Possible in Writing

I didn't wake up one day and decide to become a writer or an activist. It's more like opening the doors of a house threatened with demolition.

Every text I write is an attempt to save something from oblivion: a face, a scent, a sentence spoken by a martyr but left unfinished. This force that drives me to write is not individual energy but a collective memory that dwells within me—the memory of mothers who have lost their sons, of homes that have been destroyed, and of the land that continues to resist oblivion. I write because I believe that memory is the highest form of resistance, and that language is capable of restoring humanity's right to be told, not erased. Writing, for me, is neither a profession nor a luxury; it is a means of survival.

When I write, I feel that I am completing what those who have passed on began—those who were not given the chance to finish their last words. I write so that Palestine remains present in language, even if it is destined to disappear from the map.

I was born in Libya in 1975 to Palestinian parents, from Ashkelon to Rafah. I carried the name of Palestine within me even before I was aware of it. The first word I knew was 'refugee.' When I was little, my mother used to say that we were 'guests everywhere.' I searched for temporary guests—strangers like us—in every country except our own.

We spent my childhood in the Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon. The Israelis waged war from 1982 until we escaped in the spring of 1985. I remember the beginning of the war, because my sister was born during the shelling. Ambulances came to our house for my mother and the baby, but my mother returned without her. We learned that she had died.

When Lebanese forces attacked the camp, my father had to smuggle us out through back roads until we reached Beirut. One moment I will never forget is fleeing the camp, walking over bodies and body parts lying in the streets. My feet still ache to this day.

My father and I set off from Beirut by boat to Cyprus, while my mother and brother flew to Athens. We arrived at Cairo airport and were detained for four days. My brother and I slept in the corridors while our parents were interrogated.

Airports still evoke anxiety in me. Every flight brings back that child who slept on the tarmac of Cairo Airport, unsure whether she would be allowed to enter or be sent back into exile.

War doesn't end when the bullets fall silent; it settles in the body, in memory, and in the reactions that accompany us into adulthood. The sounds of explosions, the images of escape, and the bodies we stepped over in my childhood still live within me as if they happened yesterday. Therefore, for me, an airport is not the beginning of a journey, but rather the beginning of an age-old experience of fear, one that only ends when the plane takes off and leaves the ground.

I arrived in Egypt as a child, carrying the memory of exile, and grew up there until I became the woman I am today. Egypt was never a mere stopover — it was where my political and intellectual consciousness took shape, and where I learned that freedom is not a slogan but a daily responsibility.

There I experienced the discrimination Palestinians face when identity becomes a legal and political burden. But I also learned what it means to belong to a vast Arab cultural space, where ideas coexist, visions clash, and the book remains the primary teacher.

Cairo was my true university. My education extended beyond classrooms into libraries, cultural cafés, newspaper pages, and publishing houses — reading Muhammad Abduh on reform and reason, Taha Hussein on doubt, Naguib Mahfouz on the Arab city's contradictions, and later Samir Amin, Galal Amin, and Nawal El Saadawi, who gave me the tools to think about political economy, colonialism, dependency, and the relationship between freedom, the body, and power. Journalism taught me even more than books: that the Palestinian cause is inseparable from democracy and freedom of expression, and that tyranny in any form reproduces injustice.

My political life began with the student movement, then widened into the popular movements demanding reform, especially Kefaya after 2005 — years that taught me change is made not by elites alone, but by people who reclaim their voices.

When the Egyptian revolution erupted in January 2011, I was part of the youth movement that preceded and accompanied it, and the civil action that tried to protect its goals, through 2012. For me, it was not only an Egyptian event; it was an Arab and human moment that affirmed that dignity and freedom know no borders or nationalities.

Through journalism, publishing, and founding Ibn Rushd Publishing House, I came to believe that culture is not an elite activity but public action — that books and debate can resist tyranny as much as any political act.

It's difficult for me to summarize Egypt in a single narrative: a country that gave me so much, and with which I have often disagreed — as much a part of who I am as it was a part of my struggle. Defending Palestine, I have come to believe, begins with defending human freedom everywhere.

My first visit to Palestine in 1998 was as much a journey through my family's memories as it was a journey through geography. I travelled between Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Palestinian coastal cities I knew from my grandmother's stories: Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Nazareth, and then Ashkelon, where her house was in the village of Barbra.

When I arrived at my family's house, which had been confiscated in 1948, a Jewish woman of Moroccan origin who lived there greeted us and allowed us to enter. The house had changed completely, except for the kitchen. It remained exactly as my grandmother had described it throughout my childhood, as if time had stood still there.

I couldn't contact her at that moment. I returned to Haifa, to the home of my friend, and from there I called my grandmother.

I described the house to her as I had seen it, and I reached the kitchen. There was a short silence, then she burst into tears. She was reclaiming her home through my voice, more than fifty years after being uprooted from it.

A few days later, she passed away.

That call still haunts me to this day. I don't know if I offered her final solace, or if I awakened in her a longing too great for her heart to bear. But I realized that houses can be confiscated, but no one can take away memory.

After graduating from university in 2000, I received a new permit to enter the Gaza Strip. I intended a short visit but decided to stay, even though my residency wasn't legally secure and the Second Intifada was about to erupt. I arrived in Gaza in September 2000, and within a few weeks, everything changed.

I began working at Ramtan News Agency as an editor and news producer during one of the most turbulent periods in contemporary Palestinian history. The newsroom wasn't detached from the events; it was part of them. We followed the raids, bombings, incursions, assassinations, demonstrations, and city closures moment by moment, while simultaneously trying to verify information and maintain accuracy amidst the chaos.

Journalism in Gaza wasn't just a job. We wrote while clashes were raging nearby, sometimes leaving the office to find the news had already reached the street. I covered people's stories before I covered politics. I saw how the occupation altered the details of daily life: children delayed from school by checkpoints, families who lost loved ones, farmers prevented from accessing their land, and doctors trying to save lives under bombardment. I realized that real news doesn't begin with a military statement, but with a human being.

These years reshaped my professional identity. I learned that journalism isn't just about reporting facts, but about defending the truth against propaganda, giving people names, faces, and stories, instead of reducing them to mere numbers in news bulletins.

I left Gaza in 2003, but I never truly left. I returned several times: to cover the Israeli withdrawal from the settlements in 2005, and later solidarity and documentation missions. My last visit was in 2018. Since then, Gaza has remained more than just a workplace for me; it is my little homeland.

When the Egyptian revolution erupted, I was in the square, believing that the overthrow of tyranny was a symbolic victory for all the oppressed, including my own people.

But the path wasn't straight. After the revolution, we found ourselves facing a form of despotism that had changed its face but not its essence: a struggle against the exploitation of religion in politics on one hand, and against the return of military dominance on the other. We struggled for a democratic, civil state that safeguards dignity and equal rights for all.

This path led me back to prison — the second of two arrests that follow.

Prison was not foreign to my family's memory, but it was a harsh personal ordeal: a cramped cell, lengthy interrogations, and the realization that freedom could be taken away by decree. Prison was also a profound intellectual turning point.

I was arrested twice.

The first time, in 1999, Israeli authorities arrested me upon my return from a visit to Palestine because of books I had brought with me through the Rafah crossing. I was detained for six months without trial, then released after my health deteriorated.

The second time, in 2020, I went to the immigration office in Cairo to renew my residency permit, and instead, I was taken to prison. I was detained for ten days, then a deportation order was issued against me to Turkey. Two years later, the Egyptian judiciary upheld the deportation order, based on my writings and intellectual positions.

But the two arrests were not the same. The first time, I thought prison was walls, iron doors, interrogation, and waiting. The second time, I realized that prison can also be an administrative document, a political decision, or the constant feeling that your life can change in an instant because you have the wrong identity or say the wrong word. Prison didn't teach me fear; it taught me that fear is a complete system, one that begins before the cell and continues. Then, if we allow it to dwell within us.

It also taught me that freedom is not merely the opposite of imprisonment. Freedom is for one's conscience to remain free, even when one's movements are restricted. It is to remain capable of thinking, choosing, and speaking when silence becomes safer than words. I left prison more convinced than ever that dignity is not measured by what one possesses, but by what one refuses to relinquish. And writing and journalism have transformed their meaning from mere professions into acts of resistance and defence of rights and people.

Istanbul is a seaside city, like Jaffa and Gaza, but the sea didn't know my name. The same sea touched our cities, but the waves carried no messages from our shores.

Forced exile in Turkey was harsher than I expected. My passport required me to declare I was Palestinian, and I felt a hidden discomfort settle over people's faces — fear and doubt, a history standing between us far greater than the sea.

My deportation from Egypt was a new uprooting, not a journey of choice. I packed a small bag and left behind more than thirty years of my life: my work, my publishing house, my friends, the city where my consciousness was formed.

I arrived in Istanbul in the final days before the world went into lockdown. Just as I began to know the city, it closed its doors, and with it, the world. For three months I barely left my apartment — no friends, no colleagues, no network to rely on. I was living in exile within exile: one imposed by deportation, another by the pandemic. Writing became my only way to resist the isolation.

It wasn't until 2021 that my life in Turkey truly began, as I found other Egyptian and Palestinian exiles who, like me, were rebuilding. In 2022, my first book, Letters from the Diaspora, was published — a declaration that exile cannot silence a voice, even if it silences a place. But stability stayed fragile: temporary residency, work I couldn't find, a language that stood like a solid wall — daily reminders that my life remained in limbo.

Meanwhile, Gaza was facing genocide. I followed the news moment by moment, writing daily in its defense, driven by a helplessness that was more than geographic distance.

Then, in mid-2024, my mother passed away — the last person who had known my entire life before exile. I have not recovered from that loss.

I wrote because Gaza was being annihilated, because my mother had passed, because I knew no other way to resist absence. My writing became like lighting a candle in a closed passage.

Here in Sweden, the silence is like those moments after a bombing, when all sound ceases except the moans of survivors. No home, no family, no homeland, no history. The nights are incredibly long.

In Sweden, loneliness takes on another form: pitch darkness, bitter cold, thick fog, and a pervasive grayness. People here test you for a long time before they give you a place in their hearts, and winter itself prolongs this test. No one knocked on my door but the wind, and no one asked if I had returned safely.

In my Swedish city, snow covers the sidewalks, and the sky is heavy, as if the earth were writing in a silent language: “Here, you must begin with the snow.”

In Sweden, the new language is not just letters; it is a key to a locked door. But even if the door opens, the warmth emanating from it is not the warmth of the East that I know. People try to understand me. They are captivated by the beauty of the language, its pronunciation, the structure of its words and poetry, and by the vitality that surges through my body when I speak about Palestine, Gaza, and the genocide. They apologize profusely for what is happening, but then ask, “What will you do next?” and all I can say is, “I will return someday.”

After gradually rebuilding my life and participating in cultural, literary, and human rights activities, I became the target of a sustained public campaign because of my writing on Palestine and my public defense of Palestinian rights. What began as accusations soon reached into the institutions I depended on to stay — my grant, my residency itself.

I challenged those actions, and the threat was reversed. But the campaign that provoked it didn't end there, and neither did its cost.