-Essay-
DEIR AL-BALAH — “Jamila” is a character I discovered from a television series before the beginning of the devastation we’ve been living through. My friend, Amna, had recommended to me the three-episode drama called: The Past’s Heartache.
The name, I told her, was a cliché — too much.
We laughed. But I decided to give it a try when she told me that that the 82-year-old Syrian-born actress Mona Wassef played the main character.
The plot follows this female lead after she had entered a mental hospital, where she’d chosen to try to forget all the troubles of the past that had left her so wounded.
Jamila lives in a state of constant denial of the past through her relationship with her son who visits her every day to try to remind her of the past, trying to evoke some sense of nostalgia. He tells her the same story every day.
Yet Jamila, who had married for love and gave birth to a child, wants nothing from the heartache of the past, preferring to live without memory so that it can’t hurt her in her present state.
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In one of the first scenes of the trilogy, the son asks her: Do you feel like you know me?
She replies: I see strange faces. I feel something familiar in them.
She ends the discussion with an unjustified outburst. “That’s enough!,” she barks at him.
She then notices a box and asks about it. The son replies: “Maamoul.”
She objects: Maamoul, I don’t like maamoul!
The son says: But these are from Damascus!
She concedes that they have the scent of Damascus, the taste of Damascus. Then she picks up one of the maamoul cookies and lifts it to her nose. Her eyes are full of sorrow and regret, hesitant in a way that makes you feel like her memory will return. She brings it to her mouth. She takes one bite and then starts crying.
Even if the situation looks almost hopeless, it gives her son hope.
Forgetfulness with purpose
Now, with Jamila passing through my mind, I’d seen the same need to forget as I woke up one recent day during the ongoing war. It was a Wednesday, perhaps the seventh day after the 400 days since the war begin. We keep a calendar of the war.
Increasingly I have a fear that cannot be understood or explained. I am getting used to this sense of the present that has been created by our saga of displacement. I started feeling as if I grew up in the neighborhood in Khan Yunis whee I’d been displaced to. I argued with a merchant as if I had been his customer for many years. I rarely left the house where we’d been sheltered, unless there was another displacement.
I was afraid of getting used to this memory, and of creating a course for my senses other than the one I possessed. I try instead to maintain my memories of sensations and things in Gaza City. I don’t want them to disappear. It would feel like falling from a great height, or like a hole in your memory.
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What’s left of Gaza City
Earlier in the war, when we had been displaced to Rafah, I sat with Alaa and Yasser, my nephews. They talked about their fears and a feeling that what we used to live was a dream, that the current situation has always been our true reality.
So I spent my days of displacement in Rafah with a defense mechanism to “deny the senses” It began to feel that we were heading towards a “lifestyle of war” that would last for years.
Inside me, I raised the volume of the noise of al-Nasr Street in a moment of congestion, the sound of a wedding and a procession in al-Rashid Street, the smell of Abu Talal’s falafel, and my complaints about the congestion at al-Saraya intersection…
Hummus is on my mind
Today, I stand with those beautiful features, in front of my new fear in Deir al-Balah, the home of the latest displacement that began in May.
I got a message from a friend: “Zahran’s Hummus is on my mind.” She was referring to one of the most famous hummus restaurants in Gaza City. Many of my life’s mornings have begun there.
This morning could have been very ordinary, as if your senses were passing on a journey from al-Nasr Street. The main morning station. The bell announcing the beginning of life. It’s written in front of me on a sign “Zahran’s Hummus.”
Still,I cannot recall that scent of the beginning of the day, a scent of so many Gaza City mornings.
I tried and tried, but failed to conjure the scent. I stood at the door of the restaurant without memory and answered my friend: Is it possible that the taste will remain the same? Is it possible that the taste of hummus remembers us?
And I went on searching for the normality of a typical day in my senses.
Market memories
Zawiya market in Gaza City is a true test of the senses: the smell of cumin, of cinnamon. No. There is the smell of marjoram which is my aunt’s request for diet purposes, and my sister will add it to her pastries. I recall that one of them asked for lavender oil to add to the incense burner to give the house a different scent.
The smell of pickle juice is the smell of Gaza.
The smell of pickle juice is the smell of Gaza. The red pepper appears like a mountain in the middle of the hills of Daqqa and Zaatar. It gives you the feeling of testing your senses. The colors tickle your feeling of hunger. There are the vendors’ carts that sell pistachios, sesame, and walnuts.
All of this is gone…
A few days ago here in Deir al-Balah, I came across “Akila”, the name of one of the most famous shops in the old market in Gaza City, with a sign declaring: “the same taste.” But of course it is not.
The market in Deir al-Balah is also trying to create a variety of mountains of Zaatar, Daqqa, pepper and other features of the spice shops. Some of the stalls create the same identity of the pistachio and sesame carts, with signs bearing the same names that were there. It is as if we are creating alternative homes for everything that’s been taken from us.
Not unlike the series character, Jamila, who rejects her present, we, the displaced of Gaza, are trying to hold on to our memories before they are gone forever.
