from the article:

Images from the War

1

With half a memory and ruined images, I turn over the past, repeating names that have no sound. Anxiety echoes back. The streets revolve, and the houses in my mind revolve, empty except for fear. I leave behind the years of experience, the tears and laughter, the farewells and encounters, and I run. Survival is a lost horizon, hope a device for the needy.

I fall into regret. For the meaning of life I go back to the drawing board, one foot tracing the steps, the other resisting missteps. In faces, a dictionary of fortitude, a thesaurus of longing. In conversation, stories amputated by a stray explosive. And in me a strange heart, an eye unable to contain its tears, a footstep hobbled by not knowing what now.

I carried all that came before and all that I’ve become. About my history I schooled others and was schooled. I was changed by this endurance, by hard necessity. Words grew in helpless silence. The ordeal shaped me. The body was besieged by a house unknown to it, by roads that do not lead to it. But hope leaks between our conversations. We chew it, chew its promises. For a long time we believe it and we don’t let go.

2

I call out the powerless names, the narrow definitions. A pain resulting from restriction and from thought. A river releasing the current of its language into me, plunging me into the mind of the ancients. With a pair of clipped wings they say: My throat. I crouch, overcome by the weight. I refuse answers. The group photograph rejects me.

I drag my stubborn footsteps, pave my path. The river is angry, slapping my heart. I no longer care about footsteps, about meaning, about the knocks on the door, about my experiences and mistakes and missteps, my satisfactions and my grievances. I cross with neither my heart nor the river. On my back I carry frightened voices, asleep on my shoulder. To the tree from which I dropped at the beginning of time, with a color and a name and a voice that tries, I ask: Who am I? The tree hears nothing, says nothing. I say: What is war? A stab at immortality. A lust for it. I carry the answer and the explanation. I turn the facts over and accept them. I set off like a bird that knows its expanse and its nest, heart full and eyes hungry for salvation. Astonishment fences me round. The body is dug with the voice of our masters. They have eaten what remained of longing. Reassurance dazzles me: I see it waving at me behind the fence of amazement. There it is; I recognize it, but it cannot reach me.

3

After a brief death, television was revived for the purpose of broadcasting names, each one snatched away by a weapon between inexperienced hands, and to convey to us—lest we forget—the moment memory was demolished and the capitals wept.

Red is a color that belongs to us. The martyred, the injured. Massacre. Blitz. And the color of the line that mourns us hastily, in shame.

Papers are our mission. We gather what may establish our names, so prone to being forgotten, and our birth certificates so that no confusion may exist as to our age. Then we remember that we have lived through four wars, and our miracle is survival.

The voices are heavy with reproach. We put questions to the gods and whatever lies beyond. The voices are questions going to and ceaselessly fro. There is a babble under your breath. All eyes huddle round. There is only one answer you are seeking: when will the house stop spinning?

Calm is a cruel warning sign, a lurking we know well. We repeat as many verses as we can, then we test our hearing. If you can hear, you are saved, and if you cannot hear, you become news.

Numbers are a waking nightmare, a hammer on our fingers. We count everything into which life has entered and which death crept in behind through the back door.

Ceasefire, an exit from one war into another. For war traverses us and finds a sister here. A single blaze that does not shed its burden and does not let us go.

Doha Kahlout is a poet and teacher from Gaza. Her first collection of poems, Ashbah (“Similarities”), was published in 2018. She was selected for a residency at Reid Hall in Paris as part of the Displaced Artists Initiative, co-sponsored by the Columbia Global Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, but has not been able to take up her place since the Israeli invasion of Rafah and the closure of its border crossing in May 2024.

Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer and translator. Among her translations from Arabic are The Annotated Arabian Nights and Something Evergreen Called Life, a poetry collection by the Sudanese writer and activist Rania Mamoun. She is currently living in New York, where she is a Visiting Professor at Columbia University