Translated from Arabic by Suneela Mubayi

I have not written anything worth publishing since the 8th of October. Since the beginning of this genocidal war, I have lost the luxury of experimenting and transgressing, of digging up the dirt under everything we don’t dare to question, all the truths we hold to be self-evident when it comes to the homeland, to gender norms, to the body. There is a serious setback embodied in this forced return to brandishing the fundamental symbols, the ones that we thought had become outdated and irrelevant to the point of becoming part of folklore. But this latest war of survival has its own rules of engagement, and there is no longer any time for queer writing.

Gaza has become the ultimate reference point on which to measure everything. It is now the ultimate Truth lying in wait to ambush me, creeping towards me/us to give us the breaking news. As you sip your coffee in some chic cafe, an entire residential block in Jabaliya or Khan Younis is destroyed, and as a result, ninety people are killed, among them women and children, who collapsed like an avalanche of flesh in mere minutes. As you walk your dog on the beach, you look at the semi-naked bodies of Israeli men sunbathing or exercising to strengthen their muscle mass and try to deal with the clashing primal urges inside your head. Gazan bodies topple one after another as they flee from the north of the strip to the center, from the center to the south, or from the south to Hell, through being sniped or just by the sheer shamelessness of the Truth. It feels like I’m living in a stream-of-consciousness movie, where the consciousness of the main character, who is saturated with hate, malice, and a thirst for vengeance and retribution, is dissociated from the audio track and visual reel.

What should I write about? About the detainees piled up in front of cameras in their underwear? About the aesthetics of their bodies in all their diversity, ranging from those whose bodies have been sculpted by hardship to those who have sculpted their bodies in fitness centers to mimic a body they want for themselves? About the kinds of underwear that Gazan men prefer? Boxers, Speedo-style tighties, or the white cotton trunks that reach to the knee, usually worn by older men like me (the ones over fifty)? What should I write about? Why guys from Gaza get to have less hairy bodies, whereas men in the north, especially those close to the Lebanese border are covered in hair, especially on their backs?

Should I write deconstructive texts that fight against ossified ways of thinking? We’ve really become experts at deconstructing: deconstructing bodies and transforming them into dissociated limbs. A mother carries her children’s dismembered body parts in a blood-stained bag. A father wails in grief near the body parts of his family, repeatedly uttering hasbi allah wa niʿm al-wakil, entrusting God to take care of things for him. Here is the head of my rebellious daughter, he says, and there is the arm of my effeminate-looking son, and here is the waist of my daughter who preferred Lacan over Freud; she was writing a thesis on Baudrillard’s theories of terrorism.

I think that what’s left to me is to wait. To pass the time like this, to count the losses, to see whether I have lost my ability to wander outside the pack and create literary shocks. Or have I lost my mojo? Has what my mother said about me ten years ago - that I came out too Palestinian - actually come true? My mom died two years later, and I’m afraid that she may have been proven right, that I’ve come out too Palestinian for my own good and have lost the luxury of transgressing boundaries, either as a result of aging or from the impact of the thought of this genocide.