We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, edited by Ahmed Alnaouq and Pam Bailey (Hutchinson Heinemann)
Who Will Tell My Story? – A Gaza Diary by Anonymous (Guardian Faber)
The genesis of the We Are Not Numbers project – commonly referred to by its founders and contributors as WANN – goes back to 2014. The story of editors Alnaouq and Bailey’s meeting, their connection to Gaza (one as an activist, one as a native) and the circumstances that led to WANN are recounted in the anthology’s heartfelt but economical introduction, so I won’t recount it here. That was a hint, by the way, to order or go out and buy this book immediately, not only because it’s urgent and essential (it is, and then some!) but to support the project, boost sales and keep it in the public eye. Again: buy this book. Then review it, blog about it, link to other revuews, share information about it on any and all platforms. With the far-right sabre-rattling and howling over freedoms they never lost, and the press seemingly happy to roll over for them, it’s essential to remember that the only story right now is Gaza and the genocide being perpetrated by the Israeli government – everything else is a distraction.
WANN started life – and continues to develop – as a website. The aim is to give a platform to emerging young Gazan writers to share their stories, to which end they are partnered with experienced writers who act as mentors. From this smart and effective framework has emerged poetry, memoir, opinion, testimony, remembrance, defiance, hope and despair. We Are Not Numbers collects seventy-four pieces of writing from between 2014 and the present. The website contains vastly more material. New work appears on an almost daily basis. An information pack is available for download on how to organise a solidarity event. The link is given at the end of this review. Again: please visit and publicise the website and keep the dialogue going. Host an event if you can.
As a reading experience, the anthology is incandescent in its intensity. The pieces are generally short. I don’t think any single contribution runs to more than seven pages. Many clock in at just two or three. This is testimony as compression, apt since life in Gaza is transient, unpredictable and liable to end violently with little or no warning. Contributors speak of leaving their homes with trepidation, unsure if the building will still be standing when they return. Those who have homes, that is. Many have been evacuated – displaced – multiple times. Or ended up living in tents of crammed into a municipal space such as a school yard with countless others similarly made homeless.
And yet it’s not all unremitting misery for 340 pages (though be advised there is testimony here that will reduce you to tears, both of helplessness and fury). Subjects include star-gazing, football shirts, pets, family, friendships, love, marriage, children, food, photography, literature, science, art, education, ambition, mental health, self-identity and donkey carts. There are moments of quietness, introspection and even humour. Ahmed Alsammak contributes a winning homily to artist Timaa Hassan whose multi-media work incorporates elements of the tactile by which blind art lovers can interact with the experience the work. Raed Sadi writes about Jehad Shehada’s participation in the “Gazavision” song contest, an event organised to satirise and protest Israel’s hosting of the Eurovision in 2019.
Of course, the brutal reality of life in Gaza – blockaded, starved and continually assaulted by the IDF – is the constant throughout the book. The earliest entries date back 2014; the most recent are absolutely contemporary. The timeline is a necessary corrective to the propagandist assertion that “it all began on 7th October”. The accretion of unflinching detail, culminating in Yusuf El-Mbayed’s account of the sickeningly casual violence he suffered at the hands of IDF soldiers, demonstrates that Israel’s actions have no basis in legality, morality or any framework of human comprehension. What we are seeing on the news daily – what is brought home by the multiplicity of voices in We Are Not Numbers – is an act of genocide.
The anonymous author of Who Will Tell My Story? – a volume that started as a serialisation of his diarism in The Guardian, who have teamed with Faber & Faber to produce this volume – expounds on many of the subjects, and brings to life the wasteland-like images, that populate We Are Not Numbers. But he employs a somewhat more philosophical approach, often thinking back to times past whereas the WANN contributors tend to live (and write) absolutely in the moment.
Which isn’t to say that Who Will Tell My Story? is gentler or less upsetting. In fact, in its sustained narrative of displacement, evacuation, temporary shelter, reliance on others and desperate, often day-long odysseys through a ruined landscape just to scavenge for the basics – a narrative that unfolds across six months – an evocation of the sheer weariness of surviving from day to day in Gaza emerges in a way that viscerally communicates the numbing terror of it all.
I chose not to use any quotations from We Are Not Numbers in this review because isolating four or five passages from a volume to which seventy-four writers contributed hardly seemed fair to all of those I would necessarily have had to leave unquoted. Freighting the latter half of this review with a top-heavy sampling of just one authorial voice can hardly be claimed as an act of balance, but the weariness of the anonymous author of Who Will Tell My Story’s articulation provides a pervasive portrait of the circumstances under which the young writers in We Are Not Numbers are daring to strive for meaning and hope.
18 October: … I cannot imagine that while I am ‘safe’, there are children under the rubble, some dead and some alive, whose stories took a very wrong turn. Those children were supposed to be having fun at school, going to amusement parks, and at night hearing bedtime stories about love and kindness. I’m still alive, while mothers are losing their children every day, fathers are incapable of sheltering their own families, and young people watch their dreams fade. Apparently, I am lucky – my time hasn’t come yet.
25 October: … I see a girl, about ten, holding a gallon drum of water. She walks for two steps, then stops to rest, and so on. It is very clear it is too heavy for her. We are in such a hurry that we do not stop and offer help. In these days, everyone tries to run their errands as fast as possible and get home before something bad happens. I feel ashamed.
31 December: … Loss has become another companion in our days. We have reached the stage of not sharing our losses with the others because everyone is suffering. Sometimes it feels like a misery Olympics, with everyone in the group facing their own tragedy: someone lost a loved one; someone lost their home; someone lost their dream; and someone lost all three of them.
20 January: … In the past, I have always wondered about that moment when medical workers, especially doctors, start dealing with sick people as work and not as humans. Right now, I ask myself whether people around the world, witnessing and watching our misery, have reached the stage where they think of us as merely news instead of children with dreams for the future, mothers and fathers who wanted a better life for their kids, teachers who wanted to inspire the coming generations, and workers and farmers and musicians who wanted to follow their passion.
Neil Fulwood
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