An elegy for the hapless children of Gaza

Shelley Walia

Professor, Dept of English and Cultural Studies, PU

I write at a moment of deep anguish, stunned by the suffering, death and pain of children in Gaza. The murky reality of children without a childhood stares us in the face. The tragedy of Gaza is deeply personal, as it is to many across the world, especially the poets who have survived the genocide or those who are regrettably no more. Amid the Christmas and New Year celebrations, we need to pause and reflect on our response to grief, to loss, to the risk of genocide of one’s people. It is a time to reflect on what it means to fight for freedom against oppression, and for peace against war.

As the world watches with horror the events in Gaza, the courageous writings of Palestinian poets offer a profound contribution to the poignant depiction of the consciousness of young children. Only by addressing the suffering of the children can there be hope of telling the world what it means to be living in Palestine.

When did we stop caring for the lives of children? To brutally kill children just to get to your enemy makes no sense. Why is the world so obsessed with killing children? We cannot forget the widespread massacre of children in Ukraine, and before that in Yemen, Syria or Iraq, where about 50,000 children were killed. To overlook this reality is to be complicit with the perpetrators. We ignore it at our own peril.

It is the poets, says Naomi Klein, “who catch the unmediated glimpse of what it looks like from the inside, and what it feels like to be there”. The stirring poem ‘My Son Throws a Blanket Over My Daughter’ by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was last week stripped and battered by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, brings home the terror and the fear in the heart of the child: “My four-year-old daughter, Yaffa, / in her pink dress, hears a bomb / explode. /She breathes in deep,/ covers her mouth with her dress’s ruffles. /Yazzan, her five-and-a-half-year-old brother, / grabs a blanket warmed by his sleepy body. / He lays the blanket on his sister. /You can hide now, he assures her. /As for me and my wife, Maram, we pray/ that a magic blanket would hide all the houses /from the bombs and take us to somewhere safe.” No place is safe, not even hospitals and schools.

This is the iconic tale of a small nation turned into a graveyard of innocent children. Poets like Mosab are busy “knotting poems from shards of glass, concrete, steelbars”. “Isn’t easy”, he continues, “sometimes my hands bleed.” It is the poetry of growing up and living under constant siege and direct attack. In the face of the ever-present menace of surveillance drones and bombers, a man is seen “planting a rose in the hollow space of an unexploded tank shell, using it as a vase.”

Stories pour out of this miserable land by its people who refuse to give up. The group called “We Are Not Numbers’ ensures that the stories hidden behind these ‘numbers’ reach across the seas, a clarion call to the people of this world to wake up to their tragedy, and to the tragedy of the dead children.

No one could tell the story of the children with greater poignancy than Mosab, who in his collection of poems Things you find hidden in my ears (2022) writes about the children leaving behind their home: “When I left, I left my childhood in the drawer/ and on the kitchen table. I left my toy horse/ in its plastic bag, / My tired parents walked behind, / my father clutching to his chest / the keys to our house and to the stable.”

Prof Refaat Alareer, a famous Palestinian poet, who was killed a few days ago in northern Gaza, passionately wrote in ‘Gaza Writes Back’: “Sometimes, a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.” Though dead, his poetry is the story of every citizen of his land, of every child; it is the poetry of survival in the face of a nightmare. As he wrote a few days before dying: “ If I must die,/ you must live/ to tell my story/ to sell my/ things/to buy a piece of cloth/ and some strings (make it white with a long tail) / so that a child, somewhere in Gaza / while looking heaven in the eye / awaiting his dad who left in a blaze — / and bid no one farewell / not even to his/ flesh/ not even to himself — / sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above/ and thinks for a moment an angel is there/ bringing back love/If I must/ die/ let it bring hope/ let it be a tale.”

Poets do not die, they live on in the songs and dreams of their countrymen for a brighter and a peaceful future. Art survives if the human spirit imbued with hope survives. Great poets like Mahmoud Darwish will succeed even in death to tell their story of resistance and liberation, their tale of continuing on the path of longing, “searching for the boy I had left here. I didn’t find the mulberry tree he climbed or the courtyard where he used to lose himself. Nothing! Nothing — except the shell of a church without a bell.”

At such an hour, Christmas can help us if we were to meditate on the nature of man and the human condition. We must recall how November 26, World Olive Tree Day, which signifies peace, wisdom and harmony, was drowned in the din of drones and bombers and the plunder of the olive plantations that Palestinians have subsisted on for centuries. Humanity must take note of what Mahfodah Shtayyeh, a 60-year-old woman who has loved and nourished her olive plantation, said while hugging a mutilated tree: “Settlers will never be able to take my land. We will keep resisting until the world ends.”

Collectively, we must redeem humanity from

the sin of cold-blooded vengeance. Civilisations survive only because people, in spite of the loss of loved ones are ready to forgive. It is remarkable how Jews within Israel do not want to use the narrative of the Holocaust as an alibi for the massacre that their brethren soldiers are guilty of. Somewhere in their hearts springs the olive connection of peace and harmony in a world torn by frenzied terrorism, sectarian violence and the loss of the moral compass. Apartheid devastates the land. There can be no greater New Year gift for the children of Gaza than a truce. But I wonder if this gesture will occur to US President Joe Biden, who is instead despatching missiles to the region. 

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