Great Escape
Life During Wartime
How Palestinian novelist Atef Abu Saif writes his way out of Gaza
Atef Abu Saif had one of the formative experiences of his literary career in an Israeli jail in 1991. It was Ramadan, and the other prisoners asked Abu Saif, then in his early twenties, to compose a story for a breakfast. During the first Palestinian intifada, in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Abu Saif was one of the teens in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp throwing stones at Israeli soldiers — he was shot on three different occasions and still has a shallow scar peeling into his left cheek. He wrote a story about a mother who prepares her house for the return of her son from an Israeli jail only to learn that another one of her sons has just been arrested.
Abu Saif got a cold reception as he read the story aloud to his fellow inmates. There was “strong shock” on his listeners’ faces. It was an important lesson. “You don’t write a story for a prisoner to tell them that there is no hope in life,” he says. “What we write should matter for the people. You don’t write because you want to write, and you don’t write because you have the pleasure of time or your talent.”
