Every Moment Is a Life: A Gaza anthology curated by Susan Abulhawa is a tour de force

“Every Moment Is a Life: A Gaza anthology curated by Susan Abulhawa is a tour de force Submitted by Hossam el-Hamalawy on Thu, 05/07/2026 - 10:10 The beautifully compiled book’s descriptions of the torturous nature of the routine during genocide is a particularly notable inclusion Palestinian children wade through flood water in Maghazi, Gaza during heavy rains on 25 November 2025 (AFP) Off Every Moment Is a Life arrives with an almost unbearable question: How can literature be made from a genocide still in motion? There is something perverse, even obscene, about aesthetic experience under such conditions. To read these polished, translated short stories while Palestinians in Gaza are still being starved, bombed and displaced can feel like admiring the composition of a beautiful photograph whose subject is a pile of bodies. The frame may be exact, the light perfect, the sentences luminous. Yet the image remains a moral wound. This anthology does not dissolve that contradiction. It inhabits it, and asks the reader to do the same. Compiled by Susan Abulhaw a, with English editing by Abulhawa and Arabic editing by Huzama Habayeb, Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide is a bilingual act in more than the literal sense. The stories were born in Arabic, worked over in Arabic, then carried into English by Abulhawa and Kay Heikkinen. Genocide is not only mass death by bombs. It is the conversion of every routine into ordeal, every need into negotiation, every relation into fear of loss Their movement between languages is not decorative. It is political and intimate. Arabic holds the first breath of the text, its cadence, jokes, anger, religious invocations, family tenderness and street dust. English becomes the second life of the same wound, the route by which these voices cross the siege and confront readers who might otherwise consume Gaza only as footage, casualty count or diplomatic euphemism. The book began in workshops Abulhawa held with young writers in Gaza. Habayeb’s note makes clear how harrowing the editing became. For more than three months from May 2025, she worked with 18 writers through WhatsApp, watching for messages at night and dawn, waiting for grey ticks to turn blue. A request for revision might be answered, hours or days later, with news that a wife had been buried, a family had fled to the sea, or a brother had been killed. Editing, here, was not merely literary labour. It was a vigil. Refusing romanticisation The stories themselves refuse the false grandeur often imposed on Palestinian suffering. Muhammad Mu’ammar’s Coffee by Old Blue begins with coffee, sea and displacement, then sinks into the abyss of a wife buried by the narrator’s own hands. Reema Abu Mousa’s Everyday turns transport, ration coupons and a mother’s plate of beans and rice into a map of humiliation. 'An assault on history': Censorship of author Susan Abulhawa roils Oxford Union Read More » Khuloud Abu Zaher’s His Name Is Salam places childbirth in a hospital corridor crowded with bodies, allowing a newborn’s cry to answer, not erase, the dead. Ghassan Salam’s Ma’rouf is almost unbearable: a rescued orphan, renamed, loved, returned, then killed. Diana Islayh’s A Trail of Soap follows a woman to a makeshift toilet, where privacy, water and bodily dignity have been annihilated. Saja Laham’s My Room mourns the private kingdom of a bedroom lost to homelessness. Rizq Ahmad’s title story finds in family life under a tent the stubborn pulse of affection, humour and attachment. Khadija Abu-Lebdeh’s The Decision turns remembrance of a beloved brother into an act of fidelity. Amrou al-Najar’s Delirium catches a mind trying to assemble ordinary life after order has been shattered. Fatma Asfour’s Fashionista may be the collection’s most defiant gesture of style: clothes are not vanity, but a claim to selfhood against the politics of reduction. The writers were participants in Abulhawa's Gaza workshops (Simon & Schuster) Nebal al-Najjar’s For Gaza to Leave Us Something dares to say the forbidden thing: the desire to leave, and perhaps never look back. Maram Hammou’s Gone follows grief through the loss of an aunt and the collapse of a medical future. Samya al-Laham’s The Cobbler finds grace in an encounter with an elder who repairs a shoe. Ali Abu-Zayed’s The Breadline distils the new economy of hunger into waiting, crowding and endurance. Maysa Salama’s Umbilical Cord binds birth, kinship and land in a refusal of severance. Samah Abu-Awwad’s The Story Isn’t Over brings lyricism to survival without pretending survival is consolation. Abdallah al-Sayyed’s For the Sake of Diapers shows fatherhood reduced to desperate provision. Lubna Meqdad’s From Tent to Tent traces displacement as a repeated tearing of the body from place. Converting routine into ordeal The insistence on the daily average Palestinian life under Israel's genocide gives the anthology an immense force: the queue, the cart, the cup of coffee, the toilet, the phone signal, the loaf, the diaper, the vanished room, the road between tents. These details do not minimise the catastrophe. They reveal its machinery. Genocide is not only mass death by bombs. It is the conversion of every routine into ordeal, every need into negotiation, every relation into fear of loss. 'If I must die': An anthology of a stubborn, brilliant life in Gaza Read More » There are moments when the literary shaping feels almost too beautiful. That discomfort should not be edited out of the reader’s response. The anthology’s sentences can be finely made, sometimes startlingly so, and that fineness stands beside torn flesh, hunger and bereavement with a troubling elegance. But the alternative would be worse: to demand that Palestinians narrate only in screams, statistics or raw testimony, as though craft were a privilege reserved for those not being killed. These writers insist on form because form is one way of staying human. The collection also resists the Western habit of asking Palestinian writing to prove innocence before it is allowed complexity. Anger appears without apology. Shame, vanity, impatience, exhaustion and longing sit beside compassion. Gaza, in these pages, is not only where people are being killed. It is where people are still naming babies, mending shoes, boiling coffee, missing rooms, loving the dead and writing A woman wants to look elegant. A daughter curses transport. A father hunts diapers. A young woman dreams of departure. None of this weakens the moral charge. It rescues the writers from sainthood, which is another kind of erasure. Their humanity is not awarded by suffering. It precedes it, survives within it, and speaks in accents no occupying power can fully police. That choice gives the book its bruised, difficult and necessary authority here. The result is not a monument, but a breach in the wall of abstraction. It records what international language so often evades: that Gaza is not a symbol populated by interchangeable victims, but a dense human world of mothers, students, widowers, aunties, fathers, singers, fashionable young women, stubborn children and exhausted writers. To produce these stories, revise them over broken connections, and live long enough to tell them was itself resistance. Not resistance as slogan, but as breath held against erasure. Every Moment Is a Life offers no clean redemption, no consoling arc, no safe distance between art and atrocity. Its achievement lies in making that distance collapse. The reader is left with beauty that cannot absolve itself, and testimony that refuses to be reduced to pain alone. Gaza, in these pages, is not only where people are being killed. It is where people are still naming babies, mending shoes, boiling coffee, missing rooms, loving the dead and writing. Every Moment Is a Life: Gaza in the Time of Genocide is available from Atria/One Signal Publishers . All proceeds go to the contributors in Gaza and to the Palestine Writes Literature Festival. Books Discover Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0

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