Text by Yumna 14, from Gaza – Italian version here
In Gaza, childhood has a different taste… The taste of fear, deprivation, and patience beyond our years. In Gaza, the years are not measured by age, but by the number of wars that a child has gone through. How can a child dream in a city whose features are erased by war every time? How can he think about the future when he barely survives the present? In Gaza, the years are not measured by age, but by the number of wars that a child has gone through.
In Gaza, flowers do not grow from the dirt, but from under the rubble, and trees do not grow upwards, trees do not grow upwards but are cut down before they can even dream of a branch. In Gaza, childhood is not the beginning of life, but a test of survival, born with the burden of a besieged homeland on our shoulders, afraid before we understand what fear is, and crying before we know what language is.
What is childhood? I used to think that it is is a small world of simple dreams, I see it in the form of a doll, a laugh, a bedtime story, but in Gaza, childhood is measured by the number of times we have survived, not the number of holidays or summers.
Every war steals a year of our lives and leaves us with a fear that has no cure.
Our mornings opened to sounds not like the chirping of birds, but the roar of planes. The sky screamed, as if it were lighting up. When my mother woke me up, she didn’t say, “Get up for school”, but rather, “Get up quickly, we may have to flee”.
Our war is not a passing by, but it is like a monster that lives in the alley, waiting to hear a child’s laughter, to silence him forever, changing its shape every time: once in the form of a missile, once in the form of an urgent call on the TV, and once in the voice of the neighbour screaming: ‘it’s the end of the world, the house is collapsing!’, and even when the monster is gone…
…it leaves its claws embedded in our memories.
Not until that that night when the glass shattered around us, and we ran to a corner of our home. The corner was our shelter, I was shaking and clutching my mother’s dress, silently wondering: is this my last day?
I could hear the screams of the neighbours, and I prayed to God that none of them had died. …. Death had become an cruel guest, visiting us uninvited.
My childhood was not framed pictures on the walls, but the smell of blood and powder, the sound of accelerated footsteps in the middle of the night, the echo of crying that did not stop, even when everyone was silent.
I never wrote a poem about my classmates, nor about my dream of a rosy life, but about the loss of my friends, and of my school that turned into a shelter … and then into rubble.
Children all over the world are asking: “What will we do during the holidays?”, while we ask: “Will there ever be a holiday, or will we be scattered in pieces under the rubble?” While they choose the taste of ice cream, we choose the corner furthest from the windows. Their children are afraid of the dark, and we are afraid of the light … because the light means that the airplane saw us.
Gaza not only taught me patience, it made me understand the unsaid: to look into the eyes of adults and understand what they are trying to hide. Every time I hear laughter, I get scared … Because laughter here is often followed by a heavy silence, or a tragedy. In Gaza, hope is not a rosy idea… Hope is only that you return home safe and sound.
Even if the war stops one day, it will not be extinguished within us. War is not a sound that comes and goes, but an invisible dew that pulsates whenever we hear a loud sound or smell a strange odor. We, the children of Gaza, do not heal easily because we are not wounded once, but every day.
In Gaza, we don’t need miracles, because we have lost the ability to dream. We are the children of war, our voices are heard, and our hopes have become part of the land upon which we live without childhood, growing in the shadow of fear, and breathing sadness with every breath: We no longer know what it means to be safe, because for us, safety is just a word in history books, far removed from our reality.
Is there anyone who hears us, or has our voice been drowned out in the silence of war?
Yumna 14