Written by Wadah Abu Jamea. Introduction and translation by Ahmed M. Saleh
Supported by the Ecoversities Alliance , we aim to shed light on a group of Gaza-based writers and poets who continue to document their experiences and sufferings from tents, streets, and paths of displacement in front of hospitals, classrooms, and mud ovens. Many have been forced to use books as fuel to cook food after everything else was burned.
In yet another, dramatic siege the importance of writing grows as a means to highlight the stories of the Palestinian people who face daily catastrophes. Amid the terrifying death, daily famine, and bloody disasters that have been ravaging the Palestinian body for over a year since the onset of the genocide, writers, poets, and artists rise to scream at us from their deaths, seeking to save what remains of our humanity by writing their wills, diaries, testimonies, and lives that were stolen from them in the harshest and most brutal ways. Writers have documented their experiences and sufferings, bearing the burden of conveying the voices of their deceased to a world that is broken in its humanity. Is writing, in its essence and core, an act of resistance, a way to continue striving for life in the face of death? Is it a mere attempt to question death itself, in search of meaning from within the absurdity that reality has become?
حتى
وأنت فزاعة
وإن ابتعدت كل العصافير
عن حقول القمح
أحد ما سيطلق عليك الرصاص
*
حتى سقوط الإبرة في حياتي يحدث جرحاً
*
يا الله
لم تعطني أرنباً أبيضَ
ولا جمهوراً
هل أزلت قبعة الساحر عن رأسي؟
*
أحمل قلبي
وأركض طويلاً بلا توقف
من يكترث لحبة قمح على ظهر نملة.
Even as a scarecrow
And though all the birds
Flee from the wheat fields,
Someone will still shoot at you.
*
Even the fall of a needle in my life leaves a wound.
*
Oh God,
You haven’t given me a white rabbit,
Nor an audience.
Have you taken the magician’s hat off my head?
*
I carry my heart
And run long and far without stopping.
Who cares about a grain of wheat on the back of an ant?
الطّفل الذي قصفت
عائلته
كان يلعب بعيدًا عن فناء المنزل
لا يعرف أنّ للحرب طائرةً
يجلس الآن
على كرسيه المتحرك
ظناً منه أنّ كل هذا الغبار خلفته أصابع
الطباشير
التي رسم
بها
طائرته الورقية
A child whose family
was bombed
Played far from the yard of the house
Didn’t know
the war had an airplane
He sits now
in his wheelchair
Presuming all this dust was left behind by fingers
Of chalk
With which
He drew
His paper plane
لم يترك لي السفلة أي شاغر
كلما أوقفتُ رجلاً في ضياعي الكبير
لأستفسر عن هذا التيه
استهزأ بي
وعندما حاولتُ مداعبة شعر طفلة
أخفتها أمها مني
وفي المرة التي طلبتُ فيها من مسنة في الحافلة
أن تجلس مكاني
نزلت وهي ترتجف في المحطة القادمة
وكلما استرحتُ من تشردي
على مقاعد الحدائق
تتسارع الحشرات والغيوم والسكارى نحو المغادرة
وحدهن فتيات الليل من يقطعن وحدتي
ويسألن بود لم أعرفه قط:
“هل لديك بيت؟”
The scoundrels left no place for me.
Whenever I stopped a man in my vast confusion
To ask about this bewilderment,
He mocked me.
And when I tried to gently touch a child’s hair,
Her mother hid her from me.
The time I offered an elderly woman my seat on the bus,
She got off at the next stop, trembling.
And whenever I sought respite from my wandering
On park benches,
Insects, clouds, and drunks rushed to leave.
Only the night girls break my solitude,
And ask with a kindness I’ve never known:
“Do you have a home?”
كان طفلاً
ينحني ليربط حذاءه
كبر حرباً واحدة
لينحني
باحثاً عن قدمه
*
اعرف طفلا
لم يسعفه عمره
ليحضر حصة الحاسوب من قبل
قتلته إسرائيل
بالذكاء الإصطناعي
*
أطفال
لم يتعلموا سوى العد
من واحد إلى عشرة
قتل منهم رقم
لا يستطيعون
قراءته
*
ثمة تلميذ
بفارغ الطفولة
ينتظر الحصة الأخيرة
من الحرب.
He was a child
Bending down to tie his shoe,
He grew up in a single war
To bend down again,
Searching for his foot.
*
I know a child
Whose short life
Never let him attend a computer class.
Israel killed him
With artificial intelligence.
*
Children
Who only learned to count
From one to ten
One of them was killed,
By a number
They can’t even read it.
*
There is a student,
In the absence of childhood
Waiting for the final lesson
Of war.
Waddah Abu Jamea was born in Gaza in 1996. He currently lives in Belgium as an asylum seeker, while his family lives in a tent in the southern Gaza Strip. He is a writer and poet, and has published a poetry collection entitled “A World Injected with Botox.”
وضاح أبو جامع من مواليد غزة عام 1996، يعيش حالياً في بلجيكا طالباً للجوء، بينما تقيم عائلته في خيمة جنوب قطاع غزة. كاتب وشاعر، صدر له ديوان شعري بعنوان “عالم محقون بالبوتوكس”.
Ahmed M. Saleh, is a Palestinian from Gaza, living in Belgium but with family in Gaza. They have launched this crowdfunding campaign in an effort to raise funds to ease and/or escape the devastating conditions they are experiencing during the current genocide being committed there by the Israeli government.
Your contribution, no matter how small, will bring his family one step closer to safety and security. If you are unable to contribute financially, your help in sharing and spreading the word, sharing this poetry, or any other fundraising effort would also be immensely valuable.
You can send funds in solidarity via their campaign here: https://gofund.me/44c3ebcc
