Translator’s Note: This is a new translation of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s “A Note from Gaza.” Kanafani (1936-1972) wrote the story in 1956 when he was teaching in Kuwait. The last of three such notes—the others are from Ramla and Tira, both located within present-day Israel’s borders—it was published in his 1962 short story collection Land of Sad Oranges. Arabic literature of the 1950s and ’60s was full of Sisyphus types who called for engagement, eschewed detachment and, at the end of novels, walked toward their native cities. That is what we have here: a patriotic narrator who decides to head toward his native city and do the most revolutionary thing ever: Stay put.
My dear friend,
I’ve just received your letter, in which you inform me that you’ve carried out, on my behalf, everything necessary to support my stay with you in Sacramento. I’ve also just gotten news informing me of my acceptance to the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of California. I must thank you, my friend, for everything. So it might seem rather strange for me to impart to you the following bit of news—and you can be sure, Mustafa, that I feel no hesitation at all. Indeed, I’m absolutely certain that I haven’t seen things with more clarity than I do now. No, Mustafa. I’ve changed my mind. I won’t follow you to “the land of greenery and water and pretty faces,” as you wrote. On the contrary. I will stay here. And I will never leave.
It truly bothers me, Mustafa, that we won’t continue the course of our lives in one stream. I can almost hear you reminding me of our vow to continue side by side, and how we used to shout: We’ll get rich! However, my friend, there’s nothing else to be done. That’s right. I can still remember with clarity the day I stood on the tarmac at the Cairo airport, shaking your hand and gazing at the insane engine. In that moment, everything was spinning with the engine’s raucous roar. You were standing before me with your full, silent face. It hadn’t changed a bit from the face of your youth in Gaza’s Shejaiya neighborhood, save for those flattened wrinkles. We had grown up together, and we understood each other completely. We promised each other to continue our lives together until the end. But I can’t.
The plane is set to leave in fifteen minutes, you said. Don’t stare like that at nothing. Listen to me. Next year, you’ll go to Kuwait, and you’ll put aside however much of your salary you need to wrench yourself out of Gaza and get you to California. We started out together, and we have to continue together.
In that moment, I was watching your lips as they moved rapidly. That was how you talked, with no commas or periods. Yet I felt inexplicably that you were not totally content with your decision to flee. You couldn’t name three good reasons for that flight, and I too suffered, I too was torn. But the clearest feeling was: Why don’t we leave this Gaza and flee? Why not? For by then, your situation had begun to improve. The Kuwaiti Ministry of Education had contracted with you to work for them, though they hadn’t hired me. And in the onslaught of misery in which I lived, small sums of money occasionally made their way from you to me. You wanted me to consider them debts for fear I would feel pitiful or less-than. You understood my family circumstances completely, and you knew that my miniscule salary in the UNRWA schools wasn’t enough to support my mother, my brother’s widow, and her four children.
Hear me out, you said. I want you to write me every day, every hour, every minute. The plane is about to take off. I won’t say “goodbye” but “till we meet again.”
Your cold lips touched my cheek, and you turned your face away from me and headed toward the plane. When you turned back toward me again, I could see your tears.
Afterwards, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Education hired me on contract. There’s no need for me to repeat here how the details of my life there played out, for I used to write you constantly about every little thing. My life was sticky. Empty as a small shell lost in a burdensome loneliness. It was a slow negotiation with an obscure future, opaque as the first darkness of the night. It was a rotten routine, an unpleasant struggle with time. Everything was sticky and hot. My whole life was slippery. All I did was yearn for the end of the month!
In the middle of the year – that year – the Israelis hit the center of Sabha and bombarded Gaza, our Gaza. That event could have changed something of my routine, but then, that event wasn’t something I took much notice of. For I was going to leave this Gaza behind and go on to California, where I’d live by and for my own self—a self that had suffered for a long time. I remembered Gaza and all who lived there. Everything in that severed city reminded me of worthless canvases painted in gray oils by a sick man. That’s right. I used to send to my mother, my brother’s widow, and her children tiny sums of money to help them make ends meet. But I too would be liberated from that last thread tying me to Gaza—there, in verdant California, far from the stench of defeat that had been clogging my nostrils for seven years. The sympathy that bound me to my nephews, their mother, and my own would never be enough to justify the course of my tragedy—that tragedy which ran not horizontally but vertically. It could not drag me down more than it already had. I had to flee!
Mustafa, you’re familiar with these feelings because you’ve actually experienced them. What is that obscure thing that used to bind us to Gaza and curb our enthusiasm to leave? Why don’t we dissect the matter to make its meaning clearer? Why didn’t I leave behind this defeat, with all its wounds, and proceed to a life that’s more colorful, more joyful? Why didn’t I? I didn’t exactly know!
When I took my vacation in June and packed up everything I owned, looking forward to that sweet release, to those small things that give life a pleasant, variegated air, I found Gaza just as you know it: closed in upon itself as if it were the interior whorls of a rusty conch shell cast by the waves upon the sticky, sandy beach near the slaughterhouse. This Gaza: more distressed than a sleeping soul struck by a horrible nightmare, with its narrow alleys and their peculiar scent—that of defeat and of poverty—and its houses with their bulging balconies. This is Gaza. Yet what are those obscure things, those unspecified things, that draw a man to his family, to his home, to his memories, just as a gangara bush attracts a stray herd of mountain goats? I don’t know! All I know is that, on that morning, I went to see my mother in our home, where I was met by the wife of my departed brother as soon as I arrived. Crying, she asked me to carry out the request of Nadia, her injured little girl, in the Gaza Hospital: Nadia wanted me to visit her that evening. You know Nadia, my pretty thirteen-year-old niece, don’t you?
I’d come to love Nadia. I’d come to love that entire generation so nursed on defeat and dispersal that it considered a happy life a kind of societal perversion.
That evening, I bought a pound or so of apples and headed toward the hospital to visit Nadia. I knew that my mother and sister-in-law had hidden something from me, something they couldn’t bring themselves to say, something unbelievable, the aspects of which I couldn’t positively ascertain. I’d come to love Nadia. I’d come to love that entire generation so nursed on defeat and dispersal that it considered a happy life a kind of societal perversion.
What happened then? I don’t know! I entered the white room with extreme tranquility. A sick child possesses a kind of holiness; what, then, if that same child is infirm because of severe, painful wounds? Nadia lay on her bed, her back propped on a white pillow overspread with her hair, which resembled an expensive fur. There was a profound silence in her wide eyes and a tear suspended in the depths of her distant black pupil. Her face was calm and tranquil yet inspiring, like the face of a tortured prophet. Nadia was still a child, but she appeared to be more than one, much more, and older than a child, much older.
Nadia.
I don’t know, was it I who spoke or someone else, someone behind me, but she raised her eyes toward me, and I could feel them melting me, like a sugar cube fallen in a cup of hot tea, along with her gentle smile. I heard her voice:
Uncle! Did you just arrive from Kuwait?
Her voice broke in her throat, and she raised herself, leaning on her shoulders, and extended her neck toward me. I patted her back and sat down beside her.
Nadia, I’ve brought you some presents from Kuwait, lots of presents. I’ll be waiting for you when you get up from this bed healthy and strong and come to my house so I can give them to you. I bought you the red pants that you wrote asking me for. That’s right—I bought them all right!
It was a white lie born of the tense moment, and I felt as I uttered it that I was speaking the truth for the first time. But Nadia shuddered like someone jolted by an electrical current and bowed her head with a terrible calm. I could feel her tears wetting the back of my hand.
Tell me, Nadia, don’t you like the red pants?
She lifted her gaze toward me and made as if to speak, but stopped. She gritted her teeth, and I again heard her voice from afar.
Uncle!
She extended her hand and with her fingers raised the white blanket and pointed to a leg severed above the thigh.
Oh Mustafa.
I will never forget Nadia’s leg severed above the thigh. No. And I won’t forget the sadness undergirding her face and fused forever in its sweet features. That day, I left the hospital for the streets of Gaza, gripping with raging contempt the two coins I’d brought with me to give to Nadia. The blazing sun filled the streets with the color of blood. Mustafa, Gaza was completely new. You and I had never seen it like that before: the rocks piled up at the entrance to the Shejaiya neighborhood, where we used to live, carried a new meaning, as if they had been put there only to lay that neighborhood bare, to explain it. This Gaza—where we lived with its good men for seven years of nakba, seven years of catastrophe—was a new thing. Gaza was signaling to me that it was only a beginning. I don’t know why I felt that it was just a beginning. I imagined that the main street, as I walked in it returning to my house, was nothing other than the start of a long, long street leading to Safed. In this Gaza, everything was rising up in sadness for Nadia’s leg, severed above the thigh, in sadness that didn’t stop at the bounds of weeping, for it was a challenge. No, more than that, it was something resembling reclamation—the reclamation of that severed leg!
I went out to the streets of Gaza, streets filled with the light of a blazing sun. They’d told me that Nadia had lost her leg when she threw herself on top of her younger siblings to protect them from the bombs and the flames. They had clung to their house, refusing to leave. Nadia could have saved herself, could have fled, could have saved her leg, but she didn’t.
Why didn’t she?
No, my friend! I won’t go to Sacramento, and I’m not at all sorry. No, sir. And I won’t finish what we started together in our childhood. That obscure feeling I got as you were leaving Gaza—that small feeling must rise up like a giant in the depths of you. It must grow and expand, exponentially so, and you must search for it in order to find yourself—here among the ruins of an unsightly defeat. —Kuwait, 1956
Translated for Grand Journal by William Tamplin
