DEIR AL-BALAH — It’s about 50 days in my new shelter. It’s my fifth displacement to a house, another home that it’s not mine, in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza.
I woke up with a great desire for that other house: my home. The Arabic language is very compassionate to include the possessive pronoun (my) – my home. It makes you feel as if you own the whole world, and can walk proudly from here to there.
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I was alarmed by the urgency of my desire, and my inquietude rose further when I found the box of vanilla was empty, and I would go without the flavor I add to my morning cup of coffee with milk.
I rushed to the apartment of the lady who owns the house. I asked her for some vanilla. Feeling ashamed, I stood by the front door of her apartment. She invited me inside, with a smile: “Come in, the house is your home!”
Oh God. This phrase has been repeated many times throughout my displacement between Khan Younis and Rafah, and now again here in Deir al-Balah. Whenever the owners of the house noticed shyness or distress in my behavior, they said: “Nevermind, the house is your home!”
It’s a harsh language that suddenly drops the possessive pronoun (my), and replaces it with (your).
Still, it’s never quite like the meaning of the “my” in my actual home.
Your house!
In Rafah, I was thrown off by the local dialect, when the woman who owned the house there decided to open her closet for me in the days of extreme cold. She said with a smile, which was later repeated in Khan Younis: “but in any case, the house is your home.”
She used “your” as if my anxiety was exposed to her so the display of the jackets would give me some comfort to defeat the cold around me. All that I was saying at the time — despite my deep feelings of gratitude — was that this closet and this wide house wouldn’t give me the warmth of (my) home.
Today I stand at the door in shame. I want to break the desire and urgency of longing, the longing that might push me to cry and collapse to the ground. There is no luxury for that. We are constantly on the run, fleeing within a space that changes rapidly, every three minutes it seems.
This is war. It forces you to face that the fact that anything can happen at any moment. Time is made of stone and rubble that suddenly lands on your head. Yes, you have to give up that luxury of crying. Now.
I sent my questions about houses and homes to friends:
Do you know what a house is?
What does a home taste like?
What does the house look like?
What does the house smell like?
What color is the house?
I want an imagination that pulls me away from the insistence of a child who stands in front of me, screaming: “I want to go home now.” There is no house like your home, but the home is my home!
The questions were returned with one answer from those outside the war. It was as if you were asking them about “the idea of the house,” while my reflection was from friends inside the war, as if I had asked them: “what happened to the house?”
So, does home appear to be an idea, an event, a feeling?
In any case, being far from home creates plenty of interpretation and confusion!
How?
Get me to my home!
In November 2020, after mother suffered a stroke, we moved her to the ground floor of our house, so it would be easy access in case an ambulance was needed to rush her to the hospital.
On the last day before she died, she asked us to take her to her home, even though she was in the same house. Every time she woke up from her coma, she said: “This is not my home, take me to my home!”
We did not understand the value of this last lesson. We were selfish, thinking only about facilitating her transportation to the hospital.
I remember the last time she insisted on going home. She got angry, and despite her inability to move without help, she tried to go upstairs to her home (her apartment) on the second floor. But she couldn’t make it much past her bed.
We responded to her insistence. We thought that she would be relieved, and her health could improve, if she went up to her room and her bed looking out windows face to the north and east. We took her up the stairs in the house in the evening, and when we got her to her room, she smiled, and said in a slow tone, but a peaceful voice: “Yeah, this is my home!”
I felt the relief evident on her face, which I hadn’t seen for a while. And before she slept for the last time, she said while we were preparing her bed: “The house is a paradise, even if you are disabled, and no matter what happens.”
Two hours before dawn, my mother took her last breath on her bed, and in her room.
My mother died after she was reassured that we understand the meaning of a home. Home is sacred. Home is a feeling.
My home. Our home!
Less than two years after my mother’s death, in March 2022, Uncle Abu Yahya, who was actually a very close family friend, died in his home.
Abu Yahya’s home gave me the same feeling as my home. In those intervening two years, whenever I was overwhelmed by longing for my mother, when I wanted to hear her voice, I would run to his home, which somehow wiped away the traces of my tears with the smiles of those inside.
Now I stand at the lady’s door here in Deir al-Balah. All the kindness of the world appeared on her face, while she said: “The house is your home.” I have nothing I can bring from my own home to provide relief!
I hoped I could tell her that I want the “my” that refers to (my home) where my mother left the lesson of the sanctity of her eternal rest in our home.
That home, that house was destroyed by the war in October 2023, without giving me a chance to withdraw the title of (my) ownership from my mother’s bed; from her closet; from her kitchen; from her chair; from her storeroom; from a staircase she climbed proudly, chirping in welcome to her first grandson; from a jar of strawberry jam on the upper kitchen shelf, and the taste of ginger on her balcony…
The war also destroyed any chance of escaping to Uncle Abu Yahya’s house (our other home) and forced me to move towards the south, destroying all pronouns — (my) (our) — along the road. I was forced to be eternally grateful for those polite and generous words from strangers that my home is your home, and remain attached to the hope of this poetic verse: “All people’s hearts are my nationality; revoke my passport!” even if I know would replace it with what I feel now: “All houses are like my house … but it is not my home.”
