Adi Magazine

rehumanizing

policy

  • home
  • About
    • About ADI
    • Our team
  • submissions
  • archive
  • Contributors
  • contact
  • Search
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • Newsletter
Share on Facebook
Tweet about it
Share on LinkedIn
Pinterest

From the river to the sea

There was no time to mourn. No time for the dead or the living.

  • Yara Ghabayen
  • October 2023
  • Art, Testimony
  • Violence

Artist Statement

I’m a 24-year-old Palestinian artist who was born and raised in the Tuffah district of Gaza City, but I’ve been living in the US for a few years now. My father felt the need to leave Gaza due to the constant attacks and massacres that have been carried out over the past decades. It was only recently that we were allowed to visit regularly over the summers, even though the humiliation that we experienced at the borders stung. As harsh as the conditions were, the people of Gaza always knew how to hope and to create life from the rubble and the dust. We never expected that our visit in July of 2023 would be the last time we would see so many family members and friends, the last time we would see our city – our home – as it once was.

On October 15, my father and I woke up to the news that 25 members of our family were killed by a single Israeli air strike: my uncle Mahmoud Darwesh Ghabayen and his entire family, my aunt Maryam Darwesh Ghabayen and her entire family, my great aunt Faiza Ibrahim Ghabayen and her family, including many of her grandchildren.

In the north, the attacks were worse than in any previous war so they relocated to the south, to what the occupying forces said was “the safe zone.” They found a skeleton of a house with no walls to stay in, but they could not sleep. It was too crowded and too cold; the kids were crying and screaming all night because they could feel the vibrations from nearby bombings in their bones. My uncle Mahmoud told my mom that the night had been hard on everyone, but he planned to look for plastic wrap to hang over the frame in place of walls so they could try to keep warm. He thought that a nearby school might have food to spare for the family. The next afternoon, my uncle Mustafa received a call. He rushed to the skeleton house along with the civil defense team and members of the community to find that it and a line of houses around it were now just a pile of concrete blocks and debris, a mass of gray destruction. They tried to dig the family out by hand. It haunts me to know that at first some screams echoed from within the rubble, and then everything went silent. Mustafa said couldn’t recognize his own brother; the faces he had looked at his whole life were wiped of all features.

There was no room in the freezers at the morgue, so they were laid out on the street in rows of body bags. The following morning they were buried in a mass grave. There was no time to mourn. No time for the dead or the living.

During my last visit to Gaza, everyone asked me if I was still drawing and painting, especially my uncle Mahmoud. He was the person who gave me my childhood in Gaza. Without him, I wouldn’t be the person that I am today. I wouldn’t laugh the way I laugh. I wouldn’t find humor and witty jokes in everything. I would not make art without him. I was too ashamed to tell him that the trauma of war sometimes was too much for me, that I had hoped art would give me a voice but I felt unheard.

I hadn’t painted in a while, but I am now, using it to process my grief, my loss. I do it to continue his legacy and to share my family’s story. This is for them.

  • ceasefire now family Gaza history Israeli occupation palestine violence war

Yara Ghabayen

Yara Ghabayen is a 24 year old Palestinian artist from Gaza, born and raised in Tuffah district in Gaza City.

‹Also in this Issue›
  • Art, Opinion
Gaza, I Wish We’d Meet Under Better Circumstances

Hasheemah Afaneh , Dalia Tuffaha

I first met the Gaza Strip on a television screen back in 2004, at eleven years old. 

  • Protest
  • Art, Essay
To Live Free

laila r. makled , Dina Fawakhiri

To colonizing propagandists, our story is the American Dream. To us, it’s an ongoing tragedy.

  • Intervention
  • Art
Girl from Ramallah

Mariam Darraj

  • Intervention
  • Art, Essay
My Gifts from Gaza

Yousef Abu-Salah

Baba once mentioned how Palestinians were the patient dough of the Taboon. No matter how much we are kneaded, beaten, and stretched beyond our limits, our capacity for hope is supernatural. Taboon, even burnt beyond recognition, is still Taboon.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Three Poems

Rashid Hussain , Salma Harland , Dana Barqawi

I’m against my country’s revolutionaries / Wounding an ear of wheat / Against the child / Any child / Holding a grenade

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
I am the stranger

Bassam Jamil , Nicole Mankinen , Bint Bandora

I am the stranger / The shadow beneath the cloud / Adrift and looming over my land

  • Protest
  • Video
Scenes From Home, Memories in Motion

Rania Lardjane

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
(out of borders)

Hani Albayarie , Khaled Jarada

He wears winter and searches for another land, / Where he will say to the raining clouds, / To sow the sea in a land other than the one we know. / Hope was the last breath of the traveler, / Hope was his land.

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Summer Awad , Dana Barqawi

I want to whisper to him that his existence / Is revolutionary, that his sumud is breathtaking, that I see his gentleness

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Why I Love Secrets and Lies

Veera Sulaiman , Dina Fawakhiri

You learn to make your gods as small as a coffee cup and hide your future in it

  • Protest
  • Audio
Hell in My Home

Suzana Sallak

Have you ever wondered what hell feels like on Earth?

  • Violence
  • Art, Essay
In October, the sky turned white

Nama’a Qudah , Dina Fawakhiri

Why are these babies asking too much when they demand nothing but the most basic human rights?

  • Violence
  • Art
Timekeeper

Michael Jabareen

Time stops. The clock’s pointer, at all times alarmed, stands still.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Recipe for Being Palestinian

Alia Yunis , May Grabli

Rise like our bread to speak for those who have no food.

  • Protest
  • Art, Testimony
From the river to the sea

Yara Ghabayen

There was no time to mourn. No time for the dead or the living.

  • Violence
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Aiya Sakr , Asma Barakat

You’ve burned the sheikh’s field, worth a lifetime of planting / and fed him a variety of jail cells instead.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Edward Salem , Bayan Dahdah

God said (and already you can tell / I’m making this up), / If you lift a rock, I am there.

  • Violence
  • Art
Unprovoked

Ahmad Mallah

We became just numbers with no stories, no dreams.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
A Farm in Gaza

Kat Abdallah , Mette Ehlers

My grandma had a farm in Gaza where her children played outside. Only her two oldest sons remember living there.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
Letters to the Unliving and Unborn [for Palestine]

Liane Al Ghusain

We are the land and the land is us. / Its holiness and grime cannot be dispelled from us.

  • Protest, Violence
  • Art, Poem
Two Poems

Priscilla Wathington , Bayan Dahdah

One honey eye got stuck open / watching the burned enter the street.

  • Protest
  • Art, Poem
For the Dead Among Us

Lisa Suhair Majaj , Fadia Jawdat

We will open the day for you, and the night. We know that you are beneath the earth, or ash

  • Protest
  • Vignette
A Few Lines

Bader Alzaharna , Fadia Jawdat

At a hospital-turned-housing-shelter, a father wept, cradling his newborn son at the gate of Al Shifa hospital. 

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
Homeland

Farah Alhaddad , Fadia Jawdat

is this a disappearing game or stretching membrane?

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
I Was Imagining

Mikhail De Palraine , Fadia Jawdat

Planes claim the sky; claim mothers and fathers, / Claim dreams, futures, one last kid's hope

  • Intervention
  • Art, Poem
[ ∙∙∙ ]

Fady Joudah , Fadia Jawdat

This is what faith taught you. / This way, art. That way, God.

  • Intervention

Adi Magazine rehumanizing
policy

  • home
  • About
  • submissions
  • archive
  • Contributors
  • contact
  • Search
  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • Newsletter
© Copyright 2025
  • Site Credits