By Doha Jamal (Edited by Eros Salvatore)
My teacher once told us,
about something called freedom.
So I asked him quite kindly:
What is freedom to a Palestinian like me?
Blockaded into this slice of land by the sea?
Unable to stay, unable to leave.
Is it a Greek word for abolishing our slavery?
Or things we import or produce naturally?
My teacher answered, tears flowing free:
They made you forget your own history,
and all of our values so you can’t even see, that
our culture and language is God’s poetry.
I am sorry, that I could not teach you
that freedom is not by the sword or the pen,
nor is it a thought or identity.
Freedom is simply the state of being free.
I rejoiced, I knew freedom I thought!
But alas, though I was free, Palestine’s sorrow was not.
For now, my teacher lies buried beneath the rubble.
A pile of bones; now freedom’s my trouble.
So again I searched far and wide until God revived
me, and said there was still life to live.
For I will teach the next generation to stand up in class like I once did
and proclaim what freedom is!
Afterword
I met Doha Jamal (aka Doha J. Yousef) in May 2024 soon after I began writing stories about Gaza refugees. She messaged me with the same dramatic flair she uses in her poetry.
“Please help us, help my family, help me, don’t leave me, please be my hero, be the savior of my life, be the hero of my story!”
I had been talking with her older sisters Alaa and Fatima and would eventually publish their stories Gaza’s Last Fairytale and Fatima’s Family is Going to Die in online magazines. Doha was just weeks away from her seventeenth birthday but was anything but shy. She had already lived a full life. In 2014, at the age of seven, the family house was bombed. Soon afterwards she composed a poem about the loss of her home and recited it on an Arabic television channel. She sent me the video. More videos of her performances followed and I could tell how headstrong and proud she was of her accomplishments. By fourteen she was married, but that didn’t stop her prodigious output. Nothing could.
Doha’s zest for life captivated me, and I tried to put the energy of her exuberant performances onto the page. Unfortunately, I had to curtail major details because I didn’t want to overwhelm the reader. Doha’s teacher died in prison while in solitary confinement, not under the rubble of a building. Most likely, he was tortured to death. I didn’t ask why or how. Though I get close to many refugees, I give them space. They are forced to talk to us by their situation. I don’t want to take advantage.
The accumulation of everything Doha has been through before becoming an adult is mind-boggling, and I wanted the reader to face the horrors with ample space between them. So I sliced up the pain to make it more palatable. And that’s ok. It leaves room for us to realize later that it’s not a political prisoner who was tortured to death, it was a child’s teacher. It was our teacher.
Like most refugees, Doha has been forced to evacuate multiple times and lost all of her possessions. Most of her immediate family survived the past fourteen months of genocidal war except for her beloved elder brother Bahaa and her brother-in-law Mohammed. They had been trying to rescue Palestinian civilians when Israeli soldiers shot them. An ambulance was called, but the soldiers refused to let it through. The pair bled to death by the next morning. That was in November 2023 and the Jamal family has learned to adjust. But the terror continues and each new catastrophe tears at Doha’s heart.
“I have become afraid to sleep, afraid not to wake up, afraid to wake up to the flames burning my body, I have become sensitive to loud noises…I have started imagining my [dead] brother talking to me, I have started to feel that death is close to me.”
In the fall of 2024 things started to disintegrate all over Gaza due to a decrease in the amount of humanitarian aid allowed in by Israel. Doha’s family can no longer afford to buy what it needs. They go hungry. They huddle together for warmth. They try to keep dry in the winter storms. They don’t sleep.
Doha barely communicates with me anymore. This is partly because wi-fi connections have been harder to find as things deteriorate, and partly because she doesn’t have the energy to write. Hunger has replaced creativity. The search for warm clothes, food and clean water replaces searching one’s soul. There is little left of the life Doha once had, but she’s happy she found someone to publish her poetry. That’s something teenage girls everywhere would be quite excited about.
You can find out more about Doha here.