Who’s Lost More? When To Flee? Time For Some Blonde? Tales From A Gaza Beauty Salon

-Essay-

GAZA CITY — “What is wrong with a drowning person clinging to a piece of wood or a stick or a straw? What is the crime in making oneself a colorful glass lantern to endure the darkness of its colors?” This is how the late Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour put it in her “Granada Trilogy.”

I have kept this quote in front of my mind since the moment that Gaza City began to catch its breath after we returned home. I was like a man trying to ask for forgiveness to his own home, which had become so insignificant that he’d left it and lost it. But now he has returned, standing at the thresholds of all the city’s streets, asking for forgiveness.

I do not understand my soul’s insistence that the city blames me from the moment I stood at its door. I really behave like someone apologizing for something he is not guilty of. What is wrong with clinging to a straw? Really, shouldn’t the city open its arms to me like all mothers when we’ve come running home to them?

I walked near the sea for three minutes once, but I was like someone startled by the sound of death in his dream so I ran toward the house to repair what the sea’s color had given me. It was grayer than the city, as if a true reflection of itself and its ruins.

Afterward, I went on searching for another form of forgiveness to ask from the city. In fact, and in the same narrative of the Granada Trilogy, Radwa says: “Calamities seem big enough to seize the soul, then comes something more severe and harsher so that what seemed big becomes small and shrinks folded in the corner of the heart and the chest.”

Death with healthy hair

Now, the calamity of seeking forgiveness from the city seems less harsh now that war has returned and devoured the remaining chances for the soul’s survival from its conflicts.

I turned into a woman trying to compensate for every opportunity where her death appeared clearly in front of her, chasing her, sinking its fangs into her neck, hands, body, and even her feet, while she ran from the first explosion that brought her back to the first day of the war. I began to see every opportunity as an attempt to make up for what I lost or what I will lose.

Then the war returned

For example, on the first Friday of Ramadan, the siege and closure of crossings seemed like a silly joke that would end soon. So I decided to join my friend at the “Cosmetics” shop, a different way to try to repair the effect of an old war, or as we said laughing in front of the man in the shop:

“We’ll die with a sweet smell and healthy hair.”

And we prepare for the days of the new war.

Comparing sufferings

The most terrifying thing here seems to be that we have divided the days of the war like chapters in the book of memory. We say: the war in its first part, the war in its second part, the first famine, the second famine… as if everything is separate, independent. The days are so boring that we have to separate them so they don’t die all at once as we are dying now while witnessing every moment in them.

The war returned with its second part, fiercer. Why do we see it this way?

Because we experienced the worst when we left the city all at once. Now we have to test another space for our feelings, comparing our losses in the first part with the losses of the second part.

It seemed as if we were displaced, so we experienced expulsion and did not want it. Others experienced siege and hunger, and do not want to relive the same feeling.

“We can endure hunger but not displacement!”

And the opposite comes from those who experienced hunger: “God willing, you will never experience hunger, displacement is more merciful!”

I have to compensate for my hunger by satisfying another hunger. This is how psychology brilliantly convinces us that what our desires do is a substitute for many lost desires. So hunger does not seem to be in a loaf of bread or a dinner table, but hunger for the idea of life as a full hearty meal.

Secret space

It’s a kind of “joke” that the siege and hunger are just good pressure from the occupation to get its share of blood and killing and death, and that those who negotiate get their share by standing firm over the corpses of the city and its rubble

Adeeba, a writer, runs a beauty salon in the Saraya area in central Gaza City. She was originally a student of my friend the hairdresser Ramzi, who has been taking care of me and countless other local women for years.

After Ramzi was forced to shut down, Adeeba, his grateful student, opened her own salon a year before the war and acquired from him a secret: that such a place must be a space for women to share and receive their own comfort after a long escape from this life.

Adeeba returned to the city in February: “There isn’t a wall without a shell hole. There isn’t a white space except for a black dot.”

Coloring sorrows and hair

I am now trying to compensate for my hunger by satisfying another hunger. Every boredom that affects women is colored by a woman cutting her hair or dyeing it or treating it. And we women, despite our different signs, have the same “defense mechanism”: we recolor the desires of our bodies as an external change that restores the balance of our insides.

For three days now I have been entering looking for women who resemble me and who are looking for their own space like me. I suppress my shyness when I say: I want to cut my hair, color it, or as I told my father when I returned on the first day:

“If the war continues, I will be blonde for it!”

We laughed as if we betrayed the war with laughter and colored hair.

I got tired of my sad face and damaged hair.

In moments like this, I feel as if I am betraying all those moments of deep sadness.

Then I met a women who goes by the name of Islam. She was busy restoring vitality to her hair through “protein and straightening” sessions. A fashion we all chase wanting soft hair straight on the shoulders.

Islam told us about her son, a 17-year-old shot to death by an Israeli helicopter as he was fleeing in Rafah, in southern Gaza. She talks about her loss in one of the most absurd scenes I’ve seen since the war began. Her hair is in Adeeba’s hands and her tears are in her hands. She justifies her embarrassment:

“I got tired of my sad face and my damaged hair. Maybe I can help surpress that feeling if I became more beautiful… and yet, the pain is not forgotten. It burns your soul!”

Since the beginning of the war I have fallen into the trap of comparing losses, which always makes me see my losses as just a small loss compared to what others are living through.

On the third day, preceded by the second and first days, I met four to five women every day, who all came to this space to arrange the space of the straw in their days and endure the darkness of the colors which have all become ashes.

Polishing black nails

The salon, covered at its door with a plastic tarp, blocks the view of the opposite building, destroyed, whose residents did not survive.

We now sit, six women, coloring our sorrows by dyeing and cutting hair. We polish and repolish our nails. A woman treats the blackness between her fingers after cooking gas ran out and fire became a substitute. The woman stands bent, blowing on her soot to ignite it.

The truth, after three days, is that we are women beyond all measures. The question revolves in our mouths while we drink coffee and tease the war in Adeeba’s salon:

Maybe we can only overcome our sorrows by drowning in the details of a previous life.