Voices from the void

It's a cry from a world of death, destruction and loss. A cry without tears — they have dried up.

- KANKANA DAS

Where parched voices no longer make a noise, but the emotion reverberates almost in surround sound. Letters from Gaza is tough to read in one go; it requires pausing every now and then to clear one's visual memory and cherish the beauty of this compilation of poetry, monologues, letters and a few short stories. While the collection might have come together in the past year and a half, each piece of writing is an amplification of voices on a genocide of the Palestinian people that not a single external agency has stuck its neck out to stop for 75 years.

As poet and teacher from Gaza, Doha Kahlout, asks in her piece "A Siege of Questions and No Answers", "...does the world actually see us? No answer seems meaningful. If it does, then where is it?" She talks about her days beginning with the search for water and ending with "bread dipped in exhaustion".

There is the daily queueing up for bread for hours, of going to sleep and waking up to the buzzing sound of drones overhead, the blast of missiles hitting buildings and of tanks rolling closer.

Given the systematic bombing of the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Army since October 7, 2023, some of the 30 authors are no longer with us, others no one knows where to find them anymore. In such a situation, putting together a collection like this could not have been easy.