Surviving Memories
Hani Zurob


“...Valid till announced otherwise, and everyone who disobeys will be punished badly”, still ringing in my ears as if it were viable to this moment. Since 1987, and I was not even 10 years old... I was a romantic person in terms of how I look at things since the very beginning, I recall that I used to start my day by inventing a way to see the face of my neighbour’s daughter who accompanied me for one year in the Blue kindergarten. That was when I was 5 years old and before I joined the UNRWA School for Boys – a school that received only boys, as evident from its name. There were memories, memories of holding our sandwiches on our way to the KG, memories of playing and singing, memories of the beautiful face of Miss Fatma which I still recall very clearly.

The face of that girl was one of the first things that I looked for in my mornings. It is now replaced by the first pages of the electronic newspapers on the internet accompanied by a cigarette and my morning cup of coffee before I start working in my studio. At the time, I could not understand the meaning of the words I used to hear from the loudspeakers on the backs of the grungy military trucks. After inquiring and asking, I realised that they belonged to Jewish Israeli soldiers who kept us from leaving our houses; we were forced to stay at home. Since then the definition of ‘curfew’ has entered my vocabulary. And I knew that this implies that leaving our houses is forbidden and that our schools are closed, and since our schools are closed, the girls’ schools are closed too, and the corner shop of Aunti UmDiab which was full of candies and wafers and chocolates is closed, and the house of my girlfriend neighbour is closed, even the sea is closed too.

Our house in Rafah Refugee Camp stands on the corner at the junction of two streets, which were considered as main roads, relatively speaking. Due to this location, our windows were under target by everything the soldiers threw from their trucks. On one curfew day, we heard a sound of a military truck. We used to distinguish them by their sounds, we had special names for each one. The one I am talking about right now is an extra large, heavy, armoured, dark truck – we used to call this one ‘the Evil Bomber’... On that day, I think this huge machine ‘liked’ our house, it stopped five metres away from the window and started throwing or launching stones towards the big wooden window of our living room, or, as we used to call it, the TV room. Of course the wooden window shutters were closed like all the others in town. Part of the window shutters which were broken in that incident have not been fixed to this date... I really don’t know whether it was only a matter of forgetting to do it or whether it was part of the several things that were delayed, fearing that the act would be repeated, until it was forgotten for twenty years.

The door and the windows of the house were kept closed, and I remember envying the Abu Jazar family, whose house was kind of the talk of the town for being so hard to reach due to its location at the end of a very narrow street which was barely wide enough for one man to walk in. But at least the sunlight used to visit them through their open windows. This envy didn’t last long because of the stones, the tear gas bombs and the flash bangs that were thrown by the soldiers into any open window, which reached all the houses in the neighborhood. This provoked a great fear in those who were thinking of receiving the sunlight, even the Abu Jazar family.

We lived under the conditions of this hard curfew for long days and nights, and the only ‘breaks’ we had were once a week for two hours, and only for women. I recall once it lasted for 40 full days, and the only place I could run to in this suffocating situation was the library. It was a small place at the furthest corner of our house that smelled humid like a cellar mixed with the smells of ink, old papers and rat poison. But it was safe because it didn’t overlook the road, and this was the important point for me.