Atef Abu Saif

I know Atef Abu Saif from a joint tour of Germany and as the author of the 2014 novel A Suspended Life as well as his Gaza war diaries The Drone Eats With Me (2014) and Don’t Look Left – A Diary of Genocide (2023).

In the summer of 2006, Saif was the last writer to arrive in Berlin. On his way to the German capital, he had to cross the border between Gaza and Egypt while Gaza was under attack from the sea, the land and the air. Cautiously, a bright young writer approached us across Potsdamer Platz. His voice both gentle and fierce. A witness. A professor at the University of Gaza. A chronicler.

Back then, I didn’t know how far Saif’s voice would eventually reach. How he would serve as Minister for Culture in the Palestinian National Authority. How he would create an extensive oeuvre – with the novels A Suspended Life and Haji Christina being shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. How he would write for theatre. Works of political science. How he would reach audiences from Japan to Turkey to South Africa and find the strength to continue writing and publishing, even though the genocidal destruction of his people is taking place as we speak.

I continued to follow his work. Gripped by the title The Drone Eats With Me, I started reading a war journal which allowed me to listen in on a marital conversation in a house in the Gaza Strip – a dialogue between Atef and his wife Hanna: during the Israeli assault in the summer of 2014, between the bombing raids, Atef wishes to briefly visit his father’s neighborhood.

She insists it is too dangerous. I reply: “All of Gaza is dangerous.”

End of chapter. A marriage. A discussion. A retort at the end of the day. As readers, we don’t know if the writer will visit his father. Who will die and who will live to tell. But we know the writer had a retort.

At the end of the 2014 war, he tells a journalist: “I won because I survived.” But walking through Nasser Street, he realizes the only true victory would be liberation.

In October 2023, Atef Abu Saif pays a four-day visit to Gaza in his role as Minister for Culture, accompanied by his fifteen-year old son Yasser. One morning while father and son are swimming in the sea, bombs start falling and borders close down. Don’t Look Left began as a series of WhatsApp and voice mail messages which grew into a second war journal, a detailed report of the first eighty-five days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, which started in 2023.

Reading those war journals, the reader’s mind drifts to Saif’s novels. The essence of the realness of the family, friends and fellow artists Saif presents us in Don’t Look Left is not only determined by the ultimate now: by fear, shortages and flight, but – given the constant daily humiliations the human mind has to endure – also by what Saif calls “descending birds of recollection interfering with our thoughts” in his novel A Suspended Life. It is a photo, a song, a silence amid murderous noise that carries both the author and his characters back to the past, back to times of suffering.

Take the character Naîm Wardâni: this man in his sixties, working at a small printing establishment in a refugee camp in the Gaza Strip where he prints posters of Palestinian martyrs, always looks at a photo of his father and grandfather on the wall before starting work on the portraits of the latest casualties. The photo was taken in Jaffa before the war, before Naîm was born. On the opposite wall is a black-and-white postcard of that same city: a peaceful seaside scene with houses on a hill. A similar image of Naîms city of birth is to be found in every history book. It is here, in this glimpse of a fatherland beyond his reach, that we join this character at the start of a new day:

It echoes: “I will not be free if I manage to survive; I will only be free once occupation ends”.

Putting a story to paper in wartime basically only requires light, and many times, we lie awake beside Atef Abu Saif, lacking the means to write the story of the day: when his phone battery dies, when he is unable to listen to the news, when he lies in the dark and can only guess. His tenacious will to write puts the writer in constant danger. Saif puts the same determination that makes him continue visiting the cybercafé  – even when he is ashamed of his dangerous walks afterwards – into the mind of his character Naîm: “Heroism is when you know what your goal is and are determined to do the right thing, even if it gets you killed. People in Gaza fall victim to a machinery of death, like grains of corn on the threshing floor ending up in the thresher. But by resisting, we give our lives meaning – victims actually matter.”

This way, words become acts of resistance against the machinery that drives us into the silence of the dead – words from a writer born in the Jabalia refugee camp, who occasionally uses footnotes to explain where other people grew up: in places like the Nuseirat camp, where originally 16,000 refugees were put up after the Nakba, but where 66,000 people reside at this moment. People we relate with just a bit more because we learn about some of their most intimate details, like the writer’s friend who we now know sleeps with her legs and arms crossed to ensure her body will remain whole should she be killed.

In one of his war journals, Atef reminisces how thirty years ago, as a child, he used to play in the ruins, re-enacting the destruction of homes as he had seen the soldiers do. Now, children play the same game between the corpses in the ruins of destroyed cities.

Rashid Novaire

Translation: Tessa van Dooren