Diary from Gaza: A Road That Devours Time

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Editor’s Note: Bisan Nateel is a Palestinian writer and artist living in Gaza. Her work – which includes photography and poetry – focuses largely on identity, loss, borders and collective memory. Since the start of the genocide, Nateel has documented the testimonies and perspective of children through her work.

Translated for The Key by Hadeel Jamal.

Earlier that day, I was heading south from Deir Al-Balah to Khan Yunis. I wonder how this short journey had become so long. How did the road start devouring time? The car comes to a sudden halt in front of a tent that erases the very notion of hope from your mind. Cars lined up tightly, drivers breathing heavily between curses and prayers for forgiveness, and heads, if not bowed to the ground, straining to make sense of the road ahead. People on and around the road – in their cars, on donkey carts – mill about one another like ostriches, circling an imaginary fence before burying their heads in the ground. All I see in the eyes of every passerby is the same question: What is happening?

The taxi driver flips through the radio until he lands on a station where a broadcaster discusses the possibility of suspending school due to the bout of cold weather – Radio Makan, the Israeli station. I gaze through the car window at a man in the street; he is crossing a puddle, holding an empty, seemingly stale sandwich, yet he manages to work his jaw to take a bite and swallow.

A girl walks by holding her sister’s hand, helping her carry her lilac backpack and trying to protect her from the rain. Perhaps the education center hasn't closed its tent; there has been no instruction from the ministry, just the sheer determination to attend class or drown inside the tent. We find ourselves swimming with every downpour anyway.

Perhaps that is why we were born near the sea: to ride, time and again, a wave we mistake to be the last, only to be swept up in a succession of floods.

The Israeli channel’s advertisement then comes on. I ask the driver to change the station; what we see is enough, we do not need to hear about what is happening on the other side. I couldn’t care less about them wanting a public holiday because of the weather!

The driver laughs, saying he would rather listen to absolutely anything else in the world than hear about Gaza. We agree, then, to listen to anything at all so long as it isn’t the news.

He changes it to a classical music station. I try to shut out the city. 

The old amusement park in Madinat Asdaa (Echo City) comes into view: still, quiet, and motionless. Here comes a memory – a force that shields you from life’s brutality and the yearning of your soul for all that once was – tapping against your car window. I remember the school trips to the park. We would each carry our tickets, one by one, and stand in the long queue for the carousel ride, waiting our turn. I remember our voices ringing out across the park, and the horses strolling – the horses that were a core feature of this city’s clamor. Now, there are no children playing, no sound of horses galloping nearby. By the way, where have our city’s horses gone? Isn't the scarcity of horses in the city strange? Even the donkeys are worn out; exhaustion is etched into their bodies. It is as though the donkey drags itself along with the heavy cart, hauling breathing corpses who merely endure the passing of hour after hour, remaining alive until now only by a fluke of fate.

Before the genocide, Khan Yunis was filled with mazelike streets. Whenever I thought I had memorized a street name, a friend would correct me: “Jalaa Bisan Street is actually Jalal al-Jalaa Street. That’s what we call it here.”

There was a shawarma restaurant in Khan Yunis called Sanabil (Ears of Grain). I don’t recall ever visiting the south of Gaza without ordering a double shawarma and asking the waiter, “Could you please add extra tahini on the side?”

There was a Syrian man running a women’s clothing shop downtown — a refugee from his country’s war, unaware of the genocide awaiting him. A friend of mine once pointed to his shop, telling me, “He arrived in a truly terrible state, opened a shop, started building a life among us, and settled here.”

A short distance farther, there was the cultural center located in Al-Amal, meaning hope – the whole city associates this street with hope. Inside the center, there were efforts to introduce children to cinema, with a large hall, chairs, and a screen they seemed to think was big enough for showings.

There was the captivating Al-Qarara neighborhood. There, you truly understand that God breathed His Spirit into this land. I remember the shrine of Sheikh Hammouda that lay atop a small hill, nestled among green grass and almond trees, awakening within you the true meaning of the land. I would reach it by walking over scattered pottery fragments, vestiges of a craft for which the region was renowned, well before 1948. The tomb itself was simple and ordinary in appearance, a concrete slab covering a body buried beneath the earth. But what the tomb represented for the locals was anything but ordinary. Droves of residents would surround the tomb like pilgrims visiting a site they hold dear. They would carry their wishes and needs there and ask God to answer their prayers.

So, one question remains: Why did God bind me to this city if it all was destined to disappear in such horror?

–

All I carry with me into the city is my heart, searching for something meaningful to do. I am still here, surviving time and again. Then the streets and the tents appear to mock me: a girl carrying her heart! I feel a sense of shame before the scattered limbs and the remnants of bodies; a single heart is not enough, perhaps two or more are needed.

The car finally arrives at the Red Crescent Hospital in the neighborhood of Al-Amal. I knew this street before it became crowded with white tents. I knew it well, and I remember the trees that once lined the sidewalk.

At the hospital, the scene is different from what I knew. Tents have encroached upon the surrounding area, making the hospital appear to be struggling to find its own space amid the overcrowding. Its walls bore the clear marks of shrapnel, each fragment leaving a gaping hole. Everything that used to shade its streets was stripped away. I usually recognize places by their trees.

Yet, Al-Amal Hospital still stands. It has been attempting to recover, groaning to fulfill its medical functions. It had even become a space for cultural and community work, with a library now housed within its walls. There was something strange about seeing books, patients, the wounded, tents, and the remnants of bombing all in the same place.

The name of the neighborhood, Al-Amal – meaning hope – demands some reflection now. At the very least, its name ought to suit the pallid faces filling it. Hope alone is not enough.

The streets I used to explore are now empty, and everything east of Khan Yunis now lies within the “yellow line.” Here I am in the hospital instead of in one of the cultural centers or a real library. On that day, I am working with children with amputations on an art initiative to explore their new selves after losing parts of their small bodies.

In that hospital, I had intended to study the human body – that body in which, after two years of genocide, you discover entire new dimensions. God, how much there is to say about that body! Now, I am searching for children who should have been in classrooms drawing the sun in the corners of their notebooks. I search for their hands, feet, fingers. It isn’t so much about getting to recover their old personalities, but rather how to begin to discover themselves anew amid the loss of limbs. Together with them, I look for their new selves before they unravel and are reshaped forever.

Mohammad is one of the teenagers – a child, really – I am visiting. He sits in his wheelchair, an airway tube in place to help him breathe, sketching a portrait of his young beloved, imagining her sitting alone and waiting for him.

In the operating room, the doctors had received Mohammad’s body pierced by a single fragment from a recent bombardment. The fragment cost him the ability to move most of his body and left him with diminished mental functioning, but he had not lost his feelings for his beloved. His heart continued to beat. He was still able to draw a large red heart bearing her initials next to his.

A single piece of shrapnel can paralyze your body and bring you to a halt, leaving you tethered to a tracheal tube. And yet it is powerless to stop the love of two teenagers trying to envision a city different from the one they know.

Mohammad’s mother says he worries a lot about his beloved: He used to take his donkey cart over to the neighborhood where she was displaced and offer to drive her to and from school. He worries about how she will get to school now. Is she worried about him? Is she crying a lot? Does she think he has abandoned her? 

He tries with great difficulty to describe his beloved’s last address so that his mother can go visit her, reassure her that he is still capable of love, and ask that maybe she could wait for him – relay to his beloved that he might be discharged tomorrow or the day after. Yet displacement has altered the geography of the tents, and almost any street could fit Mohammad’s description. Perhaps, regardless of disfigured streets, tent cities, and maps of constant evacuation, the heart will still be able to find its way.

I am trying to master the language of the heart, like Mohammad. I ask him to teach it to me, and he tells me that he loves me too. This makes his mother laugh so heartily that it seems the fatigue of sleeping all night on a metal chair has vanished. Then, struggling to form his words, he asks me, “Do you work?”

“No,” I reply with a laugh, adding, “Were you planning to marry me because of my job?”

He raises his hand in denial and continues, “I’ll do the work and give you the money.”

Talking may be exhausting for Mohammad, but still he reveals that the shrapnel did not extinguish his sense of responsibility. He still has an emotional awareness that I now see accelerated and amplified in boys his age. If anything, his propensity for affection matured further, for when he awoke from the anesthesia, the first person he asked about was his beloved.

Mohammad sits in his chair, waiting for her, hoping she might arrive at any moment. In his heart, he suspects she has been martyred, and that is why she is not searching for him everywhere.