Mandy Fessenden-Brauer: Funeral in Gaza

I’d been in Gaza only a few days when I attended a funeral with my husband who was working with UNRWA. Outside the wake house, soldiers were revving up their jeeps, circling the area, screaming and shouting, and acting like teens drag racing in the States. Along with many others, the young boy had already been buried in the martyrs’ cemetery. Since then so many have been killed, the cemetery has been bulldozed and the bodies desecrated. If life has no meaning, I guess neither does death.

***
Death, death, death everywhere in Gaza as brackish tears
fall into polluted water. A nation is mourning as the young
join together in daring danger, sometimes only spraying
black slogans on clay walls before being gunned down by
smiling soldier sociopaths wearing litanies of historical
horrors around their necks like medals of honor, those scars
of sacred myth more than skin deep and proudly passed on
as if sadness worn inside is a gift of love, not painful pathology.

Strong faces in the diwan defiantly stare at the array of enemy
soldiers outside armed in combat gear. Reddened eyes spill
wetness for so many dead and now for the young man rotting
underground who died for the dream of a disappearing
homeland which they lost hope in long ago, secretly believing
the future didn’t have much to offer. Talking politics, downing
bitter, black coffee, reminiscing about the boy who was a good
son, very religious, all agree he was a courageous leader.

Women in black, like caucusing nuns, eyes rouged by mourning,
stare at cameraed images of the youth now only a memory in a
martyr’s cemetery, ululate and talk of Allah’s will – and death.
The grieving mother kisses her son’s kefyah, wiping her tears
with blood-stained tassels while collective comfort caresses
her heavy arms. Across reigns grandmother, bird-like in ancient
frailty, hennaed hair hanging in ochre strands from her sombre
hijab, anger solacing sadness in a rambling diatribe, subject matter

embracing political wrongs wrapped with an old lady’s truncated
tenderness for her beloved grandson forever frozen at fourteen.
False teeth lie on her lap facing forward, pink plastic gums
glistening grotesquely as loss lunges into scathing, macabre screams
while another legend is born of injustice, cruelty, obvious wrong,
a new generation hurtles into hatred, scarred beyond healing,
destined to look for an enemy on whom to carve redemption,
remembering only death, death and more death.

Copyright 2024 Mandy Fessenden-Brauer. From Remembering Life in Gaza during the First Intifada.

Mandy Fessenden-Brauer is a clinical child psychologist and has many books for children published in Egypt in Arabic and English. She currently lives between Egypt and Bali.