Q: What is it like to be a Palestinian writer at this time?
A: Once, I had no name. I rose each day as if it were the first morning on earth. I moved sturdy and permeable, translucent with a wondering hunger for the world. That is to say, I was a child, and I was safe.
In these days, language stirred around me, brushing me with its shapes. Some words left traces, or formed like dew around my throat. These I kept and sipped from; they were the sounds of love. I did not yet know the difference between English and Arabic, or how some words might become—borders, weapons, traps.
*
One day, my mother called me to her lap. She was holding a plump paperback; inside, straight and curved lines, overlaid by grid. Her long, unpainted nails traced them, then guided mine to do the same, releasing noises with each one.
In the coming days, the shapes began to coalesce, sounds forming, traveling from my mouth to my mind. “AM” was first, followed by SEE and EAT. A body, presencing.
I did not yet know the difference between English and Arabic, or how some words might become—borders, weapons, traps.
My first story: that rat is sad.
I was overwhelmed, stricken on behalf of the rat. Why is she sad? Where can I find her, can I make her glad?
The world-making power of words never left me.
*
More lessons. In a sunny playroom, my father held The World, giving its plastic orb a spin. He placed his finger on a point and taught me the word Palestine.
A revelation, and a loss. Before this, Palestine was ambient, limitless and undefined. It whispered in grainy photographs from Gaza, hanging in the hall. It breathed yansoon in the winter, naʿnaʿ in the heat. It held me in the muscled, soft arms of my grandmother, her bangles singing as she reached for me.
I had Palestine, undefined. Palestine, like respiration—constant, unconscious. Vital, and sweet.
How unbearable it is, to know life once felt so generous.
*
Of course, there was so much I did not know—all the Palestine that slept under my father’s bed, or boxed in the garage. Pages and pages, all in Arabic, traces of his past, which was also mine. A birth certificate from Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Old letters, report cards dating back to his first UNRWA classroom. A paper trail, a motley archive languaging through space and time.
All this, he sheathed in silence. He was waiting for the day the land was no longer prisoner, when our hostage Gaza would be released. And so I was not touched by that word which defined his childhood—لاجئ, refugee. History would be easier to utter, he imagined, once Palestine was free. Later, later. Inshallah. In the waning glow of Oslo, he tried to believe.
And for now, the bills and the dollars came in English. For now, he loved the way I pronounced words that tied his tongue. In the spring, he watered the grass as I covered the driveway with chalk flowers. He beamed at my quiet concentration, my head bobbing to an unheard song. His, filling with a litany of relief. How much easier my life would be. How much better he thought, how free.
*
Was he writing?
*
I did not think to resist, as language began to split. Like Palestine, Arabic was delineated, secondary, subset. Staggering: how easily its vastness vanished from view. Anglophonic dominance at the library, on PBS, at school. Arab silence, naturalized.
And so I fell in love with words as they found me: in English. They arrived self-evident, confident as canon, and I devoured. Back then, loving books felt like another way of loving life: between the pages I lived, and lived, and lived again.
*
Was I a writer yet?
*
Even after 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, the bridge between new friends. English, in our American curriculum and pirated DVDs.
Arabic flickered on fringes, in the after hours. A crooning adhan in the night. The melodrama of mosalsalat. The language of long Fridays tucked in small apartments, crowded with cousins, elders, and noise.
There, inundated by Palestinian voices, I felt myself briefly vivid, planted warm inside my flesh. Here, touching and kissing and eating and holding and language all seemed to do the same thing: remind me I was alive, woven, we.
Was this writing? Reading? Palestinian? Being?
*
I always loved coloring. Then, around age eight, I began to paint with words. The sensation of falling forward, page as plunging. Letters, the wild and benevolent animals bearing me deeper, further. Sometimes I was the gallop, and sometimes, the world. Imagination, divine. Not commanding, but collaborating with exuberance. Feral and free of fear.
My budding queerness murmured under the love stories I rewrote without The Prince. My body cartwheeled through outer space, smuggled onto submarines, sprouted wings or fins.
And always, in some margin, I was writing the word “love.” Over and over, attaching it to name after name. I LOVE MOMY AND DADY. I LOVE SITTOO I LOVE TARIQ I LOVE ALL THE CATS AND HORSES. The words felt like a kind of spell—as if my love, written enough ways, could cradle the earth.
Later, the strangeness of life grew sharper. I tasted melancholy, terror as I glimpsed my parents as mortals, the world’s senseless suffering. My own depths, too, grew ominous. Gaping, inverting abundance into threat.
Once, I wanted everything inside me. Now, writing became rescue, a rope I wove and followed through the dark. Sometimes, when I felt safe enough, language became skin. Words, my tentative or tender touch.
What I’m saying is, I was a teenager, a young woman probing her own heart. My life felt weighty and singular, and with writing, I tried to find its shape.
*
In these moments, was I Palestinian? Was my prose?
*
(((I would love art to be apolitical. Believe me, I would)))
*
As a teen, I moved “back” to the United States and found Palestine was all 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, barely parting with the softness of their “ps.” Process—their wistful, wounded civility. Peace—an English wish those at a distance were pleased to wish and wish.
Voice cracking, she spittled me with the news that I did not exist: Palestinians aren’t real.
At my Ivy League university, I heard students debate the morality of apartheid, the reasonability of theft. One morning, as I stood at a memorial for 1,300 Palestinians killed in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, a rageful white woman approached. Voice cracking, she spittled me with the news that I did not exist: Palestinians aren’t real. At this, I was speechless.
Palestinian—unreal, yet my presence made some classmates feel unsafe. Nonexistent, yet my ethnicity made three different frat boys recoil. Later, a fourth one laughed about “Arab equality” as he assaulted me.
.*
If Palestine was occluded, Palestinian was read as affront, transgression, threat. How in English it was sieged with meaning, overrun with interpretation, starved of body and earth.
*
In college, I might have written poems. I wanted to.
But with time, I began spending my words on persuasion, defense. How captured, how political, how Palestinian my prose became. I had been startled, distressed to discover Americans knew so little history. How easily, void of all context, they believed us savage, terrorist. How it hurt, to imagine my family so accused.
So, I wrote to confront them with our Nakba, to name our suffering and dead. The inverse of my father’s optimistic edits—his Palestine was a bouquet of kind memories and words. My language, swollen, exhuming all he had wanted to redact. I packaged catastrophe in paragraphs. Spoke the syntax of NGOs, the language of lack.
*
How narrow this made us. How thin my words became. Trying to slip through their needle-eyed empathy, I was disciplined diction, subtraction and projection, sophisticated and benign. My body, too, tried to pronounce worthiness: see how unthreatening, it said, shrinking. See how controlled, how small.
*
How many years to unlearn this.
How deep the silence, first.
*
Where does language go, when we betray?
*
When the words took me again, it was in the night. More alive in sleep, I was—dreaming, drifting in the mind of a child. Startling up, stirred by a young hunger that stole me to my desk. Many midnights I sat up with language, open, remembering. Inscrutable, at first—fragments of sensation, color, coalescing slow.
Until, on the page appeared: Baba and his World. My grandmother’s arms, and her voice as it always was: felahi, free of American words.
*
For a year, I wrote in secret, relearning language in both my tongues. Finding Palestine strident, vigorous in Arabic. My English, humbled, listening.
*
It’s true, that what stirred me to write at first was grandmother, father, Palestine. But when I wrote towards them, it was not, this time, to prove. There was only the rhythm of my aliveness, the love which was remembering, remembering.
Writing, beginning to be, like the beginning. Faint brushes becoming stronger strokes—language as the body’s echo, body as the instrument of life.
I was becoming, uncovering,
Palestinian,
writer,
at once
again.
*
For the first time, I had a sense of—fleeting, furtive, fragile—home. In this space, English was the walls, but Arabic, the ground and sky. Two languages, blending, Arabic at last coming first. The false starts were many—I had misplaced so much language. But always, I held close that one line by Darwish—لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. We have a homeland made of words.
*
October, 2023. A rupture in time. A rend in the false present tense, past and future pouring through. In the shattering horror, how I craved disbelief. But no—this was both unprecedented and familiar. Not new, but Nakba, amplified to the depraved dimensions of “dumb bombs” and AI. Ancestral nightmare rising—in my blood, with our blood.
Palestinian, on the far side of English safety, I am complicit—yet unfinished.
How my body shook at the wild cruelty. How I wanted to tear the walls around me, so American and demure. And how my eyes—how, how, how?—my eyes, like everyone’s, watched the atrocity go on.
Some editors scrambled to reach the Palestinian writers they knew. When they emailed, requesting words, I told them I had none.
*
Yet, in Gaza, language lived. Amidst Zionist onslaught, millions of dispatches rising, transcribing the shattered hours. Our phones filled with them—gutting footage, desperate and damning captions, inventories of heinous crime. This time, the Nakba would be televised.
*
Many of these Palestinians produce their messages in English. They die in Arabic, but know in which language they are killed.
*
The Darwish line continues: لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلَّمْ تَكَلَّمْ ….We have a homeland made of words. Speak, speak….
*
Tell the Americans, my cousin in Nuseirat, Gaza texts me in Arabic. His messages are holy and filled with horror—for over eighteen months, a record of a young man becoming ghost. Today, he speaks with a weariness that shudders my soul. Tell them: it is plain and simple: what we are facing is genocide, genocide.
*
Plain and simple—and so is my failure. Language, built by humans yet failing to encompass what they do. And yet there is love in the trying, and so I surrender to attempt.
Learning: to face Gaza is to shatter—to lose, maybe forever, that child and her wonder, the universal and timeless joy. Her departure is a wound. The grief, a sign. To write and to live for a world in which she might return.
*
The Darwish line, in full: لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلَّمْ تَكَلَّمْ لأُسْنِدَ دَرْبِي عَلَى حَجَرٍ مِنْ حَجَرْ لَنَا بَلَدٌ مِنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلِّمْ تَكلَّمْ لِنَعْرِفَ حَدّاً لِهَذَا السَّفَرْ!
We have a homeland made of words. Speak, speak, that I may steady my path stone upon stone. Speak, speak, so we may know an end to our sojourning.
*
…to be a Palestinian writer—?
To be, a choice obliterated, taken and taken from my kin.
—taken, taken, my kin—
Palestinian—now, I live watching Palestinian bodies bear what bodies cannot. (Until they cannot). My own body, Palestinian—the meaning, again, must change. Palestinian, on the far side of English safety, I am complicit—yet unfinished. Student of sacrifice, of fight.
Writer, I choose to let my language break.
*
Speak speak, said Darwish, but then—
Silence, he ordered,
silence for Gaza.
*
*
Like me, my cousin once was a child. In Gaza, there were days that he, too, woke exuberant, tumbling toward the gift of life. I know this—because he, too, is a poet. His language—exhausted, fuming, terrified—still carries the trace of song. The beauty in him, the last to surrender, even when his words speak defeat.
Unextinguished, the Palestinian who is a writer, before Palestinian writer. The spark of where he began, and belongs.
______________________________
The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza is available via Catapult.
