse and dreams that shatter. Hope is the only antidote to the violence. When I saw Fathi wail over his son’s body, ask his brother why he was burying him when he was still alive, something inside of me changed. Maybe the death of a child killed the innocence in me. I’ll never know. What I learned is that there will always be parts of time, of my conscience that time amputates. I realized that the only way of keeping my soul whole is to write the whole story, even if I’m writing what we call fiction. A way of writing that to me, is always able to retrieve the fragments of life which time wishes to bury. I wanted the reader to relate, to find themselves in the world of my narrator, and close the final page knowing there is no Us or Them.
In the same way Western consumers have read novels and watched movies inspired by the horror of genocide during World War II—fictions designed to illuminate the real stories of people who were dehumanized—my hope is that the same will be true for Palestinians, who have been subjected to unfathomable atrocities. It’s not simply a matter of capturing the cruelty of their occupier on the page or the screen, either. The point is to capture love and humanity that endures in the face of that extreme violence.
To me personally, turning to fiction allowed for stories that would otherwise have disappeared into the chest of time, to live on, and slowly but surely they are educating, bringing forth that we all share this place together. The twenty-four hour news cycle leaves little room for reflection or deeper understanding of our shared humanity. Even the stories that are printed with such intent have a shelf life that demands the pages to be turned into living stories and not wrapped around a slimy fish.
_______________________________
The Hair of the Pigeon by Mohammed Massoud Morsi is available from David R. Godine Publisher.