I recalled Gaza’s 50 percent unemployment rate. I would graduate after a few months and start desperately seeking a job, competing with tens of thousands of unemployed graduates who were also fighting over the same positions. Young men used to dream of building families and marrying the girl they loved. Now they watch their hopes crumble under occupation and blockade. I recalled the constant wars every two years, the terror and psychological traumas they inflict. The patient people who can’t leave because of the blockade and the exorbitant travel fees. The eight-hour daily electricity cuts that devastated us for years.
Thinking about these forms of suffering is unavoidable. They deteriorate your life. But coexisting could be our only key to survival. We learned to carry the weight without collapsing. We learned to read between the lines of our own destruction. Knowing that everyone is suffering gives one a strange kind of comfort.
“And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity,” Coelho wrote.
I believed it. Tomorrow will be better. The suffering is temporary. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and turned the page.
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On October 7, 2023, the war began. My job disappeared overnight. So did everything else. Before October 7, I assumed I was collecting fiction novels for escapism. Now I realize I was collecting novels that could never instruct me for what would come next. We entered a constant state of suffering and destruction with no exit gate.
The genocide in Gaza surpasses the horrors imaginable through fiction.
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Hemingway never prepared me for the smell of death, or for what it could feel like to wait for a child to die under stones while she called for help, or for seeing the corpse of a baby lifted from under the rubble. T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland could not capture the sound of silence broken by the deathly intonations of an aerial drone. George Orwell’s fictional portrayal of surveillance in 1984 never imagined a child’s head shattered, brain matter exposed, under the eyes of a human-driven drone.
Horror novelists don’t write such scenes, not because they protect readers, but because they never imagined reality could be this dark. We in Gaza experience what lies beyond fiction’s limits.
