CLP Launch Event: Session Two
A recap of Abir Kopty's conversations with Shahd Alnaami, Ahmad Elkhuwaja, and Mariam Mohammed Al-Khateeb.
On December 8th, Zines from Gaza joined PALLIES in Berlin for an evening dedicated to amplifying the voices of young authors from Gaza. Through zines, storytelling, and conversation, the event highlighted what it means to create art and literature under the conditions of siege, displacement, and ongoing genocide.
In the second session, moderator Abir Kopty was joined by another group of talented writers in the Coastal Lines Press collective.
Here is a recap of her conversation with Shahd Alnaami, Ahmad Elkhuwaja, and Mariam Mohammed Al-Khatib.
“Tell us something about yourself that your CV and Bio do not mention.”
Mariam: “Hi, it’s an honor to be here and listen to everyone. I wanted to say that I love being Gazan, and I love documenting Gaza, not merely as a city, but as the pulse of our beings, and from the neighborhood that we stood in and have been guided in….
Writing, art, music, poetry, is not a lecture in Gaza. It is how we live. This is the way we can take a breath. And I love Gaza, and because of that, I love being an artist from there.”
Shahd: “Thank you all. It warms my heart to see you at this beautiful event, to give us a space to speak, so thank you all for being here. Something I would love people to know about us is that we are human beings that have some weak points, that love to be heard, that love to be valued, that are not just news or numbers, that have dreams, that have families who care about them, that are simply human beings, not machines. We have feelings. We have emotions. We have everything as you.”
Ahmad: “I would like to answer the question by saying that my bio usually shows the finished projects, rarely the ones still being built. So I want to take this opportunity to share what’s coming: a masterclass developed with Coastal Lines Press on narrative, storytelling, and language. It asks how stories shape the way we see the world, and how language becomes a battleground where truth is defended or erased. It launches early next year, and I hope people follow it closely, not as just another course, but as an invitation to sharpen the way we read power. It’s about learning to recognize the cracks in a story, the lies that hide in plain sight, and building immunity to colonial sweet talk. It’s work we can only do together.”
Shahd, in one of your writings you said ‘because stories must be told, because my people’s suffering cannot be forgotten, because words have the power to bring life to what others try to erase.’ So, my question to you is What do you think your words are trying to bring life to?”
Shahd: “Maybe my words are trying to bring life to my sister, who I lost a year before this month. I was the one who maybe lived, but I don’t know how we switched the rooms, and now I’m here and she is in heaven, inshallah. So, it’s also for my best friend, and then for Gaza city, for the streets that are destroyed, for the buildings, for the trees that disappeared, for the sea, for everyone that lost life and had a dream, and I really hate to use the past tense as if they were just a memory because they are not. They are living with us in other ways. For everything that doesn’t have this advantage to speak in other ways. For everything that doesn’t have a voice. I’m here the voice of all of you. And I hope that I am delivering their voices as it should be or in a way that could honor them.”
Mariam, you spoke about this zine being not only about loss, but also about the persistence of life, and the refusal to be forgotten, and you also talk a lot about the memory of Gaza before the genocide, that the memory is both personal and collective, and what interests you is to preserve this memory. Are you still able to imagine Gaza before the genocide? And what is this memory like?
“Yes, people now maybe see in Gaza after two years under genocide, under the machines, under rubble, under rockets, and seeing the shelters, seeing the camps, seeing the people who have died, but no one sees what is Gaza before.
Gaza before genocide was a simple city, like a girl who wakes up every day trying to move on from her bad nights, bad dreams. Gaza even had four, five, six, seven, ten wars before this genocide and she was always trying to rebuild herself, to put a make up on her city, and go in the morning, facing life, but this genocide destroyed all of Gaza’s trying before.
And I am Mariam and I want to live and I want the memory of me before 7th October. Me, as one who gets up every day, goes to university, sees the sea, sees the people trying to make their work, people trying to face something beautiful in their lives, people who dream, people who have things to do every day, not people that are killed every day. Not people and students that are in queue for bread. No, the students are in queue for school, and they are going on with their lives.
Because of that, I think that archiving Gaza before 7 October, before the genocide, is really important, just to show the life, to show the world that we had life, and we were trying under siege. We were trying under an exhausted city, and I’m really proud of Gaza, proud of Gaza as a city, not just because I’m from Gaza, but because she’s like a beautiful woman. She’s just waking up and trying to rebuild the building that was destroyed, the hospitals that were destroyed, and the people who were killed. She’s always waiting them in the night, and we always say that the sky of Gaza is open every day and every night to welcome the martyrs who left, and we are waiting for them to come back. We’re waiting them and we put them in our memory, writing about them, about dreams.
And I just want to archive the simple things, the sound of the street, the sound of the cars, the sound of people…. Gaza is not just a rubble. Gaza is not just the camps. Gaza is not about the death.
“Ahmad, you say that your zines capture not just the destruction of the place but the persistence of ordinary existence within it. So, my question is how do you think ordinary existence is possible under unordinary, extraordinary, massive destruction and slaughter? Where do you find the persistence?”
“When I talk about ordinary existence, I’m not trying to soften or normalize violence against Palestinians, and I do want to remind everyone, including Palestinians that we are not symbols. We’re just like your neighbors. We love, we fail, we argue about groceries just like you do, and we carry dreams and disappointments about last night’s football match just like everyone else. So, we are ordinary people placed inside an unordinary life, basically.
For me, the right word isn’t resilience, but stubbornness.
Many flags have flown over this land; only the Palestinians have
and will remain.
Persistence appears in the tiny things that continue without permission. A mother is still braiding her daughter’s hair. Kids turning rubble into a playground because they refuse to wait for life to restart or other people to restart it for them. Someone boils water for tea even when the roof is gone. These gestures don’t erase the horror that happened. They only expose the human instinct to keep making meaning, even when the world is trying to kick us out of humanity altogether.”
Shahd, can you talk a little about what it means to be a writer under an ongoing siege and genocide? What are the challenges you face? How this is changing the way you write and choose your stories? Where you write? These types of things. If you could talk a little bit about that.
“The only thing I’m afraid of is to be targeted because I write. I’m not that famous writer, but I’ve always had this fear deep inside. And I had this discussion lots of times with my mom. She was really afraid that something might happen to us, to me, especially, and I do remember when I got out of the rubble and was injured and stayed at the hospital for some days, on the day that I got out of the hospital, there was someone who visited us, and I don’t know if she meant it or not, but it struck me when she said, ‘the first moment we heard that you were injured, we thought it was because of your writing and I advise my daughters to not write or post anything on social media.’
It took many days for me to pass from this sentence. Even though what happened wasn’t for me or because of me, as she mentioned, this fear that was always deep inside, but the courage that I had for my family to continue was stronger than this fear. It’s why I continue to write, because maybe we are not just writing, we are documenting the history, the history that will be told in the next few years, that maybe was not the same during the Nakba, the catastrophe.
And this is the power of writing and documenting what is happening on the ground to see these testimonies and the stories that come out of each family and each home in Gaza, and what is really exactly happening, not what the media is trying to transfer or delivering. This is what writers try to pass on because lots of people didn’t know Gaza or Palestine before this genocide, and they came to know it because of this power that was leading through writing, through speaking, through the power of words. So, it was so challenging but at the same time, we are so proud that these words have transferred to so many people around the world and that they were able to get the correct idea of what’s going on.”
“Ahmad and Mariam, I would like to ask you what does it mean to be a writer that is not physically anymore in Gaza? What does that do to your memory and the way you choose your stories? We can start with Mariam.”
Mariam: “I left Gaza after 165 days of genocide, and after 20 days of leaving Gaza, my mother called me that my grandmother was burned in Al-Shifa Hospital. When the news came in my mind that my grandmother, whose age is 90-years-old, which is more than Israel’s country and Israel apartheid, and she was killed because the soldier burned her, I did nothing. I was just looking as a crazy person, who didn’t know what to do to help my family survive from this point. I called my mother after two days and I told her that I can’t believe that my grandmother died. She told me, “No. It is not just your grandma. Your uncles and your aunts were also killed, and I was really shocked, because how can I feel this death and smell this death when there is a long distance between me and my family. How could I feel the death inside my body without being in Gaza?
When my family left from their houses because of the genocide, and I was here in the house, I feel that I’m really cold inside my home. Writing gives me the sense of what my family is feeling in Gaza, and what I’m feeling here. When I’m writing to them, I’m feeling. When they are cold, I’m writing about their cold, and I can feel that I’m cold. When my father called and told me he’s hungry, I feel I’m hungry, and I can’t eat anything. When I heard that my grandmother was burned, I felt the fire inside me, and I can’t do anything to stop this fire inside me.
Writing helps me or puts me in the situation of what they are living, what they are facing now, of what they are feeling. When I speak with my little sister, I always ask her to write about her feelings so I can feel it in me. Just when I’m reading her feelings, reading her book, I’m just feeling that I’m with her, and I want to really hug her and just say to her that you are safe, but she’s not.
Being outside Gaza, it is the fake name to be a survivor. We are surviving the death, but we are living a life after death. You can’t imagine how it’s really bad. When I hear the sound of a train, I hear the sound of the rubble. When I hear the sound of cars, I hear the sound of the rockets. When I see the queue in my university, I stand in queue like I’m waiting, but it’s a university, there is no rubble, there are no rockets, there is nothing here related to the war, but I carry the war inside me.”
Ahmad: “Well, it’s an awkward position in life to be honest, and I cannot come to terms with this fact or truly describe it to myself or to others. The feeling is like being a branch watching the tree burn. You’re connected, but at a distance that burns and hurts in its own way.
Distance changes memory, too. It sharpens some things and blurs others. But it also makes responsibility heavier: to write honestly without freezing Gaza in time, in a single moment, and to keep up with the living reality even if we’re not there, so we’re not also stuck in nostalgia of the past.
About the stories, I don’t really choose my stories. They arrive… I’ll be walking, or eating, and suddenly a whole life appears in my mind. I’ve come to believe that the stories I write are voices of people who never had the chance to speak: people who were bombed, or sniped, or were kidnapped by the occupier. Their voices do not disappear; they look for another body to carry them. When a story calls me, it feels like a duty to answer, so that when the morning comes, I can look in the mirror and know for a fact that I didn’t run away.”
“What do you think the people here can do for the project? What are you hoping for the project? And how can we support it?”
Shahd: “I wish that this [initiative] will not just stop at any point. Just to keep going, and to keep reaching more and more people. People need to hear these stories, need to read these stories, need to feel the lives that are written in these zines. I wish that this light will never fade away at any circumstances.
We will keep giving voice to the writers that may not have had any chance until this moment to publish anything. These zines are really light for the writers and light for everyone around. It’s holding our hearts, not just our words, our feelings our emotions our tears, and even the nights that we were not able to sleep, we hold open our notebooks and start to write, to pour everything outside, and to give it, maybe for someone just to feel these. So, I wish that you could gift yourself any zine you would love to have and give yourself a chance to feel these words and connect with them. I would love for you to have a chance to travel with our words to Gaza and, inshallah, in the future to the Gaza that will be rebuilt.”
Ahmad: “So, I would say, despite what the Israeli propaganda says about how ‘complicated’ the situation is, Personally, I think Palestine is a simple truth when you follow the strings.
I don’t want you to buy my zine, and to go on to just talk about the story, or about Palestine, or how nice the event was, I want you to talk to actual Palestinians.
When you go home and the lights turn off, think of how to build around you. Palestine is in you! Palestine is in your old neighbor struggling on the stairs, a child in the park who cannot find their toy, a kind smile on a Monday morning’s rush-hour traffic.
Freeing Palestine starts by freeing you! Freeing your community from the shackles of selfishness. Think of what you can offer, what you can build, for others…. and think of how to be useless to the colonial machine.
And if Coastal Lines can teach you anything it’s to always remember…
“A wing cannot lift another wing until it heals.”
Mariam: Even if the world says that the history is written by the weak or the strong, I want to tell you that the history is written by the people that have lived inside and Coastal Lines is one of the ways to write a history about us about Gaza about the dreams that are now in the skies about each thing that was in Gaza before.
First, I don’t want you to support Palestine just to say that you support Palestine, but rather to feel the reality of the one in the country who slept in the tent and the cold eats their bones, and they didn’t have a schedule to go to school, and they didn’t have a car to get to their work. These small details, people in Gaza are dying because of them.
Because the bad routine, in our lives as we live, people in Gaza dream to live this bad routine. And I want you to support more writers to write because there are a lot of stories that must be heard from the people. People who didn’t have the hobby of writing. If you want to know more about Palestine, about Gaza, and about what is happening inside, it’s not just to see the news, and to show the pictures of the people who are killed. No, you want to know what is happening, when [for example] the one is killed and his mother is looking to his body is different, you want to feel what is the meaning when you are a student, and you lost three or four years in your education, and you lost your scholarship, and you can’t leave Gaza, and you can’t go to your university, and you can’t study, and [yet] you complete your studying under this rubble.
You want to feel what is the meaning of dreaming under the tents and there are rockets above you. What are the real stories coming from these people? It’s not coming from the Israeli news or somewhere else. It’s coming from the people who are now in the sky…. We have the duty to them to write and to raise their voices and to raise their dreams. Even if they can’t live their dreams, we can help them to reach into the sky.”
Thanks for writing this, it clarifies a lot. Mariam’s words about art being how they live, how they breathe, are truely powerful. It makes me wonder about the architecture of human spirit. How does creativity become such an essential, non-negotiable output, even under impossible conditions?