Flowers Need Light
A collection of 19 personal essays spanning several years of the author’s life as she braved her fears and the realities that proved to be worse than anything imaginable. With normality having lost all meaning, sanity seeks sustenance from the light carried within. A work of immense emotional courage and resilience.
Editions: English
Letter to the Reader
I invite you to walk with me. As a witness and war survivor, these words come from within, an echo of what was lost and what could not have been saved. They are for those who lost a piece of their soul. Some of these words are someone else’s reality and I cannot imagine their pain. By documenting their stories, I hope I can honour their memory.
Images and Text
Recommendations
Lama Alharazin reflects on days and months and years living in Gaza, her home, seeking light and beauty and survival during genocide, in a “forest with unimaginable beasts” where “a normal day can turn into a scene straight from hell.”
Outside their tent, her family plants seeds: basil, mint, peas, and more. Her mother carries the mint and basil seedlings when they walk south—and she continues to tend that garden. Likewise, Lama tends her writing, her soul, her existence, and others’ stories. She searches for nourishment and beauty and pieces of home like her mother does. She is terrified and miserable. She makes pizza. Her home is bombed. She must walk over dead bodies. She hopes and sees goodness. She loses hope. She listens, she looks.
She asks us to listen and look.
While of them are powerful, the section that struck me the most came at the end, “In Gaza you will meet all sorts of sorrow.” It’s a catalogue of the people she’s encountered in Palestine and what their eyes will tell you, the details of their witnessings and experiences that all speak of horror and heartbreak. 24-year-old Lama’s writing, like her drawings that accompany it, is intricate and truthful. Her zine is vital reading.
“Even flowers need light to blossom, and so do we.”
—Danielle Davis
About the Author
Lama Alharazin is 24 years old. She studied Literature and Translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, where she got her degree in September 2023, and lives in Gaza City. Rain Was Once a Promise, her first zine, was published with Coastal Lines Press in 2026. She writes to make sense of the world she is living in, and to reach other people with her words.
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