22 February 2025

Muqawama by Abu Leila

Wasafiri is proud to publish the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize shortlisted pieces. In this piece of life writing, Abu Leila mixes forms to dazzling effect, incorporating interviews, prose, and verse to chart a personal and familial history of Palestinian resistance.

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.

All quotes are from interviews, transcribed and translated from Arabic.

In April 1998, I was a child, like her,
in the land where people are meant to die.

I was scared, like her,
of buildings melting like candles.

She slept in the UN building,
safe in her mother’s arms.

She slept as one of eight-hundred and
she died one of one-hundred-and-sixteen,

She was a child, like me,
and we had not yet learned to speak,

let alone write, too young yet
to know what it means to be killed,

let alone know of empire, of someone
more human than us holding the gun.

The rocket came from the land of Israel,
and found her, gently breathing.

My father saw her under rubble,
She looked just like me:

curly-haired, wild-eyed,
clenched fist baby.

In April 1998, my father packed our bags,
we left behind his mountains
my mother’s olive groves
   two grandmothers
one grandfather
   six aunties,
nine uncles
   dozens of gossiping cousins
two milk siblings

   wild-hearted friends
the sea
   falafel
morning coffee,
what the neighbours said
who got married when
dabke
   smoking
arak
siblings strung together like a necklace.

We went where people are not supposed to die,
and I lived, I looked, I clenched my fist.

I carried her blood in my mouth
and blessed it.

It reminds me who life is for,
It prepares the curse I spit at you:

You who have good milk in your mouth,
you with half-open, restful eyes,
you who look on the daughter’s dirty face
and see a savage,
terrorist child of terrorists:

May your white teeth fall from your mouth.
May your white faces burn with phosphorus.
May you feel the taste of death.
May you feel the terror of the life
that beats under your rubble,
the life that will kill you before it dies.

I didn’t die. I lived long enough to listen. I lived long enough to carry the weight of everything I heard. I heard my mother’s tales. Always the same tales, over and over. I know these stories like I know Cinderella and the Looney Tunes. I heard them at lunchtime while eating spaghetti. I heard them while walking home from school on streets with trees all the same distance from each other. While watching Disney Pixar on Saturday evenings, with the salt of popcorn under my nails. I heard them so much.

Mother: I liked to race by the road in front of the house with my brother. There was an Israeli sniper on the road, he was there to shoot us. It made a really fun game, as we had to run in zig-zags, to escape the bullets. The game was: if you die, you lose.

Mother: Your grandma was always making things: bread, taboulleh, baba ghanoush, keshk, rose water, orange blossom water, burghol, flour, tomatoes, and lettuce. She also made clothes, though they were awful, she was not good. All the children had three dresses: two for every day, and a special one. When the bombs came down in Beirut, I would run upstairs and put on my good dress. I thought, if I die, I don’t want to die in ugly clothes.

I am in London today and I hear a bomb has fallen by my auntie’s flat in Beirut. I am wearing a keffiyeh that she convinced me to buy. The lady from the thrift shop insisted I wouldn’t find one at better value anywhere else. She was wrong, but my auntie said, ‘Go on, you only come here every five years.’ I always listen to my auntie. No lie could come from the mouth of a woman who fries golden chips and chops bright green parsley every single evening.

I learn about the bomb from the family WhatsApp group. I respond with a shocked face, hoping the round mouth of the emoji and her sickly yellow skin can express the fear and mourning I feel. Nobody else responds to the message at all. When I call my auntie, she says all is fine.

I was at my auntie’s flat just two years ago, when I brought the keffiyeh. The flat is in Dahye, the Beirut neighbourhood that a middle-class auntie tells me I should never go to. ‘The water is poisonous and dirty like the people,’ she says, ‘You can smell the people’s misery there.’ It is my favourite neighbourhood in Beirut. In Dahye, the streets are named after the Southern villages its inhabitants escaped, the faces of martyrs hang at every corner, neighbours shout each other’s names across the roads, the buildings huddle over each other like stray cats. I remember it like a song, like —

the little white buildings huddle together, sun-scorched,
balcony kissing balcony.
The market man knows my auntie’s name,
the old crochet he sells flowers
exactly like my grandma’s did,
and when a car goes past, music blaring,
the children dance.

The building is there, crowded with family on every floor. In my auntie’s flat there are her sons, her husband, and her cat. The cat is very naughty. I sat with her that December night. Not exactly sat, rather walked between the living room and the kitchen as she showed me recipe upon recipe.

Auntie: When I first married my husband, the comrades up at the centre loved when I arrived. The food I brought they hadn’t seen in years. 'Bring her up, bring her up!' They said. It’s all resistance.

Her husband lit the shisha for me, knowing I liked this little immoral activity. He liked it too. I asked him to tell me his tales.

The shisha bubbled all night. Nancy Ajram sang sugary sweet on the television, the house smelled of onions and cinnamon, the cat pushed trinkets on the floor every fifteen minutes, and my uncle talked.

Uncle: We did all this in the resistance front, in the days of liberation. We didn’t care about religions, about anything. We cared about how to free Lebanon. But we faded away. Nobody remembers us, our operations, our struggle.

This is why I tell you now.

Tell me, uncle.

Uncle: I joined the Communist Party when I was fourteen. In 1977. When I joined, we were fighting for the rights of workers and farmers. We served as volunteers, we didn’t have salaries, each human came to the Communist Party because they liked the Marxist ideas, the Leninist ideas, volunteering.

Then Israel invaded.

Me: Fourteen is so young to join …

Uncle: That’s what’s beautiful about this. Older kids from the village joined, I was in the village.

Me: Your village, by the lake?

Uncle: Yes. In ‘82, Israel invaded. They were attacking Palestine and everyone who supported the Palestinian cause. They invaded us. We had some training, some weapons, some centres, some preparation. They wanted to eliminate the Palestinian Revolution from Lebanon. All of us, students, poor people, we stood with the oppressed people in Palestine. You know how it was.

Palestinian farmers have been threatened or molested while working on their land by settlers who claimed the land belonged to the settlements. Fruit trees on private land have been uprooted or destroyed.
- UN report, Living conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, New York, 1984.

Armed settlers have tried to take over houses inhabited by Arabs, have attacked residents and have sometimes kidnapped them, particularly students and young people, on the grounds that they had participated in demonstrations.
- UN report, Living conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, New York, 1984.

The permission granted to the Israeli settlers to carry arms and to be involved in maintaining law and order has had a direct impact on the normal day-to-day activities of the Palestinians. According to residents of the West Bank visiting Amman, who were interviewed by the consultants, the streets in Palestinian villages and towns are deserted after nightfall. People confine themselves to their homes, fearing to go out lest they be accosted by either the armed settlers, the police or army personnel on patrol.
- UN report, Living conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, New York, 1984.

The occupying authorities are continuing their practice of demolishing houses and therefore punishing the families of those suspected or convicted of committing violent acts or engaging in demonstrations, stone throwing, etc. against Israeli settlers and authorities.
- UN report, Living conditions of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, New York, 1984.

Uncle: 1982, Israel invaded, and so the Resistance Front started. We freed Lebanon. We were facing this huge army with this incredibly basic equipment. It started growing, until we freed Beirut, then it moved to Iqleem, and we freed Iqleem, then the Jabal, and we freed the Jabal. This snowball started from a handful of people and grew and reached all of Lebanon. The communists were great leaders, under the Lebanese National Resistance Front. Lots of parties then joined this.

After Beirut, Iqleem, and Jabal were freed, we wanted to free Bekaa. It was at this point that it became sectarian. One would say we did this operation, then someone else would say I did this operation.

We don’t speak about this, but comrades who were martyred were Druze, Christian, Muslims …but in the name of the resistance.

The buildings around me look so solid. I think of Gaza. I think of Beirut. I think of martyrs falling all around me. I think of the weight of my aliveness. I think of the miracle of hearing the stories that survived.

Uncle: Jamal Sati. He did the Zaghlab operation in Hesbayya. He went to look at the Israeli checkpoint every day, it was full of soldiers and collaborators. He wore a sherwal and a khaki shirt. He took his mule, put stuff on his mule, saying he’s a merchant. He sold nail cutters and underwear and other such things, village things. Every day, he went in, talked to them, sold them merch. He asked the party to do an operation there. He said, if you don’t accept this, I’ll do it myself. So the party ended up agreeing. He put 200 kilos of TNT on the mule and blew up the whole checkpoint. He died himself, with his mule.

Uncle: We spoke to the party in letters. It took ten to fifteen days to deliver a letter. And they’d send us something back, saying, ‘Go and speak to this comrade to find out about the next operation.’ I would have, say, half a lira, and he’d have the other half, so we could recognise each other. Or a page of the same magazine, torn into two. If they fit, it meant we were the right people. For safety. That’s how the resistance started. Our beautiful secret style.

Auntie: I would go to the South with the resistance. I was so young. I’d go to give the money, the letters, the orders. I was sixteen. I’d go on the Jezzine way, we were all so young, we’d go to the border. We’d go to the militants and give them letters on what they had to do, money for them. Every month we went. We heard news and carried it back to Beirut. The people who did this were not holding a gun. It was harder than holding a gun. Holding information, going to places you’d never been, people you’ve never seen. I’d go every month. For one or two years I did this. I was strong, my strength is gone now. Resistance doesn’t just mean carrying guns, though I did carry guns. Against Lahad, his army. I will tell you more stories, I am sleepy now.

She has wild curly hair, a big smile, a large frame, busy hands, and busier legs. I tell her she is still strong, and she laughs to dismiss me. She is sleepy now and I hope she gets the rest, but she gets up to check on the rice. She calls me to the kitchen to show me what spices it should have. I feel excited, and also like I want to cry.

Uncle: It was normal people. They took a woman, a normal woman who had three children with Down's syndrome. She used to fill bags of hay with weapons, and I would go and move them. This was really led by the people.

Uncle: The people fed us. When we ran out of food, we’d go to trusted houses and say we needed sandwiches. People would give it to us for free. I’d leave a message on the door saying I need this or that, food, shelter, but secretly. I’d get a message with the location and go get it.

Uncle: Those who stayed in the South during the occupation are militants. Those who gave a bottle of water to a comrade are militants. Those who cooked and delivered letters were militants. It was women and men, fighting, resisting. Now we are fading away, we are forgotten.

Palestinian must pay the price. If possible they should get awake every morning finding out they get ten or twelve corpses, without knowing what happened. You must be creative, efficient, sophisticated.
- Israeli general Ariel Sharon to his Chief of Staff (troop commander) Shaul Mofaz, in 2002.

Ariel Sharon is a man of peace.
- George Bush, 2014

The food was served to us, the living room warmed with steam.

The stories went on past midnight. I cannot tell you all of them. I will tell you one, which made everyone laugh so much, laugh hysterically, nobody could stop.

Cousin: Tell the Jabal al Sheikh story. I love this story. How you rolled. How you fell off the mountain.

Uncle: Our friend was martyred on the second of February 1988. He was martyred in an occupied area, in Jabal al Sheikh. We didn’t abandon comrades on enemy land. So we decided to recover his corpse to bury him on freed land.

It was snowing, there was so much snow.

Eighteen comrades went, with our weapons, with our stretchers, we were going to carry him. We went off in the snow. We found him. We tied him with a rope and pulled slowly, to see if the Israelis had put bombs on him or set some kind of trap. Nothing happened. So we put him on the stretcher and carried him on the mountain, two kilometres or so. We got tired. We used our torches to find our footsteps, though torches were forbidden as they made us easy to find. But there was so much fog, ten metres away from the torch you couldn’t see. We walked up to the peak of the mountain. We had to get down. It was hard to carry him down. So I said, ‘Okay, wait.’

I put down my nylon raincoat. I put him on my shoulders. His corpse. I said, ‘Comrades, you go down.’
They said, ‘What?’
I said, ‘No worries, I am skiing.’

My cousin shrieked with laughter and I shrieked with him. Uncle laughed too, putting down the shisha and shaking. My auntie threw her head back, heaving. 'Skiing!' We exclaimed. 'Skiing!' He exclaimed.

He was dead, my dear friend. If I died, we’d be both dead. So I sled with him down the mountain, me on the raincoat, him on my shoulders. It was the only way. If we’d slid him down metre by metre, we would have all frozen to death. I slid down the whole mountain with his corpse.

It was skiing.

Skiing! My uncle nearly cried from laughing.

I said, ‘Find me at the foot of the mountain.’

I went down, sliding fast like fire, like a car. I couldn’t stop. I held his hands. I was so fast that I slid upwards when I got down, some forty metres up the next hill. I was so fast they couldn’t stop me. Then they came to take me, they took him away.

We let his family know the day after. He was from Khyam, but we couldn’t say that, the border was there, it was occupied and full of collaborators. If we said where he was from they would have killed his family and blown up his house. We buried him among us. It made us proud that we always took our martyred comrades to the liberated territories.

Uncle: But now listen to the tale of Bistros.

Cousin: No, tell her the Nabi Safa tale.

Uncle: Not this time.

Cousin: It’s a collection.

Me: Each tale has a name.

Uncle: Of course. I took my children to all the places to show them where each story happened.

We had hard days. Ten years in battles, in woods. We were like wild dogs.

But if we hadn’t done it, if we hadn’t suffered, we would have never freed the country.

I call my grandma. She has survived three wars and I hope she doesn’t have to survive another. She is eighty-five, she claims to be one-hundred-and-two months-old. She says:

Grandma:

Azra’el, angel of death, is chewing on me

I am the last one left on this square

All the rest have died, young and old,

And azra’el angel of death is chewing on me.

In January 2024, I am alive
and she is dead.

In January 2024, I speak
stories that happened, while stories

are happening, and a time
is the same as another, and space

is the only gap between a child
and a child, me and

her. Now the same murder
floats up to my fingers, tracing

blood-encrusted, beloved
faces, violet eyes, freshly-bagged

brothers, on a flat, unreachable
screen, and she is here, as real

as the boiling coffee,
as the bus, as the office.

My life, unsharpened, is a burden.
So sharpen me.

Let me be a rock,
damp in a child’s hand,

heavy in the moment of heartbreak,
hurled with a cry for the glorious,

the never before seen,
the endless time after survival.

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June 2025. Submit here.

Photo: Ib Benoh, End of a World, 2003-2004, acrylic on canvas, via Wikimedia Commons

Abu Leila

Abu Leila is a Barbican Young Poet, and one of the winners of the 2019 Spread the Word London Writers Awards. They are currently writing their first novel, an extract from which won the Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award 2022. They hope to see the fall of capitalism and imperialism in their lifetime.