Andie O

“And I remember this girl, blaming herself because she was the one who insisted that she and her family go to the sea that day. So she blamed herself: ‘I was the cause. I drove them to their death.’ Another incident was in 2014, when four children from the Bakr family were killed playing soccer on the beach. I think the ball was the only survivor of that game.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“unsure why any of us would pursue this. The anxiety of scrolling through our pasts, lightly, of course, so as not to trigger any dreaded accidental liking of a weeks-old photo (or even months-old, depending on exactly how down bad you might be).”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

“The median age in Gaza is very young. Earlier you spoke of asking your father for stories about your grandfather, and how important that was for you. But there are fewer and fewer people who have memories of life outside of Gaza. I’m wondering if you can say something about this. Unfortunately, it’s not only about memories of our grandparents, but it’s also their memories that are being lost, those are what we need to hear and memorize and then transmit to our children and grandchildren. But I’m also so saddened to think about my generation, our memories, being required or expected to tell our own stories of what happened to us in Gaza. I mean, for example, in 2021, 2014, 2009, or 2008. All the massacres and attacks on Gaza. Maybe our grandchildren will not ask us about Jaffa and Acre and Haifa. No, they will ask us about the 2014 war. What happened to you? What did you eat, which of your friends was wounded, did you leave your home, where did you go? This is a prolonged state of exile and estrangement and expulsion and ethnic cleansing. Our grandparents were driven from their homes and their cities, and any trace of them has been erased and replaced by something else, which is now called Israel. But we, their descendants, were also robbed of our right to dream and think about those places—no, instead, we are forced to live in the nightmares of our own current life. And they are creating more misery for us, wounding us again and again, so that we forget those earlier wounds in the face of the fresher wounds. The more the Israelis attack us, the more they are trying to erase the older memories. So it also becomes a matter of exhaustion.”
― Mosab Abu Toha, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

“What you may learn is that there are places you can go where no one will pay attention to you if you don’t cause a fuss. Sink down into a big chair at the library for a few hours, and hold a book on your lap, and if you fall asleep, no one will be bold enough to wake you up. Spend a dollar or two at the McDonald’s and sit with a newspaper you swiped from the top of a trashcan, and that booth can be your booth for a little while. There is a way to blend into the architecture of a place, as long as you don’t summon any chaos while you do it. Walk through a park where the weight of summer has broken the necks of the sunflowers, sent their faces moaning near the soil they burst from, and imagine that even the flowers must try to make a deal with whoever their god is, hoping for a better result than their current predicament.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension