I talk to my dead body in Gaza

Author:

Issa Qaraqe

I am now a corpse in Gaza.

But I am still speaking.

Death in Gaza is strange; it is not an end but another form of life. Here, bodies do not die all at once but die many times: once when the rocket falls, once when the world denies the report, once when a child is buried without a name, and many times when no conscience stirs.

I am a corpse, yes, but I am not voiceless; I speak to myself, to my fragments, to my limbs scattered like harsh memories. I speak because silence is betrayal, and because silence is a death more hideous than the one that clings to me.

I was walking on Salah al-Din Street carrying a bag of bread. I was not a fighter, not a politician; I was just a person who wanted to live. But in Gaza, the desire to live is a crime, and standing on your feet is an act of resistance.

Death came from above, from aircraft that know us by name, programmed to our bodies not to maps. Death in Gaza is precise, calculated, cold. A technological death carried out by “advanced democracies” at the touch of a button; they said I was “collateral damage,” but I was a whole world, a small dream, and a pain larger than all the UN reports.

I am a corpse now, speaking to myself, asking: Will my mother see me? Will she recognize me among the rubble? Will she look for my severed feet, or will she lift my head and sing to me as she used to when I was a child?

I address the world:

Why are you comfortable? Why do you eat calmly while we crumble? Why do you read this text as if it were fiction while I lie here under a cloud of smoke? Is it because I am Palestinian? Or because I am from Gaza? Or because my death does not resemble yours, so you cannot feel me? I am a corpse, yes, but I carry the questions of the living; I put them to you — to those who justify, to those who remain silent, and to those who balance between the killer and the victim.

Do I not have a name?

Do I not have a homeland?

Didn’t I write, laugh, get angry, love, fear, learn?

Wasn’t I like you before a shell shattered me?

Do not wait for your own death to understand mine.

Do not wait for your corpses to hear my voice.

I am now a corpse in Gaza, but I speak, and all Gaza’s corpses speak. I am a corpse — perhaps a child or a woman, perhaps a young man or a medic, perhaps an old person killed in the flour queue, perhaps a poet buried in the coffin of a poem, perhaps a journalist whose camera eye was blown out. I am a corpse without family, without relatives or friends; all of them have gone, gone forever, and I remain alone searching for someone alive to speak to me and guide me to a grave.

In Gaza there are corpses that still speak, that cry, testify, curse. Outside Gaza there are living people who resemble the dead: masters of numbness, leaning on the benches of neutrality, as if oppression does not concern them, or as if they themselves have become silent corpses. Many have lost their souls without a bullet fired at them — they died when conscience died, and when blood became a political detail on the news bulletin.

How many corpses there are in the world: corpses walking on two feet who smile to conceal themselves, faces lit but hearts extinguished for years. They are in quiet cities, in luxurious offices, in forgotten villages, in alleyways, on school benches, in broken bathroom mirrors — living without meaning, without hope, without love, without a cause.

I speak with my corpse to help me lift the rubble and gather the remains of my body: Rise, my corpse, there is no one else left with us under the dust and concrete, or in this cell — rise. The resurrection has occurred; look, the revival has begun, the crossings have opened and bread has rained down, and the Arabs have come out and their eternal message from the mortuaries.

Rise, my corpse, they will build you a monument in the city and a beautiful mural colored in purple blood, and thinkers will write the literature of tragedy and win international prizes in your name. You will tour every museum of corpses in the enlightened world, and archaeologists will say you are the most beautiful icon — a corpse from Gaza, a pictorial painting for the schools of art in Europe and America, lectures in academia and anthropology. They will tell the story of a human who once had a life. Rise, my corpse; there is now a literature called the literature of the corpse.

My corpse is everywhere, leaving its blood wherever it goes — in bedrooms, in the murdered man’s nightmares, in analysts’ salons, in the aerospace industries, on land and sea. My corpse besieges the powerful and pounds on bodies, reminding them of bombs and knives, cells and bombardment and savagery; reminding them that the dead always return from death so that memory does not die.

Death in Gaza is a temporary act, a state of transit; it sleeps on torn pillows and smiles from pictures hanging on tilted walls. How does one die who has become an idea?