For more than 60 days, Fedaa Zeyad, a Palestinian writer and mother, has been documenting the diaries of the war on Gaza on her Facebook page. She describes the details of death, destruction and terror; the tragedies of displacement and the longing for a return to normal life.
Fedaa has chronicled the war that has erased everything, homes, streets, memories, people’s faces, their names, their simple dreams and daily trials. She tells us amazing details about Gaza, which we know very little about, and whose existence we only seem to remember in times of war.
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She shares her memories of the house where she lived before the displacement, the road to it, the Gaza Sea that looms from its nets, and the staircase that she used to sweep after each war, the neighborhood homes that are full of love and the bustle of life.
She concludes each writing with the phrase: Gaza, chapters of surprise and attempts to survive.
Fedaa Facebook updates
I’ve been following Fedaa since the war began, and I’m worried whenever she is late to post her updates; so I sheepishly send her a message, to check on her. I’ve learned from what she writes that she is taking care of three children — one of whom wishes she had a tortoise shell to hide people under.
I’ve also learned that they’ve been displaced from the north to a safer place, and that a raid destroyed her home on October 13, and another raid demolished the wall on which Yasser, her nephew, had pinned his paintings and a third raid cleared the warm corner she coordinated with her nieces Lillian and Eileen for the autumn, singing “Hope yes there is hope.”
Yes, in this war, Fedaa lost her home and her city, everything that represented a life for her, and she lost relatives, male and female friends and neighbors.
May she not lose hope.
Two days ago, Fedaa added a picture of two young men, Mohammed and Awad, who she said were the twins of her friend Hanadi, who had waited 10 years for them to come. Hanadi, along with her husband Ibrahim and son Awad and 50 members from her family, were killed in Jabalia camp massacre. Her body remained unidentified for 10 days, until the man who shrouded the bodies in the Indonesian hospital identified her from a chain in her neck. Only her son Mohammed, who is now in the European hospital in southern Gaza, survived the massacre with a burned face, body — and as a lonely orphan.
In her writing, Fedaa addresses all the events surrounding her, her emotions, conveyed by the breath of a writer and the eye of a journalist, transmitting feelings honestly and sincerely, and the news with transparency and credibility, whether its a personal passage or documentary material.
Being lucky in Gaza
Two months into this war, Fedaa, with all boldness and objectivity, without polishing and embellishing the reality by vocabulary of steadfastness, vigor and victory, has conveyed a true picture of the human catastrophe that has befallen Gaza and its people.
She writes:
“Being lucky in Gaza is finding a breadcrumb, a dash of flour, a sip of water, or water for the bathroom, a place to charge batteries and cell phones, a working Internet network, a phone call with an answer from the caller’s number, a stitching thread with anesthesia to treat a wound, a hospital bed, a place to sleep, a safe space for women and children, personal hygiene supplies for women, medicine, painkillers…
The luckiest is the person who finds a grave to bury the bodies, and even more so is he who could retrieve the bodies of his family and friends from under the rubble.
And this is what is not documented by cameras and victory speeches.”
Because you are young
Fedaa is tired of all the attempts to portray Gazans as superheroes, preferring to depict them simply as human beings: fearful, exhausted, desperate, objecting to the terms and conditions of this war. She avoids the use of vocabulary such as heroism, resistance and triumph.
One day during the war, she wrote something that appeared to be addressed to Palestinian political leaders: “As you believe that talking about our sorrows is a defeat, we see your talking about resilience as a lack of modesty”
Fedaa doesn’t speak only in her name, but in the name of those who are silenced; she raises her voice on their behalf. Once, following an impassioned speech by a well-known political leader, she wrote: “Nothing is more filthy than mockery except those who sit somewhere and say about us: The honor of the nation is in our hands, and because we are in a state of war we are very ashamed to ask him where is he placing the honor of the nation?! This simply means that we don’t know where to go to protect ourselves, so it’s hard to worrying about caring for the honor of the nation for you! “.
On a night of violent bombardment, when massacres were spreading from house to house, the heart of Fedaa broke when she saw an image of an orphaned girl. She wrote as if she is patting her on the shoulder:
“How much death has passed over you and you still go out and are stubborn saying: Here I am Uncle!”
Not because you are mighty, but because you are young and you dream that you will always be enjoying life
Tiny and dreaming to brush your hair and run
They broke your legs, and you still dream
To wear embroidered dresses not a shroud
To run away from the waves on the shore, not from the shrapnel
But don’t believe me, believe that I am like you, and you were and are still dreaming!
Believe that not once was this distorted morning your dream.
When the summer came
During the war, the displaced person lives a borrowed life that does not resemble his real one; so he longs for the details of his previous life, even all that seemed boring, repetitive and neglected.
The displaced person even becomes nostalgic for trivial things, lending it moral value in reaction to the existential anxiety imposed by the war. Fedaa wrote: “We had worries other than this, oh Allah! Other than this, which we do not know what it is or what its form looks like, we were suddenly sleeping and woke up to a large field of anxiety.”
Unfortunately, Fedaa was recently forced into a second displacement, but this time it wasn’t a house, but a shelter. She hasn’t told any details about it yet, it could be an UNRWA school, or the headquarters of an international organization or a hospital ward…
She did, however, mention that she was with a group of “sweet girls,” who by their singing part of “Yama Moyle Al-Hawa,” offered the shelter center a moment of tranquility:
And I walked under the winter
And the winter hydrated me
And when the summer came
it sparked my passions
The age of the young
is still a vow for freedom.
