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Introduction
by Dalia Taha
There are no more precious words than the ones that were written in spite of pain, censorship, torture. Pages that shouldn’t exist. Pages that are forbidden. So imagine how precious are the writings of Palestinian political prisoners. For years I have been captivated by their letters. In them I find something more truthful than many celebrated novels. There are no unnecessary words. No lies. Even wedding congratulations sent from prison feel like poems. Perhaps it has something to do with the impossibility of their journey. The number of hands they pass through, furtively, to reach us. The effort that was required to decipher the tiny letters, written on paper thin enough to be rolled into capsules. For before they appear on our screens there are people who received them, copied them, edited them, and made sure their meanings were conveyed correctly. They arrive after a dangerous journey. So what are we expected to do with them, when they fall into our hands, coming from a place that was built to silence the writers of these letters? Perhaps the question that we ought to ask ourselves is this: How can we be serious and stern readers of these letters? How can we, as readers, do justice to these letters? Perhaps the answer to this question lies in the literal reading of them. Most are written in small fonts, on paper that is scarce and require a great effort to decipher. To understand the real letter inside these letters - the humanist and ethical lessons that it offers - requires us to start from the lesson that the literal reading of the text provides, which is to recognise that deciphering them is not an easy task. It’s true that these letters issue from profound suffering, from the harshest places on earth. But it’s unfair to reduce them to this. In reality these letters contain fundamental truths; truths that now seem essential and important, in a world that is built to snuff out our belief in responsibility, justice, and possibility. To listen attentively, wit h great fidelity, is to make sure these letters achieve their purpose, which is to release us back into the world, as better readers of it.
During the Great Revolt of 1936, the British Mandate began the mass incarceration of Palestinians. After 1948 British prisons became Israeli prisons. In the beginning there was not enough space in them. 150,000 Palestinians were held in barbed wire camps by the new state after 1948, a state born as a gulag. Many were used as slave labour.
In Searing of Consciousness (Or Redefining Torture) Walid Daqqah writes that Israeli prisons were built to crush and deform Palestinians, to instill an atmosphere of fear. There are no Palestinian stories without broken ribs and shattered skulls. And there is no Palestinian gathering where tales from captivity are not told. About 40% of Palestinian men in the occupied territories have been arrested since 1967. Women are also incarcerated, as are children and teenagers. Many of my friends and colleagues, relatives, students, and teachers, have been imprisoned.
People are rounded up for the most banal reasons. In 2019, 70 Palestinian students from Birzeit University were imprisoned on charges of student union organising such as “participation in a student trip,” and “participation in dance event.” These were just some of the charges, but increasingly, Israel is now not even bothering to pretend. Administrative detention orders allow them to detain anyone without charge or a trial, which can be renewed indefinitely. People spend years in administrative detention in places that have over time become household names for us. Our other geography. Askalan, Ad Damoun, Jalbou, Ramleh, Nafcha, Naqab, Ramoun, Ofar, Hadarim, Hsharon. We live our lives in the interstices of this geography, imprisoned by these names, before or after our release. In a voice message smuggled out of prison during a prisoner hunger strike demanding an end to the practice of administrative detention, Ghassan Zawahrer describes the release from prison as a release into another prison, in which you are waiting for your next imprisonment. So you are unable fully to commit to anything. You are unable to know your children or your siblings. You are woken in the middle of night by any sound. Knowing at any time your house can be filled by screaming soldiers. Knowing what then awaits. Palestinians endure brutal torture in prison. I have spent days reading the details of this torture on the website of the only organisation who works to legally support prisoners. The organisation itself has been harassed and assaulted by Israeli forces. It has now been condemned as a terrorist organisation, and its offices have been raided over and over again, with laptops and documents confiscated.
Every time I read a letter written by a Palestinian political prisoner I have the feeling that it is part of an endless conversation. A conversation that originates from the first human inscriptions on stone, their paintings on wall carried on in philosophical debates, in wondering poems, in plays seeking to understand the role of the human in a world governed by larger forces. This conversation that began with a desire by humans to understand the world, their place in it, and their beautiful attempts to make something of their bewilderment and pain, turning these feelings into larger utterances about life. The conversation that was carried on by those who insisted on telling the truth and reveal the unseen forces working underneath our reality. Perhaps what I recognise in their letters is that which distinguishes great work in the humanities: the search for what deserves to be investigated, the desire to make the world a more humane place in which to live.
Like all the voices that defend the truth in a world that prefers to shy away from it, those who carry these letters, like lanterns, know that their larger battle is not against their jailor or killer, but against the forces that help keep a society dormant. They know that these forces work tirelessly to fabricate fantastical stories about our world, satisfying a horrid appetite to refashion pain as normalcy. These forces destroy the richness of our experience, insisting on making small compartments for our ideas of humanity, of society and of desire. One of the most eviscerating truths about these forces is that through them runs no path for transforming our world. They lay waste our belief in the power of the people; shame the impulse to be angered by pain and criminalise the struggle for justice. We see examples of this all over the world, not only in Palestine. The carriers of lanterns know that these forces, and the stories they tell, are more insidious and deeply rooted, than those who would kill us. They lurk unnoticed in our daily lives in the form of innocent desires and ambitions: obsessions with personal success; nonchalance towards the pain of others; spiteful competitiveness; greed. We can feel their deeply ingrained power in certain moments. In the way that we flee across the street when we see a stranger approach. In our blind hatred towards those who we are made to see as ‘other’. In our fear of those who tell us a different truth. In the belief that safety comes from installing a surveillance camera rather than working against poverty and inequality. In disbelieving the power or need for protests, strikes and political actions of all kinds. And at the core, the unshatterable belief that the best we can do with our lives is to get a good, stable job.
I think about the writing of prisoners because prison is the most difficult place to write. And because the life of these letters can tell us a truth about the work that writing should do. Which is to arrive from a place where a writer is aware of the bars behind which he lives, and wants to make others see the bars behind which they live, and to break them. Writing seeks to break bars, to free us. In that simple exercise, it can remind us that jails and fortresses are not as impregnable as they seem. That we can always find a way to communicate. I turn to prisoners’ letters when I question the role of writing, and ask what it should do in a world in which we are killed and brutalised every day? How to continue writing and speaking when you are being silenced? How to insist on telling the truth in a world where the powerful have the capacity to silence you? How to feel what truths are necessary?
Despite these horrors, our prisoners remain unflinching. Throughout the years they’ve lead strikes, staged acts of resistance to improve the conditions of their lives, or protested the injustices of their incarceration. They’ve transformed their cells into libraries, schools and universities. They have produced books, poetry, children’s literature, letters, academic research, and all kinds of literary and academic work that enriches our imagination and expands the practice of our resistance. They are our heroes, our teachers. Above all, their insatiable hunger for freedom, their stark refusal to accept injustice, and to flatten the experience of being alive, are for us lessons in both beauty and horror.
Held behind bars, denied all pleasures, even the simplest things like a view of the sky or the sight of a rose, brutalised and tortured, Palestinian political prisoners keep fighting, using ingenious ways to write, and to explore why writing matters. They know that humans suffer other kinds of imprisonment, and they know that writing has to make people aware of the cells they might be living in. In doing so, it can show us the possibility of many kinds of freedoms. In a world where we can only imagine personal salvation, they insist on collective salvation. They remind us that being a better dreamer means being a better human. That we can’t imagine a better world unless everyone has a share in it. That we have no choice but to fight against injustice.
That responsibility towards the pains of others is not an ideological duty but an act of love. Walid Daqqah writes “I worry all the time that I might stop feeling shocked and moved by the pain of other people. Any people. I worry that I will no longer be moved by scenes of injustice, any injustice. The act of being moved is for me a daily preoccupation, by which I gauge my strength and resilience. The capacity to feel the pain of other peoples, the pain of other humanities, is at the heart of civilisation.” Aysheh Odeh writes: “I never dreamt of gold or fancy clothes. The sight of gold on the bosoms of women felt vulgar. We dreamt of a free country in which we can travel not as strangers. We want to create a beautiful and free world”. Salah Hamouri writes: “For me, real life is in the train to freedom and its sacrifices and not in the station waiting for someone to manufacture our freedom”.
Palestinian political prisoners write to us. Their letters, which issue out of the darkest of places, are philosophical disquisitions on what it takes to live with others, in this world, believing that we can change it. In the smuggled voice-message, addressing Palestinians, and detailing the life of Palestinian political prisoners and the reasons for why they were committed to a hunger strike, Zawahreh signs off this message with the words: ‘Your sons and daughters’. And something falls into place for me. Because the destiny of the son is to look with piercing, questioning eyes into what has for others become normalcy. The destiny of the son is to face his father. To be a son is to carry the responsibility of having to reiterate again and again the injustices of the world he has inherited. This is what writing should do. It can’t stop reiterating. It cannot get tired. It can’t stop saving. But the gift of their writing is the greatest gift. The gift of reading as a disclosure, or revelation. That is what happens when we find our way to the pages that were supposed to be unreachable. That is when we become true readers.
3 letters by Walid Daqqah
Parallel Time Today is the 25th of March. It’s the first day of my
20th year in prison. It’s also the 20th birthday of a young comrade.
Remembering the day of my arrest, and the birthday of my comrade, I ask
myself; How old is Lina today? Lina who is now a mother of two. How old
is Najlaa? Who is a mother of three. And Haneen, who now has a girl?
What about Obaida, who went to study in America. I never had the chance
to say goodbye to him. Or my nephews and nieces, some of whom were
children when I was arrested, some of whom were born years after my
incarceration. How old are my brothers, who are now married, and have
become fathers? I didn’t ask such questions before. I didn’t care about
the larger meaning of time. Time mattered to me only as minutes that
flew by during family visitations. 45 minutes is hardly enough time to
ask all the questions that I have written down on my palms, alongside
the requests for things I need, so that I will remember. It is a lot of
work for Sana’a to run the errands for me and this work is also a work
of memory. We are not allowed to bring papers and pencils to
visitations. So we have to remember. But in the frantic rush of minutes
I forget to notice the lines wrinkling my mother’s face. I forget to
notice that she has started to dye her hair. I forget to ask her, what
is your real age, Mama? What do I mean by her real age? I don’t know my
mother’s real age. My mother has two ages. Her age in real time, which
is the age I don’t know. And her age measured in the years of my
imprisonment. In this parallel time she is 19 years old. I write to you
from this parallel time. It is a confined place, and inside this
confinement we don’t use the measures of time to which you are used,
like minutes, and hours; unless our time and yours converge at the glass
barrier of a visitation. Only in those rare instances are we forced to
use your time. As it were, your concept of time is also the only thing
that hasn’t changed in your time. Luckily we still remember how to use
it. Prisoners who joined us in our cells during the Intifada told me
that so many things have changed in your time. Rotary dial phones are
supplanted by push button Telephones. I have also heard that car tyres
don’t have an inner tube, but are now made using only one tubeless tube.
I like the logic of a tyre made in this manner, with a material that is
self-sealing, preventing air from escaping. I like it because it
resembles the prisoner who is assailed by “the nails” of his jailers,
protecting himself only by means of his own self. There is no
alternative but to rely on this self-repairing system.
Meanwhile, we discovered that those who are in the driver’s seat of our
struggle, our leaders, cannot encounter a nail without running over it,
nor see a bump without veering across it. All the while believing that
they are finding clever short cuts, shortening the distance and
conserving our energy. These drivers are not merely careless. They just
learned to depend on these kinds of tyres. As if they weren’t made of
flesh and blood. As if they had neither desire nor hope. We became
something they trade in the market, a market of political machinations.
Why not take some tyres and give us a bit of vehicle instead? What is
the use of tyres without a vehicle? I wish that the Arab and Palestinian
leadership would become better at what they do. I wish that it could
rely on this kind of internal system of self-repair. I wish that they
would stop calling for the help of American (and other) tyre-fixers, who
make a mess of everything. As is the case now in Lebanon. If we have to
talk about politics, this is what I have to say. Even though I have
decided not to talk about politics. In parallel time we see you, but you
don’t see us. We hear you, but you don’t hear us. As if there were a
glass barrier between us, tinted on your side, like the car windows of
important people. Tinted until some of us, in our presumptuousness,
began to act as if they were important. And they in turn convinced us
that we were important. And why not believe in our importance! The
peculiarities of the situation demands it. In the rest of the world,
states and governments hold political prisoners. In our country, which
has a government but no state, we have a Ministry for Political
Prisoners!! For those who don’t know us, you should know that we have
been living in parallel time before the end of the Cold War, before the
fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist countries. We have been here
long before the demolition of the Berlin Wall. We were here before the
first Gulf War, and the Second and the Third. Before the Oslo Accords,
and the Madrid Accords. Before the First Intifada and the Second
Intifada. Our age in parallel time is the age of revolution, before its
political factions arrived on the scene. We have been here before Arab
satellite TV. Before hamburger culture flooded our capitals. We have
been here before the invention of the mobile phone, telecommunication
systems and the Internet. We are part of history. But history, as you
know, is something that is over. We are the exception in this story. We
are a past that does not come to an end. We speak to you in your present
so that it doesn’t become your future. I said earlier that our time here
is not your time. The reason is that the movement of time here cannot be
divided into past, present, future. As it churned in confinement and
stasis, our time stripped our language of common concepts of time and
place, or at the very least diminished them. Here, for example, we don’t
ask when we will meet, or where? We have met and we still meet in the
same place. We walk here in improvisational fashion, along the border
between past and present. And every moment beyond the present is an
unknown future, which we do not know how to handle. Our future is beyond
our control. Our situation resembles that of all other Arab countries,
but with one crucial difference. While their jailers are Arabs, those
who keep us captive are foreigners. We are imprisoned here because we
searched for a future. And here the future was buried alive. In our
parallel time, most of us have never had to answer the question so often
asked of children; what will you become when you grow up? What do you do
when you are an adult? Even though I am 44 years old now, I still don’t
know what I will do when I grow up!! In parallel time we are the measure
of time. We are that time that does battle with place, pitting itself
against it. This is how we become the measure of our time. We mark that
time by the arrest of one person, the arrival of another, the release of
someone else. In our parallel time these are the markers that matter. We
know how to tell the time, and the day, and the year, by means of your
measure of time, but these measures are useless here. What is useful is
the following; ‘this happened when this guy arrived,’ or ‘before that
guy was released.’ And because we don’t know when someone will be
arrested or moved to another cell, we don’t have the measure of the
future. So we borrow your measures when we point to the future. Your
time is real time. Your time is the future. In parallel time we develop
strange attachments to objects, which make(s) sense only to those who
spend time in parallel time. How else could you understand the
relationship between a political prisoner and the undergarment that was
the last thing he wore before his arrest? How could we explain our
profound attachment to random objects whose loss would make us
unimaginably sad, even bring us to tears? Strange things, like a
particular lighter, or a particular box of cigarettes, which suddenly
becomes invaluable and charged with all manner of emotional importance
because it was the last thing we carried on us in “the future.” It is as
if these random objects reassure us of a certain truth, which is that we
once were outside this time. They are the evidence that tells us again
and again that we belonged to your time. Not just commodities to be
consumed and discarded in garbage bins, these objects are the straws
that a drowning man clings unto, as he tries to stay afloat in the ocean
that is parallel time. In 1996, I heard the honk of a Subaru for the
first time in ten years, and cried. For the inhabitants of parallel
time, the honking of a car is much more than an attempt to alert. For
the occupants of parallel time, this sound solicits the deepest and most
profoundly human of feelings. The relationship with time developed by
the inhabitants of parallel time is no less strange than the
relationship with things. Here, you might forge a special emotional
connection to particular blots in the walls of your cell, caused by
humidity or water seepage. Or you might develop an emotional connection
to a hole in one of the walls, or in the door. Consider the following,
strange conversation, teeming with emotions, interruptions,
descriptiveness, as if it were giving an account of Heaven and its
Celestial Gate, not a prison cell and its gaps. First prisoner: ‘There
is nothing like section 4… Gone are the days of section 4’ Second
prisoner: ‘It’s true, but the best thing about section 4 is cell 7’
First prisoner (while sighing in pain): ‘I know…I know what you are
going to say…From that cell you could hear in the early hours of the
morning the sound of cars on the highway’ Second prisoner
(interrupting): ‘That’s not it…Do you know the door of the cell? The
door of the cell!! Between the door and the wall there is a huge
gap…like 2 centimetres…if you were looking through it while lying on
your bed you could see the end of the corridor.’ I wasn’t planning to
write today about time, or place, or about parallel time, or anything
else really. Like philosophy or politics. All I wanted to write about
were the sources of my anguish. About what I like and what I hate. But
the writing that I had not planned to do resembles the life I had not
planned to live. Let me admit in fact that I have never planned
anything. I didn’t plan to become a fighter, nor a member of a political
party, nor to be involved in politics. This is not because all that has
happened to me happened by mistake, or because politics is a hateful
thing, as some people like to think, but because to me these were big
and complicated topics. I’m not a fighter or a politician by choice. If
I had had my way I would simply have lived my life as a labourer,
painting walls, or an attendant at a gas station. Which is what I was
doing when I was arrested. I could have married one of my relatives,
just like everyone else. She could have given birth to seven or ten
children. I could have bought a truck, or learned the intricacies of
selling cars, or exchanging currency. All of this was possible, until I
was confronted with the atrocities committed during the wars in Lebanon,
like the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, which shook me to the core. I
worry all the time that I might stop feeling shocked and moved by the
pain of other people. Any people. I worry that I will no longer be moved
by scenes of injustice, any injustice. This is for me a daily
preoccupation, by which I gauge my strength and resilience. The capacity
to feel the pain of other peoples, the pain of other humanities, is at
the heart of civilisation. The expression of the mental aspect of a man
is his will, the essence of his physicality is work, and the essence of
his spirituality is feeling. And to feel the pain of fellow human
beings, the pain of other humanities, is the essence of human
civilisation. This essence is what is targeted during every day and hour
and year of a prisoner’s life. You are not targeted as a political
being, nor as a religious being, and consuming being, who is being
denied the pleasures of a material life. What is targeted inside you is
your social side; the human inside you. What is targeted is any
relationship that extends you beyond yourself, be it with other people,
or with nature. Even a relationship to your jailer as a human being.
They do everything to make us hate them. What is targeted is your love,
and your style, and your humanity. I will admit now, in my 20th year in
prison, that I don’t feel hatred, nor do I feel beset by the
indifference and brutishness of prison life. I will admit that I become
childishly happy for the simplest things. A word of praise or
encouragement overjoys me. I will admit that my heart quickens at the
sight of a rose on TV, or a natural vista, like the sea. I will admit
that despite everything I’m happy. There are no joys of life that I
miss, except for two scenes, of children and labourers. The sight of
children drifting in from all parts of the village in the morning,
heading to school. And the sight of labourers in the early hours,
trickling in from all streets and corners during a cold, foggy winter
morning, trudging towards the town centre, all set to make the trip to
work. I will admit now that it would not have been possible for me to
enjoy these feeling(s), that it would not have been possible for all
this love to remain with me, if I had not had the love of my mother
Farida, and of my wife Sana’a, and of my brother Hosni…if I had not had
the support of my parents, and felt encircled by loved ones and friends.
I will admit now that I’m still human, clutching my love as if it were
an ember. That with this love in hand I will remain resilient. And that
I will love you. For love is my humble victory over my jailer. With
regards, Walid Daqqah
Milad (A Place without a Door)
Once, after she had returned from a trip to the ocean, I promised Milad on the phone that I would take her there next time. She paused for a few seconds, hesitant to respond, as if she didn’t want to shock me before finally saying, “No, you don’t have a door.”
For a long time whenever Milad asked me on the phone, ‘Daddy, where are you?’ I avoided using the word “prison.” I feared that it might be too much for her at her tender age to begin to live with this word and its weighty implications. Torn, I grappled with the question of whether I should nevertheless tell my daughter the truth? Or should I hide the bitter reality, to prevent the connotations of the word prison from lodging in her imagination?
Through her visits, Milad came to understand what a prison is, long before she learned the meaning of the word. To her it was a place without a door. Where her father was confined, which he was unable to leave. And for her, if there was no door, then there could be no visit to the ocean. No breakfast to share. And no chance for me to accompany her to the nursery she fondly referred to as “school.”
From the earliest moments of their lives our children come to understand the reality of walls, barriers and checkpoints. They do so long before they are introduced to the word “occupation”. So we ask ourselves a vexing question, one that is of the utmost importance to their education: How do we turn the oppressive feeling created by this reality into a force for positive action, which could contribute to the constructive growth of their young and developing personalities?
While thinking about whether I should use the word “prison” with Milad, memories from my years of captivity began to play in my mind. During these years, I found myself living alongside not just one but three generations of prisoners: the Father, the Son, and the Grandson. Perhaps it is the pervasiveness of prisons in the lives of children, through their frequent visits to incarcerated family members, which brings them back to the confines of the prison as prisoners themselves. In one of my stories from life in prison, entitled “Uncle, Give Me a Cigarette,” a 12-year-old child prisoner asked me for a cigarette. In normal circumstances, outside the walls of the prison, I would have said no. We don’t want children to smoke. But in this environment, it struck me that the child wanted by this request to grow up quickly so that he could better confront the years of confinement that now loomed before him or perhaps recover from the violence of his arrest. By the act of smoking, he seemed to proclaim “behold me, an adult.” So I handed the child a cigarette. And in the presence of Milad, I finally spoke the word “prison.” In the end, I followed Milad’s own cue to me. She had taught me the importance of honesty and truthfulness when raising children. In the end, it did not matter if she heard me use the word “prison.” In her heart she had already felt what it meant. It is a place without a door.
With regards, Walid Daqqah
“Uncle, Give Me a Cigarette”
It is morning and I hear the jangling of two sets of handcuffs as the prison guard approaches us. He throws them to the ground, clanging against the concrete floor, and a sense of calm settles over the room. There’s one bundle to tie the hands, and another, with longer chains, to tie the legs. Eight pairs of handcuffs of each kind, for seven prisoners.
I stand with the others in the middle of a small yard, ringed by holding cells, and try to lean against the wall. I am tired of being moved between prisons since we started the open hunger strike. I gather my energy and try to take in as much air as possible in preparation for a journey that will last hours inside an iron box that in this heat quickly turns into an unbearable furnace.
Once he is finished handcuffing us, the guard heads off for the prisoner transport truck. And then I hear a voice emanating out of the cell behind me… “Uncle, give me a cigarette.” I peer into the cell’s darkness but cannot see anyone, and for a moment I think I am delirious. Then the voice issues out of the cell again, this time louder and more desperate. “Uncle, my uncle, give me a cigarette!” I stare into the cell again and call to the voice. “Where are you?!” “I’m here, down here!”. Hunching down, I peer through the slot in the bottom of the door through which prisoners receive their food and have their hands tied before being let out of the cell, and I see a child, not older than twelve years old. A child asking for a cigarette.
I didn’t know how to respond to him. Should I give him a cigarette, I wondered, or should I educate him about the dangers of smoking in the way that adults do with children outside prison? Adults, adults…and then I am struck by the fact I am including myself in this category. By the fact that he called me “uncle.” Am I so old already?
I was suddenly terrified by being addressed in this manner. It was the first time during my 26 years of imprisonment that I have met someone speaking to me across such a distance of age. In prisons we are used to not addressing each other in this way, with social honorifics marking our age. Regardless of what our age differences may be, we all address each other as “my brother” or “comrade” and, more recently, “fighter.”
I considered the child, empathising with his craving for the cigarette. The craving is not for the rush of nicotine but for what the cigarette signifies. Frightened, a mere child in the harsh world of the prison, he wanted to become a man quickly. Meanwhile, it is now my desire to turn back time so that I can again become a child, at least a young man, the way I was when I entered prison more than a quarter of a century ago.
Both of us were fearful. I was fearful for the time that had passed and he was fearful of what had not yet passed. I was afraid of the past and he was afraid of the future. I was afraid of having lived a life that had burnt out in prison, and he was afraid of what the cigarette that was now lodged between his lips could not burn away. The cigarette became something else after he had exhaled and so did he, standing tall now on his toes, appearing now older than his age. The ember glow became a lantern in his hand, chasing away the darkness of the cell, dispelling his fear and loneliness.
He was not smoking but trying to dispel the image of a child that so incontrovertibly clung to him. In the world of the prison, in the face of the cruelty of its guards, childhood is a burden. Knowing that he was to face years of imprisonment, he was seeking to rid himself of his vulnerability and innocence, for which he clearly had no further use - it having made no difference to the judge that had sentenced him to four years.
The guard came back for us, picked the eighth pair of handcuffs up from the concrete floor, and barked at the child to push his hands through the slot in the door. So the child pushed them through still holding the cigarette between his fingers. The guard shouted at him to drop the cigarette and then muttered to himself in Hebrew, bemoaning the sight of a child smoking. Nevertheless he proceeded with the handcuffing, remaining unmoved by the sight of those small hands in handcuffs. Because the child’s wrists were too small, however, he struggled several times to secure the handcuffs, and finally decided to use them to chain the boy’s legs.
When he was moved out of the cell, in preparation for the transportation, I looked at him and imagined that he was my own son, such as fate had not yet wanted to bring into the world. I wanted with every strain of my being to hug him and as these paternal feelings surged through me, I felt an overwhelming desire to cry. But I hid my feelings. I did not want to shatter the image of the man that he wanted now to become. I walked over to him, so as to shake his hand as a comrade, and a rival, asking
“How are you, fighter?”With regards, Walid Daqqah
Nafcha Prison , July 2021
For three months now, I sought to get started on this article or another, however, each of my attempts, for several reasons, quickly faltered. This was so even though engaging in writing was no longer a constraint for me as it had once been.
Most of the challenges I faced with regards to writing came in the form of moments spent in silent waiting or moments of anxious anticipation. However, these moments were not empty, rather they were crowded and busy. And these moments are precisely what makes time move quickly in here, like words gushing out from the edges of your mind with a fluidity like water. Or it can also make time move slowly, sluggishly, dragging along dully, like the slow sway of the trees responding to a gentle breeze which gives the viewer an illusion of movement, while in reality it was still and motionless. An overwhelming desire to write about the future overcame me, however the effect of the present situation I was in, deterred me from doing so, or perhaps I allowed it to affect me?!
The biggest obstacle, however, came from a person who motivated me to write this text. She was unaware that we are all seated on the precipice of time which is chronologically equal for everyone, but different in terms of value and essence for every individual. In brief, let me narrate to you my story with time and with Dalia.
In a prison, establishing “personal” means of communication between the prisoners and the outside world doesn’t come easy. However, after much struggle, painstaking effort and unimaginable costs, the prisoners where I was imprisoned had done so. I used it one day to contact my friend with the objective of completing a research project which we were co-authoring during our incarceration here. The prison warden however released my friend on bail thereby interrupting the completion of our project. However, before he could embrace his newfound freedom, we both agreed to work towards the completion of the project even if it was to be done remotely. It was for this purpose that I contacted him and during our conversation he told me about the possibility of publishing literary works, and suggested that I should do some writing of my own and work towards publishing it.
To be honest, the source of my friend’s confidence and faith in my abilities as a writer who could compose literary works was a mystery to me. Especially, since in the years gone by, his friendly teasing at my skills as a writer used to be quite sharp. I’m not sure from where I got the courage to go along with his plan but eventually ended up agreeing with his suggestion.
I asked him to elaborate further on this project and he began painting a vocal portrait of it, most of which I did not understand except that I would be required to write about the future and what it means. And he also mentioned that I needed to speak to a lady named Dalia who would be supervising the project. I took her number from him despite my reservations about my temperament, which sometimes affected my ability to write and thus might cause me to miss deadlines. Besides which, time inside a prison is determined by the prison administration without consideration of a prisoner’s needs. Nevertheless, after a couple of days I asked my friend to schedule a call with Dalia so we could discuss the details of what was required.
Now to the appointed meeting… I do not like to miss any appointments that I have agreed to, not because I am strict with myself, but because, in prison, I do not have many appointments or a busy life. In fact, I have no appointments at all! Life inside a prison is a life of repetition and daily routines which one can become accustomed to quite easily. The frightful thing is when we allow it to assert its dull authority over us. Every new day resembles the one before, making life monotonous, making it sway to a well-established rhythmic pattern.
Despite my scepticism towards the project, which several times made me hesitate, I pushed my doubts aside and called Dalia at the appointed time as I had promised to do.
During the course of the conversation, I could feel the positive energy of Dalia and it rubbed off on me and we talked at length. She elaborated on her ideas, explaining that the project was commissioned with the objective of shedding light on any of the following topics: the future, the resistance, the night, and the gun. Different ideas which got me thinking about the various ways one could approach these topics. After agreeing to speak again in the coming week, we hung up.
Little did I know that this would be our first and last conversation. After dinner, all of my companions returned to their cells, made themselves comfortable on their mattresses and busied themselves with whatever they saw fit. As for me, I began focusing my thoughts on my conversation with Dalia and the possible topics I could write about. What future should I write about? How do I reconcile between prison and the future? How should the tone of my language be? Should I be overly optimistic in my writing? Should I write about the exchanges that some of the most optimistic of my fellow inmates have shared with me? They believe that these prison cells will one day, after liberation, become museums or memorials chronicling the colonial era. I am quite certain that many, even those who were very pessimistic by nature, harboured similar thoughts as this is what all previously colonised nations did once they achieved independence from their colonisers. But what is so novel about this idea? Where is the creativity in this? How is it captivating? Where is the ability to amaze? Not finding it fulfilling I did not wish to waste readers’ time with this, though I realised its importance. Writing stimulates the imagination. And it is the spark of imagination which softly caresses the soul of a person and makes him reach for the horizons of tomorrow. And it opens for him the windows of hopes and dreams. This is the most beautiful function of writing when it engages the imagination and juxtaposes it to give reality another opportunity to dream.
I turned my gaze towards the television and saw trailers for two films about breaking out of prison to be screened tomorrow. I decided to watch them. Perhaps, they would offer me a path to escape from the harshness of reality and look to the future.
The time to make the second call to Dalia, as agreed in our previous conversation, had now arrived. I was accustomed to scheduling my phone calls in the mornings rather than in the afternoon or evening, as this was when it was the least busy. With few takers for the phone in the mornings, it afforded the best opportunity to have an extended conversation, which when calculated, came to 17 minutes as opposed to ten in the afternoon and five in the evenings. However, I scheduled my second call with Dalia for the afternoon, despite it being a shorter duration, since it suited her better.
And as luck would have it, as soon as it was noon, sirens blared, set off by the prison administration, which meant the closure of all the sections and that the inmates would have to return to their cells. We had to be extremely cautious and had to hide our phones, as we feared that the prison administration might set a trap to confiscate them under the pretext of training. The training session ended after three hours, which was after my scheduled time with Dalia. So, I decided to postpone the call since only five minutes remained from the time allocated for me.
After the evening session I got up and turned on the television to watch the two movies whose main plot revolved around a man who was skilled in breaking out of prison regardless of how tight the security systems were. This prompted the prisons to hire him and use his skills to identify possible vulnerabilities in the security systems. In the movie, he is initially arrested and then thrown into prison while none of the guards were aware of his character or his craft. He, then, begins to prepare a plan to escape.
The second part of the movie dealt with the same plot. However, with the addition of a sci-fi angle to it whereby it shows the development of a futuristic prison with stringent security systems in place. In reality, I found both these films quite pedestrian. Both the films fulfilled their goals of covering the basic themes Hollywood is dependent on: entertainment, excitement and violence. Nevertheless, I do not deny that they carried a useful idea, albeit an insufficient and incomplete one, on how to break out of prison.
The protagonist of the two films summarises the requirements needed to break out of prison in three main points:
— First, you must have intricate knowledge of the prison system, the rotation system of the guards, the total number of guards and the places where they are stationed.
— Second, you must have some external helpers from outside the prison whom you can depend on.
— Third, you must have someone to help from within the prison apparatus itself, preferably, someone like the prison doctor whose humanity can be exploited to your advantage.
The idea intrigued me. Especially, given my interest in the stories of certain escapees, most of whom were captured before, during or after their attempted escape. A few of them, however, managed to evade capture. While some were later martyred. However, the question uppermost in my mind at the moment was, ‘Why has this idea of breaking out of prison lost its allure in recent years?’ It was hard to believe that the idea of breaking out never crossed the minds of these fettered long-term prisoners, every time they were by themselves.
That night, before I went to bed, the idea of breaking out as demonstrated in the movie occupied my thoughts, and I allowed my imagination to flirt with the idea as an exciting adventure. It is the right of every one who has been denied their freedom to ponder over it and to dream of escape. Especially since I was sick of the intellectual meandering I indulge in every day to escape from the depths of this abysmal concrete prison.
I was quite inspired by the first two points in the movie, however the third step seemed a bit more difficult. As I conjured up the image of our two prison doctors I recalled the scenes of interrogation at Al-Maskobiya Detention Centre. During one of the rounds of interrogation there which my friends and I endured, I was brought to the doctor on a wheelchair after a round of torture. He looked at me with revulsion from afar and without bothering to examine me, he shifted his gaze towards the guards and intelligence officers and said: ‘there is nothing wrong with him. Take him back for further interrogation.’ A sentence he kept repeating with all my friends who were brought to him after being subjected to torture.
I cursed him and cursed the memory I had of him, then I realised the lateness of the hour. I asked myself, ‘do you really want to break out?’ The answer was, “no.” I put an end to my crazy imagination and told myself, ‘you have traversed half the distance, only another half remains.’ I turned off the lights and went to sleep.
My friend arranged another meeting over the phone with Dalia. And that was to be either on a Monday or Wednesday and scheduled specifically at noon as she was busy at other times. And I agreed. Then I arranged with Ayman – “the gazelle operator” - to schedule the call at noontime on Monday. Just so you know, Ayman was known as the “the gazelle operator,” as gazelle was the nom de guerre for the telephone. This was done so that the inmates do not use the word telephone, even by mistake, in front of the guards. Smuggling phones into the prison is a hugely complicated and expensive affair. And as a result, there are very few phones within the prison and a constant target for the guards. It was quite common for the prison administration to conduct intensive search operations using their special units with the objective of finding and confiscating phones. The section where I was being held had four phones and the time for using them was allotted equally among 160 prisoners, spread over a period of 8 hours, during “free” time alone, as a precaution against the possibility of sudden raids by the prison guards.
Anyway, I spoke to Ayman and told him I needed a phone with good call quality and reception as I had something important to discuss. The reason for my insistence on a good phone was that most of the phones were worn out due to heavy usage and additionally the prison administration had installed interference technology with the capability to disturb and prevent ease of communication and also to significantly reduce the call quality.
To protect the devices and ensure their longevity, a specific person is selected to press the numbers on the keypad for dialling. It is preferable that the person selected for this task has fingers which are slender and known for their agility. He should also have the ability to handle the delicate number pad bearing in mind the fragility of the device. You may mock what I say, but this is the reality. The phones are very small, perhaps the size of two fingers held up together. Most of the phones are called cockroaches and the names are ascribed to them based on their colour. For example, red cockroach, blue cockroach etc., and sometimes it is shortened to just “red” or “blue.” And each of the devices acquire their colour from the colour of the cardboard box which was used to pack it in as it is smuggled into the prison without its battery and back cover. It is the responsibility of the inmates to re-assemble it once it is smuggled inside.
When the time for my call approached Ayman gestured to me from the courtyard with a tilt of his head, and I rushed to him. On our way to the phone, he told me in his thick accent, “Listen, my friend, I going to tell you about this phone which is big enough it may even be visible!” I burst out laughing at his humour. I sat next to the phone and gave him the number which he promptly dialled. As the number went through, I could feel the vibrations associated with the ringing of the phone. However, Dalia did not bring it to life with a response from her end. I made another attempt to call her, but it wasn’t better than the last time. I said: “It appears that she has not noticed her phone ringing,” and I tried a third time until the phone emitted a hoarse sound from all the screaming.
Ayman looked at me and said: “It is such a shame with regards to your time. You lost three minutes from your allotted ten. It is better you dial someone else, so your time does not go for a waste.” I agreed with him and so I gave him my mother’s number and she picked up her phone at the very first ring!
I tried to go to sleep, but the ghost of my thoughts continued to haunt me and prevented me from drifting off. A rather stubborn issue I suffer from is when my mind is occupied with something, it consumes me entirely and I am unable to let go of it, unless I get some satisfactory answers which would calm my mind at least temporarily.
What does imprisonment and the future mean? One besieges you with all its might while the other strives for freedom with all its will. A continuous struggle. I had asked myself this question nearly fifteen years ago while I was a teenager. At the time of my first arrest carrying this burden as a sixteen-year-old I did not imagine that my imprisonment would be longer than five years. It appears now that I may have have been too optimistic. To be honest, I did not truly realise the reality of this until a couple of years before, while I was sitting in the visitors’ hall waiting to get a glimpse of my beloved mother amidst a crowd of prisoners, all of whom were waiting in similar anticipation. I caught sight of an elderly man who was standing right across, with four prisoners between me and him. I scanned his face and realised that he appeared familiar. I thought maybe I had met him during one of my previous arrests. I wanted to go up to him and find out, but I was overcome with shyness and held back. For if he recognised me and I did not recognise him, it would make for an awkward situation. Not only would I be embarrassed, but I would be making him uneasy and perhaps resentful.
I remedied the situation by enquiring about him to a young man next to me. He told me: “That is Tha’er. He is one of the fighters belonging to the “al-Kataib” group who were all arrested at the end of the Al-Aqsa uprising.” I remembered him immediately. We were both imprisoned in the same facility thirteen years ago. I was young back then and only recently arrested. He was a young man, a lovely companion, sincere in heart and speech. Back then, he was expecting to receive a lengthy sentence. I wondered if he possibly got out and was arrested again just like me and several others or if he was still serving the same sentence. His features had changed a lot since I had seen him first. Wrinkles surrounded his eyes and his face. Hair on his head had turned completely grey. The only exception was his smile which hadn’t changed. I made my way towards him eagerly.
"Tha'er, hello."
"Hello, hello."
"How are you?"
"I'm very good, thank you."He appeared to be scanning me with his eyes in an attempt to try and remember me. “I know, maybe you don’t remember me, but we were incarcerated together thirteen years ago in Ofer Prison, Section 15. My name is Tariq.”
He greeted me warmly, except that I felt that he couldn’t locate me in his exhaustive memory which perhaps included thousands of prisoners who have passed through the twisty corridors of prison in recent years. And to put him out of his misery, I asked him:
“Are you still serving the same sentence from thirteen years ago?”
“Yeah, by God, the same sentence. This sentence may die, but not my soul!” He then laughed out loud. I became cheerful seeing his high morale and joined him in his resilient laughter.
“Why did they pronounce such a lengthy sentence?”
“Twenty years in total!”
“May God grant you good health, Uncle, for the sake of the homeland.”
“And may God grant you good health too and protect our country”. He was right. I did not know what to tell him. My feelings of despair seemed intertwined with his. I also felt I was projecting my misery onto him. I tried to smile and maintain my composure as best as I could, until suddenly, the families burst into the visitors’ hall. Their sudden entrance removed the grief from my face which was about to reveal itself to him.
I went to sit with my mother from behind the glass and began to enquire about my family.
Throughout the visit, I was unable to turn my gaze towards him without a painful mixture of emotions swelling up within me, alternating between anger and grief. His face had become sad, crowned with a large radiant halo of grey hair and the pure whiteness of his eyes added a luminous sparkle to it.
Thirteen years, and he hadn’t left the narrowness of this place, crafting his world between its four walls. The reels of my memories of the years gone by flashed in front of me like a swift bolt of lightening. How did I spend my time in comparison to his? The same time period, yet it had completely different experiences, personalities, moments of sadness and joy. My mind jumped to all the beautiful experiences and moments that I have lived through, while he appeared to be ensnared in a monotonous existence, sustaining himself in it but without truly living.
What does the future mean? Isn’t it the past and present connected to tomorrow? He and I will reach the future, but in two entirely different eras, different ages, and varied experiences, running parallel to one another. The time within the confines of a prison and the life spent therein is a period of calmness and serenity despite its density.
Wednesday came, bringing with it another appointment with Dalia. I agreed with Ayman to provide me with an “almost visible” device, so he asked me to wait a little. I strolled on the bridge metaphorically called “the corniche” because it gives a space and a feeling of detachment from the prison every time I walk there.
I stood at the door of my cell and looked at the mint that I had tried to grow with cotton. It was a humble attempt on my part to conquer this fortified concrete structure in which we live by giving it a natural touch. We are forbidden to establish any relationship in this place, with plants, animals or even insects. This is done so that we may forget our own humanity. Those caught in the act of rearing a bird or planting a seed or any other similar violation of this rule are subject to a fine or even solitary confinement. Such a life makes us long for even the dust with its myriad colours, scents and textures. The place is unappealing in every aspect. Even the colours are tasteless. You are confined within grey walls, iron gates, blue doors and a bright red courtyard.
Ayman came to me with his gaze still fixed on the pot in which I was growing the mint. He asked me: “What are you staring at?”. I told him: “The mint. I place cotton buds and cigarette butts in them and water them and ensure they get enough sunlight every day. Yet they weren’t growing well. Anyways, what’s up?”
He laughed and told me, “I merely say bismillah (in the name of God) and grow my mint. And you? What did you say? Did you say, in the name of our people?” Let the people make it sprout. Let’s see.”
He waved his hand in a smooth motion from top to bottom, saying to me encouragingly, “Come on, it’s your turn.”
Both of us laughed and made our way to the cell where the phone was kept. As I repeated Dalia’s number, his soft fingers began dialling. I called her number three times, but she didn’t answer. Being unable to reach her repeatedly sent feelings of resentment and anger sweeping through every inch of my body. Despite myself, my tongue muttered: ’Does she think I have a phone solely for my myself, so I could call her whenever I want? Does she think I am afforded some preferential treatment over the other one hundred and fifty nine prisoners? Does she not know that this is a smuggled phone from within the prison? Does she not know that time available is limited for a conversation and we rarely get the seventeen minutes allotted for each prisoner? And every precaution must be taken to ensure a simple phone call is made without getting caught?
I stayed up that night, obsessed with thoughts about the future again. I had concerns on how the birth of our freedom would look like in the future. I wondered if there would be a tomorrow where we would be liberated? How would the act of liberation be achieved in the future? This was especially concerning to me, since the methods and means by which the powers that be exert their domination and control, are becoming more and more advanced. The rapid pace at which technology is developing serves as a barrier to our freedom and may even be a contributing factor towards our subjugation.
The discussion happening these days revolves around the attempts to implant electronic chips in the human body which would function to boost memory, while also assisting in completing all cognitive processes. This raises disturbing questions for me about the possibility of controlling the human mind and directing it through these chips. What worries me even more is the potential for this technology to be used in the struggle between forces seeking liberation and their hegemonic opponents. What would be the fate of humanity if control over human behaviour becomes possible? This makes the question of freedom and the future a question which gives sleepless nights to all those who are seeking their freedom.
How frightening is this scenario, which reveals a dark future for mankind and for our pursuit of freedom, justice and humanity? The powers that be would not only be able to externally exert their influence but also manipulate the thought processes within our heads. When such a time comes, there would no longer be a need for prisons, as the mind would be imprisoned. Any idea of rebellion would be nipped in the bud. We would then become mere “robots” in the hands of governments, capitalists and colonialists. We wouldn’t be inside prisons, but prisons would be built within us. And this wouldn’t be a metaphorical imprisonment, rather this would be the true imprisonment.
I suddenly woke up from my reverie. What was I thinking? What is this nonsense? No, robots will not control mankind. We would never accept that. Mankind is better than that. I got up from my bed, washed my face, and grabbed a copy of our internal party magazine, and opened an article about “Shabak” (Israeli Security Agency) and its modern technological capabilities. I devoured it eagerly and quickly. The more I read the more I felt the walls narrowing around me and sensed a hidden anxiety beginning to seep in. I closed the magazine and cursed its editor. A strong desire to sleep overcame me but my anxiety wouldn’t allow me to do so. How can one sleep, while the prison awakens every possible form of anxiety around you? Prisons are always designed to put us on a confrontational course with our anxieties. The one who is patient and perseveres is the one who holds the edge in the future.
My failed attempts to contact Dalia continued because she thought I should call at a convenient time for her. She didn’t say it explicitly, but her behaviour suggested so. I decided to reach out to her again, even though she appeared unable to comprehend my situation within these four walls. Despite her behaviour, I asked my friend to explain my situation to her a little so she may understand. Eventually, I excused her indifference as she lived in a completely different world to mine and in a time completely different to mine. In her world, her job, her chores, make up her life. In here, time is nothing, while to those on the outside, it is everything. Life outside is crowded, fast paced, and structured. While on the other hand, life inside a prison is empty, slow paced and amorphous.
In the end, I distanced myself from her and felt that I had been extremely tolerant with her actions. I decided to give up on writing to show her that I was upset, but at the same time tolerant. Once I stopped writing, I returned to devoting myself to my personal projects inside the prison.
An entire month passed without my pen producing a single sentence of any kind, be it good, worth reading or otherwise. During this time, I had also fallen short on my reading which had become sporadic and patchy. I had to wrestle with myself to read, much like a matador grappling with a bull. I was also made aware that within this month I would be transferred to a new prison and furthermore the department representative also informed us that the annual inspection would also take place. I was apprehensive that my writings would be confiscated and so I was living in anticipation of the transfer and inspection.
While we’re at it, I must say that prison is a world of continuous expectations and anticipations. Precise, painful and overwhelmingly repressive moments of expectation and anticipation, such as: freedom, court dates, letters (post/checkpost), count, visitation, inspection, bathroom, food, messages etc.
This state of anticipation continues painfully to gnaw at your life with its sharp fangs and is served to you on a platter every day to the point you become numb. Thus, the days of this month turned into a rope wrapped around my neck and tightened until I was transferred to Nafcha Prison which was a very real transition into another world within a world of nothingness. I arrived at Nafcha Prison after a long and arduous journey and looked at it from the outside through the small window niche in the top of the checkpoint wall. The prison was an old building in the heart of the desert, suggesting a state of being forgotten.
A prisoner by my side, serving a life sentence, commented, “Languishing behind the walls of this building are dozens of “lifers” whose lives are buried within its depths.” I felt the eloquence of what he said and how well it resonated with the external appearance of the place, as those buried there have been forgotten for decades.
I took my first steps towards the prison gates and I realised that I am on the threshold of a world completely different from those I experienced in all of my previous arrests.
In the first few days, I was childlike in my astonishment at the place. The strictness of the administration with the prisoners and their lengthy sentences, carrying the burden on their shoulders and the visible effect of its weight on their faces. The schisms within the prisoner movement. The deadly heat. The narrow, constricted cells. The somber lighting in each room. For a brief moment it felt like I was entering the prison for the first time. It felt like I was living for the first time. I could actually feel myself falling into an abyss of oblivion in the middle of the desert.
My first few days in Nafcha were difficult and very hot. I felt the grip of the place tightening my existence in every way, but I looked to those around me and drew some inspiration from their patience and found a way to deal with it. It is said that, historically, Nafcha was intended to imprison the leaders of the resistance movements. They brought all such leaders, cadres of different organisations and those who were leading the rebellions in other prisons elsewhere and interned them in Nafcha with the intention of isolating them and preventing collective organisation. With the passage of time, much to the surprise of the occupational forces, the realisation dawned upon them that they had gathered the fiercest of activists altogether in a single prison, thereby inadvertently facilitating coordinated activism in an even more effective manner. It was from here that the most important hunger strikes in the history of the prisoner movement began. However, even to this day, Nafcha remains notorious as the place occupying forces incarcerate those whom they particularly wish to punish.
What makes matters even worse is the rarity with which we were able to communicate with the outside world using our smuggled phones. A prisoner was able to speak only for three days every week for a maximum duration of 15 minutes each time. An insignificant allowance which did not quench our thirst of hearing some news from our families or to even reassure them of our well-being.
I had this strange feeling that isolation in this prison would be beneficial for me in one way or the other. I opened up to the other prisoners here and got to know them, their stories, their lives. As my interactions with them increased, I became acquainted with the activists whose names shone in the skies of our nation during the Second Intifada. However, the impact of the burdens these people carried over the years dimmed their shine towards a different time and world.
Despite the lengthy sentences — in some cases life — and the depressing reality of the Palestinian cause, I was still able to get a sense of pride and resilience in their words. I could read the hope they carried within their eyes. Perhaps it is adversity which strengthens rather than breaks the spirit of defiance. I invested two weeks in getting to know the people in my section and even met some of them for research purposes, whereby I was able deeply to immerse myself in their innermost thoughts and ideas. The firmly rooted beliefs of some of them amazed me greatly, and their human-interest stories drew me in more and more. And the more I immersed myself in their exploits, the happier and more comfortable I became around them. The third week had barely ended, yet I felt my association with the others wasn’t recent, rather it had started ages ago.
My topics of conversation with them often revolved around their hopes for the future, their dreams which lie shattered in an air of betrayal or lie, diminished by a powerful sun absorbing the moisture of their lives. Yet they remain firm, within their dark world, holding on to small threads of hope with great effort, preventing each from falling into a swamp of despair. They perceive life as something beautiful, not as a silly joke. And so, you will find them living their lives with the freedom of adults and the playfulness of children. The amazing thing in all of this is that I found the secret to their resilience. They hide their beautiful dreams and hopes within the drawers of the future, safeguarding it in case it slips into the mire of the present. It’s as if their tongues echo what the Hikmet said a hundred years ago in his Turkish prison:
The most beautiful of seas is that which we have never visited yet,
The most beautiful of children are those who haven’t grown up yet,
The most beautiful of days are those we haven’t witnessed yet,
The most beautiful of words I wish to say are those that I haven’t said yet. I have spent many nights pondering deeply on my lengthy interactions I had here. Many thoughts and wishes come to me in the middle of the night. I marvel, laugh, become sad and even cry thinking about them. I find myself amazed at the resilience of the prisoners in the face of their cruel Sisyphean fate. The future now appears to me with its childlike simplicity, more straightforward than all the philosophical complexities in whose templates I trapped myself. Similarly, it also dawned on me that child-like happiness is not complicated to attain. Modest, easily accessible things have the power to impact our lives, infusing them with joy and stirring them profoundly from within.
The future, as depicted by my incarcerated friend Hassam Shaheen, is hope. And hope has many manifestations. For example, it is the anticipation of waiting for the red moon while sitting for hours by the apertures of the cell door, so that we can enjoy its appearance for a short, fleeting moment, even if it was merely reflected off a mirror. Hope is the wish to spend the night without allowing life to make us cower towards the corners of warmth and love or behind the curtains of solitude and tears.
Hope is: A desire to embrace the Suhail star with our eyelashes from the foothill of a mountain. A longing to embrace the dirt with our bare feet. The pleasure of sipping our coffee with an ornate cup, carefully chosen, sharing a moment of tranquility and quiet reflectiveness. The love that gushes into our hearts after a long thirst. The serenity to cast a morning smile on a dove nesting on your windowsill and letting it be in peace. The beauty in contemplating the splendour of a flower and thanking it for the joy in your eyes due to its excessive beauty. The happiness in laughing and screaming at the laughter and screams of children, even if they are not your own. The astonishment at the blueness of the sky which enriches the clouds and sends down to us the joy of rain. The future is a simple wish. A path which is upon us to tread continuously despite its inherent difficulties. A wish which demands… The uprooting of prisons from our lives, And the colonisation of our lands, And the injustices preventing our aspirations, For this to be fulfilled, it requires us to continue fighting. It is the tool which paves the way for the future and the shield which will protect it.
Tariq Matar Nafcha Prison July 2021.
Salah al-Hammouri from Ofer Prison: How long will I carry the number 1124052?
How long will we remain numbers? Today marks 21 years since I have been carrying the number 1124052, the prisoner number that identifies me to the so-called ‘Prison Administration’. This number has been with me since I was arrested as a child in 2001.
This number has become a barcode for us, a group of prisoners who have been arrested more than once. This number makes us feel that we are nothing more than a commodity for the prison complex, a human commodity that can be consumed in any interrogation centre, in any prison, in times of peace and war, before the Cold War, after the War of Attrition, during the Oslo Accords and after the Intifada. The only constant is that the human merchandise that fills the prisons has no expiration date.
This occupation does not consider or treat us as human beings; human beings who have the right to live like other people do. Everything in prison is organised in order to make even the life we live outside the prison walls difficult for us. We steal moments of life and joy between one arrest and another, as we have become afraid of excessive happiness and stable life, for fear of the next shock. We do not have enough courage to plan for the distant future for fear of disappointment, which creates an atmosphere of tension and instability for us and all those who surround us.
Ironically, from the moment we enter prison, our dreams grow bigger and bigger, and we begin to regret every moment of joy and happiness that we did not take advantage of in the world of freedom. These dreams begin to intersect with the world we left behind. One moment we imagine that it is possible for our daydreams to intersect, after we are liberated, with the reality we left behind. The only explanation for this phenomenon for us is that the world stopped at the moment of our arrest. So we build a world of imagination and a reality of dreams. However the most difficult and painful thing to realise is that the bigger our dreams, the narrower our reality, so that our dreams of freedom, partners, friends and family collide, within seconds, with our bitter reality. We soon discover that the ceiling of our ambitions, is to be forgotten by the prison guard for five more minutes before locking us back into our cells at 6 pm, or to hear a song on one of the radios that reminds us of our beautiful days outside these prison walls.
The worst place a person can be sent to is prison. It is a place like no other in the world, it crushes us and our dreams, ambitions and hopes like an olive in a press. What I hate most is the state of waiting, a feeling that is intensified in prison. The draining effect of waiting in prison is like global warming draining the world outside the prison world.
But what is on my mind these days is that if I hate waiting while I am a few kilometres away from my homeland and my city of Jerusalem, what would waiting be like if I accepted to be exiled from my homeland?
I know that love for one’s homeland is a one-sided love affair that brings only pain, suffering and loss, because it robbed me of the best years of my life, stole my youth and adolescence and made me much older than my age. Yet I adore my homeland and I am sure of the sacrifice, while the homeland responds with “Is there anything more?”. Most people see this as a waste of life, but real life lies in the quest for freedom and sacrifice, not in waiting for someone to set us free.
Letter by Khalida Jarrar ‘Mother of Yafa’’, July 2021
’Suha was born while her father was detained, and now she has left us while her mother is detained. This is a condensed human story of the life of a Palestinian who loves life, hope and freedom, who hates slavery and colonisation. This occupation robs us of everything, even the oxygen we breathe. It deprives me of saying goodbye to my little bird Suha, so I bid her farewell through a rose that grows in the soil of our homeland. As for you, Yafa, my second bird, I love you with all the heartbeats in my heart, just as I loved the sister of your soul, Suha. May you be strong so that I can draw my strength from you. I say to Ghassan, be strong, take care of yourself and Yafa, and don’t worry about me.
I say to all of you, give Suha what she deserves, talk about her, her traits and her splendor, and plant an olive tree next to her grave to give her shade. I love you.’
I’m hurting, my darling, only because I miss you I’m hurting, my darling, only because I miss you.
From the strength of this pain, I embraced the sky of this country through the window of my prison cell in Haifa. I stand tall, I am patient, despite the shackles and the jailer. I am a mother who is aching with longing. All this can only happen in Palestine. I just wanted to say goodbye to my daughter with a kiss on her forehead and tell her: I love you as much as I love Palestine. Forgive me, my daughter, because I was not at your wedding, I was not near you while you mourn for your sister. But my heart reached the heavens in longing, touched your body and planted a kiss on your forehead through the window of my prison cell.
Suha, my dear… They prevented me from saying goodbye to you with a kiss, I said goodbye to you with a rose. Your parting is painful, painful. But I am as strong as the mountains of my beloved homeland.