Omar Hamad is a Palestinian writer and pharmacist bearing witness to genocide in his home of Gaza. He writes about stolen love, safety and peace, and the reality of life on the ground.
I walk barefoot on the embers of war, carrying in my right hand my tattered shoe and in my left my pen, to write the journey of this shoe’s life—now unable to continue the road with me, as if life burdens me with weights I cannot bear.
Now I walk with nothing. I walk through a book that knows nothing but sorrow, its pages filled with lines of oppression and injustice while silence grips us, its pages heavy with the screams of mothers, the tears of children, and the anguish of fathers. I search carefully for the meaning of hope and find none, for the meaning of love and find none.
This longing for my library is killing me—the longing for Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love, for Rumi’s Quatrains, the longing for my pen and inkwell, where I dip the pen to let it drip letters soaked in spiritual romance and love.
And between every book, the shelves were adorned with chrysanthemums and anemones. My library was like paradise—I would travel and sail through its books to seize wisdom and the self I had forgotten since the first day I was forced to abandon reading and became bound to writing blood, tears, and forgotten remains.
And here I am now, walking over a punctured memory—every step revives an old pain, every glance behind me like a call from a time I buried beneath the rubble. I once wrote with ink, today I write with ashes. I once plucked roses from language, today I gather only thorns sprouting over wounds that never heal.
I write so I do not forget… do not forget what the house looked like before it turned into a gravestone, do not forget my sister’s laughter still clinging to the walls of my memory, do not forget my mother’s face as she covered our plate of food with her prayers for us, and do not forget that night when everything collapsed—except my pain. Today I walk surrounded by a vast emptiness—an emptiness that can only be filled by the voices of those I loved… who are gone. I walk with the memory of a tattered shoe, a groaning heart, unfinished texts, and a childhood dangling from the roof of a tent, waiting for time to pass, for home to return, for the guns to fall silent.
Perhaps I will write—not to immortalize the pain, but to say that we were here… loving, dreaming, planting, drawing, singing, reading, writing… before our lives were reduced to a passing news bulletin or a cold political statement.
And I will keep writing, until the last drop of ink… or blood.
A crowdfunding campaign has been set up for Omar and his family. You can donate here.