Thoughts from the inside 19 - a gauze from Ghazza

The beginning is lost in the decades that saw us younger.

I think it was the last years of the last millennium, or at most the very first of the new one.

It was one of the first degree theses I had the honor of tutoring.

To tell the whole truth, it didn't start from there, but a bit of time before.

It started from a friendship who was built working with homeless people.

A deep friendship, that has overcome the necessary sometimes divergent visions of the world, that has gone beyond the hair that whitens and falls out, the stomachs that swell a little. Nothing special, just the thousand ailments of life.

My friend is K, a Palestinian. I avoid to use his full name on purpose, not because i want to hide a friendship but because i want to preserve him and his family, his companions, his loved ones. 

When we started working on his degree thesis, it was the time of the second intifada, early 2000s. The degree thesis was simple in the essential frankness of its title: "Palestinians and violence".

After an initial introduction with all the historical indications to give voice to a reality of illegal occupation and permanent discrimination, we focused on the youngsters, and through their stories and narratives we opened up to reflections on the nature of the traumas they had suffered. That they would continue to suffer. 

The objective of the field-research was to giving voice to those who had been silenced, to open up in them the possibility of building a discourse anyway. However and despite.

Working on the field with girls and boys in the West Bank and Gaza, we focused on the "how" those young lives lived their life, who were sometimes broken, often shattered.

We wrote, or rather my friend K. wrote, about how the children of the West Bank were inclined to define the “We” through the sense of belonging to their family, to the Famula, while the children in the Gaza Strip saw themselves through national or religious belonging (“we are Palestinians, we are Muslims, we are Palestinian Muslims”). And while the children of the Strip defined themselves as “persecuted,” in the West Bank the definition of the self was linked to poverty and misery, even though they were still better off economically than those of the Strip.

The family was experienced as a factor of stability, solidarity and social union, as well as a source of love and protection. 

The children emphasized the importance of staying together and helping each other whenever circumstances required it.

The dimension of time had taken on its own particular meaning. 

Past, present and future were powerful words, and they opened up a world. And closed others.

For the older boys and girls, who had lived through the first intifada in the 1980s, it was a taboo subject, which they did not want or could not talk about, being too painful. It was the generation that had experienced the massacre of the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp in 1982 and of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in 1990.

On the other hand, for the youngest, there was still a memory of leisure and play.

Compared to the present, even if many gave illusory answers to avoid too painful emotions, it was already defined as difficult, not good, in need of a change that would avoid the arbitrary repression they suffered on daily basis.

The future was already dilated and torn, differentiated by the possibilities imposed by the occupation to their life expectations. 

If in the West Bank there was a prospect of a future, linked to study and a professionalism that could be built abroad and then returned to help one's own people, in the Gaza Strip the lack of prospects flattened the future on survival, harnessed as it was in the forced closure in an open-air ghetto-prison from which no one could escape.

The percentage of girls and boys who declared that they were afraid of leaving home permanently was almost 30%. 

Experiences of anxiety, phobias and panic attacks were already very widespread, over 50%. 

And then claustrophobia, difficulty sleeping and dreaming. Bedwetting.

That was it. Twenty and more years ago.

Before the "defensive shield operation" in Jenin and the West Bank in 2002, and those that followed in Gaza in 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2012 and 2014. Before now.

My friend K.'s degree thesis was written twenty years ago, give or take a day.

From that work, we developed the idea and practice of bringing a voice that made a speech, despite the situation, and to contain it. 

The idea and practice of giving strength, support and legs to a youth center in the West Bank in the Aida refugee camp. Amal El-Mistaqbal, that's its name. It exists, it resists, still.

Idea and practice for a psychological support center, to give a space to the many who suffered from post-traumatic syndromes in Gaza.

Needless to say, it no longer exists. The center no longer exists. Destroyed and razed to the ground, like the city and the strip. 

The traumas and post-traumatic syndromes still exist, multiplied by a thousand, two thousand, 34 thousand. They are contained only by the death suffered.

There are no gauzes, neither real nor metaphorical, that can hold.

Gauzes.

The word “gauze” comes from the Arabic word “Ghazza”, because it comes from Gaza, from a fine weaving art that is thousands years old.

Two questions remain, as Emily Berry recalled.

How many of our wounds have been healed thanks to them. 

How many of theirs have remained open because of us. 

Of silence and indifference.

Two questions that are absolute affirmations for those who stand in solidarity, and are not afraid. 

For those who challenge life. 

For those who hold the keys tightly in their hands. 

Ready to return.