Other Voices: Introducing Lujayn of Gaza and The Textual Materialist Newsletter
"Everyone in Gaza Resists in Her Own Way"
Plans for The Textual Materialist
Since this is my first substantive Substack post, before I begin introducing Lujayn, I should begin by explaining my plans for this newsletter. My interests range broadly, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about how I can organize my posts in a way that provides value for my readers and subscribers, giving them a sense of structure as they engage with my work, without overwhelming them.
My interests oscillate between poetics and politics, so those are obvious themes, but I also want to use this platform to highlight the work of other writers and co-authors who have inspired me and shaped my own work. They will have a dedicated space here too.
Finally, I have a book I need to finish! It is currently called Sex and the State: Marriage and the Origins of Gender Inequality and has been under contract for years with Redwood Press, the trade imprint of Stanford University Press. You can read more about it here and here. (Sorry that the posts are paywalled at the moment; I am gradually migrating them here and adding new content related to my book as well if there is interest).
So that leaves me with quite a huge range, and I want to make sure that I don’t inundate people with content that they don’t want to read. Here is what I have decided on for now as a way to manage to the sequence of posts I share on this platform, so you can expect what to see and when.
At this point, I am planning to release weekly posts (I was thinking of every Friday but that may change, and this post is an exception) according to a rotating sequence of 4 categories (or “sections” to be precise in terms of Substack).
Politics, Section 1: On the first week of the month, I will release an article, essay, or creative reflection that broadly touches on politics, usually in relation to Palestine or elsewhere in the Middle East (especially Iran) or the Caucasus. Many posts will be related to my book Erasing Palestine or the Gaza Genocide. These posts will be archived under the section Politics here.
Literary Imagination, Section 2: On the second week of the month, I will release an article, essay, or creative reflection that broadly touches on poetics, usually in relation to Persian, Arabic, or Georgian literature. I love English literature too and am slowly working on a book about writers’ homes, so there is no limit to the types of literatures that might be covered here. Anything to do with how poetry reshapes the world. These posts will be archived under the section Literary Imagination here.
Sex & the State, Section 3: On the third week of the month, I will release an article, essay, or creative reflection relating to my next book, Sex and the State. It could be an excerpt from the book, or material that I have decided to cut from the manuscript, or anything else that keeps me going and keeps my focus on finishing this multi-year project. These posts will be archived under the section Sex & the State here.
Other Voices, Section 4: On the fourth week of the month, I will release an article, essay, or creative reflection that is authored by someone other than myself. In some cases this will be something that I have translated or co-translated. In other cases, it will be the words of someone who has inspired me, as is the case with this post by Lujayn. I also anticipate featuring the work of the poet
, whose words have deeply shaped my own. These posts will be archived under the section Other Voices here.
One reason why I created this four-part structure is so that my subscribers can choose to receive emails for just one or more of these series rather than all four. There is still a lot of technical stuff I need to master on this platform, but my understanding is that if you click “unsubscribe” when you get an email from this newsletter, you will then be given the option of unsubscribing from all emails or just from one specific section. At least I hope that’s what happens. If you would like to do that but are having trouble setting it up, let me know. I can manually change the settings so that you only receive emails for specific sections.
So that’s the overall plan for The Textual Materialist in the near term. If it appeals to you, please share and restack this post, and consider becoming a paid subscriber so that the publication can grow and I can invest more time and resources in it.
Introducing Lujayn
And now, having introduced my plans for the newsletter, I want to introduce Lujayn, my beloved friend in Gaza.
Lujayn and her family have become the eyes through which I have watched the genocide. The picture included as the cover image of this post is of bookmarks she embroidered herself for me and my family, working in the ancient Palestinian art of tatreez (embroidery). Lujayn learned this art from an elderly woman whom she came to know during the genocide.
As my first post introducing Lujayn, I am including the first story I worked on with her, describing her forced displacement from the home where she was sheltering in March 2024. The below essay was first published in The Nation in April, but the below version is more up-to-date. I am considering someday publishing all the essays Lujayn has written during and after the Gaza Genocide as a short book, to which I would write a forward explaining how we came to know each other. If there is interest in that, let me know.
I have by now worked on seven essays with Lujayn, of which only a few are published (two more will be published very soon). So please look out for more content from Lujayn on the newsletter’s “Other Voices” section on the 4th week of every month. And please share Lujayn’s work as widely as you can. As you can see from the below, she is a very talented writer!
In the video below (I wish Substack would let me add a caption to the video-does anyone know how to?) I read an excerpt from this story at a pro-Palestine rally in Bristol, UK, where I live.
Everyone in Gaza Resists in Her Own Way
This is what happened.
On 2 March 2024, my dad went to bring us supplies from Rafah despite the danger on the road. He stayed overnight in Rafah because there was no transportation at night. That night, suddenly, the situation changed. The sound of explosions and missiles was everywhere.
My mom, me, and our extended family were sheltering together with four other families and eight unaccompanied children in a home in Khan Younis. We came out of our rooms and hid in the area beneath the staircase. There was gunfire and strange sounds everywhere. We tried to understand what was happening, but we couldn’t because there was shooting and chaos all around.
Mom kept telling me, “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine,” but I could see how she looked around anxiously. She told me, “I need to understand what’s happening. Stay away from the windows.”
I could see strange green light lines entering from the window, and I heard the sound of bullets. I told her, “No, it’s dangerous,” but she insisted. She said, “I have to understand what strange thing is happening.” So, I climbed under the staircase. She came back and she told me, “Come quickly.”
We hurried downstairs, and Mom told everyone: “The bulldozer is demolishing the house in front of ours, and the tanks have surrounded us from all sides. We need to get out quickly before they come towards us.” No one thought going out was a good idea.
Mom told them that she would go out first. If they allowed her to pass, she would signal to us to come out. Everyone told her she shouldn’t go out. We knew that people were dying outside.
As we were talking, two teenage girls and three children suddenly came to the front door. One of them was covered in blood, crying, and screaming. They were the children of the family whose house had been demolished in front of us by the occupying army. Their father was also in Rafah like my father, but their mother, sister, and the rest of the family had been martyred under the bulldozer as it destroyed the house while they were inside. Everyone was stunned.
Mom told me to bring her my first aid supplies. She started to wipe the blood from the little boy and sterilize the wounds. Then she bandaged them while trying to comfort him.
Suddenly, we heard a loud noise. The bulldozer was coming for our house. Mom stopped and told me, “I must go outside and try to stop them because we’ll die under the bulldozer. I’ll tell them that we are civilians. If they hit me and let you all out, then you leave after me. If they hit me and continue to demolish the house, know that I tried everything I could with my last hope that you would be safe.”
I started crying. Everyone told her to stop, saying the army would kill her. At the same time, we could hear the bulldozer approaching. Mom quickly went out and stood in front of it, exactly in its path, and started telling them that there were civilians, women, elderly, and children in the house. The bulldozer kept coming.
Suddenly, a tank flashed its light and the bulldozer started backing away. As I was coming out of the house, I saw Mom next to the tank, refusing to move. Green lines covered my mother’s body and head.
I understood that the tank’s machine gun was aimed at her. I knew they were going to shoot at her while she stood there. I closed my eyes. Then, the green light stopped flashing, the tank started signaling, and two people from the house came down the stairs, carrying a white flag.
Everyone tried to understand what Mom was saying. The army was signaling for us to leave, and when the tank signaled with the green light, we understood that we should go to the nearby school. Mom moved quickly and urged us to leave. Everyone was trying to get out.
Mom told me not to be afraid. She lifted the injured boy up by his legs, while the girl carried her brother by his arms. We started walking behind the others. Mom was panting, and her breath was short. I understood that she needed her inhaler for her asthma. When I tried to give it to her, she said there was no time, just keep going quickly, don’t stop. If we stopped, bullets might hit us.
I don’t know how we made it to the school, but we were all safe. Mom made the boy sleep on the mattress and made sure he was okay. Then she sat me on a chair. It was two in the morning. Mom kept telling me not to worry.
A few hours later, the soldiers shouted in Arabic that we must clear the place through a certain route to another place. So we went outside. On both sides of the road, there were tanks, soldiers, and bulldozers. A soldier was speaking Arabic and selecting people, including women, to be arrested and taken to Israel.
I don’t know the exact number they arrested but it was more than two hundred and close to three hundred because I saw many trucks being loaded with people and taken away to Israel. I saw more than ten trucks, and each truck was loaded with about twenty or thirty people.
Those of us who remained were taken to a partly destroyed building three hundred meters away from the school. We stayed outside from nine or ten in the morning until eight at night, waiting in front of the entrance to the building.
Everyone started getting hungry and thirsty, especially the children. Suddenly the soldiers brought water bottles and started handing them out. Mom told us that we shouldn’t accept water from the occupation army, and that we would leave soon. She asked everyone to be patient, and added that if anyone couldn’t bear it, they could drink.
The little boy with us asked why we shouldn’t accept the water. She told him it was because the soldiers were taking pictures of themselves while pretending to be kind to show the world how well they were treating people, but in reality they were demolishing houses on people’s heads and trampling them with their bulldozer at dawn. She was right. One of the soldiers was taking pictures, and we refused to take water from them.
I stood in front of the building’s entrance. I couldn’t even sit down when a soldier told me to sit and aimed his rifle at me. Mom came and stood in front of me, speaking forcefully in Arabic and English, telling him not to scare her daughter, as there was no room. There were elderly people next to me and if I sat so close to them, I might hurt them. For a moment, he aimed his weapon at her. She remained standing between me and him, the distance being approximately a meter and a half.
I was scared, but even more than that I was amazed and asked myself where Mom got this strength from.
Everyone was afraid, and most were crying, but she stood still, speaking and comforting me. The soldier left, and Mom sat me down. It was around eight in the evening. She placed me and the others with me in the middle, while she stood at the end near the soldiers. She told me: “If they let us go together, it would be good, but if they didn’t let me go with you, take the money and the phone. You’ll definitely find Dad outside.” She instructed the others where to go.
They separated us and took us for inspection. Strangely, they let us pass without any searching. We kept walking until we reached the last tank. Mom was holding my hand in one of her hands and the hands of the two little children in her other hand.
Suddenly, the army was gone, and it was dark. Mom switched on the flashlight, and we saw Dad come running towards us from a distance. The father of the little children from the house we’d seen bulldozed was also approaching us, running. Dad hugged me tightly. Then I felt Mom stopping as if she had been waiting for this moment to catch her breath. I couldn’t believe we had made it out alive.
After this experience, Mother, I have to tell you something. I learned two things that I won’t forget. First, we must never let go of our strength, courage, and faith in God’s will at any moment. Second, we don’t turn our backs on those in need, no matter what.
You didn’t leave the boy or his sisters alone. You carried their brother with them. You stayed by their side and told me: “They have no one else but us.” I won’t forget any of this. I’ve become certain that the occupation can never destroy our faith, our strength, our courage, our goodness, or our compassion.
I don’t know if the war will stop while we’re still alive, but what matters is that there are many people resisting with what is more important than weapons.
Every day, a father walks beneath the bombs to feed us.
A mother stands against bulldozers and tanks to protect her daughter, knowing that even if she dies, her daughter will live.
A grandson carries his grandmother on his back and never thinks of leaving her behind even for an instant.
A sister pulls her brother out from under the rubble, away from death, and tries to save him.
Mom, this is my country, this is my people. Every generation of Palestinians will pass these lessons onto the next.
Lujayn
March 2024
Rafah, Gaza Strip, Palestine
You can listen to me reading one of Lujayn’s yet to be published stories here:
