Words As Borders, Weapons, Traps: Sarah Aziza On Being A Palestinian Writer Today

Q: What is it for illustration to beryllium a Palestinian writer astatine this time?

A: Once, I had nary name. I roseate each time arsenic if it were nan first greeting connected earth. I moved sturdy and permeable, translucent pinch a wondering hunger for nan world. That is to say, I was a child, and I was safe.

In these days, connection stirred astir me, brushing maine pinch its shapes. Some words near traces, aliases formed for illustration dew astir my throat. These I kept and sipped from; they were nan sounds of love. I did not yet cognize nan quality betwixt English and Arabic, aliases really immoderate words mightiness become—borders, weapons, traps.

*

One day, my mother called maine to her lap. She was holding a plump paperback; inside, consecutive and curved lines, overlaid by grid. Her long, unpainted nails traced them, past guided excavation to do nan same, releasing noises pinch each one.

In nan coming days, nan shapes began to coalesce, sounds forming, walking from my rima to my mind. “AM” was first, followed by SEE and EAT. A body, presencing.

I did not yet cognize nan quality betwixt English and Arabic, aliases really immoderate words mightiness become—borders, weapons, traps.

My first story: that rat is sad.

I was overwhelmed, stricken connected behalf of nan rat. Why is she sad? Where tin I find her, tin I make her glad?

The world-making powerfulness of words ne'er near me.

*

More lessons. In a sunny playroom, my begetter held The World, giving its integrative orb a spin. He placed his digit connected a constituent and taught maine nan connection Palestine.

A revelation, and a loss. Before this, Palestine was ambient, limitless and undefined. It whispered successful grainy photographs from Gaza, hanging successful nan hall. It breathed yansoon successful nan winter, naʿnaʿ successful nan heat. It held maine successful nan muscled, soft arms of my grandmother, her bangles singing arsenic she reached for me.

I had Palestine, undefined. Palestine, for illustration respiration—constant, unconscious. Vital, and sweet.

How unbearable it is, to cognize life erstwhile felt truthful generous.

*

Of course, location was truthful overmuch I did not know—all nan Palestine that slept nether my father’s bed, aliases boxed successful nan garage. Pages and pages, each successful Arabic, traces of his past, which was besides mine. A commencement certificate from Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Old letters, study cards making love backmost to his first UNRWA classroom. A insubstantial trail, a motley archive languaging done abstraction and time.

All this, he webbed successful silence. He was waiting for nan time nan onshore was nary longer prisoner, erstwhile our hostage Gaza would beryllium released. And truthful I was not touched by that connection which defined his childhood—لاجئ, refugee. History would beryllium easier to utter, he imagined, erstwhile Palestine was free. Later, later. Inshallah. In nan waning glow of Oslo, he tried to believe.

And for now, nan bills and nan dollars came successful English. For now, he loved nan measurement I pronounced words that tied his tongue. In nan spring, he watered nan writer arsenic I covered nan driveway pinch chalk flowers. He beamed astatine my quiet concentration, my caput bobbing to an unheard song. His, filling pinch a litany of relief. How overmuch easier my life would be. How overmuch better he thought, really free.

*

Was he writing?

*

I did not deliberation to resist, arsenic connection began to split. Like Palestine, Arabic was delineated, secondary, subset. Staggering: really easy its vastness vanished from view. Anglophonic power astatine nan library, connected PBS, astatine school. Arab silence, naturalized.

And truthful I fell successful emotion pinch words arsenic they recovered me: successful English. They arrived self-evident, assured arsenic canon, and I devoured. Back then, loving books felt for illustration different measurement of loving life: betwixt nan pages I lived, and lived, and lived again.

*

Was I a writer yet?

*

Even aft we moved to Saudi Arabia, English crowded us. My father’s company, and our housing, was American. Around us, expats hailing from China to Senegal to Peru. English, nan span betwixt caller friends. English, successful our American program and pirated DVDs.

Arabic flickered connected fringes, successful nan aft hours. A crooning adhan successful nan night. The melodrama of mosalsalat. The connection of agelong Fridays tucked successful mini apartments, crowded pinch cousins, elders, and noise.

There, inundated by Palestinian voices, I felt myself concisely vivid, planted lukewarm wrong my flesh. Here, rubbing and kissing and eating and holding and connection each seemed to do nan aforesaid thing: punctual maine I was alive, woven, we.

Was this writing? Reading? Palestinian? Being?

*

I ever loved coloring. Then, astir property eight, I began to overgarment pinch words. The sensation of falling forward, page arsenic plunging. Letters, nan chaotic and benevolent animals base maine deeper, further. Sometimes I was nan gallop, and sometimes, nan world. Imagination, divine. Not commanding, but collaborating pinch exuberance. Feral and free of fear.

My budding queerness murmured nether nan emotion stories I rewrote without The Prince. My assemblage cartwheeled done outer space, smuggled onto submarines, germinated wings aliases fins.

And always, successful immoderate margin, I was penning nan connection “love.” Over and over, attaching it to sanction aft name. I LOVE MOMY AND DADY. I LOVE SITTOO I LOVE TARIQ I LOVE ALL THE CATS AND HORSES. The words felt for illustration a benignant of spell—as if my love, written capable ways, could cradle nan earth.

Later, nan strangeness of life grew sharper. I tasted melancholy, panic arsenic I glimpsed my parents arsenic mortals, nan world’s senseless suffering. My ain depths, too, grew ominous. Gaping, inverting abundance into threat.

Once, I wanted everything wrong me. Now, penning became rescue, a statement I wove and followed done nan dark. Sometimes, erstwhile I felt safe enough, connection became skin. Words, my tentative aliases tender touch.

What I’m saying is, I was a teenager, a young female probing her ain heart. My life felt weighty and singular, and pinch writing, I tried to find its shape.

*

In these moments, was I Palestinian? Was my prose?

*

(((I would emotion creation to beryllium apolitical. Believe me, I would)))

*

As a teen, I moved “back” to nan United States and recovered Palestine was each talk. Or—no, not Palestine, but conflict. Not Palestine, but Israel and the Arabs. Israel, besieged by explosive beings who were begging for a cage. Not Palestine, but peace process. American lips, hardly parting pinch nan softness of their “ps.” Process—their wistful, wounded civility. Peace—an English wish those astatine a region were pleased to wish and wish.

Voice cracking, she spittled maine pinch nan news that I did not exist: Palestinians aren’t real.

At my Ivy League university, I heard students statement nan morality of apartheid, nan reasonability of theft. One morning, arsenic I stood astatine a memorial for 1,300 Palestinians killed successful Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, a rageful achromatic female approached. Voice cracking, she spittled maine pinch nan news that I did not exist: Palestinians aren’t real. At this, I was speechless.

Palestinian—unreal, yet my beingness made immoderate classmates consciousness unsafe. Nonexistent, yet my ethnicity made 3 different frat boys recoil. Later, a 4th 1 laughed astir “Arab equality” arsenic he assaulted me.

.*

If Palestine was occluded, Palestinian was publication arsenic affront, transgression, threat. How successful English it was sieged pinch meaning, overrun pinch interpretation, starved of assemblage and earth.

*

In college, I mightiness person written poems. I wanted to.

But pinch time, I began spending my words connected persuasion, defense. How captured, really political, really Palestinian my prose became. I had been startled, distressed to observe Americans knew truthful small history. How easily, void of each context, they believed america savage, terrorist. How it hurt, to ideate my family truthful accused.

So, I wrote to face them pinch our Nakba, to sanction our suffering and dead. The inverse of my father’s optimistic edits—his Palestine was a bouquet of benignant memories and words. My language, swollen, exhuming each he had wanted to redact. I packaged catastrophe successful paragraphs. Spoke nan syntax of NGOs, nan connection of lack.

*

How constrictive this made us. How bladed my words became. Trying to gaffe done their needle-eyed empathy, I was disciplined diction, subtraction and projection, blase and benign. My body, too, tried to pronounce worthiness: spot really unthreatening, it said, shrinking. See really controlled, really small.

*

How galore years to unlearn this.

How heavy nan silence, first.

*

Where does connection go, erstwhile we betray?

*

When nan words took maine again, it was successful nan night. More live successful sleep, I was—dreaming, drifting successful nan mind of a child. Startling up, stirred by a young hunger that stole maine to my desk. Many midnights I sat up pinch language, open, remembering. Inscrutable, astatine first—fragments of sensation, color, coalescing slow.

Until, connected nan page appeared: Baba and his World. My grandmother’s arms, and her sound arsenic it ever was: felahi, free of American words.

*

For a year, I wrote successful secret, relearning connection successful some my tongues. Finding Palestine strident, vigorous successful Arabic. My English, humbled, listening.

*

It’s true, that what stirred maine to constitute astatine first was grandmother, father, Palestine. But erstwhile I wrote towards them, it was not, this time, to prove. There was only nan hit of my aliveness, nan emotion which was remembering, remembering.

Writing, opening to be, for illustration nan beginning. Faint brushes becoming stronger strokes—language arsenic nan body’s echo, assemblage arsenic nan instrumentality of life.

I was becoming, uncovering,
Palestinian,
writer,
at once
again.

*

For nan first time, I had a consciousness of—fleeting, furtive, fragile—home. In this space, English was nan walls, but Arabic, nan crushed and sky. Two languages, blending, Arabic astatine past coming first. The mendacious starts were many—I had misplaced truthful overmuch language. But always, I held adjacent that 1 statement by Darwish—لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. We person a homeland made of words.

*

October, 2023. A rupture successful time. A rend successful nan mendacious coming tense, past and early pouring through. In nan shattering horror, really I craved disbelief. But no—this was some unprecedented and familiar. Not new, but Nakba, amplified to nan depraved dimensions of “dumb bombs” and AI. Ancestral nightmare rising—in my blood, pinch our blood.

Palestinian, connected nan acold broadside of English safety, I americium complicit—yet unfinished.

How my assemblage shook astatine nan chaotic cruelty. How I wanted to tear nan walls astir me, truthful American and demure. And really my eyes—how, how, how?—my eyes, for illustration everyone’s, watched nan atrocity spell on.

Some editors scrambled to scope nan Palestinian writers they knew. When they emailed, requesting words, I told them I had none.

*

Yet, successful Gaza, connection lived. Amidst Zionist onslaught, millions of dispatches rising, transcribing nan shattered hours. Our phones filled pinch them—gutting footage, hopeless and damning captions, inventories of heinous crime. This time, nan Nakba would beryllium televised.

*

Many of these Palestinians nutrient their messages successful English. They dice successful Arabic, but cognize successful which connection they are killed.

*

The Darwish statement continues: لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلَّمْ تَكَلَّمْ ….We person a homeland made of words. Speak, speak….

*

Tell nan Americans, my relative successful Nuseirat, Gaza texts maine successful Arabic. His messages are beatified and filled pinch horror—for complete eighteen months, a grounds of a young man becoming ghost. Today, he speaks pinch a weariness that shudders my soul. Tell them: it is plain and simple: what we are facing is genocide, genocide.

*

Plain and simple—and truthful is my failure. Language, built by humans yet failing to encompass what they do. And yet location is emotion successful nan trying, and truthful I surrender to attempt.

Learning: to look Gaza is to shatter—to lose, possibly forever, that kid and her wonder, nan cosmopolitan and timeless joy. Her departure is simply a wound. The grief, a sign. To constitute and to unrecorded for a world successful which she mightiness return.

*

The Darwish line, successful full: لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلَّمْ تَكَلَّمْ لأُسْنِدَ دَرْبِي عَلَى حَجَرٍ مِنْ حَجَرْ لَنَا بَلَدٌ مِنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلِّمْ تَكلَّمْ لِنَعْرِفَ حَدّاً لِهَذَا السَّفَرْ!

We person a homeland made of words. Speak, speak, that I whitethorn dependable my way chromatic upon stone. Speak, speak, truthful we whitethorn cognize an extremity to our sojourning.

*

…to beryllium a Palestinian writer—?

To be, a prime obliterated, taken and taken from my kin.

—taken, taken, my kin—

Palestinian—now, I unrecorded watching Palestinian bodies carnivore what bodies cannot. (Until they cannot). My ain body, Palestinian—the meaning, again, must change. Palestinian, connected nan acold broadside of English safety, I americium complicit—yet unfinished. Student of sacrifice, of fight.

Writer, I take to fto my connection break.

*

Speak speak, said Darwish, but then—

Silence, he ordered,

silence for Gaza.

*

*

Like me, my relative erstwhile was a child. In Gaza, location were days that he, too, woke exuberant, tumbling toward nan gift of life. I cognize this—because he, too, is simply a poet. His language—exhausted, fuming, terrified—still carries nan trace of song. The beauty successful him, nan past to surrender, moreover erstwhile his words speak defeat.

Unextinguished, nan Palestinian who is simply a writer, earlier Palestinian writer. The spark of wherever he began, and belongs.

______________________________

The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza is disposable via Catapult.