Book name- LETTERS FROM GAZA: BY THE PEOPLE, FROM THE YEAR THAT HAS BEEN
Author- Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer
Published by- Penguin
Price- Rs 599
To write letters is to assert the witnessing of life as reality, even when the world is indifferent to testimony. It is a wager against annihilation — not only of the self but of meaning itself. Letters from Gaza engages, uniquely, with this wager. It reminds us that even in its most horrific and dehumanising subjection, human beings persist, mostly through remembering — through words uttered in grief and introspection, or, as the poet, Mahmoud Darwish, once discovered, by simply acknowledging the presence of absence.
The book is unsettling. It offers no lessons in the fractured histories of the twentieth century leading to what Pankaj Mishra calls the “World after Gaza”. Crucially, it withholds catharsis — that most literary of lies — and proffers what its compilers call “of-the-moment war literature” from people trapped inside Gaza, that ancient littoral city off the Mediterranean, once known for oranges and stories, now pitilessly bombed into near-oblivion.
What unfolds is not reportage, nor resistance literature, but the rawness of pain expressed through a chorus of suffering: poems, letters, diary fragments, and first-person testimonies that do not seek to persuade but to remember. Composed amid siege and devastation, these voices do not merely describe atrocity or mourn. They embody the paradox of the human: to speak the unspeakable, without lamentation, to remain human when humanity itself is treated as expendable. What is documented is not only what is happening, but what it feels like to continue existing — conscious, dehumanised, yet articulate — in an apathetic world that chooses silence. “There is no news here,” the compilers write. “All we have is life regained through writings.”
These writings make us painfully aware that the destruction unleashed in Gaza during 2023-24 was not merely tactical. It was also, in a deeper sense, cultural. Not just homes and roads, but ancient architectures — hospitals, museums, bookshops, cemeteries — were reduced to dust. The targeting was epistemic: a war on how a people remember, imagine, and re-imagine themselves across time.
We read Haidar al-Ghazali, a 20-year-old Palestinian, who lost his university and his home to the bombings: “Writing is the only thing that erases my pain. I write because what we are going through is bigger than all of us.” His words are both affirmation and lament: a recognition that writing cannot contain the devastation, but must be attempted anyway.
We encounter Yousri Alghoul, a writer from the Al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, who once built a personal library of 3,000 books. His home was destroyed in an airstrike. “I feel lost, adrift in this abyss,” he writes. Yet from the ruins of shattered schools, he salvages books and attempts the impossible: to guide children through grief by teaching them to write — to turn sorrow into expression, grief into writing.
We listen to Mayar Nateel, a graduate in English from Al-Aqsa University, her university obliterated by airstrikes. She tries to recall the names of Gaza’s streets and thoroughfares — now turned to sand and debris. Her family home was destroyed along with her father’s lifetime of paintings. In the camps, she cannot sleep. She has grown used to the nocturnal buzz of Israeli war-drones — “the deadly little zananas.” And the siege turns inward. “I cannot bear looking in the mirror,” she writes. “I am afraid I might see my sadness, afraid that my self would kill me.”
Many testimonies also speak of ‘scholasticide’ — a term whose neologistic chill cannot mask its violence: the systematic erasure of a people’s ability to think. In Gaza, where illiteracy was once nearly nonexistent, and from where teachers were ‘exported’ to the Gulf and North Africa, schools, universities, libraries have now all disappeared.
So what is poetry, then, in such a world? “Sorrow is the gift given to us by the world,” writes Hind Joudah, a poet named after a deer or a faraway country, trapped in Al-Breij Camp. Her poems do not plead. Quietly, they offer sorrow back to the world that created it: “Dear world,/ In short, we are the culmination of your deep and brutal grief.”
Hiba Abu Nada, another poet, writes: “If you think I have remembered you,/even once,/ know that I have forgotten you/ a thousand times in this poem.”
Hiba and her son were killed in October 2023 by the Israeli bombardments.
A survivor for now, Mahmoud Jouda writes from a camp in Gaza where he lives with his two daughters. His voice does not break, but bends — towards song. “People still sing, and I still walk in the streets, shuffling in my mother’s slippers, continually in song. Because, as Victor Hugo said, ‘When hope is gone, song remains.’”
But this is no celebration. It is the residue of song as echo. A song as the final fragile act of memory, when the memory of a civilisation irretrievably turns to rubble.