Ghassan Kanafani - Letter From Gaza (2008)

Speaker 1: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, because I don't know at what time of day you'll be listening to this. Time passes. But what makes sense of human lives stays the same. And I want to read you a short story by the great Palestinian writer Gassam Ghanifani. He's a writer I admire very much. And in the last book I've written, not yet published, it's dedicated to his memory. He was assassinated in 1972 by the Mossad, the Israeli secret police. He was 36 years old. The story I want to read you He wrote in 1955, that's to say seven years after the Nakba, the great expulsion of the Palestinian people from their lands. Dear Mustafa, I have now received your letter. in which you tell me that you've done everything necessary to enable me to stay with you in Sacramento. I've also received news that I have been accepted in the Department of Civil Engineering in the University of California. I must thank you for everything, my friend. But it will strike you as rather odd when I proclaim this news to you. But make no doubt about it. I feel no hesitation at all. In fact, I'm pretty positive that I have never seen things so clearly as I do now. No, my friend, I've changed my mind. I won't follow you to the land where there is greenery, water and lovely faces, as you wrote in your last letter. No, I'll stay here and I won't ever leave. I'm really upset that our lives won't continue to follow the same course, Mustafa. For I can almost hear you reminding me of our vow to go on together. And then of the way we used to shout, we'll get rich. But there's nothing I can do, my friend. Yeah. I still remember the day when I stood in the hall of Cairo airport, pressing your hand and staring at the frenzied motor of the plane. And at that moment everything was rotating in time with the ear-splitting noise of the motor. And you, you stood in front of me, your round face silent. Your face hadn't changed from the way it used to be when you were growing up in the Shia quarter of Khaza, apart from a few wrinkles. We grew up together, understanding each other completely, and we promised to go on to the end. But there's a quarter of an hour now, a quarter of an hour left before the plane takes off. Don't look into space like that. Listen. You'll go to Kuwait next year and you'll save enough from your salary to uproot you from Gaza and transplant you to California. We started off together and we must carry on. I hear you saying that to me. I hear you. And at that moment, I was watching your rapidly moving lips. Yet in an obscure way, I felt that you were not completely happy with your flight. You couldn't give three good reasons for it. The Ministry of Education in Kuwait had given you a contract, though it hadn't given me one. Later, in the trough of misery where I existed, you sent me small sums of money. And you knew my family circumstances. You knew them in and out. You knew that my meagre salary in the UNRWA school was inadequate to support my mother, my brother's widow, and her four children. Listen carefully, write to me every day, every hour, every minute. Look, the plane's just leaving. Goodbye. Or rather, till we meet again. Later, the Ministry of Education in Kuwait gave me a contract. My life there had a gluey, vacuous quality, as though I were a small oyster lost in oppressive loneliness. There was a slipperiness to my whole life. It was only... And in the middle of that year, the Jews bombarded the central district of Sabha and attacked Gaza, our Gaza, with bombs and flamethrowers. I was going to leave this Gaza, leave it behind me, and go to California, where I would live for myself, my own self, which had suffered for so long. I hated Gaza and its inhabitants, everything in the amputated town, reminded me of failed pictures painted in grey by a sick man. Yes, of course, I'd send my mother and my brother's widow and her children a meagre sum to help them to live, but I would liberate myself from even this last tie-to there in Green, California, far from the reek of defeat which for seven long years had filled my nostrils. You know these feelings. because you've really experienced them. What is this ill-defined tie we had with Gaza, which nevertheless blunted our enthusiasm for flight? Why didn't we analyse the matter in such a way as to see its clear meaning? When I went on holiday in June, and then assembled all my possessions, longing for the sweet departure, the start towards those little things which give life a nice bright meaning. I found Gaza, just as I had known it, was more clamped than the mind of a sleeper in the throes of a fearful nightmare, with its narrow streets, which had their bulging balconies, this Gaza. Yet what are the obscure causes? that draw a man to his family, his house, his memories, like a spring draws a small flock of mountain goats. I don't know. All I know is that I went to my mother's house that morning. was weeping, if I would do as her wounded daughter Nadia, now in Gaza Hospital, wished me to do, and visit her that evening. Mustafa, do you know Nadia, my brother's beautiful 13-year-old daughter? That evening, I bought a pound of apples and set out for the hospital to visit Nadia. I knew that there was something, something about it that my mother and my sister-in-law were hiding from me. I loved Nadia. I loved her from habit, the same habit that made me love all that generation, which had been so brought up on defeat and displacement that it had come to think that a happy life was a kind of social deviation. They entered the white room very calm. Ill children have something of saintliness, and how much more so if the child is ill as a result of cruel, painful wounds. Nadia was lying on her bed, her back popped up on a pillow over which her hair was spread like a thick, There was a profound silence in her wide eyes and a tear always shining in the depths of her black pupils. Her face was calm and still, but eloquent, as the face of a tortured prophet might be. And Nadia was still a child, but she seemed more than a child, much more, and older than a child, much older. Nadia! I've no idea whether I was the one who said it or whether it was someone else behind me, but she raised her eyes to me and I felt them dissolve me like a piece of sugar that has fallen into a hot cup of tea. And together with her slight smile, I heard her voice. Uncle, have you just come from Kuwait? Then her voice broke in her throat and she raised herself with the help of her hands and stretched out her neck towards me. I patted her back and sat down near her. Nadia, look, I brought you presents from Kuwait, lots of presents. I'll wait till you can leave your bed. completely well and healed, and then you'll come to my house and I'll give them to you. I've bought you the red trousers you wrote and asked me for. Yes, I bought them. It was a lie, born of the tense situation. But as I uttered it, I felt that I was speaking the truth for the first time. Nadia trembled as though she had had an electric shock and lowered her head in a terrible silence. I felt her tears wetting the back of my hand. Say something, Nadia, say something. Don't you want the red trousers? She lifted her gaze to me and made as if to speak, but then she stopped, gritted her teeth, and I heard her voice again, coming from far away. Uncle? hand, lifted the white coverlet with her fingers, and pointed to her leg, amputated from the top of the thigh. I went out of the hospital in Gaza that day. The blazing sun filled the streets with the colour of blood. And Gaza was brand new, Mustafa. You and I never saw it like this. The stones piled up at the beginning of the Shahiya quarter, where we lived. had a meaning. This Gaza in which we had lived, and with whose good people we had spent seven years of defeat, was something new. It seemed to me just a beginning. I don't know why I thought it was just a beginning. I imagined that the main street that I walked along on the way back home, I imagined it was only the beginning of a long, long, long road leading to Safad. Everything in this Gaza throbbed with sadness, which was not confined to weeping. It was a challenge. More than that. It was something like reclamation of the amputated leg. I went out into the streets of Gaza. Streets filled with blinding sunlight. And they told me that Nadia had lost her leg. when she threw herself on top of her little brothers and sisters to protect them from the bombs and flames that had fastened their claws into the house. Nadia could have saved herself. She could have got out, run away, rescued her leg. But she didn't. Why? No, my friend. I won't come to Sacramento and have no regrets. No. And nor will I finish What we began together in childhood, that obscure feeling that you had as you left Gaza, that small feeling must grow into a giant one deep within you. It must expand. You must seek it in order to find yourself here among the ugly, I won't come to you, but you return to us. Come back to learn from Nadia's leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth.