Literature in the Form of Haunting Nightmares

I was listening to Ghayath Almadhoun on a podcast when he said: “I cast an envious glance at writers and poets who were born into different surroundings.” Then the poet’s voice cut off; either the internet or the electricity went out, as usual. Although the silence came suddenly, but it wasn’t sudden for my jumbled thoughts. It slipped into a question that lingered in my mind, as if it tied scattered thoughts and blurred observations into a single thought. The matter turned from simply listening to deeply reflecting on a specific thought. I wanted to complete it with what I had observed and scrutinized. Thus, it became: "I cast an envious glance at writers and poets who were born in settled surroundings. Their words are neither about an occupied homeland nor about ruins and rubble. Their words are about a wish in the sky, about a flower in an orchard, or even about the colors of the rainbow in their land.”

Since childhood, I have surrounded myself with Palestinian literature. I feel as if the Palestinian writers and poets have taken it as a vast repository of their tragedies and disappointments. If they try to fly to the sky, they are struck by a spiteful bullet, that reminding them of the black fences that confine them. The ink of their pens is the blood of the martyrs. The pens begin and refuse to place a dot that would suggest satisfaction with the end of the words. Their pens narrate real nightmares, about a family waiting for a tattered piece of paper that would allow them to reunite after years of separation. They tell miserable yet determined attempts, like a little girl trying to write with her left hand after losing her right to an airstrike or a blind bullet. The pen writes easily, without the need for the writer to brainstorm to create detective novels to keep the reader engaged deeply to finish reading the novel. They narrate literally and with actual words; there is no need for metaphors. The literature is stained in red, a spectacle to behold, yet dangerous for any reader who dares to come too close. This is the literature that dropped in my hand and the kind my eyes have read for most of my life.

I find myself reading a Nakba novel while living through a present one. I read in the book about the sound of an explosion, and then I heard it exploding in my neighborhood, so I don’t get bored with the reality. I go to read war diaries, and I discuss with other readers about our written reality between the lines at dedicated gatherings, and I find them like me, deeply immersed.

I don’t have the time to read Western literature, because sometimes I feel it’s a betrayal. As if there is no trace of reassurance; fear has become the companion, the maze is the compass, the homelessness is the shelter, and the inhalation here has become without exhalation!

Maybe this is a reason why I am helpless to write another poem far from the red color, the green color erased from the color wheel here. Maybe we will create another similar and special color for us, recognizing it with us, and we won’t share it with those who don’t understand us. Or maybe if my entire surrounding changed, I would be able to write trivial things and wouldn’t care to share them. Because we are nothing but a mirror of this city, a mixture of it, like a dough that takes shape, and its ingredients are the events and the sorrows of the city. Every event that happened to it is reflected back to us; it rages against us to declare that it is the tyrant. So we turn to paper, hoping we might be able to empty out this chaos; we empty it in random words, in a drawing in black, and recite it in a poem that doesn’t have a title or end; all of it is nightmares, whether in waking or in dreams, and if you ever manage to escape them, tell me how you did it!