I didn’t want to say or write another word. I thought: it has all been said and written. It has all been done: screamed, bled, kicked, wept, shouted, beaten, bombed, tortured, killed, died, injured.
And then I’m sitting in Berlin and I read on my phone: “If there any way to evacuate me and my family from gaza tell me, any chance can get me a new gate in the life. Best regards from Husam.”
I had read a piece of his in ArabLit Quarterly, “Hunger That Defeats Language.” There is a figure above the text of the piece that’s reminiscent of a woodcut by Käthe Kollwitz.
When I read Husam Maarouf’s piece, I thought: I’m going to get this published in Germany. I’m going to put everything else aside and ensure that a German version is published. It may be that people cannot or do not wish to utter words like genocide and apartheid, occupation, colonialism/postcolonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, anti-Israelism and all these words. That may very well be. And least of all Nakba, but that is an Arabic word. We have just seen it ourselves and the people have been living through it for decades, for days, for months, for hours, and on and on since the ceasefire—the official ceasefire. I address myself to those who cannot or do not wish to utter these words, and to those who will not allow themselves to judge. Well, a few may have allowed themselves to pass judgment on the old GDR elites—but you reap what you sow, you’ll see. And one really didn’t want to break ranks over the Nazis after 1945, especially in the West—it was the Cold War after all.
For the former East Germany, on the other hand, antifascism was state doctrine. This affected self-image pressed critics into the position of revanchists; not just hooligans, thugs, or the like, but people who might harbour fascist sympathies. The activists of the peaceful revolution stood up against these ideological constraints.
With the concept of “Staatsräson”—the national interest—a completely different doctrine is taking root (and has been, well before 7 October 2023): loyalty to Israel. Recognising the State of Israel has been made a requirement of naturalisation in some of Germany’s federal states and all sorts of utterances related to Israeli war crimes are not only frowned upon, but treated as potential criminal offences. Anything that takes the Palestinian position into account is targeted as veiled or “genuine” antisemitism. A state doctrine is being introduced, one whose point of reference is neither the Universal Declaration of Human Rights nor Germany’s constitution, but “anti-antisemitism”—interesting, particularly in a nation whose Nazi perpetrators got off largely unpunished.
Hunger, nonliterary
On all these grounds, I return to this text: an excerpt from “Hunger That Defeats Language” by Husam Maarouf:
“I am a writer. / Or I was. / But now, I can no longer write. / I am hungry. And hunger is stronger than words. Stronger than memory. Stronger than cognition. Stronger than my need to document. / This is not a retreat from writing. It is a total paralysis. / I no longer have the tools to express myself. / I no longer have the body to sit. / I no longer have the mind to form a complete sentence. / I am afraid that I will die before I can write my own death. / I am afraid that my language will remain locked inside, never finding a way out. / I fear hunger more than death, for it takes you in slow, devouring waves until you become a disintegrating shadow, unable even to scream. / Will anyone read this? / Will anyone believe that a writer could no longer write because he had nothing to eat? / Will anyone care that, in a corner of the world, people are starving so completely that their souls are silenced? / Perhaps not. / But I wrote this – despite everything. / To say that writing is possible. / Only if the body is allowed to survive.”
I arranged for Husam Maarouf’s piece to be translated into German and made public. Now everyone could read it on the Medico International blog on the organisation’s website. And so we write back and forth as if everything were normal, about the release of the piece, the translation, the honorarium, an inquiry from the press. I (the one who eats) write on my laptop, I write to him and pass along a press inquiry.
There are people who are still alive despite the Gaza War and the destructive rage of the Israeli army. But this is not due to any personal attribute, it is a matter of luck. It is a matter of luck that they have survived structurally planned annihilation. Just as it is not personal misfortune that tens of thousands did not survive, that they were killed in a hail of bombs, in shelling, by hunger, and other ordeals.
I wish the Web were not only for these virtual matters, that it were a pipeline and I could send him and his family a chicken or some flour. A chicken or two chickens and flour. I remember how diligently my mother gnawed off the last bits of a chicken. She sat there for hours, long after we had left the table. The kitchen table with the white paint peeling off the legs. She had survived the Nazis in illegality, with no ration cards for groceries. Later, her teeth fell out: vitamin deficiency. I found letters from a friend of my mother’s in which she says she has ration cards for my mother and her daughter, that she has put them aside for her; others write that they can’t provide a place to stay, but at least a few ration cards. My grandparents, also living in illegality, write about how they were exploited harvesting cherries, that they sometimes got a little cash, but no ration cards, and that they were hungry, hungry every day. There wasn’t much to be done with cash. There were just the ration cards. And no one could imagine the situation, they said.