here and not here

This creative text is adapted from the narration in my film here and not here (2025)—a diary, dispatches from a place that does / not exist—a site of pressured being, a state in waiting, a geography beyond, but permanently besieged by conflict—and also the willed, resistant space of dream, desire, and imagination. Made in the Occupied West Bank and Golan Heights during the A. M. Qattan Foundation’s “Ways of Traveling” Residency, 2020–23, here and not here reflects multiple creative collaborations and conversations.

 

1

I always like seeing Ahmad; we understand each other’s faces. 

What are your triggers? he asks.

Privilege … It just comes out.

He laughs knowingly. I try to be clearer as it is such an entangled thing. He simplifies it for me, those who behave with entitlement. For him it used to be yellow licence plates.

He tells me about growing up in a refugee camp, about the countless arrests, starting at childhood. There is always a silence underlying his speech. 

I like listening to him, how he tells of his life. 

We speak about those who wish not to use force, and those who do. 

Where does the sadness go, when it leaves (if it does)?

 

2

Hind tells me about the Israeli Ambassadors’ Forest (for diplomats to Israel) and how the planting of trees erases history, covers former villages and renders them antique, cloaks graveyards, uses up groundwater, and destroys the delicate ecological balance, while also denying those who have inhabited the region for centuries, especially the Bedouin of the Al-Naqab, their rights to the land. Only the former South African ambassador refused to have trees planted in his or his country’s name, saying that it replicated apartheid. 

Eirini, a psychotherapist, and I think about the difference between people going to a forest to hike and those going to a forest to hunt and kill, not for food or any reason other than to engage in blood sports. In the UK it is conservatively estimated that around fifty million game birds are bred and even more imported for shooting estates every single year. This calculated and calculating violence against another being, just because they can . . .

 

3

I meet a woman at a bar, and we start talking. She tells me she was in prison for 45 days; her brother is still incarcerated. Someone else tells me there are prison cells numbered according to severity; some in which you can only stand up but not lean against the walls, as they are deliberately lacerating. 

I remember stories from my grandfather of his being tortured in the gulag, in a cage where he could neither lie down nor sit. This reminds me of John Berger’s observation that while there are prisons, we have prisons inside of us. 

 

4

A woman on the bus offers me a seat, and, when I ask her for directions, she turns to me and asks, Have you heard the news? So many times I found myself saying now all will change. Just earlier, Lina told me how exhausted she was, always having to be so switched on. 

Nidal refuses the term “colonisation.” We are occupied. He looks at me directly and says, Your country is responsible for this. Nothing makes sense, he adds. This is a country of nonsense.

In English it is almost impossible to speak without including terms of militarisation, financialisation, and ecological damage; talk of conquering and victory, value, worth and reward, of dirty and soiled items. 

I remember the composer Pauline Oliveros asking if we are creating the sound we hear by listening, or if the sound is creating our listening. 

 

5

How do those with the task of naming weapons of war name their children? There is a history in this naming. For instance, Little Boy and Fat Man were the names of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lavender, the aromatic plant known for its soothing and calming effects, is now an AI program utilised to target people and buildings in Gaza. “Where’s Daddy” is a track-and-kill programme …

 

6

John Berger, in his book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, writes that poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known. 

Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument (who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?). The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience, which demanded, which cried out. 

 

7

Abu Hasan is an injured hyena that became a resident of Qalqilya Zoo. Striped hyenas are timid and may feign death when attacked. I know the danger of comparing behaviour across species, yet survival mechanisms may touch us in unexpected ways. 

Animals in enclosed spaces lend themselves to easy metaphors, don’t they? 

I once tried to sit 

on one of the vacant seats of hope 

but the word “reserved” 

was squatting there like a hyena 

(I did not sit down, no one sat down) 

The seats of hope are always reserved—Najwan Darwish, Reserved, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid 

Wolves and Hyenas Hunt Together, Prove Middle East Peace Is Possible—Washington Post headline, 2016

When Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, writer and politician Horace Walpole called her a hyena in petticoats. 

Many animals died in Qalqilya Zoo because of the blockade and the last intifada; some were literally frightened to death by the explosions. The zoo is not real life, Shuruq says later. A zoo must never be a metaphor. It is just what it is. Palestinians must never be a metaphor either. Isn’t it ironic that the only zoo in the West Bank is in a village surrounded by the wall? 

I grew up in a country, Germany, with a separation wall. Thousands of weapons, land mines, attack dogs, and armed border guards killed or maimed those attempting to cross. Perhaps this was where my dream of a borderless future began. 

There are no wild animals in Qalqilya, Mustafa says. 

Shuruq says that in Palestine, the ABC is not an alphabet. 

I say that I think it is an alphabet of horrors.

Dotted around the West Bank, mainly in Area C, are large signs that feature images of howling wolves with Hebrew letters, indicating illegal Israeli settlements. 

Furthermore,

Wolf Pack is the vast facial database with all available personal information collected by Israel on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. 

Red Wolf is a facial recognition system that surreptitiously scans and stores biometric information and tracks movement, used at checkpoints, especially around Hebron. 

Blue Wolf was an earlier photo database for facial recognition of Palestinians, notably used in raids. 

White Wolf is a security package and an app used by settlers to check whether Palestinian workers have the correct permits.  

I think of Jean Genet’s Prisoner of Love, where he writes that the hour between dog and wolf, that is dusk, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other, suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day . . . The hour in which . . . every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphosis, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment …

 

8

What is the meaning of a life when it is always contained, spatially and socially? 

I remember the writer Robert Macfarlane questioning the relationship between beauty and atrocity in a post-massacre landscape. Is it possible to take pleasure in such a place? 

I remember someone saying that there is no innocent landscape.

How can one traverse a vanishing landscape? What happens when the possibility of walking is increasingly prohibited, even outright dangerous?

I join Ibrahim and the group Let’s Hike Palestine. The first excursion is to a Canaanite village called Al-Jib, which is near Jerusalem, with a winery that is thousands of years old, as well as an equally aged water trough placed along the ancient trade route. 

Someone on the hike says that, for them, freedom means no borders.

We cross through the fields onto a path where a car with a donkey tied to the back passes us. The donkey has no eyes and must have been dead for some time. Watching it well into the distance, all of us voice some kind of sadness for this full but lifeless form, when a boy with a living donkey emerges over the rise, riding past us with a beaming smile. 

We watch them for longer.

 

9

I often think of film language, not only the written, as a language of war, and I am certainly not the only one to note this, as the technology developed alongside military usage. How then to work in this language, consciously, responsibly, and beyond its association with shooting, target, cut? The moving image, across platforms, is used so pervasively as an extension of power, by nation states, by corporations. 

Toni Morrison wrote that oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

 

10

In Bethlehem, Dalia tells me about a cauliflower tree which has been genetically altered because of the ongoing tear-gassing of the refugee camp by Israeli forces. 

Shuruq, Samah, and I think about belonging; such a fragile process, especially since we have all known prolonged violence, and appreciate that each of ours is different, and wish to explore that space between us. We allow each other mistakes, imperfections, and an attention to the possibility of failing. 

 

11

Samah draws on ancient recipes to recreate them, and to learn about plants more deeply, she also draws them. I tell her that I always have been drawn to plants growing though cracks, and they appear in all my films. I tell her about my visit with Shada and Salim to Sittee Amina, about eating half a kilo of dates in three days and about how, in my stumbling Arabic, I thought I heard her say she was 57, but she is 75. Samah replies by telling me that the date palm tree is polyamorous and falls in love with other trees. She says, I like that personification of the tree’s intimate life.

After that, we both sign off our messages, long live the date palm!

 

12

A few days before I visited Sakiya, it had been raided by a group of approximately twenty illegal settlers who forcibly entered their premises in Ein Qiniya. Old stone walls were torn down, not for the first time, and trees were marked, including one that served as a shrine. It is in such trees, where it is said that spirits of the upper (and to a lesser degree those of the lower) world—even local saints, the awliya—may live and appear. 

In her novel Harrow, Joy Williams writes that I think the world is dying because we were dead to its astonishments pretty much. It’ll be around but it will become less and less until it’s finally compatible with our feelings for it.

 

13

When I met Abdallah, he was filming landscapes under threat across the West Bank. Again, we talked about words and their meaning. So much of the English language, I told him, is bound up with capital, the value of things, the power over things. We spoke about looking, seeing, witnessing, about unforgetting and remembering; about the conditions of remaining, about moving on, about the ghosts that are all around us.

Where are the living among the dead?