Uncountable

I’ve never been much of a fruit eater. So, to arrive in Palestine with little interest in fruit and leave with a reverence for it, feels significant. I hadn’t even tasted a fig until I lived there. One night, in an apartment full of friends, I mentioned I’d never had one. One of my friends gasped, disappeared into the kitchen, and returned with a fig in her hand. I let her feed it to me.

It tasted like soft, fleshy honey. A texture both fibrous and melt-in-your-mouth. The skin was tender and edible, the center a dusky pink. A fig is an inverted flower, pollinated by a wasp that squeezes through a tiny opening at its base, sometimes leaving parts of itself behind. There is a chapter of the Quran—Surah at-Teen, The Fig—in which Allah “swears by the fig and the olive.” Teen, the Arabic word for fig, is an uncountable noun. There is no singular or plural. Neither one nor many. They exist as presence, not quantity. A miracle not to be counted, but to be experienced.

And then, there were the strawberries of Gaza.

Tiny berries, barely the size of a thumbprint, the size strawberries were meant to be. They ripen in Gaza’s winter, a warm sweetness punctuating the chilly air. A field of ruby hearts carried in cardboard crates to open-air markets. One spring in Ramallah, I couldn’t find Gazan strawberries in any of the markets. Then, in a traffic jam at a busy intersection, I spotted a roadside fruit stand. Cartons of strawberries stacked like offerings. I rolled down my window and shouted to the vendor, “Min Ghazza?” From Gaza?

He smiled. Aiwa! Yes!

He passed me two cartons through the window and waved away my money. I held them like treasure, rubbing the sticker with my thumb: two graphic strawberries encircling the words PRODUCT OF GAZA, PALESTINE (ابتاج غزة فلسطين). A year and a half later, I tattooed those words on my forearm when the grief of witnessing genocide had hollowed me out.

close-up of a tattoo in black on olive skin, a line-drawing strawberry on either side of arabic writing, ابتاج غزة فلسطين

How many versions of myself have I had to survive? How many deaths and rebirths can a body hold in one lifetime? How many Gazan strawberries have we been deprived of while the farmers fight for their lives ? How many love stories between the fig and the wasp? How many burial shrouds have wrapped how many bodies, bodies containing infinite universes?

Subhanallah for what can’t be counted in this life.

And yet, I would choose this pain over and over. Because it means I got to know Gaza. I got to eat its figs and strawberries. I got to learn about the miracle of the wasps. I got to slip my toes into Gaza’s sandy shore, playing tarneeb under the night sky. I got to reemerge into this pained world, swearing by the fig and the olive.

I never want to forget the sunrise call to prayer I once heard from my bed in Gaza. From the mosque across the street, which during Ramadan buzzed like a beehive, throngs of worshippers, an aliveness held inside stone. There is a chapter in the Quran named for the bee, Surah Al-Nahl, in which we learn that Allah inspired the bees to build their homes in mountains, trees, and man-made structures, and to gather from all fruits to produce honey to heal humanity. That call to prayer felt majestic, spilling through a slumbering Gaza into the tiled halls of my apartment, into my half-dreaming ears. Could there be a more sacred stirring from sleep? An invitation to taste the honey of divinity.

I write this to say thank you to the Gaza of before.

I write to say thank you for loving me.

I write to say I’m sorry for what we let happen to you.

I write to say I love you.

I write because my memory, once sharp, vivid, is starting to dull. Maybe it’s the medication that helps me carry the unrelenting weight of genocide. Maybe it’s just trauma. I don’t care to name the cause. I just care to remember.

I didn’t need medication when I was there. Gaza, for all its hardship, was never cynical. It was full of hope. It was full of life. There were gift-givings and shared meals. Long workdays and slow Fridays. A pyramid of hummus in Souq al-Zawiya. Knafeh ghazzawiya, which is second only to knafeh nabulsiyyeh. There were all these things, tastes, smells, textures. And I was woven into them, engulfed like a wasp in a fig.

I moved to Gaza when I was 27. I search for these memories now at 36. The noticing of time’s passing, that is its own kind of ache. I learned to bear separation. But the severance of Gaza from the world as we know it?

Still, I must hope. Because that is what Palestine demands. And for me, to hope is to remember.

I remember Nadia telling me to take a jar of Gaza’s sand with me. I wish I had. I remember the tired handshake of Mohammed the fruit vendor after the May 2021 bombardment. I wonder if he’s still alive. I wonder if we’ll ever cross paths again. In the spirit of hope, I imagine our reunion, and I cry at the miraculous joy of it all. The tears of my future self rise up in my present body.

I remember the bougainvillea near my office. The way fuchsia blooms spilled defiantly over gray walls. That’s the thing about Palestine: its beauty insists. My friend Asmaa photographed me there once. Photos rarely capture my beauty, but that one did.

I remember the woman on the phone, a few chairs away, a fellow detainee at the Erez crossing. She thought I was Palestinian and told me I was in the wrong section. I said in Arabic, ana ajnabiyya. I’m a foreigner. She asked where I was from. I said Pakistan. She laughed, a playful acknowledgement that we are one. Even that, mundane, beautiful, unforgettable.

I remember Ghada teaching me Arabic calligraphy. I was terrible at the pen grip, but I kept trying. I practiced while detained at Erez, in orange plastic chairs meant to humiliate. Writing my name again and again. Repeating her strokes until they resembled something beautiful.

It was all so vivid. So extraordinarily ordinary. So I commit to remembering, chasing uncountable memories, repeating the strokes until they resemble something beautiful.