Elegy for Fatima Hassouna

by Haidar al-Ghazali
4.17.2025

Fatima asked me to write her epitaph. A heavy task no text can fulfil.

I don’t believe that Fatima has gone or that this city will lose one of its clearest voices.

I don’t believe it because Fatima suits life: the dreams she drew, step by step, image by image, poem by poem, song by song.

I don’t believe it.

I remember one day we met during the genocide. I remember our talk of Gaza whom we love for no reason, with no justification, without even understanding why we love a city in which we are killed every day. We walked in Sahaba market with a friend and she joked “you have an agent now, Haidar, we want a treat!” And we drank “barrad”. We were in a famine, a jet hovered above us, and we were drinking barrad and walking as though we owned the world.

I remember when she visited our home during the genocide to film a story about me. She sat with my mother for a long time, and she promised it would not be the only visit. Fatima, I’m still waiting for you.

I don’t believe that she has gone. I examine conversations that take on new meanings. I found a message where she says “pray God I see you high, high up there and I tell my kids about you and say be like Haidar.” I stared for a long time at the words “my kids” and I saw a mother teaching her child about life, taking photos of him - exceptional photos, his birthday, his first steps.

She likes photographing hands, she would have taken a photo of his hand in hers - on the road.

I stare at the words “my kids” and I imagine how the air would have been green with her smile as a mother, how happy she would have been with her fiancé and with the love the genocide cut off. I imagine the wrong we would do Fatima if we don’t think of her passing, in itself, with all its weight, all its wounds - with all her children who will not come, and her love that’s been broken - the wrong we would do her if we don’t think of her passing, just in itself, as a massacre.

The Israeli Occupation killed Fatima and ten of her family because she dreamed, because she laughed, because she’s real.

Fatima is part of a generation in Gaza bidding itself farewell. Life made us slowly, and we know very well what we want. We never heard the sound of a plane unless it was bombing us, we never traveled except by closing our eyes as we looked out to sea. Among us are poets and artists and photographers and singers. We have the energy to build an abundance of beauty for a world that only needed to look to see us.

Some of us you know and some you don’t and I promise I will not wait till they pass before you get to know them.

Earth is letting us down, killing the dream within us; we write wills that the elderly in other parts of the world don’t think of. We say, as Fatima said to me, “perhaps our salvation, Haidar, lies in not being saved.”