A Rose Shoulders Up

Don't ever be surprised to see a rose shoulder up among the ruins of the house: This is how we survived.

- Chinki Sinha

- Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet and writer, who was kidnapped by Israeli forces on November 19, and later released. When he fled Gaza, he only carried with him a book of his verses.

WAR is ontological devastation, too. How does one then write about war? How do we understand the loss then? How do we make sense of a war elsewhere? We turn to the poets, artists and people. They are living the war. There is a lot of smoke and dust. In the skies that I don’t see from here, there is a lot of fire.

Some might even say they are like fireworks. There is a play I remember by that name. By Palestinian writer Dalia Taha. Al’ab Nariya/Fireworks was produced in 2015 about children and people who carry their grief in their hearts as they go about their daily lives that are shaped by war. War fractures childhoods. I have seen too many bloodied toddler shoes in Gaza lying in the rubble in the last few weeks.

In the play, a 12-year-old girl Lubna wakes up with the sound of what she feels are fireworks. Her father asks her if she is wearing earplugs. The fireworks are in fact bombs. But her father tells her they are not. Overhead planes, he said, are ambulances. “There’s no one on the streets but us. You run that way and I’ll run this way. Whoever gets back to the front door first without getting shot, wins.”

Taha doesn’t name the town. In this town in Palestine, Lubna and Khalil are playing on the empty stairwell in their apartment block. They are friends. The little boy wears flashing red trainers and plays Ninja Turtle Games. The little girl talks about martyrdom, death. That’s how they live and play.