Between Ruins and Imagination: Wasim Said’s firsthand account of resistance and survival in Gaza by Mary Turfah

The final section, called “My Psychological Torment: Between Ruins and Imagination,” is not quite an ending. The genocide has “shattered the stability of my mind and infected me with a strange psychological syndrome,” he writes, one that he believes “haunts every soul in Gaza.” He sees his own crushed skull scattered, his blood saturating the pages of his books. He sees in a flash thousands of dismembered bodies outside a bakery, “their blood soaking the bread.” He sees a friend walking toward him, very much alive, and then his friend is “body parts exploding in my face,” even as his friend embraces him and asks, “Why are you crying?” He sees his mother headless. At night, the nightmares persist, and every day he is no longer sure whether he is alive, because awake, asleep, trapped in his mind, “all are the same.” The last three lines of Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide read,

If I stay alive, I will finish the story . . .

This is all I could write . . . 

The rest is being written now . . . in

blood.