My Study of Dystopian Fiction Never Prepared Me for Reality Here in Gaza

Por Said Alsaloul — Truthout

As a teacher of English literature in Gaza, I’ve seen my relationship to books be overturned by the violence around me.

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As a 27-year-old English literature graduate and English teacher from Gaza, I have always been passionate about teaching. I enjoy helping my students learn to speak English by reciting stories aloud.

I connect with them through English, so I collected every English-language book my hands could reach. Before October 7, 2023, during my fourth year in university, I used to visit a bookshop in Gaza City to buy English novels for enhancing my linguistic link with my job and the students. In 2022, shortly before I graduated, I wrote a short story about our tough conditions in Gaza and submitted it to a writing competition. It ranked seventh out of 80 stories, and I received a reward. What began as a practice to improve my English turned into a way of life. Whenever I had money, I bought a few novels until I gathered a large collection and built my own English library. Sometimes I purchased novels I would never open, but it felt satisfying to have them on my shelf. I could sense linguistic progress: a future.

After lectures, I went to a park near the university where I enjoyed the shade from trees and a soft breeze. It was my place where I could sit on a bench under a big tree, a cup of coffee in one hand, a novel in my bag. The novels were all fiction. What I loved was the way the writers chose words. That gave me the literary sense to generate a unique language over time.

In that shady spot, I opened The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and began to read: “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.”

I recalled Gaza’s 50 percent unemployment rate. I would graduate after a few months and start desperately seeking a job, competing with tens of thousands of unemployed graduates who were also fighting over the same positions. Young men used to dream of building families and marrying the girl they loved. Now they watch their hopes crumble under occupation and blockade. I recalled the constant wars every two years, the terror and psychological traumas they inflict. The patient people who can’t leave because of the blockade and the exorbitant travel fees. The eight-hour daily electricity cuts that devastated us for years.

Thinking about these forms of suffering is unavoidable. They deteriorate your life. But coexisting could be our only key to survival. We learned to carry the weight without collapsing. We learned to read between the lines of our own destruction. Knowing that everyone is suffering gives one a strange kind of comfort.

“And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity,” Coelho wrote.

I believed it. Tomorrow will be better. The suffering is temporary. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding and turned the page.

When I closed the novel, I was certain Coelho had written it for Gaza. For us. For the young people who struggle so much until we believe it is part of life to keep suffering. For those who are still dreaming no matter what.

Then I saw the word on the cover: fiction.

What was fiction to the world was not fiction to us.

I took a pen and crossed it out. I wrote: reality.

I started to read fiction not just to escape, but to understand, to see how fictional worlds were constructed, to learn how to change our reality, or at least adapt to it. Reading became my life, not just for language, but as a chain of subplots that I recognized in my own existence.

One day I turned to Shakespeare:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles…

I once saw Shakespeare’s words as distant, beautiful meditations on grief — something to study, not to live by. In university lectures, the beloved professor Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023, always asked us: “How can you relate to this as a Palestinian?”

“We lack freedom, suffer the devastating blockade and limited resources to thrive. We are the exception case for the world’s rules,” students would reply. “So shall we stay silent and say it is okay to suffer or shall we rebel?”

Refaat took up arms with a pen. He wrote our suffering in stories that couldn’t be ignored. He co-founded the We Are Not Numbers project to help young Palestinian writers narrate our stories. We lived the suffering and chose to write about it, to open the world’s eyes.

On October 7, 2023, the war began. My job disappeared overnight. So did everything else. Before October 7, I assumed I was collecting fiction novels for escapism. Now I realize I was collecting novels that could never instruct me for what would come next. We entered a constant state of suffering and destruction with no exit gate.

The genocide in Gaza surpasses the horrors imaginable through fiction.

All the parks where I used to sit were destroyed. My university was bombed. The places where I built connections with my novels’ characters no longer exist. Cities became ghosts. Displacement emptied everything. Hunger struck hard. Death tolls rose in thousands.

Some of this was familiar to me from horror novels I read, but what I witnessed went beyond anything fiction could conjure. We have lived through horrors that no book could ever capture.

Death in Gaza is nothing like fiction. It has a smell. It sounds like a muffled mouth under the rubble. It looks like blood-soaked concrete and disfigured bodies. My eyes cannot endure it; my mind cannot bear the terror.

As Hamlet decided to rebel against his oppressive uncle, he paid with his life. That was the cost Refaat paid too for his rebellious, courageous writings.

I remember my neighbor Rahaf — a child calling her father’s name from under the rubble, her voice growing weaker. Her father couldn’t reach her. He could only listen until her calls stopped.

Hemingway never prepared me for the smell of death, or for what it could feel like to wait for a child to die under stones while she called for help, or for seeing the corpse of a baby lifted from under the rubble. T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland could not capture the sound of silence broken by the deathly intonations of an aerial drone. George Orwell’s fictional portrayal of surveillance in 1984 never imagined a child’s head shattered, brain matter exposed, under the eyes of a human-driven drone.

Horror novelists don’t write such scenes, not because they protect readers, but because they never imagined reality could be this dark. We in Gaza experience what lies beyond fiction’s limits.

And I couldn’t stop remembering those moments: mothers emerging from under the rubble with blood streaking their cheeks, smoke filling their lungs, screaming, rummaging through the stones for their families, begging us to rescue their children while aircraft still hovered above our heads.

For Shakespeare, “a sea of troubles” was a metaphor for the difficulties of life. For us, it is an actual sea of rubble, of bodies turned into ashes. Compared to Gaza, Shakespeare’s words are a romanticized whisper. The war has shattered the ostensible timelessness of his art.

Before the war, we could analyze literary suffering from a distance. Now we live in a reality that surpasses even the bleakest plays.

The classics were gentle. Gaza is the opposite.

I don’t read to understand anymore. I read to forget I ever did. I read until my eyes blur, until sleep takes me. The words become shapes — nothing more. Humanity dies, and the world watches. Indifferent. What could be more fictional than this?

Orwell wrote:

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy — everything. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between woman and man. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer.

I turn pages I’ve already read, searching for a sentence that might make sense of what we are experiencing. I never find one. No line promises the creeping “Yellow Line” will stop its westward crawl to devour more lands. No sentence assures me that this tragedy has an ending.

There is no fiction left to escape into. There is only Gaza.

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Said Alsaloul is an English trainer and writer based in Gaza.

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Fonte: Truthout