Between us is a wall, and all the spaces are lit by a sun that does not resemble our sun, but it is here, above us, between us, within us, urging us with questions.
Do we stay in place, or do we move into wandering?!
The last night before the anniversary of the first year of the war, October 7th, in the year twenty-four, certain phrases have stuck in my mind since I left Damascus years ago: “Low ceiling, dark horizon, weak night.” Nothing has changed since the moment of awareness flashed like a twin presenting the paradox of death in the streets of the Syrian capital, and Gaza is reliving it, followed by Beirut and all the besieged cities. That you are alive, still, but to exist that is another matter. Here, where the comma in the text catches its breath, I write about the self-delayed in understanding, becoming a self that follows its comprehension like a crawling child, trying to grasp what surrounds him, without being able to recognize his own face in some mirror. I knew that I was at the beginning of a long road, one for which the breaths allotted to me might not suffice, but I try to step toward it as much as I can.
Thousands of images of faces whose features we wouldn’t have known if not for this war, preceded by thousands of stories whose heroes had no identifiable features, only traits. In a world of speed that consumes news like a raging fire, leaving no ash in the moment when death captures its victims, writing once again becomes a siege in which light and darkness slip through as much as the fingers can type or drag a pen of confession across the back of a page or a cigarette box.
A new year begins, in the timing of a war that has never ended, a space that repeats the fall of its victims, increasing their numbers, and changing the features and methods of death. There are those who count the total numbers, as the figures rise and the value of humanity declines.
I don’t have much to say now. Later, perhaps, time will not allow me to open my computer and type, but I have written on the classroom wall of some school, on the cigarette box, on my arm that will bear alone what I cannot. This action, it is all that remains for me, for no voice rises above the sound of rockets and shells.
The sky ascends inside the sun, the world stands in its usual silence, except for a solitary tree on a hill overlooking us. I can almost hear its voice condemning the massacre and the semiconductors, the voices drowning in the expanse of the carnage. Everyone knows his brother, everyone knows his own whispers.
It seems like a hybrid fantasy, for it is truly happening, but it barely finds anyone to believe it. The fourth week after the first bombing reached the wall of our new memory, and I think I stopped counting my fingers since I left the space of Damascus, between a tender branch and the claw of a wounded bird. The stories seem similar, but I am not in Gaza, and I only hear their voices through those who passed by them quickly, describing a truly surreal scene. I am now searching among the crowded voices for something resembling those stories, but I have not found a voice like mine. Perhaps it is the bewilderment and overwhelming confusion.
Where to? The question asks me with a voice disguised in foolishness, the same voice that surrounds us all. Relative calm, cautious crossing, suffocating silence, immense crowding, then nothing—no idea to throw into the depths of this death, no remains of the letters of the language.
Alone, despite the noise of the universe around me, despite the screaming colors, in the maze of waiting, alone, but I am not alone in this solitude.
It is a language that does not resemble the language of journalistic reporting; you will not find in what I write numbers that explain the victim counts, and I will not write about that now. But I remind myself to give you an idea of an experience you may one day live. Despite hundreds of hours following the massacres in Gaza over decades, and despite living through a large part of the Syrian war, I still feel awe and fear every time the smoke rises around us, or a missile passes over our heads, as if I am experiencing all these harsh events for the first time, without any previous sensory or intellectual experiences.
In every war in the world, we will find voices raised against it, calling for its end, because they know that this war is like a fire, spreading and affecting the entire world in one way or another, and that we humans have become weaker in the face of its sounds. So I urge you to unite against oppression and the makers of death, for we are all trapped in one shared fate, even if the faces of death vary within it. Do not remain silent; demand the end of this war, for it will drag behind it wars that will inevitably reach some of you.
Bassam JAMIL