In Gaza, laughter was a short break in between crying

I have been away from Gaza for a hundred days. For more than three months – or, as they say, a season long – but I don’t feel that time has flowed through me as he did with others. It is as if I got stuck in a single moment: the moment of departure. No real farewell, but a brutal uprooting of my body.

Life in Marseille feels light, like a breeze that caresses my face every morning. Everything moves in this new place. Life goes fast. The metro is not waiting, cafés are full, jokes fly from mouths that do not seem affected by sorrow.

Sometimes I sit with friendly people – young and old, men and women. They speak softly, they laugh, they talk about their plans for the weekend, their upcoming vacations, their wish to try a new restaurant or visit a city they have not seen yet. They talk about their summer, their new job, the best croissant they recently tasted. They laugh because the weather is nice.

And me? I smile with them – or try that. A timid smile escaped shocked from my mouth, as if he doesn’t know how to be born without cutting his way out.

I don’t get angry with my table companions, and I don’t blame them for their liveliness. But I can’t fully join them. I notice that I am retiring in silence, conversations, leaving the table before my grief comes out.

I say to myself: “Stay strong, don’t be sad among the lucky ones, don’t spoil this moment full of laughter.” But I slide away. I return to that place that no one else can reach – where faces keep looming, where images stack and the sound of explosions mixes with the howling of a child and the shouting of a woman who has lost everything.

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Children in Jabalia, in the north of Gaza.

Photos Bashar-Aleb/AFP

Strange alliance

In Gaza, laughter was not a reaction to something funny, but a short break between crying. If we did not succeed in catching a mosquito at night, we laughed. If a new evacuation zone was announced, we laughed. If there was no bread. If we had to eat herbs. If we baked bread from animal feed – then we laughed. Laughing steeped with pain, black humor that keeps you alive in an unbearable reality. A joke was: “Those who do not die from bombing dies of laughter.” What a strange alliance between oppression and laughing.

I remember how we laughed, my friends and I, if we heard that air strikes had hit an ’empty area’. And we said to each other: “What kind of empty area where people have been living for seventy years?” We laughed because we had nothing else. If we didn’t laugh, we would explode inside.

I compare that laughing with laughing that I hear here, in France or the Netherlands. Laughing clean, light, born of luxury. I feel like a traitor when I smile so much – and a traitor when I don’t do it. What a burden this is.

I have been trying to adjust for a hundred days. But on the inside something whispers: “This life has temporarily borrowed you”

I have been trying to adjust for a hundred days. I try to be ‘normal’, enjoy my breakfast, wear a nice jacket, listen to music on the way, participate in talks. But something inside whispers: “This does not belong to you. This life has temporarily borrowed you.”

If I grab my phone and send a friend in Gaza a message, she says: “The house next to us has exploded, but we are okay. We were clearing rubble and found a cat alive under the rubble! Can you believe it? We laughed for an hour.” I smile – and feel that laughing stifles me. What kind of life is it, in which we laugh at a cat who comes to crawl out of the dead?

Recently I have started collecting every smile from Gaza. As if I am archiving them in me. Every dark joke, every sarcastic comment about destruction and death. And I wonder: how have we survived all those years? How is it possible that we have not gone crazy? Or maybe … we are.

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Too expensive desserts

Now I am in pleasant restaurants in Marseille or Paris, and see people laughing at expensive desserts. Sometimes I feel jealousy – not for their safety or wealth, but to live the privilege without feeling guilty.

Here in Europe, museums organize exhibitions entitled: ‘Art in times of war’. We lived art in Gaza. Every survival act was a painting. A hiding place was art from a bombed school. Feeding twenty people with a single bag of rice was art. Making children laugh without toys, without safety, without a future … was art.

Every night before I go to sleep, I send a message to someone in Gaza: a friend, a family member, a journalist who still records death with a broken phone. Every night I stare at the black check marks, and wait until they turn blue. Every night I carry their voices in my dreams.

I recently walked past a shop window. There was a shirt with the text: “The world is yours.” I stopped. I looked at it. And I thought: no, the world is not mine.

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