Journal for Cultural Research

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Sensory siege: dromocolonisation, slow violence,

and poetic realism in the twenty-first century
short story from Gaza

Isabelle Hesse

To cite this article: Isabelle Hesse (2017) Sensory siege: dromocolonisation, slow violence, and
poetic realism in the twenty-first century short story from Gaza, Journal for Cultural Research, 21:2,
190-203, DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2016.1272786

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2016.1272786

Published online: 05 Jan 2017.

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Journal for Cultural Research, 2017
VOL. 21 NO. 2, 190–203
https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2016.1272786

Sensory siege: dromocolonisation, slow violence, and poetic

realism in the twenty-first century short story from Gaza
Isabelle Hesse 
Department of English, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Since the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the subsequent Received 30 September 2016
siege, and Israel’s military operations in the Gaza Strip, including Accepted 25 November 2016
‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008/2009 and ‘Operation Protective Edge’ KEYWORDS
in 2014, it has become difficult to convey the normality of life in Gaza, a Gaza; short story; poetic
normality that is often elusive in a situation that is increasingly defined realism; dromocolonisation;
by the accelerated and technological violence of dromocolonisation, slow violence; Gaza Writes
at the same time that it is marked by what Rob Nixon has termed ‘slow Back; The Book of Gaza
violence.’ To make these forms of violence visible and apprehensible,
recent short fiction from Gaza has turned to poetic realism and the
use of the sensory experience to represent life under siege. Contrary
to visceral realism, which promotes a focus on the body as a site of
victimhood and suffering, poetic realism allows the short story writers
discussed in this article to reclaim agency and to define a Gazan
identity that resists the subjection and subjectification of human
rights discourses and of the Anglophone media by focusing both on
the ordinariness and the extraordinariness of living in Gaza in the
twenty-first century.

Introduction
During Israel’s 2014 military operation ‘Protective Edge’ a number of games, such as ‘Gaza
Assault: Code Red,’ ‘Bomb Gaza,’ and ‘Whack the Hamas,’ were circulated online, which
encouraged players to destroy Gaza and the Hamas. Created in the style of these and similar
games that are still available, Canadian filmmaker John Greyson’s short film Gazonto (2014)
overlays Toronto with places in Gaza – as the contracted name ‘Gazonto’ suggests – that
were attacked during ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in order to show how a similar war would
affect a ‘Western’ city. Greyson puts the viewer into the position of an Israeli soldier, who is
asked to ‘bomb Gazonto, an open air prison between the Credit and the Rouge Rivers, from
Eglinton down to the lake’ (Greyson, 2014). This choice of perspective, together with the
superimposition of Gaza and Toronto, abolishes a distance that John Collins has attributed
to the use of technology in modern warfare, which ‘tends to increase the distance between
those carrying out the violence and those receiving it and, by extension, seeks to shield the
former from critical public scrutiny’ (2011, p. 101). However, not only those carrying out the

CONTACT  Isabelle Hesse  isabelle.hesse@sydney.edu.au

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH   191

violence, but also those watching it on their TV screens, are removed from this violence,
which reifies their emotional and political distance from these events. On one hand, Greyson
puts his viewers into the uncomfortable position of an Israeli soldier bombarding civilian
targets, which implicitly accuses them of complicity with Israel’s actions and thus decreases
the political distance between them and Israel’s military operations. On the other hand, he
also brings the events in Gaza into the realm of the familiar, reducing the emotional distance
between Gaza and Anglophone audiences, by demonstrating how a similar war would
affect Toronto and showing the consequences of this war for individuals, their homes, and
their infrastructures.
Abolishing the distance created by Anglophone media depictions of Gaza and offering
an alternative portrait of life under siege that brings everyday Gaza into the realm of the
familiar also drives a series of recent publications from Gaza, such as The Book of Gaza (2014)
and Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza (2014). Refaat Alareer, the
editor of Gaza Writes Back, a collection of short stories written in English which has been
promoted as part of the international Palestinian solidarity movement,1 argues that his book
offers ‘a much-needed Palestinian youth narrative without the mediation or influences of
translations or of non-Palestinian voices’ (Alareer, 2014a, p. 13). Apart from commemorating
the fifth anniversary of ‘Operation Cast Lead’ through its 23 stories – the amount of days that
the invasion lasted – this collection, as the title suggests, writes back to official narratives
about Gaza and its inhabitants, offering a largely unmediated2 perspective of life in Gaza for
English-speaking audiences. The ‘permission to narrate,’ to use the late Edward Said’s well-
known phrase, has of course been central to Palestinian literature and culture since the
establishment of Israel in 1948, especially since the Palestinians, as Said has famously stated,
are an ‘invisible people’ in the Israeli narrative and ‘so much of [their] history has been
occluded’ (2003, p. 20). This idea of the invisibility of the Palestinians is not only linked to the
Zionist depiction of Palestine as ‘a land without a people,’ but also to the position of the
Palestinian story, and history, in the Israeli discourse, which denies the existence of a
Palestinian nation without Jewish sovereignty (Piterberg, 2008, p. 94). The short story writers
discussed in this article – Atef Abu Saif, Jehan Alfarra, and Yousef Aljamal – are certainly
addressing and remedying the representation of Palestinians in the Israeli narrative but also
in the international imaginary, where Palestinians are either seen as abject victims or terror-
ists, as Bernard (2012) and Khalili (2007) have argued. Neither of these categories allows for
much agency in addition to eclipsing the Palestinian resistance against an occupying power,
which aligns with representations of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.3 But above all Abu
Saif, Alfarra, and Aljamal bring, as Ra Page has noted, ‘the normal life of Gazans into the
foreground for a change, to spotlight the domestic, the ordinary, and the everyday – human
stories that Gaza, like any other city, must be teeming with’ and go beyond what Page terms
‘the basic vocabulary of (…) war-porn: the bomb-damaged buildings, the hysterical mourn-
ers, the angry funeral processions (…) – images that are both extremely familiar and impos-
sible to connect to’ (2015, p. 243). This impossibility to connect to life in Gaza is not only due
to metropolitan audiences’ political and emotional distance but it equally stems from a
widely held belief, reinforced by the international media, that Israel’s military operations in
Gaza are acts of self-defence against terrorism.4
Since the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, the subsequent siege, and Israel’s
military operations in the Gaza Strip, including ‘Operation Cast Lead’ in 2008/2009 and
‘Operation Protective Edge’ in 2014, it has become difficult to convey the normality of life
192   I. HESSE

in Gaza, a normality that is often elusive in a situation that is increasingly defined by dro-
mocolonisation, which according to John Collins ‘designate[s] how techno-logical acceler-
ation, while (…) being used by particular actors for purposes of colonization, is itself
colonizing humanity’ (2011, p. 24). However, Gazans not only have to cope with the accel-
erated and technological violence of dromocolonisation that they are exposed to in the
form of helicopters, unmanned drones, and Israel’s sudden military attacks but they also
experience what Rob Nixon has termed ‘slow violence,’ a ‘violence that occurs gradually and
out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space’ (2011,
p. 2). In order to make these different types of violence ‘visible,’ and to allow their readers to
connect with life in Gaza, Abu Saif, Alfarra, and Aljamal resort to new strategies to represent
their situation by depicting life under siege through the sensory, following Nixon’s recom-
mendation that ‘imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it acces-
sible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses’
(2011, p. 15). The focus on the senses, and the concomitant humanisation, is also used to
reclaim the humanity of ‘precarious lives’ to use Judith Butler’s term (2004, p. 33), whose
subjection to violence ‘fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already
negated’ (2004, p. 33). Moreover, accessing life in Gaza through the senses contributes to
bringing this situation into the realm of the familiar, following Sara Ahmed, who has empha-
sised that the encounter, and especially the rapprochement, between the self and the
strange(r), is achieved through the sensory experience: ‘in face-to-face meetings, where at
least two subjects get close enough to see and touch each other, there is a necessary move-
ment in time and space’ (2000, p. 2). Although in this case Anglophone audiences do not
encounter life in Gaza face-to-face but by reading words on a page, I would nevertheless
argue that ‘seeing’ and ‘touching,’ as well as the sensory experience more widely, are key to
moving the ‘strange(r)’ closer to the self, thus making ‘precarious life’ accessible to wider
audiences and retrieving the ‘vulnerability,’ and the concomitant ‘grievability,’ of these lives
(Butler, 2004, p. 30).
In this regard, Abu Saif’s, Alfarra’s, and Aljmal’s narratives can also be situated within a
human rights discourse that emerged after the Oslo Accords in 1993 and which peaked
during the Second Intifada, marking an important shift towards privileging the bodily expe-
rience of the conflict in order to draw attention to the Palestinians as human beings and
thus as deserving of human rights, as Lori Allen argues:
Through a focus on bodies and the blood, guts, and flesh to which so many are reduced by
Israeli violence, the physical common denominators all human beings share are thrust before
the world’s eyes. Palestinians are staging claims to a humanity shared in common with the
international community and, therefore, to their status as deserving of human rights. (2009,
p. 162)
The suffering body as a marker of shared humanity is still widely used in the political and
cultural self-representation of Palestinians, often by drawing on visceral realism. While vis-
ceral realism lends itself to representing extraordinary events, such as war and occupation,
and has been associated with an anticolonial mode of writing as Bashir Abu-Manneh has
noted in relation to the Palestinian novel (2016, p. 24), what is often neglected is the more
mundane, everyday experience of life in Palestine, which is more easily accessible and relat-
able to by a general audience. As a result, in the short stories discussed here, there has been
a turn towards poetic realism, a prominent mode in 1920s and 1930s French cinema, which
puts an emphasis on ‘exploring the poetry that lies within the everyday and the
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH   193

commonplace’ (Kuhn & Westwell, 2012). Contrary to an exclusive focus on the body that
defines the Palestinian experience above all in terms of suffering and victimhood, I would
suggest that poetic realism allows writers to situate themselves as subjects of human rights
discourse by emphasising not only the humanity but also the agency of people in Gaza.
However, Lori Allen draws attention to the problematic status of human rights discourse in
contemporary Palestine, as it ‘has become the object and inspiration of cynicism for many
Palestinians, the results of years of unfulfilled promises, unregistered claims, and unsuccessful
battles for political change’ (2013, p. 15). Nevertheless, she asserts that this cynicism ‘can be
a form of awareness and a motor of action by which subjection and subjectification are
self-consciously resisted or at least creatively engaged’ (2013, p. 16). Indeed, Abu Saif, Alfarra,
and Aljamal can be said to creatively engage with Palestinian subjection and subjectification
by the metropolitan media as well as resisting the resurgence of the idea that Palestinians
are a ‘humanitarian’ problem. Avi Shlaim has confirmed the reinvigoration of this rhetoric in
relation to Israel’s ‘Operation Cast Lead’ where ‘the undeclared aim [was] to ensure that the
Palestinians in Gaza [were] seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus
to derail their struggle for independence and statehood’ (2009). By focusing on the poetic
realism of everyday sensory experiences, Abu Saif, Alfarra, and Aljamal are able to represent
ordinary life in Gaza, while bringing life under siege, and the exposition to ‘slow violence’
and dromocolonialisation, into the realm of the familiar and reasserting the need for not
exclusively engaging with Gaza as a humanitarian but above all as a colonial problematic.

‘Operation Cast Lead’ and its aftermath: Jehan Alfarra’s ‘Please Shoot to Kill’
Although many Palestinian writers favour the novel or the poem as a narrative form to resist
metropolitan depictions of Palestine, there is a precedent for using the short story for this
purpose, for example in the works of Samira Azzam, Emile Habibi, and Ghassan Kanafani.
According to Jo Glanville, the Palestinian writer Liana Badr resorted to writing short stories
after she returned to Palestine in 1994 in the wake of the failed Oslo Accords because ‘the
atmosphere [was] not conducive to writing novels’ (2006, p. 8), suggesting that the short
story lends itself to depicting life under occupation. In the Arab world more widely, the short
story is one of the most popular literary forms and is considered as the ideal genre to ‘enhance
the readers’ awareness of the burning issues of the time, whether political, social or cultural’
(Hafez, 1992, p. 278). Jehan Alfarra certainly uses her story ‘Please Shoot to Kill,’ which was
published as part of the Gaza Writes Back collection, as a political medium to depict ‘Operation
Cast Lead,’ Israel 2008/2009 military operation in Gaza, and its aftermath, to metropolitan
Anglophone audiences. An activist and social media blogger, Alfarra explains her motives
for writing as follows: ‘it has become a compulsory responsibility for me to put into words
and reflect the reality of our day-to-day lives, given the failure of the Western media in doing
so’ (qtd. in Alareer, 2014c, p. 186).
Thus, it is not surprising that her story starts with the very mundane experience of her
protagonist Laila being unable to print off her assignment due to a power outage,5 which
serves to illustrate the commonalities between life in Gaza and elsewhere. The first sensory
experience of the story – Laila’s ‘pace quickened’ (Alfarra, 2014, p. 93) – conveys the nerv-
ousness and the urgency of the situation, and even though Alfarra does not describe any
sounds, the reader can imagine Laila’s anxiety being reflected in the sounds of her footsteps.
The emotional stress of the situation is also projected onto the sound of the neighbour’s
194   I. HESSE

generator, which is making an ‘aggravating, annoying noise’ (Alfarra, 2014, p. 94) with the ‘a’
and ‘n’ alliterations reflecting the negative emotions that this sound instils in the protagonist.
Alfarra hones in on the everyday implications of living under occupation, focusing on the
minute and tedious experiences of Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip. But this example, as
trivial as it might seem, also evokes the wider implications of life under siege: the complete
dependence on Israel for resources, not only in terms of electricity but also for water and
building materials, which has increased with the intensification of the blockade after the
election of Hamas in 2006. Eyal Weizman sees this blockade as
the culmination of a process that saw Israel’s control of the enclave transformed from a physical
‘occupation’ (…) to a ‘humanitarian management,’ exercised as the calibration of life-sustaining
flows of resources through the physical enclosure, one meant to keep the entire population
close to the minimum limit of physical existence. (2011, p. 81)
This description again reflects the idea, promoted by Israel, and often taken up by the inter-
national media, that Gaza should be perceived as a ‘humanitarian’ problem, thus conveniently
eclipsing it as a site of anticolonial struggle. However, at the same time one of the problems
of the Palestinian cause is being identified as both humanitarian and anticolonial, which
results in the Palestinians neither being able to fully benefit from the resources that would
be granted to a population in need of humanitarian aid nor being able to easily access the
rhetoric of anticolonial resistance due to the widely circulated idea that Israel is not an
occupying, nor a colonising, power.
After this focus on ordinary life in Gaza, Alfarra confirms the link between sound and
emotion that she set up at the beginning of her story. The ear has often been identified as
a ‘particularly vulnerable organ of perception’ since it is ‘always in operation, unreflectively
accumulative, and naively open to even the most harmful of loud, high, or concussive sounds’
(Schwartz, 2006, p. 487), which was already suggested through Laila’s anger at hearing her
neighbour’s generator. Hence, it is not surprising that Alfarra chooses to introduce the mem-
ory of ‘Operation Cast Lead’ through sound or rather the absence of sound: ‘it was an oddly
quiet night’ and ‘only the sound of silence [was] filling the space’ (Alfarra, 2014, p. 95). This
silence is posited as the proverbial calm before the storm, and conveys a sense of impending
doom, which is confirmed when the narrator describes the ordeals they have already gone
through: ‘fifteen nights of immense horror and fear that one of those loaded Apaches flying
over their house non-stop, or one of those blood-thirsty, monster-like Merkava tanks outside
might be bombarding their house instead of their neighbors’ (Alfarra, 2014, p. 95). This
account of ‘Operation Cast Lead’ not only demonstrates dromocolonisation’s effect on Gaza’s
inhabitants – including the constant and threatening sounds of the helicopters, which is
implied in this description – but equally on the Israeli soldiers who execute dromocolonial
violence. The anthropomorphisation of the tanks as ‘blood-thirsty’ and ‘monster-like’ dehu-
manises the soldiers by reducing them to the machines that they operate, thus exemplifying
how ‘the purveyor of violence, shielded by distance and technology, disappears into the
machine’ (Collins, 2011, p. 86). However, this description not only draws attention to the fact
that the tanks protect soldiers from being perceived as ‘purveyor[s] of violence’ but actively
questions the effectiveness of this ‘shield’ by ascribing the qualities that could be attributed
to the soldiers to the machines that they disappear into.
The initial silence described above, and the slow pace it implies, stands in stark contrast
to the speed with which dromocolonial interventions are carried out. John Collins has argued
that
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH   195

by virtue of superior technology, the colonizer is the one who has the ability to go the fastest and
therefore leverage acceleration to his benefit. This explains why the colonized tend to experience
colonization as a process of violent acceleration. (2011, p. 83)
The suddenness of these attacks is exemplified when a bomb explodes, quickening the pace
of the story, and reflecting the suffering of the Palestinians during ‘Operation Cast Lead,’
especially in terms of experiencing ‘accelerated violence’: ‘they heard a ravaging explosion
that shook them inside out’ (Alfarra, 2014, p. 97). Alfarra links the noise of the bomb to the
shock waves and almost visualises its noise, appealing to several senses to create a synaes-
thetic experience that enables readers from outside Gaza to reflect on the implications of
this event, aligning her portrayal with Lori Allen’s observation that: ‘The body is the material
through which a sense of immediacy is cultivated. It is the ground of affect, and both visual
media and human rights work in Palestine elevate it as such’ (2009, p. 172). However, unlike
the emphasis on the body that Allen identifies, Alfarra chooses not to represent the visceral
experience of the aftermath but instead focuses on the auditory: ‘[Laila] could hear an ambu-
lance, though there was no sight of any. An Apache flew over the house, forcing Laila down
on her knees. Soon, the drones came to accompany them, making the sounds of the night
even creepier’ (Alfarra, 2014, p. 98). The sound of the bombs is followed by the buzzing of
the drones, demonstrating the quick succession of fast and slow violence. The exclusive
focus on the aural experience of the situation exhibits the vulnerability of the Palestinians,
not only during Israel’s military operations but also in their daily exposure to dromocoloni-
sation and slow violence, confirming the power imbalance between Palestinians and Israelis.
Moreover, the aural description of the bombing serves to criticise Israeli war crimes, including
the arbitrary attacks that the population of Gaza suffers from as part of the Israeli occupation,
as the ear is effectively transformed into a ‘listener’ (Schwartz, 2006, p. 488) and a witness to
the events of ‘Operation Cast Lead.’ In this way, Alfarra challenges what Laura Marks has
identified as the ‘perceived imperialism of vision’ and an ‘alignment of visual information
with knowledge and control’ (2000, p. 194), especially in circulating images of Palestinian
victims in the media, which offer very one-sided representations of Gazan life and rather
than considering them as victims of wars, they are represented as casualties of Israel’s military
operations which are deemed necessary to protect the country from ‘terrorism.’

The sounds of dromocolonisation in ‘Omar X’

Acting as a witness to events in Gaza, and especially Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,
also plays a key role in another short story published as part of the Gaza Writes Back collec-
tion. Yousef Aljamal’s ‘Omar X,’ which is only four-page long, hauntingly narrates the death
of the title character Omar by combining gritty and poetic realism. The story is based on
real-life experience as the author lost his oldest brother Omar to Israeli snipers in March 2004
(Aljamal, 2014a). Aljamal, like Alfarra, is a blogger and ‘believes strongly in alternative media
to reach the masses in the world’ and he has explained that ‘words might be stronger than
war machines and sharper than swords’ (Alareer, 2014c, p. 189). Aljamal chooses to focus on
sensory experiences, particularly sound, to represent life in Gaza as well as drawing on film
techniques, offering very factual descriptions and moving quickly from one scene to the
next. In this sense, ‘Omar X’ feels reminiscent of action movies, with the title character cast
as the hero fighting against the odds. The everyday is only briefly established at the begin-
ning of the story, which starts with silence and darkness. The first sound that the reader
196   I. HESSE

hears is Omar’s footsteps: ‘His steps beat the ground slowly, looking for the path’ (Aljamal,
2014b, p. 107). The use of the word ‘beat’ is contrasted with ‘slowly,’ establishing a tension
between the desire not to be heard and the impossibility of achieving this goal, at the same
time that it suggests that the protagonist is hiding or escaping from someone. This action
also disturbs the ordinariness of the moment, and the idea of the refugee camp as a place
of refuge and respite, which is completely disrupted in the next sentence: ‘The thump-thump
sound of a helicopter was getting closer, penetrating the peace of the crowded refugee
camp’ (Aljamal, 2014b, p. 107). The slow beating of the steps, whose onomatopoeic sound
mirrors the beating of the character’s heart, is contrasted with the noise of the helicopter,
opposing man to machine, and stressing the uncertainty and vulnerability of the protagonist
in relation to the Israeli military presence. By contrasting the footsteps with the sounds of
the helicopter, Aljamal exemplifies John Collins’s argument that dromocolonisation offers a
new perspective on confinement, which is seen ‘primarily in terms of overcrowding and
literal enclosure’ (Collins, 2011, p. 86). Instead, Aljamal can be seen as ‘focus[ing] on how
acceleration produces forms of material, psychological and existential confinement’ (Collins,
2011, p. 86) by describing Omar’s footsteps and his attempts to escape from the helicopter.
Unsurprisingly, the helicopter is depicted as an intruder, disturbing the silence and peace-
fulness of the refugee camp and it is accompanied by the ‘familiar noise of the tanks rolling
in, [which] violated the silence of the night’ (Aljamal, 2014b, p. 107). The verbs ‘penetrate’
and ‘violate,’ used in the description of the helicopters and the tanks, denote a forceful intru-
sion and compare the military intervention to a sexual assault, denouncing the physical and
psychological harm that the Israeli Defense Forces’ military presence inflicts on people, and
the ‘body’ of Palestine6 as well as on their places of dwelling, including the refugee camp,
which by its very name, should offer protection to its inhabitants.
After the departure of the helicopter and the tanks, sounds are used to evoke a pastoral
mode, which contrasts with the urgency and danger of previous events. Omar and his friend
Sa’ad,7 both of whom are identified as freedom fighters, hide from Israeli soldiers in an orchard
and the scene is described as follows: ‘The grass under their feet was fresh, the only noise
they could hear was that of the branches rubbing against them as they went further’ (Aljamal,
2014b, p. 108). Implied in this auditory and tactile description of walking through the orchard
is the smell of fresh grass, which adds to the idyllic character of this scene, using poetic
realism not only to focus on everyday objects but also to offer an aesthetic engagement
with them. But this moment is soon disrupted by an ‘artificial’ and foreboding silence, drawing
the reader from poetic into gritty realism: ‘Silence was heard again, this time even clearer’
(Aljamal, 2014b, p. 108), which describes silence as a noise that increases in volume. Schwartz
has argued that the ear should not exclusively be considered as vulnerable and passive but
that: ‘the human ear is an active agent in its own right, not simply a well-tempered receiver’
(2006, p. 487). The ear as an active agent permeates Aljamal’s story, where the absence of
sound is used to foreshadow military incursions, similar to Alfarra’s uses of silence in her
short story. The slow pacing and the setting of a peaceful pastoral mood are not only dis-
turbed by the sudden silence but also by depicting an encounter between Omar and Sa’ad
and the disembodied presence of Israeli snipers: ‘Bullets poured down from the building
into them’ (Aljamal, 2014b, p. 108). Aljamal cleverly uses poetic realism to lull the reader into
a false sense of security and to create a peaceful mood, which is disrupted by the gritty
realism of short and simple sentences comparable to how the extraordinary interrupts the
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH   197

ordinary in Gaza, not only through Israel’s military operations, but equally through its dro-
mocolonial control of everyday life.
The narrative then changes to Omar’s life flashing by, and this flashback operates almost
in a film-like manner, moving quickly between different temporalities and focusing on the
visual, which is emphasised by the introduction of each scene with the words ‘he saw himself’
(Aljamal, 2014b, p. 108). Aljamal’s use of vision in this passage exemplifies Tim Ingold’s dis-
cussion of this sense: ‘vision places us vis-à-vis one another, “face-to-face”, leaving each of
us to construct an inner representation of the other’s mental state on the basis of our outward
appearance’ (2000, pp. 246, 247). Vision is thus seen as a distancing mechanism and as pre-
venting an immediate in-depth engagement between self and other. Hearing, on the other
hand, as Ingold goes on to argue ‘establish[es] the possibility of genuine intersubjectivity,
of a participatory communion of self and other through shared immersion in the stream of
sound’ (2000, p. 247). In Omar’s flashbacks, it is indeed hearing and sound that allow for a
‘participatory communion’ between Omar and his environment, as well as confirming that
‘hearing defines the self socially in relation to others (Ingold, 2000, pp. 246, 247). When Omar
returns with his mother from the maternity ward, his father sings the Lebanese singer
Fairouz’s song ‘We will return one day to our neighbourhood’ from her album Jerusalem in
our Hearts (1971). This song, exemplary for Fairouz’s wider commitment to the Palestinian
cause (Morgan & Kidel, 1994, p. 179), establishes a link between Omar’s birth and his role as
a freedom fighter for Palestine and the concomitant return to the Palestinian homeland, as
indicated in the title of the song. The flashback is then interrupted by the present, as ‘a second
bullet hit Omar’s body’ (Aljamal, 2014b, p. 109). This stand-alone sentence is followed by
further flashbacks, where Aljamal combines different sensory experiences to convey a synaes-
thetic portrait of life in Gaza and the development of his protagonist: ‘Faster than the wind,
which blew very often with the smell of gun powder, Omar grew up’ (Aljamal, 2014b, p. 110).
The tactile experience of the wind is conflated with the smell of gun powder, which allows
the author not only to drive home the dangers of life in Gaza, where gun shots and violence
are part of everyday life, but it also metaphorically aligns Omar’s development with the smell
of gun powder, suggesting how important the occupation and the ongoing fighting are for
his personal choices. Omar’s flashback is interrupted once more by the sound of the present:
‘A third and last bullet broke the scary silence’ (Aljamal, 2014b, p. 110). The silence, which
was previously described as peaceful and artificial, now becomes ‘scary’ since the absence
of sound also denotes the absence of life. Omar’s vulnerability is contrasted with the enemy’s
unceasing shooting as ‘the bullets kept coming’ (Aljamal, 2014b, p. 110). Again, the Israeli
soldiers are represented as a disembodied and dehumanised presence; they are not referred
to as active agents but they are only defined passively through the guns from which their
bullets emerge.
As foreshadowed throughout the story, Omar becomes a martyr for Palestine, and his
death confirms the link with Malcolm X, already established through the title of the story.
Malcolm X, like Omar, was killed by bullets and two days before his death, on 19 February
1965, he proclaimed that: ‘It is a time for martyrs now, and if I am to be one, it will be for the
cause of brotherhood. That’s the only thing that can save this country’ (1992, p. 467). In his
final gesture of reaching out to his friend Sa’ad, – ‘He gathered enough strength and extended
his hand over Sa’ad’s body. And before he could do anything, his hand fell down’ (Aljamal,
2014b, p. 111) – Omar illustrates the importance of brotherhood and cohesion for the
Palestinian liberation struggle. However, the link with Malcolm X could equally be read as
advocating martyrdom as a means to liberate Palestine, which aligns with Malcolm X’s stance
198   I. HESSE

on the use of violence in civil rights movements: ‘If it must take violence to get the black
man his human rights in this country, I’m for violence’ (1992, p. 401). Aljamal foregrounds
the rhetoric of national liberation as an important aspect of life in Palestine, as well as for
reclaiming agency, as it helps to resist an exclusive focus on Palestine as a human rights
issue, and the concomitant image of Palestinians as passive recipients of aid, and thus con-
tests international perspectives on Palestine, which now often see this cause as ‘one of human
rights and global justice’ (Tawil-Souri, 2015, p. 147).

Poetic realism and pathetic fallacy in Atef Abu Saif’s ‘A Journey in the
Opposite Direction’
Atef Abu Saif’s short story ‘A Journey in the Opposite Direction,’ which opens his edited
collection The Book of Gaza, does not explicitly focus on Israel’s military operations, contrary
to his recently published diary entries The Drone Eats With Me: Diaries from a City under Fire
(2015), which recount his experience of life in Gaza during ‘Operation Protective Edge’ in
2014. His short story is set in a non-specific time in Rafah, a town in the Southern Gaza Strip
close to the Rafah border crossing, the only point of entry and exit between the Gaza Strip
and Egypt, which is controlled by the Egyptian authorities and is often subject to closures.8
This non-temporal setting suggests that the experiences described in Abu Saif’s story are in
many ways timeless, albeit linked to a specific space, thus referencing the longevity of the
occupation of Gaza, which has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967 and under
siege since 2007. The setting also immediately addresses the idea of confinement and the
restrictions of mobility that Gazans are subjected to. The psychological impact of this con-
finement is not often shown on the news, exemplifying one of the main challenges of rep-
resenting slow violence, which according to Nixon consists in ‘how to devise arresting stories,
images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects’ (2011,
p. 3). Abu Saif’s story addresses exactly this representational challenge by showing how
being imprisoned in Gaza affects individuals. His story opens with the line: ‘the four of them
returned disappointed’ (Abu Saif, 2014a, p. 1), setting a weary and disillusioned mood from
the beginning. The four characters mentioned here are Ramzi, his friend Samir, and Nadia
and Samah, and their disappointment is strongly linked to their ability, or rather inability, to
leave Gaza. Moving into and out of Gaza is a driving force in Abu Saif’s narrative and the
author himself has linked identity to mobility and space in the introduction to his collection,
stating that ‘in my story, searching for a certain place means searching for oneself, just as
fleeing from the present means discovering mistakes from the past’ (Abu Saif, 2014b, p. xii).
All four characters are indeed searching for a place for themselves and are at a crucial point
in their lives where they need to decide whether to stay in Gaza. Both Nadia and Samah are
unable to cross the border to go abroad, while Ramzi is waiting in vain for his brother, whom
he has not seen for twenty years, to return to Gaza. Samir, however, who has managed to
come back into Gaza after being in Dubai for 10 years, says that ‘Gaza is nicer from the outside’
(Abu Saif, 2014a, p. 4), illustrating his disappointment with Gaza as a place and addressing
the differences between the imaginary Gaza he had created in his mind and the Gaza he
encounters upon his return.
In addition, the title of the short story could be read metaphorically not only as a journey
into Abu Saif’s characters’ pasts but equally as a movement away from media depictions of
Gaza. Indeed, many of the author’s descriptions of life in Gaza contradict the monochromatic
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH   199

images of Gaza as a war-torn place circulated in the media, especially in the wake of the
military operations carried out by Israel in the Gaza Strip since 2008.9 Throughout the open-
ing passage, Abu Saif interweaves disappointment and disillusion with the beauty of Gaza’s
urban setting. Although he foregrounds the general weariness of living in a confined space
under Israeli siege – ‘the scene suggested that it was the end of an exhausting day for all’
(Abu Saif, 2014a, p. 2) – he also focuses on the beauty of Gaza as a place. He describes the
sunlit road: ‘Thin shafts of evening sunlight played across the surface of the road’ (Abu Saif,
2014a, p. 1) and compares the streetlights to ‘falling stars’ (Abu Saif, 2014a, p. 7). However,
this idyllic portrait is contradicted by the use of pathetic fallacy, when Abu Saif explains that
the lights ‘flickered as though to mirror the fitful thoughts of the women, exhausted after a
long day of travel, during which they had failed to cross the border’ (Abu Saif, 2014a, p. 7).
Nadia’s and Samah’s disappointment at being unable to leave Gaza is reflected in and visual-
ised through their surroundings, bringing their experience into the realm of the familiar by
linking it with an everyday object. Through this technique, Abu Saif reinforces the links
between their emotions and their surroundings, implicitly referencing the fact that it is Gaza
as a space, or more accurately, Gaza as a space under Israeli control, that shapes their iden-
tities and emotions.
Pathetic fallacy is a recurrent trope in Abu Saif’s story, serving to make the experience of
living in Gaza accessible to a wider audience. In the opening of the story, when the characters
return from the border, bananas and dates are seen as hanging ‘like lost opportunities’ (Abu
Saif, 2014a, p. 1), which again illustrates how everyday objects are used to reflect characters’
emotions. Throughout the story, fruit is linked to unfulfilled expectations and dreams, for
example when the author says about Ramzi and Samir that ‘none of their dreams had been
realised, and the fruit of life, whose tree they still climbed, remained mostly unpicked’ (Abu
Saif, 2014a, p. 3–4). This comparison makes their dreams and hopes almost tangible, provid-
ing a sensory experience of life in Gaza to readers across the world. However, it also implicitly
references Gaza’s past as a fruit-growing region, as Abu Saif notes in the introduction to his
collection: Gaza is the ‘exporter of oranges and short stories’ (Abu Saif, 2014b, p. x).
Read in this light, his story can also be seen as deploring Gaza’s economic demise and
what Sara Roy has termed ‘de-development’ under Israel’s occupation since 1967, which she
defines as ‘the deliberate, systematic deconstruction of an indigenous economy by a dom-
inant power’ and whose purpose is ‘to ensure that there will be no economic base, even one
that is malformed, to support an independent indigenous existence’ (1995, p. 4).10 However,
in spite of these allusions to the Israeli occupation and its consequences for Gaza and its
inhabitants, there is a pronounced absence of explicit references to Israel, whether physical
– in the form of soldiers or settlers – or remote – in the form of drones. Instead, Abu Saif
chooses to foreground everyday activities such as eating, smoking, and meeting friends,
which can be read as a conscious refusal to let life in Gaza be exclusively defined by the
Israeli occupation. This is also mirrored in the ending of the story, which concludes on a
hopeful note, with Ramzi, Samir, Nadia and Samah being granted a brief moment of respite
while looking at Wadi Gaza: ‘The wind carried their laughter far away, across the frothy churn-
ing water to the heart of the sea’ (Abu Saif, 2014a, p. 15). Ending with laughter and finding
beauty in the everyday, although certainly in many ways utopian, nevertheless leaves the
reader with an image of Gaza that subverts ideas of this space as being exclusively defined
by war and destruction and allows Anglophone audiences to connect with the normality of
life in Gaza, while being aware that this normality is only temporary.
200   I. HESSE

Through its focus on everyday life in Gaza, Abu Saif’s story, like Alfarra’s and Aljamal’s, is
able to resist the reduction of Gazans to numbers, challenging both the passivity and
abstractness that results from such representations of Gaza, which is a tendency that Abu
Saif has also deplored in his diary: ‘Everything is turned into numbers. The stories are hidden,
disguised, lost behind these numbers. Human beings, bodies, souls – all are converted into
numbers’ (2015, p. 76).11 Bringing hidden stories to the fore and uncovering the effects of
the siege of Gaza and Israel’s military operations on individual lives is a central concern in
the stories discussed here, together with speaking ‘truth to power,’ as Refaat Alareer has
noted after the publication of his edited collection:
It was high time to break the intellectual embargo Israel has been enforcing for decades, and
similarly, it was high time to break with psychological shackles and talk to non-Arabs in the
language and discourse they understand. (2014b, p. 528)
Abu Saif’s, Alfarra’s, and Aljamal’s dissidence not only arises from the fact that their stories
are writing back to the official Israeli narrative, as many Palestinian works of art have done
before them, but this resistance is strengthened by their focus on the sensory experience.
Their experimentation with the aural, olfactory, and tactile experiences of life in Gaza not
only uses a ‘language and discourse that [Anglophone audiences] understand’ but equally
confirms a shift from an exclusive description of the visual and bodily experience of life under
occupation to encompassing the sensory experience of the siege more widely. This shift is
significant, as it allows Abu Saif, Alfarra, and Aljamal to resist the exclusive representation of
Gazans as humanitarian victims and instead it enables them to foreground their agency as
anticolonial subjects. Moreover, on a collective level, their emphasis on the sensory, in its
diametric opposition to the unfeeling numbness of machines, and by extension dromoco-
lonisation and global warfare, exposes the dangers of accelerated processes of globalisation
for individuals. The increasingly de-sensitised attitude to violence and suffering, not only of
colonisers but also of those who are complicit in dromocolonisation from a distance, is
challenged by Abu Saif, Alfarra, Aljamal in their narratives, illustrating creative ways of resist-
ing processes of globalisation and their effects on individuals as well as reclaiming Gaza as
a space of resistance against occupation and colonisation.

Notes
1. 
This is confirmed by the collection’s endorsement on websites such as the Electronic Intifada
and Mondoweiss, as well as its inclusion in the 2014 shortlist for the Palestine Book Awards.
2. 
It has to be noted that these texts are of course mediated in that they were written in English,
which is not the first language of these writers, as well as being edited by Refaat Alareer.
3. 
See for example the open letter from the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq (2014):
http://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/topics/gaza/829-an-open-letter-from-al-haq-to-the-media-
on-operation-protective-edge. Greg Philo and Mike Berry have observed in relation to reports
about ‘Operation Cast Lead’ that ‘what is absent is that the Palestinians are a people in a war
of national liberation, trying to throw off an occupying force’ (2011, p. 346). Both Jehan Alfarra
and Yousef Aljamal use their blogs for a similar purpose, see Alfarra’s blog ‘And thereby hangs
a tale’ (https://palinoia.wordpress.com/), and Aljamal’s blog ‘He who is brave is free’ (https://
yeljamal.wordpress.com/).
See Philo and Berry’s More Bad News from Israel for a discussion of Israel’s use of this rhetoric, and
4. 
especially pp. 141–153 for an examination of the idea of self-defence and protection against
terrorism in the context of ‘Operation Cast Lead.’
 JOURNAL FOR CULTURAL RESEARCH   201

5.  For a discussion of Israel’s control of Gaza’s energy supplies since 2006, see for example Eyal
Weizman’s The Least of all Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, especially
pp. 87–90.
6. The representation of the Palestinian collectivity as a body aligns with uses of the body in
colonialism, see for example Anne McClintock’s discussion of this in Imperial Leather: Race,
Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (1995).
7. Throughout this article, I will follow the spelling for Sa’ad used in Aljamal’s story.
8.  For a detailed report on recent closures of the crossings in Gaza, see UNRWA’s (2016) Gaza
Situation Reports: http://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/emergency-reports. It is also worth noting
that Rafah is only one of two crossings that can be used by individuals; the other is Erez in
Northern Gaza.
9.  Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar list the following descriptions associated with Gaza in the
twenty-first century: ‘Open-air Prison, Terror, Resistance, Poverty, Occupation, Siege, Trauma,
Bare Humanity’ (2016, p. 1).
10. Although Roy is writing before the Israeli disengagement from Gaza, the concept of de-
development is still prevalent today, as she asserts in a 2014 article:
de-development has arguably reached its logical conclusion with the current, increasingly
distorted reconfiguration of economic activity, where foreign aid (including humanitarian
assistance) – combined with smuggling in the case of Gaza – rather than production is a
principal source of economic sustenance and growth. (2014, p. x)
11. The Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights also has a project entitled ‘We are not numbers’, which
shares stories of Palestinians that go beyond the numbers and images disseminated by the
media: http://www.wearenotnumbers.org/

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Isabelle Hesse, PhD, is a lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research is sit-
uated at the nexus of postcolonial, Middle Eastern, and Jewish studies and her first book The Politics
of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism and Colonialism was published
by Bloomsbury in 2016. Her current research project examines the Holocaust, Israel, and Palestine as
narrative tropes in British and German culture.

ORCID
Isabelle Hesse   http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7874-1114

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