I lamented that while the search engine results were satisfactory, they hadn’t translated into increased sales.
I was frustrated.
After October 7, our texts became a litany of anxious reassurance:
“Reassure me?”
“Al-Hamdu lillah.”
“Reassure me?”
“Al-Hamdu lillah ‘ala kulli hal.” (Praise be to God in all circumstances.)
“Reassure me?”
“The situation is catastrophic; al-Hamdu lillah.”
“Reassure me?”
“The situation is extremely catastrophic.”
“Reassure me?”
“Reassure me?”
“Reassure me?”
“Al-Hamdu lillah.”
“Reassure me?”
Rani is an e-marketing expert in Gaza.
I’m a bookseller in Kuwait.
After our initial meeting, I decided to sign the contract without deliberating further or checking out other options. In Kuwait, we know Palestinian competence well. It was a decision not devoid of emotion, no matter how impartial I claimed to be; Rani is from Gaza. Period.
I have never met Rani in person, of course. Our interactions have been limited to video calls about technical details, where I try to mask my ignorance through administrative delegation and more administrative delegation. “What do you suggest? What should we do? Good, let’s do that. Goodbye.”
Once, mid-video call, I interrupted our conversation to point to the Palestine shelf in the bookstore. I was proud and boastful, like a six-year-old yearning for her teacher’s approval, a shiny star on her hand, and the coveted praise: “Clever!” I wanted him to encourage me, to affirm that “this is resistance,” that cultural work is “important.”
At the same time, I wanted him, as a Gazan entangled in his fate as a Gazan, to grant me absolution for escaping his fate.
I wanted him to forgive me for what I don’t know.
The Palestinian books section was a recent addition to the bookstore, implemented after the events in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. It was marked with a small plaque engraved with “Palestine” in a font distinct from that used for other sections.
It was a special section, receiving special treatment, inconsistent with our usual classification logic: philosophy and thought, history and geography, novels, poetry, psychology . . . etc. We don’t have, for example, a section called Kuwait. We never needed to, as books naturally distributed themselves according to their field of knowledge. Normally, it was easy to dissolve the place into sections, but that wasn’t possible when it came to Palestine. So we resorted to piling all the books atop one another in three columns: studies, novels, poetry collections, folklore, and biographies and memoirs. I didn’t realize it then, but it seems I was in the process of constructing a narrative, or localizing one, that oscillated between the declarative and the poetic, the elusive and the direct, logic and emotion.
When Rani offered a courteous smile as I read him titles by Pappé, Finkelstein, and Rashid Khalidi, I felt that he was old and I was a child.
That he knew and I was ignorant.
That he was a son of life and I was a daughter of books.
That piling books atop one another wouldn’t make a single difference in his life.
I felt ashamed of myself.
Did I expect a person besieged in an open prison since 2006 to rejoice at the sight of a shelf of books?
We didn’t speak of Palestine after that. All we discussed was Google and sales . . . until October 7.
It was then that Rani became someone who belongs to me, not just an acquaintance.
And because I cannot be acquaintances with all 2.2 million Gazans living under the extermination project, Rani became the face of Gaza for me.
And because I know at least one Gazan, I was able to confront reductive narratives, cold statistics, and treacherous, far-removed headlines from Fox News and Al Jazeera alike.
It wasn’t solidarity, for solidarity is the luxury of the other; the Japanese protesting at Shibuya Crossing, the Irish in the streets of Dublin, the American Jew demanding a ceasefire at the Statue of Liberty. Solidarity is for them. But not for me, because I know that geographical happenstance is what afforded me a roof, bread, and fuel, a sky free of drones and white phosphorus, and a future that seems, at least theoretically, almost to preclude the possibility of my family being used as a testing ground for Israeli-American weapons, and because I know that America took both matters upon itself: supporting the settlement of Palestine in 1948 and liberating Kuwait in 1991.
The difference between us was mere happenstance.
Through a fragile dialogue thread extending from October 8 until this moment, on the 150th day of the aggression and counting, I witnessed Rani’s displacement from Gaza City, his refuge in al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, then in an UNRWA school, then back to al-Ahli Hospital until the night it was targeted, when he “walked over body parts” in disbelief. Through his eyes, I watched the swollen bodies on both sides of the displacement road to Rafah. I felt deeply embarrassed as I asked him to send me pictures of his children, as if we were friends chatting in the evening in a café. Of course, I didn’t tell him that I wanted, amidst the deluge of videos from Gaza, to be able to recognize him and the children if something were to happen to them.
I once asked him a very foolish question: If I managed to reach the Rafah crossing from El Arish airport via the air bridge established by Kuwaiti relief campaigns, would I be able to see him, even from afar? I imagined myself standing on a truck, waving to him from behind the wall. I sent him pictures of protesters in streets across the world so he would believe he wasn’t not alone. I think he smiled politely as he did a year ago when I read him the titles of books on Palestine, knowing that it wouldn’t make a single difference to his life.
Rani wasn’t the type to emerge from the rubble raising the victory sign. He was like me in his ordinariness, just a marketing expert, diligent and skilled. A person trying to survive. Like all Palestinians on the planet, he was never given the chance to live a normal life. I, on the other hand, have grappled with this idea since my mother wrapped the keffiyeh around my neck in 1987 when I was five years old: the concept of an unfair life, and how we become who we are because of what we have no control over. And how I repeatedly escaped being someone else. With every novel I read, I arrived at the same thought; that I wasn’t Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, nor Márquez’s Santiago Nasar, nor Ghassan Kanafani’s Safiyya.
Similarly, I wasn’t Rani from Gaza; I never had to be.
That I escaped by a miracle, like Rani, who walked over body parts in disbelief after the bombing of al-Ahli Baptist Hospital.
In recent days, our communications centered on arranging his exit to Egypt. The allocated funds, the mechanism, and all those details that made my blood boil.
Rani is the only Gazan who belongs to me, and, if everything goes as planned, he and his family will be in Egypt, while Gaza will remain in my imagination, as it appears in photographs, and as Rani himself described: “a place the Occupation has succeeded in rendering uninhabitable.”
Then, I shall remember—even against my will—I shall remember. I shall compel myself to, and I shall believe . . .
Even as I sob, even as I curse and swear, even as I break down, I shall remember . . .
That Gaza is the eternal phoenix rising from its ashes; that it is, as al-Ma‘arri phrased it, “the phoenix transcending past pursuit’s grasp.” And I will whisper the continuation to myself: “Thus, defy those whom you can withstand with defiance.” Indeed, resist those whom you can face steadfastly. Be obstinate! For this is precisely what one can do in an unjust world: to create tunnels of defiance and resistance and “insolence” by means of disrupting the arrangements of deadly coldness, to grow claws, and to sabotage . . .
I shall seek solace in metaphors of this kind, and I shall envision Rani in the not-too-distant future, visiting me in Kuwait, so I can show him my bookshop with its books about Palestine. He won’t smile politely, then—most likely, he will shed tears—and I can only hope that he will feel at home . . .
March 6, 2024
