grief’s metamorphosis
& the practice of home
Last week I moved into a new apartment—my first place of my own—after several years of living in Palestine, a year of rest in my New Jersey hometown, and a year of nomadic travel. Last night, one of my closest friends Kris came over for dinner, the first friend to come hang with me in my new place.
Settling into a new place is generally a beautiful activity, a signifier of a fresh start in life. It’s taken me some time after Palestine to find my footing and stability on a new path. It’s here now and while I’m grateful for it, it has been difficult to fully feel the goodness of this moment.
Gaza is the first thing I think about when I wake up, the last thing I think about as I fall asleep. I walk down the street on a sunny day and hear birds chirping, and I think of Gaza. I look to the sky, free from warplanes and drones, and I think of Gaza. I think about these simple pleasures, these pockets of tranquility, and how they’ve been ripped away from Gaza. I look at the world around me, the chain reaction of societal decisions that afford some people a life of relative ease and others genocide.
As I settle into my new home, I think of Gaza. I think about my friends who have lost their homes, who have been violently uprooted from their homeland, or have been displaced within Gaza for the seventh time, some living in tents among relentless bombing. I think about the sheer evil that yields these outcomes. So many items in my apartment—art, rugs, ceramics—are from Gaza. These souvenirs now feel like artifacts. What has become of the artists who created these pieces?
I feel guilty, sometimes ashamed, over the glaring differential in privilege. I shared these feelings with Kris as we settled onto the couch together. She responded: Home is a practice. When I think about Gaza before this war, I think about how no one could leave. So in many ways, home is all they had. They practiced home.
Her words made me think about how I’m crafting a home in the image of Gaza. Not just through decor, but in practice. I want the experience of my home to elicit the feelings that I felt in Gaza—belonging, inclusion, warmth, generosity. It feels like a way to honor Palestine, a way to keep Gaza alive.
A part of me died inside last week with the news of Israel’s invasion of Rafah. There is a heaviness, a dead weight that lingers in my chest. It pushes against my heart and makes it hard to breathe deeply. The resounding question coming from Gaza is: where are we supposed to go? With so much of Gaza in ruins, with decimated infrastructure and inadequate medical care, with no aid coming in due to Israel’s seizure of the border and Israeli settlers actively blocking aid trucks and destroying bags of flour—what happens next for the people of Gaza?
I used to derive so much hope from the way the movement for Palestinian liberation has taken hold of the masses in America. The protests, disruptions, university student movement—all of it made me feel like things are changing, that Zionism’s chokehold is loosening. While I still value and applaud these actions, I admit they are no longer a primary source of hope for me, at least when it comes to the immediate future. Our voices have been dismissed by our so-called democratic government, student protests quelled by a militarized police force. While continuing to enable a genocide for over 220 days that has killed over 15,000 Palestinian children, Biden’s mouthpieces still robotically parade out appalling, insulting, and hostile propaganda about “Israel’s right to defend itself.”
My friend and former co-worker Mohammed from Gaza passed through DC last week. After enduring six months of genocide, he made the devastating decision to leave Gaza less than a month ago with his parents, wife, and baby girl who was born on October 6th. He then flew to the US a few weeks later to go to a training he was not sure he’d be alive to attend. We spent an evening in DC together. Somehow we still laughed over inside jokes and I swooned over photos of his little daughter Farah, an Arabic name that means joy. Between the moments of levity, Mohammed said to me, Gaza is gone, Anam. It’s all gone, swiping through his photos of the wreckage.
Seven months of utter carnage and we have failed to secure a ceasefire. While our efforts must continue to urgently bring about a ceasefire needed to protect the remaining life in Gaza, it will always feel too late. It will never bring back the countless lives so senselessly lost or restore the Gaza that holds so much history, meaning, and identity for Palestine.
While I go through a phase of despondency over the movement en masse, I get breezes of hope through personal interactions. A few weeks ago, an 11-year-old named Julia whose father is from Gaza approached me and my friend in my New Jersey hometown. She was excited to see us wearing keffiyehs in public, something she said she had not seen in our town. She told us of her organizing efforts she’s leading in school to speak about Gaza and her family’s history, despite our town having virtually no visible or vocal support for Palestine, despite children approaching her in school to say: I hate Gaza! We exchanged contact information and the next day I dropped off a Free Palestine poster to her home. To make sure my gift made it to her, Julia said: My house is the one with a CEASEFIRE NOW sign on the lawn, you can’t miss it, we’re the only house on the street with that sign. It got stolen once, but I replaced it.
What struck me about Julia was not just her young bravery, but the life I heard in her voice, the complete lack of bitterness. She spoke to me from a place of unwavering dedication to doing and saying what’s true and right, even when the world around her pushes back. I left that interaction feeling energized by Julia’s belief in a free Palestine. It resuscitated parts of me that had died inside.
Another interaction that gave me life took place during a video call I received from my dear friend Ghada last week. After losing their home in Gaza, Ghada and her family were able to relocate to Germany as refugees. Before Ghada pivoted her career to tech, she was an architect in Gaza. I asked her how she was settling into life in Germany. She said: I knew who I was in Gaza, but I’m still figuring out who I am in Germany. As soon as I get my residency and am able to work, I’m thinking of going back to being an architect. When we rebuild Gaza, we’ll need those skills. I nodded along affirmatively, and filled my lungs with the deepest inhale I had taken all day.
Grief is a profound experience, dynamic and winding. I think I have stagnated in a phase of denial, my thoughts lingering on “I just can’t believe it” whenever I see photos of Gaza’s destruction. I wonder if my stark opposition to this genocide has seeped into a rejection of reality. Yesterday, my therapist said: Acceptance doesn’t mean approval. To survive the cruelty of the present, you have to put some of your mind and soul into the future, which isn’t to say the future won’t have its ugliness. But you have to nurture your present self so that you can show up as a power source for whatever the future needs from you.
I feel myself slowly moving into a phase of acceptance. An acceptance that even if this genocide were to cease today, the annihilation of Gaza has been real, irrevocable, and life-altering. Denying the loss only offers an illusion of self-preservation—it keeps me stuck. Acceptance, on the other hand, opens myself up to another stage of grief’s metamorphosis.
In some inexplicable way, allowing myself to mourn Gaza feels like an avenue towards renewed hope, towards more energy to continue to fight for my friends who are still in Gaza. It gives me the energy to look to the future, one where Ghada is rebuilding a Gaza where Julia and her father can practice home in a free Palestine.
I am co-leading an initiative to connect allies around the world to people in Gaza as pen pals and champions for their GoFundMe fundraisers so that they can afford daily necessities in Gaza when available & escape the violence if the Rafah border hopefully opens again. Learn more and join us: www.championgaza.xyz
Thank you, Anam. For being able to find the words in the darkest moments.
We are learning resilience and hope! Thank you for your words and updates in this difficult year! 💞