Zeina Azzam: Alive in Gaza

I’m still alive. I’m doing my best to stay alive.

My mind tries to process this message from a young friend in Gaza. I met Ahmed virtually through We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a writing program for youth in Gaza, a year and a half ago. I have mentored college-age students through WANN for almost eight years now, and Ahmed was the most recent one before the events of October 2023. These mentees and their writing offer those of us outside of Gaza a sense of their emotions, dreams, and vulnerabilities as they face extremely challenging life experiences.  

Getting Ahmed’s messages makes Israel’s war on Gaza so real to me, so visceral. This war is such a wicked monument to injustice. A year of genocide has passed and Ahmed lives in the north, in Gaza City, where everyone is being starved. Many wish they had already been killed, he tells me, instead of slowly dying like this. His story is like the stories of over two million people living in the Gaza Strip, which has been decimated by Israel’s relentless bombardment. He has seen the death of countless family members and friends, has pulled people — both alive and dead — from rubble with his hands.

Ahmed spends hours each day trying to find potable water, wood to make a fire, anything for his family to eat. One potato costs $10 now, he says in a voice message, explaining that while a small amount of food trickles in on the black market from time to time, no one can afford it. He has gone for months without eating a fruit or a vegetable. Children are so tired of the same four types of canned goods that are sometimes available, he writes, and even the food in these cans is often spoiled after sitting in sun-drenched trucks for too long. Everyone’s clothes are baggy, everyone has lost so much weight. Diseases and viruses are rampant.

And despite all of this, Ahmed always spends much of his communication asking about me and my health, my grandchildren, how many figs my tree produced this year. I thank him for his kindness, I who have all the water and food that I need, live in privilege and safety. He always ends his voice messages with Alhamdulillah, Arabic for Praise be to God. After all the insurmountable cruelties that he and his family are facing, where else can they turn except to a higher power. It’s been a year and nothing has changed; in fact the killing and maiming, the displacement and starvation, have all gotten worse.

I have realized that I feel so much guilt about Gaza. I am helpless and impotent to do anything about the genocide. It seems that no amount of personal or community lobbying and protesting, writing articles or letters for the news or social media or to lawmakers, composing poems from the heart, sending donations to humanitarian organizations or GoFundMe appeals, or simply praying has made life in Gaza at all livable or secure. Nothing seems to stop Israel’s devastating war on Gaza and its people. We constantly hear of more death and destruction. It is unfathomable that no one in the world is doing what it takes to make this nightmare stop.

Yesterday Ahmed sent me a video clip of the sunset and said he hopes one day we will meet in person so he can show me the sea at Gaza. I want to write, please stay alive, please keep doing your best to stay alive. But I know that death is always around the corner in Gaza, and I have often felt obsessed by Ahmed’s situation, how he fares each day, wanting to hear from him to make sure he’s okay. Sometimes I close my eyes and concentrate on this impossible urge to keep him alive and safe. I wish hard that my thoughts can become a hedge against harm, an amulet with a turquoise bead that keeps encircling and protecting him, from thousands of miles away.

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Author’s note: Follow links provided on Ahmed’s contributor page to read his stories.

Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet and the author of Some Things Never Leave You (TIger Bark Press, 2023) and Bayna Bayna, In-Between (The Poetry Box, 2021). She is the poet laureate of Alexandria, Virginia.

Copyright 2024 Zeina Azzam