DORGHAM ABUSALIM
Everyone talks about the summer of 2014. Indeed, fifty-one dreadful days.
From Egypt, I returned to Gaza after the excitement of spending the summer vacation faded away. It was too soon to return to school in Europe, and I missed Mama a great deal.
The journey through the scorching Sinai Desert took me back to simpler days. Back then, I did not have to stop at Egyptian military checkpoints or take the crumbling ferry across the Suez Canal. Instead, the driver would zoom across the towering Peace Bridge, cutting the trip by three hours. But this is now, and much has changed since I last travelled through Sinai.
When I arrived at my parents’ house, I could not help but be overwhelmed by its majestic aura, nestled on a hill, surrounded by all the greenery. I fell into the embrace of Mama’s arms as she patted me down head to toe to feel my weight. She lost her sight several years ago, but not her motherly touch. “You are too skinny!” she said in dismay. “We’ll take care of that,” Mama chuckled as she laid out the menu options for a dearly missed homemade meal.
A few days later, I visited my sister, who married a year ago, at her apartment. “Come in, come in! Dinner will be served soon,” she chirped, as she proudly ushered me in.
Her husband was eager to meet me. We did not know each other very well. The dinner was an excellent icebreaker. As we devoured her famous maklouba, we spoke about all sorts of things. We all thought the anticipated war, especially with Ramadan around the corner, would be short-lived, nothing more than a targeted skirmish between Israel and Hamas to settle some political scores.
Little did I know, my blind Mama, paralyzed Baba, two sisters, and I would spend our nights huddled between as many walls as we could count in our quest for safety, while listening to radio broadcasts about the impact of Israel’s macabre technological prowess.
“Dorgham! Dorgham! Wake up! Everyone! Mama! Help!” my older sister rushed out of her room, “I heard it, oh my God I heard it!” she said.
“Calm down, I cannot understand you, heard what?” I asked, while slowly pulling myself out of bed after another sleepless, feverish night.
“A roof-knock! On our brother’s house next door!” she answered.
One of my older brothers, who had been working abroad for years, built a house on a plot of land that Baba gave him for a time when he and his family would return. His life’s work was in jeopardy.
A “roof-knock” is what Israel calls fair warning: a small missile strikes the target to evacuate any civilians who may be there. The irony is that the roof-knock is, in fact, deadly, so the idea of evacuation is pointless. The roof-knock is then followed by a bigger missile capable of destroying whole buildings. I’d seen footage of this horrific so-called warning on the news.
“What! Are you sure? Where is Mama? Where is everyone?” I said in shock. “Yalla, yalla, yalla!”
“Where!?” my sisters screamed.
“The garage,” I replied. My brother’s house is east of ours, and the garage is west, located on the lower slope of the hill. I thought it was the safest place. “And get in the car! Where are the car keys!?”
“Make sure you grab our bags and dress modestly in case we end up at a school shelter!” Mama told the girls. She asked the housekeeper to pack in advance, preparing for the worst.
“Mama, did you pack your jewelry!? And the land deeds!?” my younger sister asked. “The deeds, yes, not the jewelry,” Mama replied.
“What!?” my sister responded as she rushed out of the car to pick up Mama’s jewelry box.
“It does not matter,” I screamed.
“It’s fine, we will be alright,” Mama tried to calm me down.
“Why are you not moving?” my sister asked when she returned to the car.
“Give me a minute!” I said, breathing heavily.
“They say the second strike comes only a few minutes after the roof-knock,” my other sister explained. “Yalla!” they both shouted.
What if we leave the garage and a drone strikes us? Would we become suspect if we are seen driving away from the site of an airstrike? These and a million other questions rushed into my mind.
“Yalla!” my older sister snapped me out of my panic.
When we left the garage, a few meters down the road, we stopped for an ambulance, going east of our house.
“Why is there an ambulance? Was there anyone at my brother’s house? Is anyone hurt?” I asked my sisters. “Call the housekeeper!”
We decided to drive to my aunt’s, next door. “May God curse them all!” my aunt prayed. “Why would they destroy our houses like this?”
“I think there was a resistance fighter in the field by the house,” my cousin speculated. “They must have targeted someone or something.”
“Dorgham, you have lost so much weight! Who knew a war could make people so sick!” my aunt turned to me. “I know what you need! Would you like some wine?” We spent the next couple of hours anxiously anticipating the bigger missile, debating whether it was safe to go back. The missile never came.
When we returned, the family and the house staff went to sleep off the shock of the day. I stayed in the kitchen, smoking like a chimney, staring eastward out of the window until the sun came up.
I needed to get out of the house. So, when the housekeeper needed a ride to the taxi station, I volunteered to drive her.
“Your mother told me you have been ill,” said the housekeeper. “Eat salty things with olive oil and drink warm fluids. That should help.”
Piles of rubble lined the streets. The housekeeper shared with me stories she heard about every strike. I did not want to return to my parents’ house so soon. I decided to go for a ride on the coastal highway, blasting music and simply letting go.
I parked the car by the edge of a cliff and looked out into the horizon of the sea. Memories of my rebellious teens rushed into my mind. I looked around and remembered him, a neighbor around my age, with the charm of a “bad boy.” We would sneak out in his car, where our teenaged bodies would climax near a seaside cliff not far from where I stood.
For a moment, the rush of the memories felt sweet, but that quickly faded away as I walked further down memory lane.
“Where have you been!?” Mama admonished me as soon as I returned to the house. “We have been so worried! Baba had a heated argument and slapped the chauffeur for not going with you,” she fumed.
“What? What do you mean?” I asked. “He is a grown man!”
“Ya khawal!” Baba shouted from his room. He must have heard us talking.
“Here we go,” I said to Mama as I walked toward my father’s room. “I knew there is no escaping this fight no matter what, even during a war.”
“Where have you been, ya manyak!?” Baba asked with utter contempt.
“Khawal” and “manyak” are two words I thought I left behind a long time ago. They mean faggot.
“Really, Baba? Again with this nonsense? I am not a child anymore, and you will speak to me with respect!” I fired back at him.
“Come here, bring him closer to me!” Baba instructed his caretaker. The house staff never got involved in our family fights, though I always wondered what they thought and how they felt about Baba’s infamous fits of rage.
“What is it, old man? You cannot get up? Why don’t you try to run after me? You used to carry a belt, remember?” I bullied him as they all looked at me, startled by my words.
“She has not raised you right!” my father continued with his sharp words.
“Really?” I laughed, “She is my mother, careful now,” I warned him. “If she has not raised me right, your divorced mother did not raise you right, either,” I said dismissively and walked away.
I am not one to buy into archaic ideas about family and women, but I knew this was Baba’s weakest point: my grandparents’ divorce and how grandfather had treated Baba’s mother. I always wondered how Baba could repeat the same mistakes so often, when he never saw eye-to-eye with his own father because of them.
“Habibi! Please go easy on him,” Mama pleaded with me. “The house staff can deal with him, do not worry about them. They have been with us for years. You have always been tough with him.”
“He is insufferable!” I told her.
“You are too rough on him. I will not stand for it and will tell the rest of the family. You know he does not mean it the way you think he means it,” my older sister piped in.
“Enough! Let us go to your aunt’s; we’ll leave him be for some time,” Mama said, attempting to defuse the tension with her usual method of avoidance and pretending that leaving Baba alone was a solution. It never worked.
We were sitting on my aunt’s balcony when Baba appeared on our balcony, separated only by a parking lot, waving his gun around.
“Is that a gun!?” I asked, my jaw dropping. “I guess old habits die hard!” I laughed hysterically.
“Go back inside, old man!” my aunt shouted across the parking lot, while my cousin tried to calm him down. I sat there in disbelief, looking at the toxic masculinity of our world come to life, complete with a gun.
Baba fired three shots into the sky while leaning on his caretaker, as if to say he is still in charge.
“Long live the martyrs! Long live the martyrs!” our neighborhood mosque announced.
“They should play uplifting music instead of screaming chants,” my aunt chuckled. We were never a family tied to religion or the local mosque. Mama, who prays five times a day and has gone to Mecca twice, raised us all to be the sovereigns of our faith. Imams, priests, and rabbis, merchants of religion, as she would call them, have no business in our faith.
“One hell of a vacation,” Mama said as I prepared to leave the next morning.
“Yes, I came and brought the war with me,” I joked.
“I hope circumstances will be better next time,” she sighed.
“Next time!? There will be no next time, Mama. I am done with this miserable place,” I announced.
“Don’t talk like that! Home will always be home,” she sternly replied.
“So much rubble,” I said to the chauffeur on our way to the crossing.
“This is nothing, only the beginning. Farther east is where the real destruction is,” he replied. We were passing through Khan Younis, the governorate where the Khuza’a massacre took place a few days earlier. The town was practically flattened to the ground, like the Shujaiyya neighborhood.
When we arrived at the Egyptian side of the crossing, I looked around and saw a crumbling sign that said, “Welcome to Ma’bar Rafah, Egypt.”
I was suddenly struck by the realization that the Arabic word Ma’bar, which means “crossing,” shares the same root as the Hebrew word referring to the Hebrew tribe, not the language—the tribe, we are told, that crossed the Sinai in the Exodus. I then remembered one of my favorite TV political dramas, The West Wing. In an episode about the façade of making peace in the Middle East, the writers predictably portrayed an unfavorable view of Palestine. But as I endured the humiliation at Ma’bar Rafah, one line from the episode could not feel truer: “Palestinians are the Jews of the Arab world.”
The home where Dorgham grew up in Deir Albalah
Photo courtesy of the author
“My God! What happened to you?” my older brother asked in shock when he met me at Cairo International Airport nearly twenty-four hours later. “Thank God you are still in one piece, a very skinny piece,” he tried to cheer me up. “Your flight is in a few hours. I am sorry I could not convince anyone to let you stay in Cairo. I tried all my contacts.”
“I would not stay here if they offered me citizenship!” I replied angrily. “Hush now, there are security guards everywhere,” he whispered. “Here, take this. Let me know if you need more when you arrive.” He handed me some money.
When the plane took off, I felt a sudden uplift in the pit of my stomach. I wanted to weep for what had been and for what would come. For an image of myself that I knew had been shattered by the bloodshed and the pain. But the time for tears had passed, and deep down I knew a long journey of healing lay ahead. I wondered whether anyone is capable of completely healing the scars of war, injustice, shame, loneliness, and disappointment. I wondered if I even wanted to be healed, if the pain would be a good reminder of the cruelty and inhumanity of this world.
I put on my headphones and began listening to the one song that got me through the haze of those fifty-one days. I would listen to it when I needed to be alone, defying death away from a world that mistook my pain for everything except what it was: pain to be heard, to be understood, to be embraced.
I Lived (OneRepublic)
Hope when you take that jump
You don’t fear the fall
Hope when the water rises
You built a wall
Hope when the crowd screams out
They’re screaming your name
Hope if everybody runs
You choose to stay
Hope that you fall in love
And it hurts so bad
The only way you can know
You give it all you had
And I hope that you don’t suffer
But take the pain
Hope when the moment comes,
You’ll say
I, I did it all
I, I did it all
I owned every second that this world could give
I saw so many places, the things that I did
Yeah with every broken bone
I swear I lived