Sarah Aziza in Lux:
My uncle’s voice reaches me across time and space in the form of fragmentary voice notes. His words are gruff but precise as he recalls the dimensions of the two-room shelter my grandmother constructed with the barest materials on a patch of ground in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, where she arrived as a refugee and a mother of four in 1955. This was seven years after Zionist soldiers ethnically cleansed the 626 inhabitants of her village, ‘Ibdis, along with 750,000 others across Palestine in the war we call the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.”
In the years in between the erasure of ‘Ibdis and their arrival to Deir al-Balah, my grandparents, Musa and Horea, hovered a few miles from their stolen land, subsisting as sharecroppers and sheltering with not-yet-displaced Bedouins. While much of their kin scattered across Gaza, Jordan, and beyond, they strove to stay as near to their village as they could. This, despite their poverty and the “mopping up” missions of the Israeli army, which sought to expel the Palestinians who remained. They were not ready, not able to believe their exile would be final. Their loss was a reality wider than their imaginations could yet hold.
It was not until their fourth child was born — their only daughter, Bahiya — that the young parents admitted their meager wages and borrowed floors could not suffice.
More here.