The Wonder Chronicles: 3
Photo via @wizard_bisan1
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On the Naked Body
What a wonder, to behold hope in the time of genocide!
She usually begins her videos thus:
“Hi, everyone. This is Bisan from Gaza and I’m still alive.”
For the more than 200 days of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, millions of us around the world have waited daily for that proof of life. She was not yet born the last time I was in the Gaza Strip, reporting in 1998, but the voice of this hakawatiya (storyteller) is as familiar to me as the daughter I never had.
“I am so scared that they could displace us from Gaza Strip to the desert…I don’t know why you guys are just watching without doing anything. Just stop it, stop it, stop it… I can’t continue…I just wanna go back to my home,” she lamented in February, in an audio post that someone shared along with a picture of Bisan holding her cat, pre-genocide.
In her twenty five years so far, death has punctuated Bisan’s life all too often. In 2007, when she was about eight, Israel cut off Gaza from the rest of the world with a land and air blockade. The current genocide is the fifth time since then that Israel has punished Gaza with military assaults. How many bombardments in the lifetime of a hakawatiya who knows the power of her stories?
Bisan’s rage, anger, and tears are commas, semicolons and exclamation marks punctuating Israel’s savagery in her land.
And so how the wonder of her hope in a recent video burst out from the screen of my phone as if she had opened a portal and beckoned for us to follow!
She is beaming, almost breathless with glee. “I’m 25 years old, I’ve lived my whole life in Gaza Strip, and I’ve never felt hope like now. Never!”
Oh, Bisan! My heart pirouettes to see you so excited!
“These young heroes at universities around America and the world are stronger than the last occupation in history. And for the first time in our lives as Palestinians we hear a voice louder than their (Israel’s) voices and the sound of their bombs and even stronger than their control in all aspects of our lives,” she said in a post addressed to student encampments for Gaza, that she captioned “Their backs are against the wall. You are terrifying them.”
I guarantee that many of the students holding strong in the face of fascist police assaults on their encampments for Gaza at universities and college campuses across the United States know Bisan.
And how dare you despair when Bisan’s hope still burns bright? And how dare you entertain complacency as this storyteller outruns death? Follow Bisan and trust her as the barometer of the tenacity of your wonder: where is it, find it, outrun despair, catch up with Bisan.
Let your heart follow her invitation to the breathless dream of freedom.
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
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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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