While speculation on the future of Gaza abounds, what remains ever present is the wholesale destruction wrought by days and months and years of genocide. At the time of this writing, thousands of displaced Palestinians journey, once again north, to Gaza City, and beyond, in search of some semblance of home, of life.
The three authors of this edition of the Gaza Pages insist on life in every way known to them: returning, again and again, to life-affirming relations and practices, to the paths and sites of survival.
In “Recycling Genocide,” Muhammad al-Zaqzouq writes to us of these longstanding efforts, of years of sifting through rubble and ash, limbs and rebar, to aggregate some sort of means for living—for simply keeping on. al-Zaqzouq articulates this persistence not as heroic resilience, but as an age-old drive for survival: one that remains “dogged and enduring” despite Palestinians in Gaza having to repurpose the very “instruments of their own death to secure the means of staying alive.”
This edition of the Gaza Pages is offered in solemn acknowledgment of this reality, which has left artists like Adel Altaweel utterly bereft. In absence of familiarity, and from within the depths of erasure, Altaweel composes a series of nine cartographic tributes to his homeland, together posing the titular provocation “What have your maps become?” Carved into linoleum and finished with increasingly subdued strokes of ink and watercolor, this series “fade[s] to gray, then to brown, then to the earthiness of human origins.”
Where Altaweel reaches for the rhetorical—mocking in the face of ignorance and naivety—Mahmoud Alshaer joins al-Zaqzouq in conversation: the two friends write to us of their work and continued artistic collaboration amid the genocide and its fallout. Aspirational and forward-looking, yet rife with exhaustion and depletion, “Endless Rebirth and Rupture,” describes the steadfast, artistic commitments tended to between friends who, “have no idea what tomorrow will bring—life or death,” but that who, even among the uncertainty and doubt, “still share a desire to continue producing creative work, both personally and together.”