Published in ISSUE XI: COMMON GROUND.
I sob in the car park of a Tesco. No trolley will roll right and my bag keeps sliding off of my shoulder. It is the exact same fabric as my coat, creating a distinct lack of friction and ending with my sunglasses falling off of my head (along with the bag) each time I bend to pick it back up. My shoes are new and blister the corners of my ankles. I give up, sitting curb-side and think, so selfishly, “God what did I do to deserve this?” Then I go home and write in my diary about it.
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Since the 26th of February 2024, Farah Thabet, a 17-year-old Gazan, has been keeping a diary, publishing her accounts of the ongoing occupation. “We Gazans fear the sky. It is haunted by flying witches dropping bombs and reaping lives” (October 9th 2023, Farah Thebet, 2024). She publishes on WordPress, transcribing her ‘ink of survival’. She sees through eyes much older than her own, depicting perfectly the images that whirl in her mind and before her, recording her shelter, a “small space used by many” that consists of a throughway to a bombed-out kitchen where “privacy is a luxury” (Whispers Through Thin Walls).
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“My house in Cambridge is a little draughty and I barely know my flatmates,” I write in my little Moleskine book. My trials are trivial, mundane. But I write them down all the same, to keep myself alive in my mind. Does Farah write in a notebook about what she sees; is it paper, coarse bound, or parchment? Perhaps she prefers the Notes app on her mother’s phone that she has to ask to borrow. While I Google ‘timed writing exercises’ to improve my recall skills for copywriting, how much time does she have to pen the writing that flows through her hands like salt, amassing into pillars that she will never be able to turn back to. The difference and the miles betray us: she, I, and millions of others have found the space in which you are free to find whatever it is you are looking for. We have found the page, and some solace in pouring out our thoughts into its great white blank.
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“My bike keeps clipping my ankles, and I’m getting a little lonely here.” (My diary, 2024)
“After washing my face, we stepped out and walked past our demolished neighbours’ house. The thought of buried people still under the rubble haunts me.” (A Living Testimony)
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The diary — a piece of self, or an anchor to the moving plane — is a place that may serve as a signpost we all can meet under. From the short-hand notes written by a middle-aged office worker toting ‘x is a lovely restaurant in the summer months’, to the lengthy published accounts of self-defining memoirists such as Annie Ernaux or Joan Didion, we all seek a space to fill with our memories. It can be a life-saving thing, in the case of Farah, whose experiences no doubt would implode within her if not for her “pen danc[ing] amidst the bombardment”. Creatively narrating one’s own life gives control and power where there may be woefully little.
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“The common joke now is ‘could you lend me a cigarette for my lighter instead of a lighter for my cigarette?’” she writes.
Her writing retains the pensive, detached sense of self-perception, while every now and again slipping into deep, almost excruciatingly poignant prose. The page has caught Farah, where nothing else would.
I hope the stars shine bright on Farah tonight, and that one day she may be able to write of a life far removed from conflict. I hope she can “sway in the olive groves” as her rhythm and song does. I hope that one day she may look at the cream blank of a notebook page and see, not war but hope staring back at her, from the vast unending sea.
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Farah’s Wordpress is called Ink of Survival: A Teen’s Gaza War Diary
Some of her writing has been removed from WordPress. In this case you can find it on The Hands Up Project, here:
Additional links:
Fundraiser: Support Farah's Education and Amplify Her Voice (no longer accepting donations)
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