This story has been excerpted and translated by Graham Liddell from Yousri Alghoul’s story collection Jūn Kīnīdī Yahdhī ’Aḥiyānan (Sometimes John F. Kennedy Hallucinates), published in Arabic by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in 2023.
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I will write a letter to Vania—I must.
I’m still breathing, I’ll tell her, and so are those around me. Perhaps she thinks that I died when one of the merciless missiles struck the refugee camp, or the neighborhood where we live, and that now we’re all lying lifeless here, under the rubble. I’ll laugh and inform her that our bodies have hardened and developed a strange immunity to death. It was just the children who died—children, the only ones among us who don’t know the meaning of death. It had never occurred to them that bombs would fall like symphonies on their souls, taking them up to the vastness of the sky.
Maybe she’ll argue with me, saying, “I don’t believe in that heaven and immortality stuff.” Then she’ll start with another one of her gesticulating sermons that give the impression that although she’s an atheist, she rivals the church at offering life lessons. At this point, my jugular veins will swell—or will they smile, despite myself?—and my tongue will launch into the details of my own proud religious identity, and I’ll go on a rant about mistakes and sins, life and death and, yes, heaven and immortality.
I will write a letter to Vania—I must.
I’ll tell her that during the war, I turned myself into water as a way to protect myself from collapsing walls and falling furniture. I peeled off my body parts one by one, and they melted away from me until I was no longer trapped in the rubble like my wife and children, who are yet to learn the art of transformation.
I’ll tell Vania how I seeped through the walls, how my voice became a trickling sound I’d never heard before. Jackets, shirts and pants clung to me as I made my way to my children, who were crying in agony. I glided over to them as calmly as I could, not wanting any noise I made to deepen their wounds. But I had no power nor strength—la hawla wa-la quwwata—to stop the madness that was thundering down on us from above, turning us into scorched earth.
I swear, as soon as my wounds heal and my left arm sprouts anew, I will send my letter to Vania. I’ll write: The smell of my wife and children was making my nose run. So I transformed into a chimney to blow the fumes outside, thinking it might serve as a signal for someone to come and rescue us. But after I turned back into cold water and poured myself over them, dripping into their mouths and wiping away the blood that had dried on their battered bodies, they collapsed and lost what remained of their strength to survive. As they trembled with fear and cold and thirst and hunger, I tried with all my might to turn into the Incredible Hulk and to lift the wreckage of our building off of them. But the Hulk has no place in Gaza, so I failed.
When Vania reads my letter, she’ll break down and ask how this could happen. I’ll respond calmly, saying that the death of my smallest child, whom I shaded with my cloud the way God shaded the Prophet with His, had changed every pore of my body, but without turning me into that green giant, tall and mighty as a palm tree of steel. My son left us quietly, that rascal. One moment he was snoring, the next his life was snuffed out—and all of my senses along with it.
I’ll write: I tried once again to produce, from somewhere within myself, that colossus. To let out a guttural roar until the ground quaked and the sky burst open, releasing a fine thread that would connect the tattered roof of my house to a throne up above that I couldn’t quite see. I’d open a door for my family, one my grandmother hadn’t left ajar upon her return to the sky, and my daughter would smile, carrying her little brother in one arm and waving goodbye with the other, while I stared up at them, frozen in place, completely powerless. Would I cry, scream or die?
I’ll tell Vania: I went back for my wife and firstborn son. I glided over to them carefully, offered them a drink of water from my hand, then lifted them up and brought them out of the house as quickly as I could. Only to discover that they—that we—had no legs.
I know just what Vania will say. “Do you remember the man who used to do a clown act on the streets of Manhattan, who wouldn’t let the audience see his legs? Or perhaps you don’t remember.” She’ll recount how once she had wanted to joke with him, so she pinched his butt and made him yell “Ow!” the way they do in Hollywood movies. She laughed, and so did the crowd that was gathered around him, and they showered him with dollar bills. But the man cried in humiliation, because his wooden leg had slipped out of his costume for all to see. Poor thing, it broke our little hearts. Vania apologized and planted a kiss on his cheek. She dropped ten dollars into his hat and left.
“Why don’t you make your wife a wooden leg?” she’ll say, without knowing that Gaza doesn’t have the trees to produce enough legs to replace the thousands that have been amputated. Without knowing that Gaza isn’t a country, or even a city or village, but rather a little slice of hell devoid of any color besides black.
I will send my letter once I’m cured, and once I acquire two large wings. Iron, aluminum, steel, even feathers—it doesn’t matter what they’re made of. I’ll embrace my wife, hold her tight, and we’ll set off together, flying high. We’ll make it beyond the last frontier, where we’ll keep gliding around for a while to spite our wooden legs. Then finally we’ll drop down to earth like Iron Man, as frighteningly and as cinematically as possible. I’ll make the locals stop wolfing down their food and gulping away at their iced drinks. I’ll make them wander around in our world for a while, and they’ll dream of having wings like ours.
They will applaud, Vania. I’ll write to you about their applause. Someone will emerge from the crowd to take a photo of us, and it will be featured on the front page of all the newspapers and magazines. One journalist might even lead his article with a big headline that calls us “the Jumpers.”
Ahh, Vania, if only we really were like the heroes of that movie. We could travel anywhere we wanted without stopping at borders to get our passports stamped. No country’s authorities could deny us entry or deport us. We’d venture across the wide world without being stopped at a single checkpoint.
If only we had an airport, Vania, if only we had a port—if only we had half a life!—I’d move to Spain and meet you at the entrance of the Alhambra. Then I’d marry you, and we’d have children who resembled my departed angels.
Dear Vania,
I can send my letter to you whenever, because time in Gaza is beyond the calculations of our galaxy.
But when the time does come, I’ll burst into tears and yell: “I’ve made my decision! I will remain imprisoned in this open air until my grandmother allows me to ascend to the sky!” Yes, that’s what I’ll tell you. Please believe me.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yousri Alghoul was born in 1980 in Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and has published several story collections and three novels: Gaza ’87 (2017), Gallows of Darkness (2021) and Clothing That Miraculously Survived (2024). He is a member of the Palestinian Writers’ Union as well as a number of civil-society organizations, and has organized several cultural initiatives for emerging writers in Gaza. He currently lives in northern Gaza with his wife and four children, where for the past year he has documented daily life under siege for the Institute for Palestine Studies blog. “If I didn’t write anything at the time of the aggression or at the time of genocide,” he has said, “the people would not find out what happened, or they would forget it.” Yet for Alghoul, the impulse to write goes beyond bearing witness. In a recent dispatch for World Literature Today he observed: “Writing is an act of madness whose practitioners live in fantasy worlds, drowning in unreal dreams in lands where peace is unknown, so I decided to return to writing once again.”
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Art credit: Hazem Harb, Gauze P2 (installation view), 2024. Gauze on fine-art cardboard. © Hazem Harb. Courtesy of the artist.
This story has been excerpted and translated by Graham Liddell from Yousri Alghoul’s story collection Jūn Kīnīdī Yahdhī ’Aḥiyānan (Sometimes John F. Kennedy Hallucinates), published in Arabic by the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in 2023.
●
I will write a letter to Vania—I must.
I’m still breathing, I’ll tell her, and so are those around me. Perhaps she thinks that I died when one of the merciless missiles struck the refugee camp, or the neighborhood where we live, and that now we’re all lying lifeless here, under the rubble. I’ll laugh and inform her that our bodies have hardened and developed a strange immunity to death. It was just the children who died—children, the only ones among us who don’t know the meaning of death. It had never occurred to them that bombs would fall like symphonies on their souls, taking them up to the vastness of the sky.
Maybe she’ll argue with me, saying, “I don’t believe in that heaven and immortality stuff.” Then she’ll start with another one of her gesticulating sermons that give the impression that although she’s an atheist, she rivals the church at offering life lessons. At this point, my jugular veins will swell—or will they smile, despite myself?—and my tongue will launch into the details of my own proud religious identity, and I’ll go on a rant about mistakes and sins, life and death and, yes, heaven and immortality.
I will write a letter to Vania—I must.
I’ll tell her that during the war, I turned myself into water as a way to protect myself from collapsing walls and falling furniture. I peeled off my body parts one by one, and they melted away from me until I was no longer trapped in the rubble like my wife and children, who are yet to learn the art of transformation.
I’ll tell Vania how I seeped through the walls, how my voice became a trickling sound I’d never heard before. Jackets, shirts and pants clung to me as I made my way to my children, who were crying in agony. I glided over to them as calmly as I could, not wanting any noise I made to deepen their wounds. But I had no power nor strength—la hawla wa-la quwwata—to stop the madness that was thundering down on us from above, turning us into scorched earth.
I swear, as soon as my wounds heal and my left arm sprouts anew, I will send my letter to Vania. I’ll write: The smell of my wife and children was making my nose run. So I transformed into a chimney to blow the fumes outside, thinking it might serve as a signal for someone to come and rescue us. But after I turned back into cold water and poured myself over them, dripping into their mouths and wiping away the blood that had dried on their battered bodies, they collapsed and lost what remained of their strength to survive. As they trembled with fear and cold and thirst and hunger, I tried with all my might to turn into the Incredible Hulk and to lift the wreckage of our building off of them. But the Hulk has no place in Gaza, so I failed.
When Vania reads my letter, she’ll break down and ask how this could happen. I’ll respond calmly, saying that the death of my smallest child, whom I shaded with my cloud the way God shaded the Prophet with His, had changed every pore of my body, but without turning me into that green giant, tall and mighty as a palm tree of steel. My son left us quietly, that rascal. One moment he was snoring, the next his life was snuffed out—and all of my senses along with it.
I’ll write: I tried once again to produce, from somewhere within myself, that colossus. To let out a guttural roar until the ground quaked and the sky burst open, releasing a fine thread that would connect the tattered roof of my house to a throne up above that I couldn’t quite see. I’d open a door for my family, one my grandmother hadn’t left ajar upon her return to the sky, and my daughter would smile, carrying her little brother in one arm and waving goodbye with the other, while I stared up at them, frozen in place, completely powerless. Would I cry, scream or die?
I’ll tell Vania: I went back for my wife and firstborn son. I glided over to them carefully, offered them a drink of water from my hand, then lifted them up and brought them out of the house as quickly as I could. Only to discover that they—that we—had no legs.
I know just what Vania will say. “Do you remember the man who used to do a clown act on the streets of Manhattan, who wouldn’t let the audience see his legs? Or perhaps you don’t remember.” She’ll recount how once she had wanted to joke with him, so she pinched his butt and made him yell “Ow!” the way they do in Hollywood movies. She laughed, and so did the crowd that was gathered around him, and they showered him with dollar bills. But the man cried in humiliation, because his wooden leg had slipped out of his costume for all to see. Poor thing, it broke our little hearts. Vania apologized and planted a kiss on his cheek. She dropped ten dollars into his hat and left.
“Why don’t you make your wife a wooden leg?” she’ll say, without knowing that Gaza doesn’t have the trees to produce enough legs to replace the thousands that have been amputated. Without knowing that Gaza isn’t a country, or even a city or village, but rather a little slice of hell devoid of any color besides black.
I will send my letter once I’m cured, and once I acquire two large wings. Iron, aluminum, steel, even feathers—it doesn’t matter what they’re made of. I’ll embrace my wife, hold her tight, and we’ll set off together, flying high. We’ll make it beyond the last frontier, where we’ll keep gliding around for a while to spite our wooden legs. Then finally we’ll drop down to earth like Iron Man, as frighteningly and as cinematically as possible. I’ll make the locals stop wolfing down their food and gulping away at their iced drinks. I’ll make them wander around in our world for a while, and they’ll dream of having wings like ours.
They will applaud, Vania. I’ll write to you about their applause. Someone will emerge from the crowd to take a photo of us, and it will be featured on the front page of all the newspapers and magazines. One journalist might even lead his article with a big headline that calls us “the Jumpers.”
Ahh, Vania, if only we really were like the heroes of that movie. We could travel anywhere we wanted without stopping at borders to get our passports stamped. No country’s authorities could deny us entry or deport us. We’d venture across the wide world without being stopped at a single checkpoint.
If only we had an airport, Vania, if only we had a port—if only we had half a life!—I’d move to Spain and meet you at the entrance of the Alhambra. Then I’d marry you, and we’d have children who resembled my departed angels.
Dear Vania,
I can send my letter to you whenever, because time in Gaza is beyond the calculations of our galaxy.
But when the time does come, I’ll burst into tears and yell: “I’ve made my decision! I will remain imprisoned in this open air until my grandmother allows me to ascend to the sky!” Yes, that’s what I’ll tell you. Please believe me.
●
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yousri Alghoul was born in 1980 in Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City and has published several story collections and three novels: Gaza ’87 (2017), Gallows of Darkness (2021) and Clothing That Miraculously Survived (2024). He is a member of the Palestinian Writers’ Union as well as a number of civil-society organizations, and has organized several cultural initiatives for emerging writers in Gaza. He currently lives in northern Gaza with his wife and four children, where for the past year he has documented daily life under siege for the Institute for Palestine Studies blog. “If I didn’t write anything at the time of the aggression or at the time of genocide,” he has said, “the people would not find out what happened, or they would forget it.” Yet for Alghoul, the impulse to write goes beyond bearing witness. In a recent dispatch for World Literature Today he observed: “Writing is an act of madness whose practitioners live in fantasy worlds, drowning in unreal dreams in lands where peace is unknown, so I decided to return to writing once again.”
●
Art credit: Hazem Harb, Gauze P2 (installation view), 2024. Gauze on fine-art cardboard. © Hazem Harb. Courtesy of the artist.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.