by Mohamed Al-Zaqzooq, April 2024

Many clay ovens, local ovens used by rural families in Gaza for cooking food and baking flour, had spread  across the green squares distributed among the residential towers within the city of Hamad. Rural  women, with much warmth and a high spirit of cooperation, volunteered to bake flour for people if  families brought enough paper and crates to ignite fires in the ovens. 

In our house, we had no paper except for the books in my personal library. I looked at them with a tinge  of embarrassment and politely requested, with extreme gentleness, to use one or two books as fuel for  the clay oven. She said, “Let’s just use two books. After the war, you can buy two replacement books.  Feeding the children now is more important than reading to them.” 

I was overcome with a mixture of pain and regret, feeling the enormity of the situation that forced me to  consider such an idea. It hadn’t occurred to me over the years, as I accumulated these books and built  my library, that there would come a time when I would have to exchange children’s bread for books in  the library. I found myself astonished by the severity of the matter, paralyzed by the question of how  things had escalated to this point so quickly. 

For years, I had managed to build my small and humble library. Over time, it grew to hold over two  hundred books, covering philosophy, sociology, literature, and poetry collections gifted to me by friends  at special book signing events. They inscribed their dedications in their own handwriting on the first  pages, and I felt they were part of a shared long memory with those who remained in Gaza, those who  had emigrated, and those who had lost their lives in search of a better life. 

A more and more poetic moment crystallized within me towards the library, which then seemed to me  like a living mass of blood, sweat, memories, lives, and journeys in the streets, cafes, and alleys of Gaza,  and along its coast in summer gatherings and winter nights. 

So, I said, “No, I will not burn a single page of these books. There must be another solution.” Ala realized  that her attempt to pressure and convince me would not be useful, so she said, “It’s okay, what matters  now is finding paper to give to the lady so she can bake bread for us before it spoils.” 

I descended the building’s stairs and began walking the city’s streets. Contrary to what I thought, that I  would find plenty of paper and empty crates near the garbage containers and grocery stores, the city  streets were completely empty of any paper or cardboard. People had used up all the paper or  cardboard in the trash bins. As I searched, I found many men, women, and children like me, and  everyone was scanning the ground in an attempt to find small cardboard pieces to give to the rural  women to bake bread. For a moment, I felt that the city had completely run out of paper and cardboard,  and a feeling of despair crept over me as I ran through the streets searching for paper, which seemed like  a mirage. 

I almost went back to the apartment to take two books from my library to bake bread on their fire to  satisfy the children’s hunger in the apartment, but the grocer downstairs, who seemed to have been  watching my attempts and searches for cardboard, decided to finally help me after sensing my  desperation.

He said, “Looking for cardboard, aren’t you?” I said, “Yes, do you have some?” He said, “Sure, it’s no  problem for you. Take it.” I gratefully took three large pieces of cardboard from the man and thanked  him profusely before rushing back to the apartment. Feelings of pride and happiness overwhelmed me,  feeling as though the man had saved me from drowning in the sea of regret I was about to drown in if I  began burning the books in the library. 

Although the library seemed small and modest compared to others, it was for me souls of those who  wrote its books and traced its pages. This wasn’t a poetic or figurative imagination but a truth I felt for  years. I remember getting a copy of the short story collection “Autumn Leaves” by the late young writer  Mahnad Younis during an event held in his memory forty days after his suicide. I lived with Mahnad’s  small stories in the book for long days that made me feel as if I were delving into Mahnad’s depths, his  experiences, and pains. I empathized to the point of identification with the stories and the book, with a  mixture of fear and guilt towards Mahnad and his sufferings that I was not fully aware of and trying to  alleviate. I had tried more than once to remove the book from the library, by lending it to a friend or  donating it to a public library, trying to escape the feelings of guilt that I didn’t know how they had coiled  inside me and started to grow and branch out like a curse. However, something always prevented me  from doing so completely, so I tried to conceal the book by hiding it behind other books, without  completely getting rid of it. Years passed with the book secluded in the back row of books inside the  library until I took it with me to Berlin on a research and cultural exchange trip as part of a cultural event  organized by the World Cultures House organization in Germany. When I received the invitation to  participate, I felt that I needed to alleviate the feelings of guilt that haunted me for years after Mahnad’s  departure by reading his stories to the participants in the event. I remember that after my participation  and after I read the story “Forgetting,” one of the stories in the collection, to the participants, I felt that I  had to give the book, or in another form, Mahnad’s tormented soul a chance to soar outside of Gaza. I  felt I had to give it a new life in a quiet and different space from the tortured, marginalized, and damned  Gaza. I found myself trying to achieve that by discreetly placing the book on the shelves of the  organization’s library, as if withdrawing from it in a scene that seemed like a criminal farewell, as if I were  kissing Mahnad’s face before the sand poured over him in the land of Gaza. 

In the same way, I had a special relationship with the books that accumulated in my office over  consecutive years. Because of all this, I managed to avoid slipping into the pit of burning books to satisfy  the hunger of the three children in wartime.