I have begun and abandoned several essays lately because I collide into a voice that taunts and challenges: “You can’t write that. There’s a genocide going on.” Less “What’s the point?” and more “There is no point.” What’s the point in words when the screams, sobs, and lamentations in Gaza are in your mother tongue and so lacerate your heart that by the time it hands over the Arabic for your mind to translate into your written tongue, English is too traumatized and wrecked to speak and so its painful silences echo endlessly.
What’s the point of writing an essay about a dating reality TV show in which the object of attraction is a 61-year-old woman, offering the potential of challenging the misogyny and ageism of a world in which that is considered groundbreaking and yet the woman is white, blonde, heterosexual, wealthy, and conventionally attractive and so what are we challenging really?
What’s the point of an essay like that when there’s a genocide going on?
From 1997-1999, I was a correspondent in Jerusalem for Reuters News Agency. In May 1998, I went to a refugee camp in Nablus to interview Palestinians for the 50th anniversary of the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning catastrophe that is used to describe the ethnic cleansing and violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes by the newly-created state of Israel in 1948.
One of the Palestinians I interviewed was a man who was 100 years old. Although we both spoke Arabic, his great-grandchildren acted as our interpreters because he was almost completely deaf. He was 12 when the Ottoman Empire ended and 50 years old when he was forced out of his home. He had been living in refugee camps for 50 years.
But he was still alive. I remember that man often–100 years old!-- because of how many children Israel has murdered in its genocide in Gaza: “over the last 18 years, no other conflicts have killed a higher number of children in one year.”
Oxfam has said that according to its “harrowing” and conservative “at best” figures, 11,000 children were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the last 12 months.
October is Menopause Awareness Month. Living in the U.S., where white supremacist Christian zealots succeeded in destroying the federally protected right to an abortion, I am grateful every day that I am postmenopausal and can no longer become pregnant, and eye-twistingly furious on behalf of those who are not.
I am able to write this essay because I began hormone therapy in January to help me with the impact of menopausal brain fog and the changes to my genitals in this stage of my life. For this Menopause Awareness Month, I want to write about how I masturbate differently now that I’m postmenopausal.
Is there a point to an essay like that when there’s a genocide going on? How are postmenopausal people faring in Gaza?
How dare I entertain nihilism when Bisan daily stares down death in Gaza? How dare I despair when Bisan’s hope still burns bright?
Israel’s relentless genocide and blockade have left women there with no access to menstrual products, with some resorting to period-delaying pills to avoid embarrassment and shame. The “small” and daily indignities of fascist violence can often be overlooked among that gravity of death and destruction.
“One of the saddest things I’ve seen here is that many women are shaving off their hair because there is no shampoo or water to wash it in, and head lice has become a massive problem,” Liz Allcock, the NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians’ Head of Protection in Gaza. “A woman I spoke to recently said she hadn’t washed her hair for two months. Imagine not washing your hair for months. People are being forced into indignity.”
What is the point of words right now?
Bisan Owda is the point. The 25-year-old hakawatiya (storyteller) who begins her now emmy-award winning series documenting ways that Palestinians survive in Gaza with a refrain many of us know and love and daily look out for: “Hi, everyone. This is Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive.”
A post on December 15 showing her hand cupping curly hair is why I write:
“I love my hair so much! I love the gorgeous curls on my head but I couldn't keep them! Today I cut a lot of my hair because it was damaged due to the lack of clean water and hair care products that I could not carry from my beautiful room! My wonderful hair, which I always tried to leave long and take care of and refused all chemical treatments to make it straight..it’s ok.. if I survived this, I will definitely get you back.”
I write because I want Bisan to survive. I write because I want the world in which Bisan survives to be a world that would stop the fascist Israeli regime’s genocide in Gaza and its murderous invasion of Lebanon. I write because I want to see Bisan tell the stories that she wants, as mundane or as poetic as she chooses; stories that do not begin with “Hi, everyone. This is Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive.”
And that voice that taunts and challenges me with its “What’s the point” when it actually means “There is no point,” must be banished from my world because nihilism and despair are not the building blocks of that world that I want.
How dare I entertain nihilism when Bisan daily stares down death in Gaza? How dare I despair when Bisan’s hope still burns bright? How dare I entertain complacency as this Palestinian storyteller outruns a genocidal Israeli regime, armed and funded by the most powerful country in the world, determined to annihilate her people?
How dare I, when Bisan is the voice from Gaza that I hear, yet there are 2 million other voices just like hers, experiencing all she experiences, and worse - and death - who have not recorded and projected themselves to the world? How dare I, when it is Bisan times 2 million?
I write to be dangerous, to survive, to be powerful, and ultimately to be feared.
So this is why I write.
I write to avenge my silence and all who want to save their lives.
“Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first,” Cherrie Moraga wrote in her 1993 book The Last Generation. “I see the same impulse in my students–the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated–turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.”
I write to be dangerous, to survive, to be powerful, and ultimately to be feared.
“Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression. Yet in that very act lies our survival because a woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared,” Gloria Anzaldua wrote in her 1980 Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.
I write to resist–against all forms of domination and socialization that insist women shut up.
“My writing was an act of resistance not simply in relation to outer structures of domination like race, sex, and class; I was writing to resist all socialization I had received in a religious, southern, working-class, patriarchal home that tried to teach me silence as the most desirable trait of womanliness,” bell hooks wrote in 1999 in her book Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work
I write because I love this world.
“I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love,” said Terry Tempest Williams
I write because writing can and must challenge genocide; writing forestalls genocide; and writing - at its best - prevents genocide
I want to write an essay about the ways my heart and mind interpret for each other.
Which language do you dream in?
Which language do you think in?
Which language do you love in?
The world I want to live in is one in which my heart, traumatized and wrecked by the genocide, and my mind, incapable of orchestrating the words it needs, weave both my mother and written language to understand each other. I write to bring this world about.
I write for the men and women who've spent decades of their lives in refugee camps in their own homelands. I write for the children that did not get to live a day or a week of life let alone decades. I write for Bisan and for the day she can once again use her curly hair products.
I write because writing can and must challenge genocide; writing forestalls genocide; and writing - at its best - prevents genocide.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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To think that a year later this essay is just as relevant as the day you published it but the number
of deaths higher. May we see a free Palestine soon 🖤❤️🤍💚