Fatim asked me to write her eulogy
A heavy task
No text could ever truly fulfill that wish
I cannot believe Fatim is gone
Nor that this city could ever lose one of the most straight forward words
I cannot believe that, as Fatim belonged to life
To the dreams she built step by step
Image by image
Poem by poem,
Song by song.
Yes, she was the image,
The poem,
The voice of a morning bird peeking into the day
I cannot believe it
I remember the day we met during the war
After a long time apart
How we talked about Gaza
The city we love for no reason
Without any justification
Without ever understanding why!
Why do we love a city that kills us every day!
We walked through the Sahaba market with another friend
She joked, “You have a literary agent now, Haidar. We want dessert!”
All I could offer was a cold cup of tea
We are in famine,
There was a plane above us
But we drank the tea
We walked like we owned the world
I remember the day she visited our home during the genocide
To film a journalistic piece about me
She sat in our house with my mother for a long time
She promised me it would not be her last visit
Fatim, I am still waiting for you
I cannot believe you’re gone
I keep remembering our conversations again and again
It carries now a different meaning
I found a message in which she prayed for me
“May I see you high, high above and tell my children: Be like Haidar.”
It does not matter whether they would like me or not
I stared for a long time at the phrase, “my children”
I saw a mother teaching her child how to live
Wanting to take extraordinary photos of him on his first birthday, his first step
She loved photographing hands
I am sure she would have been able to get a photo of his hand between hers while both walking together
I stared again at the word “my children”
I imagined how green the air would be with her laughter as a mother
How happy her heart would have been with her fiancé
The love that the genocide did not allow it to bloom
I imagine how unjust we would be to Fatima
If we were not to consider her death itself a massacre
With all its weight
All its wounds
Her children who will never come
And the love that was shattered
Fatima was part of a large generation in Gaza
A generation who is bidding farewell
One that is shaped slowly by life
A generation that knows well what it wants
A generation that hears planes when launching raids
A generation that never got the chance to travel and explore the world
Except through closing his eyes in front of the sea
Among us are poets, artists, photographers, singers
We are full of energy that can build immense beauty
To a world that only could have turned and looked
To see how much we look the same
Some of us you know, while others you don’t
I promise that I shall not wait for their deaths so that you get to know them
We have been trayed by a whole planet
And that has killed our dreams
However, we shall continue to write our commandments until the last minute
Better than a 60-year-old elsewhere in this world can do
And we shall repeat what Fatim once said:
“Maybe salvation is in not surviving at all, Haidar”
The Israeli occupation killed Fatima
Along with ten other members of her family
Brutally they did it
For nothing
But only because she was dreaming
Laughing
For being herself
For enjoying filming, writing, and singing
That’s it
Nothing more.
Haidar Al-Ghazali
16/4/2025
