Unsent Letters #9

I needed to write this

Dear Hind,

There’s a song by Lucio Dalla, an Italian cantautore (which can be translated into “singer-songwriter” -- someone who writes the songs he/she sings), the greatest of all time to me, that talks about five people crammed into an old small car traveling from Scilla to Torino. From the deep south of Italy, to the north. Ten eyes and a common destiny, say the lyrics. A destiny far from home. The destiny of struggles and abuses and challenges that migrants had to endure to try and put bread on the table. The song was released in 1973. You wouldn’t know of it -- you’re just a little girl, and you’re from Gaza.

When my friend Rocco mentioned your story on Instagram yesterday, I went to search for it. The journalist Romana Rubeo wrote a piece in The Palestine Chronicle Italia, where she serves as the chief editor. And so I learned that you, age six, were traveling in an overcrowded car with your family in Gaza, exactly like those in Lucio Dalla’s song. Except they were running from hunger, while you were running from death. Life has turned into an eternal exodus, in that tiny strip of land. Your car was hit and everyone died except for you. You remained trapped in the vehicle amid metal and bodies, with snipers shooting on sight in the area. 

We know this, Romana Rubeo writes, because the Palestine Red Crescent somehow managed to locate you. You were scared and asking for help. They coordinated a rescue operation, but communications have been cut off and there’s no more news. Now we can only hope for a kind of happy ending to your story, assuming saving a six-year-old girl with no one left in the world can be called that.

There are plenty of stories like yours. In a normal situation, in a normal part of the world, I’d say that these stories are not for you. That you’re too little to know about them. But over there, children’s eyes cannot be kept from seeing horrors even at your tender age. There’s the story of two young brothers killed in Khan Yunis. The first went out to see if conditions were right to escape with the rest of his family and was immediately shot, his brother went out right after to try and pull him away from the bullets, but he was shot too. They both died, embraced on the asphalt. There are more than ten thousand stories of more than ten thousand children, and they all have the same ending -- all those children are dead. If we wanted to commemorate them with stumbling stones, we would need kilometers of roads, the roads that no longer exist in Gaza, along with pretty much everything else. And these stories are told by heroes in the field like Motaz Azaiza, or a bunch of courageous writers like Romana, or normal people like Rocco, who try and give them resonance by posting on social networks. Not by mainstream media. 

While the world pretends to know nothing about Gaza, and many claim that they don’t have the necessary competences or knowledge to express an opinion, hiding their heads in the sand, these heroes are working hard to make it (almost) impossible to conceal what’s going on. They’re working hard to counter the stale rhetoric that the West continues to spread, to make it so apparent and straightforward that even the blind can see. Theirs has become a mission. And I really don't know -- Rocco writes -- how the indifferent (for convenience or by choice; yes, there are people who absolutely don't care), and those who deny that all this is happening, that it is a kind of shameful and grotesque and horrific staging, and those who even justify this massacre, manage it. 

It is all in front of our eyes. No expertise is needed to understand. No complexities need to be unraveled. No higher degree in geopolitics or modern history is necessary to be stunned by the photo I saw this morning, that of a boy who lost the lower half of his body due to bombings and who now, in his brother's arms, wanders through what remains of hospitals looking for medical assistance.

Rocco writes that he, who for many years had the desire to become a father and then accepted with serene fatalism the fact that this had not happened, for the first time is grateful that things have gone this way because if he were a parent, if he had a child, the pain would be unspeakable. 

But I am a father, Hind, of two beautiful, smart, healthy, lucky humans. Lucky to be born where six-year-olds don’t have to run from death crammed in an old little car. Where their six-years-old eyes are protected from horrors. Where they don’t have to become grownups so soon. 

I’m devastated by your story. And I needed to write to you. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll stumble upon this letter. One fine day, many years from now, with the sun as warm as a safe embrace and the sky as blue as itself.  

---

"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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