Of blood, belonging and the pain of exile 
Reviewed by Rumina Sethi

Gaza Mama
by Laila El-Haddad
Women Unlimited. Pages 288. Rs 375

Laila El-Haddad is a young Palestinian mother writing her heart out in a blog, oppressed as she is by the seamless web of political forces which embrace and yet exclude her and her fellow countrymen living in exile. After a long transatlantic flight, she is stopped at the Rafah border crossing— the only route into Gaza — by harsh and heartless Israeli soldiers and visa authorities who will not permit her to enter Gaza. With bag and baggage and her two-year-old son, she waits for days and then is forcibly flown back to the US. Her story has the resonance of what one of the descendants of the Auschwitz survivors once wrote, “World history and personal history collide. This my parents had warned me about when they taught me to always keep my bags packed.”

Gaza Mama is a collection of memories and political articles about the Middle-East crisis that leaves a mother stranded at the border for days, not knowing how she can explain to her infant son the shutting out of a Palestinian from her homeland and her family. It is mainly an attempt to see her location from the outside in the context of increasing intolerance and right-wing Israeli politics.

Exiles have always been on the move across space through history: Jews, Gypsies, Moors, Turks, indentured labour, slaves and domestic labour. The Palestinian diaspora, particularly, is about oppression and collective punishment. It is about the exile that does not belong anywhere. Borders and occupation keep the exile out, foregrounding issues of nation, nationalism and migrancy.

Though often, in history, such journeys across borders were taken for reason of trade or flight from oppression, behind them are many dreams and getaways from the misery caused by political expediency, war and suffering. Space is lost and yet the exile must fight for her rights to stay and to migrate. The narrative, therefore, becomes a movement of protest and assertion against countries turning into fortresses because they would prefer to keep the migrant out or, as in the case of Gaza, of sealing it to the extent that even the indigenous population is required to obtain visas to enter their homeland.

Haddad, through her passionate cry against Israeli occupation, has succeeded in using her blog to raise international outcry for political activism and fundamental rights of migrants, helping to create the paradigmatic political space of modernity where the existence of migrants, of asylum seekers, continually opens up a wide scope for angry readings of political agendas. Such is the underlying dynamics of Palestinian displacement under the military nexus of Israel and the US. The counter discourse is replete with the vexed questions concerning belonging and distance, insider space and outsider space, carrying with it an ideology that knowingly or instinctively fixes one’s relationship in a displaced culture reinforced by principles of geopolitics in the Middle East.

A homeland that is continuously bombed and occupied compels Haddad to write a distressing story of dispossession and statelessness, of how families were driven out of their homes in the historic Palestine by Jewish militias many years ago with no contact with many dear ones left behind. The population registers of both Gaza and the West bank are controlled by the Israeli military. One can enter only by obtaining the residency card which “lies at the heart of the tight-knit mechanism by which Israel controls Palestinian movement, residency, and life in general.” As Haddad writes: “As a Palestinian you cannot separate the personal from the political. That our identity surfaces with particular intensity on international borders.”

The book boldly resists the unidirectional flow of Israeli discursive power with the acute sensitivity to military dominance in the Middle East. The Jewish diaspora fades in the light of its prosperous present. The Palestinian diaspora turns all the more tragic as Gaza lies in siege with many voices from within and without struggling to respond to the nightmare of history. Such political writings turn into liberating acts in a political environment flooded with antagonism. Haddad creates a repository of memory and cultural survival in the face of an inflammatory phenomenon and permanent uncertainty, leaving a humiliating sense of one's own inadequacy and helplessness. May you live as long. By God’s grace you are still young enough, a young man mad about scholarship."

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