Al-Atlal, Now: On Language and Silence in Gaza’s Wake

It felt like failing—all of it. First the words, then their end.

For twenty-four months you pushed your way to language, let language push through you—a desecration of articulation. Committing, casting signifiers for what never should have been. Speed, a tyrant—and yours, infinitesimal against the velocity of war. Thud-thud-thud pounded bombs, buildings, your blood. Every debris precious and unprecedented. The sky, a sea of ash and crime.

Like all things done for love, your attempts were spectacular deficiencies. Confronted with the monster’s throat, you reached for what you knew. Language as reflex, flinging vocabulary at void.Perhaps some failures are worthwhile. If the losses were immeasurable, vast too was the scope of what might yet have been, been saved. (Tortured grammar, twisted syntax of hope.) Perhaps as writer you could serve as transmitter of meaning, interpreter of atrocities. The futility of speech was not definitive—at least not yet.

After all, so much killing happened in English—its conniving, and ignorance. Words, expelling humanity from bodies, before weapons emptied into them.

And so you tried wielding English in reverse. (The temptation of the master’s tools.) Aimed at the lie of Western innocence, the false distance between there and here. Not to declare your people human—by then, you knew better than to bargain for counterfeit currency. No, you wrote to warn of what was already here, wrote to make the monster plain. Announced the Nakba in present tense, this hundred-year-old news.

Some, it seemed, were listening. Or at least, compelled by spectacle to look.^[1]

In any case, you couldn’t help it—language bled out of you, though it was a choice each time to open your veins. Months, you painted in red.

*

And nothing changed—not, at least, in the one way you’d give your actual blood to see. Merciless screens, useless sentinels, watching ambushes on repeat. Death, flamboyant and daily as sunrise. Paroxysm of familiar, déjà vu and disbelief.

*

There were so many worst parts. And this was one: how unsurprised you were. How many Palestinian lives and years have been exterminated, in the gap between words and will? Yours is not the first people prescribed erasure by and for the civilized. You know the horrific capaciousness of English. How elastic, how permeable, its morality. How swiftly it shapeshifts to violent designs.

And killers, unchecked, grow more brazen in deeds and words. Your life began inside this story: mid-arc in a genocide foretold. Zionist violence has always been prefaced by language—prophesies of erasure, famine, and plague. More chilling than all their hasbara is how much they tell the truth. How ardent, how ecstatic their voices as they proclaim their intentions, their lust for our death.

*

“Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples, together in this country. The only solution is Palestine without Arabs. And there is no other way but to transfer all of them: not one village, not one tribe should be left.”
–Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department in 1940
*

“There is no Zionism, colonialization, or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.”
–Ariel Sharon, Israeli Minister of Defense and Prime Minister, in 1998
*

“Enough with the oblique references. This is a war. Words have meanings. This is a war. It is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. These too are forms of avoiding reality. This is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. . . They are all enemy combatants. . .They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
–Uri Elitzer, Israeli journalist and confidant of Benjamin Netanyahu, quoted by Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked in 2014
*

“We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”
–Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, 2023
*

“I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic offramp with these savages. . . You can’t coexist. They have to be eradicated.”
–US Senator and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 2023
*

“There will be Jewish settlement in Gaza… because it is part of the Land of Israel.”
–Israeli Finance Minister Bezalal Smotrich, October 14, 2025, in response to the beginning of Trump brokered “ceasefire”
*

Once again, it was a Western–sponsored slaughter. Kinship of Arab-hate and Islamophobia, hegemony in love with victimhood. Until weeks of broadcast blood tarnished their story, surged as protests into their streets. Forced, they feigned concern, pantomiming empathy. They called on language to preserve, not confront, reality. Once again you watched English annihilate its own terms. How they cracked the bones of meaning, severed words from their roots. In their mouths, mass starvation becomes a grey area. “War”: the bombing of tents and aid centers, the denial of clean water, medicine and books. In their language, children are lawful targets, and a dead toddler a “lady.” Impunity as indefinite and repressed “investigations,” while bullets require no shooter to fly.

*

Language, for all its limitations, is not the killer. It is only as lethal as it is used.

*

Even so, the compulsion persists. To write, to record the carnage, if only partially. Some days, it feels like a necessary redundancy. On others, absurd.

But who are you to call futile what so many die to attempt? In Gaza, journalist after journalist is slaughtered. Destroyed for daring to document the murder of their world.

*

In Nuseirat, your cousin Nabil discovers a love for writing. Fleeing bombs, chased from one lie of safe zone to the next, he sends snatches of story and poetry. On other occasions, missives he asks you to translate. In one, he pleads for shared vocabulary. What is happening, dear world in general, and American friends in particular, is genocide.

We must agree first that what is happening is genocide, genocide.

*

The number of your relatives killed surpasses two hundred. When you cite this in an interview, the American publication calls you the next week for a fact check. The caller apologizes when she asks about documentation. But for the sake of journalistic integrity, your family’s testimony is framed as anecdote.

*

صمت من أجل غزة

In another century, Darwish called for silence. Silence, silence for Gaza.

*

You understand this impulse. For where did all our languaging take us?

Children, piled in pieces, into plastic bags. Families portioning their grief as grams, flesh weighed to approximate the heft of their dead. Sacred, obscene sacks blessed and buried with tenderness.

Hospitals: sites of slaughter. Doctors sniped or captured, mass graves where hope should be.

Headless babies. (Did you hear me? Babies. Without heads). First, a lie used to grease the gears of genocide, now a signature of our demonic age.

Flour mixed to make human paste, crushed bodies as boast.Education: a hunted entity. The horizon of higher learning annihilated, every university reduced to mushroom clouds.

A child. A child. A child. A child. A child. A child who did not know what time it was—only that the tank was approaching, and night was coming soon.

Heritage, centuries proud, stolen systematically. Libraries burned as if to say: your beauty was your first offense.

A boy. An IV bag, a tether intended to nurse life. Did the saline solution vaporize before or after he did?

*

Each of these sentences, a resounding silence. Each one an abyss. Craters of failure encircling what language cannot hold.

For what can hospital mean after al-Shifa? What does body mean after Sde Teiman? What can girlhood mean after Hind? In the wake of what we’ve done, who can define humanity?

Gaza: the graveyard of our meanings. The revelation of our truth.

*

Consider: silence as an ethical position, where we must all begin.
Silence, deep as the absence of each departed world.
Be still, and submit to ruination.
Cuff your language, hold your tongue.
Swear you’ll not speak again
unless guided by the dead.

*

And yet, a warning: silence has many rooms. Beware, or be lost within its halls. Summer 2025—silence من أجل ولا شئ. The silence of succumbing, of halted lungs. Brick of static, hot and scrambled, lodged where your brain should be.

For months, ashamed, you carried it: a fatigue that touched defeat. You hauled it between buildings, laid it on your quiet bed. And while you stood, gagged, under a running shower, each day shed another hundred of your kin.

*

In Gaza, silence thickened too. On your phone, family voices flickered, faint. Hunger, a rough palm at their throats. Something shifting—breaking?—there, too. The sea is crying, Nabil said, and the soul can’t remember why it lives.

*

Death has died in Gaza, wrote Abduljawad Omar as the summer bled to an end. Who killed it? Do we speak here of Zionist barbarism^[2], or Gaza’s will—how, in enduring what should not be endured, she has exceeded even the end of ends? Murder, executed ceaselessly, displayed to a watching world. Murder at every pace—from the lethal languish of starvation to the sniper’s speed. Murder, not only of bodies, but the very boundary of life and death.

Sumud, suspended, disfigured. Can survival be a punishment?

*

Strange, the vernacular of pity.

How many months of livestreamed starving it took, before ribcages spoke. Taut skin on tiny skeletons. Resurrecting the phantom of red lines. Decency declared a comeback, and reached suddenly for sound.

*

Pots, spoons drumming rhythmless song.

*

Death has died in Gaza, wrote Omar, but these are not his words. He is quoting a friend who speaks to him from the deathcamp of the Strip. In his sieged-but-safer home in the West Bank, he hears reproach in her words. What he writes next startles you with recognition, names a secret shame. He confesses a peculiar malady which, you suspect, is common to your kin and age: the fantasy of disappearance. An accelerating desire, as a Palestinian outside Gaza

[t]o vanish because survival itself becomes shameful. . .To vanish because rage corrodes the will to persist, because persistence begins to look like complicity in a world that remains immobile, indifferent, unbudging, even as the machinery of killing runs its course.

*

Pots, spoons drumming rhythmless song.

You tried it once. You broke your spatula. The famine carried on.

*

Silence for Gaza

and yet—here you come, returning to the absurdity of words.

*

After all, Darwish’s silence flowed to utterance. صمت was the title, an opening followed by verse after verse. The quiet called for is not absolute. No, it is silence من أجل غزة —for, toward, for the sake of, Gaza alone. An admission that, in horrific transcendence, she exceeds our address. Our voices do not reach [Gaza], says Darwish. No, all she hears is the silence of our failure. It is the thunder in her sky.

But to not address ourselves—to cloak in quiet what we’ve done—is a clemency we dare not, do not deserve.

*

Gaza has spoken. After silence must come our answer. All language, now, in Gaza’s wake.

History warns against the asymmetry of sympathy, its requirements of victimized innocence. We must move beyond this, the ethos of English. Over and over, we’ve paid too much to learn its hollowness.

Instead, we should hear Fady Joudah declare Palestine will be liberated in Arabic, and know this refers not only to alphabet. Just as Palestine is both a place and more—Palestine is an ethics, a commitment, a horizon of liberation or annihilation we are all advancing toward. Likewise, Arabic exceeds its function as nouns and verbs, becomes a consciousness.

*

In “Poetry Begins at STOP: Etel Adnan & Arabic,” scholar and writer Huda Fakhreddine defines an Arabic poetic consciousness grounded in literary and linguistic history. To do so, she calls upon deep time to invoke the tradition of Arabic qaṣīda. A poetic form which emerged in pre-Islamic Arabia, the qaṣīda may address a variety of subjects—from eulogy to romance to warfare—but finds its foundations in grief.

The qaṣīda is a monumental structure, an outstanding identification or mark of what it is to be Arab. It presents to us the original landscape, geographical, psychological, linguistic, and emotional among other things. It has served as the primary field of reference for all Arabic poetry. . . .[and] this monumental structure is always erected upon ruins.

Here, Fakhreddine refers to the tradition of al-wuqūf ʿalā al-at̩lāl, or standing upon the ruins—the classical point of departure for the qaṣīda. This motif is exemplified by the poet Imru’ al-Qays, whose iconic Mu’allaqa opens upon a lover who, while traveling across the desert, stumbles upon the ruins of his beloved’s camp. Dismounting to survey the scene, the speaker utters a phrase which rings across centuries of Arabic literary tradition:

قِفَا نَبكِ

Qifa nabki.

Stop, and let us weep.

*

Your cousin Muhanad was martyred last night, you wake on the twentieth day of the “ceasefire” and read. Muhanad, and a hundred others, while you slept. Forty-two children and counting. Counting. Counting.

Familiar topsy-turvy.
Your morning becomes
night, time
splitting,
splitting you.

Again, you are born. Here. Two-hundred times and more, Gaza has birthed you, here. At each threshold—STOP. Each one of your relatives, taken—STOP. Bullet, winter, blaze—STOP. An instant, inaugurating an absence that is now, and without end.

Stop, and let us weep.

*

كتب علينا يا بنت عمي العزيزة
 رثاء الأحبة طوال الوقت
كتب علينا يا ابنة عمي العزيزة
الحزن حتى في فترات الهدوء

My dear cousin, we are destined (it is written for us) to mourn our loved ones constantly.
We are destined (it is written for us), my dear cousin, to grieve even in moments of quiet.

*

These sentences flood your phone, again. Relatives in Gaza, stopping you, dispatching torrents of truth. Repeatedly you say to one another, we are out of words. And yet, you reach for each other here, in language. In lament, we stop and meet one another, our ruins.

*

، كتب علينا الأسى والدموع 
الموت لا ينتهي هنا ولا يأخذ قسطا من الراحة 
ذهب الذين نحبهم فما جدوى بقاؤنا

Sorrow and tears are our fate. Death does not end here,
nor does it even take a moment of rest in Gaza.
Those we love are gone, so what is the point of our remaining?

*

Death has died in Gaza. The phrase pounds with poetic force, but for your cousin, death is alive and well.

*

So what, then, of this desolation? Imru’ al-Qays instructs us in lamentation, and yet—the أطلال, the ruins he mourned were holding still. How are we to confront the fact of restless slaughter, of endless catastrophe? In the ongoingness of trauma, where are we to stand?

Be rupture incarnate, you wrote, nearly two years ago. December 2023—how much devastation you’d witnessed, by then. How much more, how much loss you had to go.

Rupture incarnate, witness as wound. The surrender of it—to stand at the threshold of your understanding, and be pierced by mystery. To be cut open by the unknowable other, all you can and can’t imagine, and enter responsibility.

Perhaps there is something beyond this. Perhaps this opening, this mourning, may become a meeting place. In spoken Arabic the root word for أطلال, ruins, is used as a verb, طِلّ. Here, it gestures to hospitality, beckoning a loved one to come, to appear, to drop by and come inside. An expression of longing, of the reality or hope of togetherness, in place.

أطلال is most frequently translated as ruins, but more precisely it is traces, remnants, the part which appears or remains discernible of that which has vanished. أطلال: a location where the past makes itself visible. A site of temporal disruption, where what was is revealed as still here.

But such uncoverings are contested. The present is a tyranny imposed by force. The powerful are always covering their traces, forbidding the right to remember, to mourn. Erasing the remnants of what they’ve done, the remnants of ours, of us. Goading the caravans ever on, they are the enemy of STOP.

*

In the spring of 2024, the Israeli army re-invaded areas in the north of Gaza it had claimed it had cleared not because the resistance factions remained standing, but primarily because people insisted on returning to inhabit the ruins, writes Nasser Abourahme

This insistence on habitable life and its ordinary rhythms–that is,the refusal of the wasteland Zionism has always sought to engender in/as Palestine–is the basis of the broader challenge to the settler regime. There’s nothing to romanticise in this. . .But to remove this grief from the temporality of a war of liberation is to remove it from political meaning entirely, to render it in the only language liberalism will allow: a strictly personal injury. 

*

STOP—let us weep

_________________—here is a poetics of silence, speech rooted in ruined space. One which gathers itself at the site of desolation, its witness opening the possibility of justice, of (re)creation, of return. Here, the poem strikes at the heart of the destroyer, declaring its guilt visible, and its desecration incomplete. Our words and bodies: a living haunting, reanimating the أطلال. Cohering a people, in love, from was to is, against violent will to disarticulate.

To speak plainly: Time is not permitted to leave our beloveds, nor their justice, behind. We know life remains, begins, here—in what they have failed, will fail, to erase. The future will not suture, power will not close this wound. For we will hold it open—this STOP, this grief and the horizon of refusal it spells. Our blood, shed and flowing—it is precious, and it is speech.

Nima Hassan, writing from Gaza, is one of many who embodies this. She, her people, voicing the ruins, declaring desolation will not have the final word.

Pain is always a powerful instigator for writing. . . Here, pain is a flood of death, corpses piling on your head, on your chest, on your heart. You are a corpse now, and this corpse must express itself. Imagine, the dead speaking. Here we are, speaking.

*

Thanks to Khaled al-Hilli for this help in the research for this essay, and to my beautiful family in Gaza for teaching me how to live.

_____________________________

^[1] In a world addicted to the propaganda of the spectacle, only the spectacular crime can make the Palestinian visible within the moral fields that manufacture the crime and propaganda against them. –Fady Joudah

^[2] Bar bar bar
was how the Greeks heard our speech —
sheep, beasts — and so we became
barbarians. We make them reveal
the brutes they are, Aleph, by the things
we make them name.

–from Dear Aleph, Solmaz Sharif