Mandy Fessenden-Brauer: Distorted Dreams About Palestine

I wrote this seventeen years after I’d lived in Gaza because people didn’t seem to understand when I tried to share what it was like to live there: the continual presence of death, the constant fear and anxiety; the curfew that kept everyone inside for weeks on end with just a few hours allowed out every week to get supplies; the innumerable acts of inhumanity, such as soldiers intentionally running over a toddler, pulverizing her legs, or deliberately shooting and destroying the eye of an infant in her mother’s arms. And then the many ways Palestinians attempted to retain a modicum of normality, lots of relatives eating together, children playing quietly, someone playing the oud, talking, laughing. The story that seemed to have the most impact happened during a long curfew; since the soldiers couldn’t find anyone to beat, they beat a donkey so badly he had to be put down. Now parents are trying to locate the limbs of their dead children by writing their names on them, or their ID numbers. Imagine!

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And so dreams drape across days like old clothes
ready to be passed on as remnants of the past,
where tranquility rests on present facades which only
look solid on lies or hopes, we don’t know which isn’t
surprising as one only takes while the other gives,
while one screams victim and the other endures
in relative obscurity since the powerful rewrite history
anyway, to reshape the past in their perverted image.

The intent is to erase the truth while those consumed
by shopping malls, football games, television and
the latest antics of the superstars, ignore insidious
actions of politicians and uninformed pundits who
supply lengthy explanations that mean nothing,
empty words running together, sound bites to be
swallowed like empty calories, believed by all who
don’t want to be bothered knowing anything different.

Copyright 2024 Mandy Fessenden-Brauer

Mandy Fessenden-Brauer lived in the Gaza Strip from 1989-1991 during the First Intifada because her husband had a job with UNRWA. She is a clinical child psychologist and has many books for children published in Egypt in Arabic and English. She currently divides her time between Egypt and Bali.