Palestinian poet Mariam Al-Khateeb Palestinian poet Mariam Al-Khateeb

“Do Gazans truly die when their body is not whole or cannot be found and when they cannot be properly grieved?” asked Mariam Mohammed Al-Khateeb, a 20-year-old Palestinian from Gaza, in a prose titled, ‘The Luxury of Death’, published in June 2024—eight months since Israel launched its war on Gaza. “To die with a full body in Gaza is a luxury,” she declared.  

When she saw a photograph of the body of her friend, Buthaina, she could not believe how her blue eyes had turned black. “Did the missile shoot black ink into your eyes?” she asked her dear dead friend.  

 In ‘Where will I hide my poem?’, she described how “debris wrecked my words until the poem bled.” Her poem was killed–a poem “made of words/ overlooking graveyards/ words overlooking death.” As no place was safe—from her ruined home to the bombed refugee tents—she hid her poem in the eyes of the children. But bombs found the children.  

She says, every day, Death puts his hand on her mouth and takes her truth and gives it to the air.  

A dentistry student, poet, oud player, translator and community activist from Gaza, currently residing in Egypt, Mariam Al-Khateeb spoke to Snigdhendu Bhattacharya about her life, art, and activism as Israel’s all-out war on Gaza crossed one year, claiming over 42,000 Palestinian lives while leveling cities and towns.  

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As a Palestinian, how has your life changed in the past year?  

My primary identity is that I am a genocide survivor. This is the most important thing that the war has done to me. When I want to tell someone about me, the first thing that comes to my mind is that I’m a genocide survivor. I prefer to say, ‘I’m a genocide survivor’ over saying ‘I’m a writer, a Palestinian writer, poet, student, worker, freelance journalist, or speaker’. Everything does not have the same importance as your life.  

Life has completely changed onwards October 7, 2023. Even after the genocide ends, our lives will never be the same. We will never live as normal people. This genocide will be in our genes. This genocide is in our blood, in our thinking, in our daily routines, in everything. It has affected the smallest things in our lives—how we act, think and deal with life.  

It’s really hard to consider genocide as a usual happening, to take it as something that will pass. No. Genocide is a hard reality that’s coming to us. It’s a hard reality unfolding in my city. I have lost my city. My city was killed. My city was starved. Every bad thing possible has happened to our city.  

What were you engaged in when the Israeli offensive started?  

I was studying in my second year at my dental school at Al Azhar University. I was an intelligent student, in the sense that I was working, writing, learning to play oud and organising poetry events. But everything changed after October 7. My college was bombed. My friend who was teaching me how to play oud lost his wife. Bombs took her away. The streets of Gaza, the flowers, the trees, the libraries, and humanity, everything bore signs of destruction. October 7 is the darkest day of my life because I can’t wake up as a normal person since then. I can’t handle my things with the same control anymore. I have become a lonely, genocide survivor.  

Now, in Egypt, I am trying to start afresh. This is hard. Every Gazan has to start from zero–they need to be born again to start their lives. Each student, each parent in Gaza needs to be reborn to start a new life. And it’s really hard because we start our lives under the rubble of our dreams. Our dreams are under the rubble of Gaza. We leave Gaza, but Gaza will never leave us. 

My family is still stuck in Gaza, and they are dying, starving and breathing under bombs and rockets. But I’m out to start from zero. I would have been in my third year of dental school if I were in Gaza. But now, I’m in my first year at a dental school in Egypt. I have lost two years but that’s better than losing my life and more things like that.  

How did the war impact your family and friends?  

Every family member had his or her own dreams and plans. My elder brother, Khalil, relocated to Egypt five years ago in search of jobs. When the bombardment started in October 2023, my sister Marah was waiting for her high school to end so that she could go to the university to study engineering. My brother Zain-Al-Abedin wanted to excel as a chess player. My father wanted to start a new project. My mother, who is a worker, had her own dreams. But since October 7, everything has been lost. There are no running schools or colleges in Gaza. They were intelligent and hard-working. But they now have nothing. Instead of being in schools or colleges, they queue up for bread and drinking water, sleep in tents, and get evacuated and evacuated.  

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How did the war impact your writing?  

This genocide is about killing machines. The pump rockets, the bombs and the rubble killed more than 27 of my friends and family. The Israeli occupation burned my grandmother in Al Shefa hospital. They killed my friends Mohammed and Mohammedani. They killed my friend Buthaina under the rubble of her house. They killed my friends Samah, Nadine and Youssef. They killed Tareq Mohammed. They killed Wafaa and Ismael. They killed a lot of my friends, and I really miss them. Also, they split up my friends. Some are outside Gaza, some in the tents and some under rubble. They split all friendships. I miss my friend. I don’t even know who’s alive and who’s dead. I can no longer go and hug them and feel safe. We can’t see each other.  

But it is important that we keep speaking clearly and aloud, our voices reach every nook and corner of the world. I love the sea. But the situation made me hate looking at the sea because, in Gaza, the seaside is full of tents and dead bodies.  

Tell us a little more about how writing has helped you cope with the situation.  

Writing gives me a feeling of being blessed. It makes me feel that I have a message to spread. I want to write to feel that I’m free inside. I can talk with my mind, I can talk through papers, I can talk about my ideas and my hard feelings about what I have gone through. I can talk about everything. Everything that I can’t discuss with others, I can discuss in my writing. 

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I have been writing since I was 10 years old. I grew up with the idea of writing. I started writing in Arabic but over the past two years, I have been associated with the We Are Not Numbers project. That’s when I started writing for English magazines. It’s something really beautiful—that we are not numbers. We try to give voices to all Palestinian writers, give space to their personal stories, lend voice to their messages, and give strength to their writing. I work with the ‘We Are Not Numbers’ project not because I’m a writer, but because I have a message, I have a topic, because I need to talk, and I need to face my feelings, face this world, face everything, to write about everything in Gaza. 

When I Left Gaza, I promised myself that I will never ever stop talking about Gaza, about the stories of Gaza, and about what’s happening in Gaza. I will never stop.  

How does it feel to stay away from family, whose lives are at risk?  

I’m the oldest student to move out of Gaza without my family. I made a hard decision. One day, I felt that I didn’t want to be killed. I didn’t want to lose the last hope in my life. I don’t want my dream to get under the rubble. I wanted to speak to the world about my dream, my story, and my friends’ dreams that were getting buried under the rubble. And I decided in November (2023) that I wanted to leave. I wanted to survive this genocide and speak to the world about how much we deserve life, how much we deserve learning, how much we deserve to make things that matter to the world and how knowledgeable we are.  

So, I said to my father that I wanted to leave. I do feel guilty. I feel that I’m selfish, I let my family die and moved out alone. I also tell myself that I’m fighting for our future, our city, and our collective dreams. It started from my personal dream, but it has grown larger than that. This dream is surviving because I want to survive and unite with my city and family.  

Leaving one’s home is a hard decision, especially when living under the shadows and sounds of the rockets, leaving your mother in tears, leaving your father’s voice. I couldn’t say goodbye to my family and friends, to my favorite places, to the things that I loved in Gaza. I had to rush to cross the border. I hugged my dad, and I saw his tears. I had to rush to go to the border crossing before it closed. Can you feel how I felt when I hugged my dad and saw him in tears, when I bade him goodbye, not really certain if I will ever see him? I couldn’t say goodbye to my mother because it was just a really tough time.  

I don’t know if I will see them ever. I’m still their hope for a way out of the country. I don’t know if I can help the rest of the family cross the border, but funds are being raised.  

Howeveracegame888, Palestinian families, especially Gazan families, have become accustomed to this life. They prefer their children. They believe in the future. They trust in God. And they know the importance of science and studying around the world.