The Violence of English

The Key is a new magazine committed to covering Palestine as the core issue at the heart of the modern world. Support our work by becoming a paid subscriber today.

Editor’s Note: The Gaza-born author of this essay, Yahya Ashour, has been in exile since September 2023, when he traveled to the US to attend the Palestine Writes Literature Festival. Israel’s genocide in Gaza began shortly afterward, leaving Ashour stranded and separated from his home and his family, who remain in Gaza. Although Ashour writes mostly in Arabic, this is his first essay written in English. Somewhere between prose and poetry, this visceral, haunting essay captures the violence and sorrow not only of his exile but also of the struggle to articulate those myriad feelings in a language that is, in many ways, synonymous with the destruction of his homeland.

Growing up by the sea, I wrote the waves. Blue was the color of my pages. My words were water. Salty, hurting, hurt. They never put out any fires; they were fire. The sun was always recycling them. They were always becoming clouds. They belonged to whomever the clouds belonged to. I was still learning the taste of rain, but I never really caught any of it. I knew it was falling. Raindrops, not rain. Something like tears that never quite leave.

Home, Gaza, was the sea: the waves, the nets. Not bathing suits and umbrellas. Home was a child who has now become a teenager who left and never turned back.

I left, and I was forced to forget the way back so I could shut my eyes every night. Since then, I have longed to talk about words, not language. Words that I flip over, words that trip me over, not translation. I want to keep on walking with words and never go anywhere. Maybe if I keep going nowhere, I’ll remember the way home.

I want to be in charge of my memory. I don’t want it to know things and remember them without me. Everyone on the television, on my phone screen, is trying to dismember my memory. I want them to know my silence, the water in my memory. It sometimes brings me joy that I grew up by the sea and drank from it. A sea – not a lake, not a river, not a valley, not a pool. It’s always going to be there. No one can drink it all, no matter how much I sometimes wish that were an option for my enemies. It won’t stop beating like a father. It won’t leave. It stays like friends who flock from here and there – everywhere.

I regret my words, the way I regret little moments of happiness. Happiness, too, was a child, and now it has become a teenager who left and never turned back.

I’m writing this. I trip over these letters because I can’t glide like water anymore. I’m writing because I don’t sound like water anymore. Perhaps I never did. Perhaps I did, though I could no longer remember. It’s very hard to remember in a language that isn’t mine. Not all shapes of words can hold memory. I still don’t know this language, because I can’t cry in it. I still can’t be water in it, or water anything with it.

This language is snow; it covers, it shields. It’s not rain, like me — my language, where words wash things and reveal them.

This happy language is not my language. Its poetry is not my poetry. It makes me a messenger, not a prophet. God doesn’t speak this language. God didn’t create it and then ruin it.

Receive The Key in your inbox for free.

Every step in this language is a step away from home, taking me farther and farther. Every sentence is another layer of rubble over my home, over my dead body.

Exile is death. It holds life the way a mirage holds memory. The absence of a mother tongue is the absence of a tongue, the presence of hunger.

I used to despise my name for the responsibility its meaning imposed; now I miss it. I know this is not who I used to be, because my name is no longer mine. It no longer moves me out of absence. I must be dead, because my name is dead here. It’s now a ghost, and I don’t believe in ghosts.

Maybe it’s a blessing not to have to express anguish in my own language. I want to keep my words clean, but I long for them to purge me of this reality. It might be a blessing not to have to process agony in my own language. That way, I know it’s always going to be there, protected, waiting for me to get back home. It could be a blessing to hurt enemies in their own language, and not mine.

Let me relish in butchering this language. Let me destroy senses with it. This language destroyed me. Let me keep enemies awake tonight. This language keeps my mother up at night.

Let me write this, so I never have to write to my enemies again. Let me write this so I never have to read my enemies again. 

The best that English speakers can do for me now is to remain silent. A silence separate from my silence. I don’t want them to suffocate my silence with theirs. I don’t want them to ask me to teach them my language. I cannot teach them my language the way I learned it. I can’t even learn my own language. It’s a tragedy to be friends with those who use words like guns. I don’t want to lose my accent. I do not recognize the letter P in poetry, in people, in Palestine.

At the end of this pool, this liquid theater, I die. I die and never come back to life. I don’t know a phoenix who writes in this language. This is the language of Batman and Spider-Man. It’s not the language of bats and spiders. It’s not the language of fish underwater. It’s the language of submersibles on a mission. It’s the language of skyscrapers, not skies. It’s the language you speak because you drink the blood of my people. I can’t trust it with my memories.