Honoring Minah

by Amber Poole

On February 19, 2024, Channel 4 News, a British Public Broadcast
Service featured a short clip from filmmaker Yousef Hammash. It is
the story of Minah Hamouadah.

Minah Hamouadah is sheltering in a school building on the Gaza Strip
in a place called Deir al Balah. I don’t know if she’s still alive or
anything more about her than what I will tell you here. Today is March
1, 2024 and for all I know the school building and its residents could
have already been murdered.

Minah told us she had been drawing since she was a young girl. She
said that this was the way she expressed herself.

Before the war, she drew landscapes, dresses, toys and children.

Before the war, she wanted to go to art school.

Before the war, she had dreams.

Now she searches for pieces of coal from the cooking stoves scattered
throughout the shelter. She uses this coal to draw pictures on the sides
of the building; children, grandmothers, doctors, fathers, musicians,
artists, teachers, all wearing the fixed face of terror. Horror. Grief.
Each one lost to her, everyone lost to each other.

She tell us there’s not a day goes by when she feels safe, and every
night that passes feels like her last.

This is genocide. A strategy enforced by a stronger nation to destroy a
weaker one who cannot defend itself with equal military might. In the
case of Minah, the charcoal from last night’s cooking stove is her only
weapon. This is how she fights back.

Everything she planned for, everything she wanted, everything she
lived for, all disappeared in seconds.

In Memories of Our Lost Hands: Searching for Feminine Spirituality
and Creativity, Sonoko Toyoda invites us to look at the Grimm
Brothers fairy tale, A Handless Maiden. This is the story about a
young maiden whose hands are cut off by her father.

If we look at this story from the polar perspective of tyranny and
submission, that of the father and what he represents in greed,
autocracy and dominance and the daughter of oppressed creativity,
vulnerability and compliance, we can begin to dialogue on the power
of our hands. The hands of a woman.

Toyoda quotes: Grimms’ Handless Maiden begins as follows:
“A miller has fallen into poverty and one day meets an old man in the
forest. The old man says, ‘I will make you rich if you promise to give
me what is standing behind your mill.’ The miller assumes the old
man means the apple tree, so he gives his promise to the old man. The
old man says, ‘I will return in three years and take what you have
promised to me,’ and then vanishes.”

The story continues with the miller telling his wife about their great,
good fortune until the wife points out that the man was probably the
devil and he was not looking at the apple tree, but their daughter.
When the devil returns to claim the daughter, she ritually cleanses
herself to keep the evil away from her which thwarts his attempt to
take her. Outraged, he then demands the father cut off her hands else
his own life will be endangered and so he does, with his daughter’s
permission.

Have we have willingly sacrificed our hands? Even if we’ve
unconsciously done so, the question begs: How do we get them back?

Hands in antiquity meant sweeping, making bread, growing
vegetables, stitching, and washing. These were the basic tasks for our precious hands. Our hands were actually our tools. Today, only those
with sufficient means and the time (on their hands) grow their own
vegetables, make their own bread, and sew their own clothes. It’s a
fashionable trend for those who have a good income and a family who
agrees to such a way of life and/or an extended community doing the
same.

Of course, Toyoda is not talking about our literal hands, but rather how
we have lost our spiritual and creative selves, using our hands as
metaphor.

She quotes Carl Jung: “If there is a high degree of conscious cramp,
often only the hands are capable of fantasy; they model or draw
figures that are sometimes quite foreign to the conscious mind.” He
means that the hands have a certain autonomy.

What if we were to use our hands again in ways that empower us, in
ways that could possibly yield economic freedom and independence.

It might be too late for Minah but for those whose hands are still
physically attached, for her, might you consider doing something
useful with them?

Many thanks to filmmaker Yousef Hammash who brought to us the
story of Minah Hamouadah, sheltering on the Gaza Strip.