Heba is Alive! by Amber Poole

I haven’t heard from you in three days. I wrote to Noor, hoping there would be some response. Thankfully, she answered quickly.

“Good morning dear, the internet is cut off in all of Gaza and the coordination of internet repairs has been rejected several times. Unfortunately, we are suffering a lot because the occupation bombed the main internet exchange, and there is no signal. I am trying to connect to the electronic chip, but I cannot connect and provide permanent internet because this chip is not available in all transmission areas. I do not know how long we will remain without internet.”

How can I utter the word ‘relief’ upon hearing such news as this, other than it has managed to assuage my worst fears that you might have been murdered while you slept. I know there’s nothing special about me, no reason why I should consider myself the lucky one for holding on to you, Noor, Haneen and Mohanad over this past year and a half plus; something, at any rate, holding on to us, when in reality, at any moment, the thread could snap, and we’d all be dangling in thin air, some dead, some alive, each of us reaching out to the other for the spark of hope that diminishes throughout the day and then succumbs to the apprehension of night before it restores itself at dawn with the opening of one’s eyes.

What’s so damned difficult is making coffee in the morning, not knowing if you have coffee, or eating, knowing damn well you don’t have food to speak of and myself, wanting cake, always cake, because I want to put something sweet in my mouth, like a magic potion, I want this sweetness to make the genocide go away. Disappear, vanish into thin air, along with the rest of the sanctimonious toads, ingratiating themselves to their own rotten ideologies, compromising their very own souls to justify the slaughter of an entire culture simply because their hyper-neurosis refuses to carry its own shadow; its own lies. So, you must carry it, you, the innocent women and children of Palestine, of Gaza. You are the designated scapegoat for their entitlement, so full of their own grandiosity that they first refuse to hear, then to listen, then they form an opinion and a very dangerous strategic action based on a story carried by the winds of deception. Let me repeat, the newborns must carry the shadow of a lie perpetrated by another. A newborn with a bullet to the brain.

I know a woman who sincerely believes that this land upon which you live was biblically accorded to only a select percentage of residents there and it dates back, let’s see, what does she say, thousands of years ago? So that’s her starting point. When I sit down to have a conversation about the genocide, which she calls a justifiable war, she can rationalize the murder of innocent women and children because God has declared this land belongs to some other group, some other people and they have every right to kill for it. There is the myth that your land was empty; that your great grandparents, for example, did not live there, that the new owners who appropriated the land, in other words, who stole it, made it a better place…I think they call this ‘making the desert bloom.’ That the new owners actually paid for the land in 1948, that it wasn’t given to them by the British. They do know how to spin these tales brilliantly. But very few know about the Al-Nakba, and those who have heard something of the kind will likely deny it. They don’t know anything about the First and Second Intifada. They don’t know about the checkpoints, over 500 plus, nor the ‘flying checkpoints’ – the most vicious. The ones set up and then dismantled knowing pregnant women will be returning within a few days as they approach labor only to get there and find the ‘flying checkpoint’ (which was open only days before) has closed and they must make their way to another checkpoint, often hours away, dying in some cases before they get there. Few know or care how your people must pass through these dehumanizing blockades every morning, lining up to go to work hours before the worker is expected, lining up just to wait or be taunted by the most moral army in the world.

These are things I don’t tell you, any more than you don’t tell me you’re positively starving because you don’t want to worry me. You write to me during Eid and tell me that I must prepare lamb and eat it because you cannot, but that’s as far as you go. You allude to this hunger in the most dignified way imaginable. In matching your composure, I tell you that the Poles don’t historically eat lamb and therefore, we don’t have good access to it. Underlying the inclination to protect you however is the statement, how do you expect me to stuff my face with a juicy lamb while you are being categorically starved to death?

But then, just yesterday, I was in the fish shop and, lo and behold, in this backwoods Polish town, there was a frozen leg of lamb from New Zealand. Who would have ever thought of finding a leg of lamb in a fish shop, in a remote, far-flung dot on the map, a frozen leg of lamb? The inside of me was leaping all over the place, rejoicing, “I can’t wait to tell Heba, I can’t wait to tell her that I’ve found a lamb.” It wouldn’t be the first time since the genocide began that I’ve wanted to reach within the atmosphere, by way of all its properties; air currents, density, pressure, temperatures, wind speeds, accelerations, turbulence, fortified by a supersonic power and speed that would allow me the means to grab hold of your hand and transport you, here, to care and comfort you. To feed you lamb and serve you coffee and black teas.

But you and your family must consider each crumb a feast in the hierarchy of the food chain. If there is a cup of lentils left, then to calculate how long it will last before another cup can be procured and how much will it cost, this cup of lentils? In some cases, it costs one’s life. In most cases, it threatens to murder the mother who seeks the food to feed her family, the mother is slayed in front of the child, leaving an orphan behind. The price for a cup of lentils is not the price I pay, nor the price anyone else I know pays. With all due respect, all our worlds should have been turned upside down, inside out. We should all be disoriented by this abomination. We should all walk to the coffee pot in the morning with the same stabbing in the pit of our stomachs. But no…we all make plans, go on holiday, stuff ourselves sick, hurt each other, scheme, demand, whine, beg for more, go to the movies, dream. But we don’t often think of your hunger. Unfortunately, we are programed to believe the propaganda: the tool for indoctrination.

I know you don’t expect me to stop eating or dreaming or laughing or enjoying a day out at the beach. It wouldn’t be a natural impulse for me. But when I do go to make the coffee, I can remember you. When I get hungry and go to the fridge, I can remember you are without. When I need to take medicine for a cold or headache and I drive to the chemist for tablets, I can remember you have no access to medication. There is no place for you to go.

The former friends of mine are the least of my sacrifices. The ones who chose a ‘political’ path over a humanitarian one are the ones whose silhouette is the only thing that remains in my life. I have no time for nor patience with anyone who chooses to stand by any political system over the welfare of any people, especially since they can’t carry their own lies alone but must project them onto to you, making it impossible for them to even discern between a political situation and a humanitarian crisis.

If I might conclude here, darling Heba, to quote a passage to you from a book entitled: Aion, by Carl Jung, in which he writes:

"As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world in the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable."

When Uncle Paul and I sheltered forty Ukrainian women and children, one was constantly bumping into one’s own shadow. My shadow work was especially prolific with N. She was a stout, pushy sort who was always in the kitchen cooking and forcing food. My inner work culminated at Christmas time when we were competing for the same space in the kitchen. I wanted to strangle her and wondered why she was giving me such fits until it suddenly occurred to me, in a flash of complete realization that, on the outside, she was just like me. Both of us deeply wounded, both of us overweight, both of us pushy, and both of always feeding, feeding, feeding—as if the only way we could heal ourselves was to feed the world. I burst out into peals of laughter and the most incredible thing happened: I felt such love towards her; my own wounded self was standing before me.

I can’t expect this from others, but it is the barometer to which I set my journey, the compass I go by. I love you, Heba. I was so relieved to hear from you last night before I went to bed, to hear you are still alive. The sweetest dream.