Now in Air/Light: Gaza Diaries by Mustafa D. Batnain and Habiba Masoud and a Conversation with Susannah Breslin
This week in Air/Light:
“‘I Hate the Subject and the Subject Hates Me’: An Interview with Susannah Breslin” by Seth Fischer
Gaza Diaries
Next week:
“Horses Impasto,” “Breath Bluff,” and “The Gauntlet,” by Hans F. Wagner
“Surviving Beneath Gaza’s Tempest Skies” and “O Lord, Guide Me Through Darkness” by Haya Abu Nasser
“‘I Hate the Subject and the Subject Hates Me’: An Interview with Susannah Breslin” by Seth Fischer
In the book, you contrast your cold, workaholic humanities professor parents with the intense interest you felt from the psychologists who interviewed you. You also say this led to your choice to be a journalist. Can you briefly explain how that connection worked?
Sure, my parents were intellectuals. They were academics. They were aloof and distant. My mother was emotionally cold and withholding, so my experiences in the study were very impactful because they were exactly what I wanted, which is to be the center of the world. On how it helped make me a journalist, my shrink talks about something called the passive into active dynamic, where you take the thing that was done to you and you turn it around. You’re now the one in a mastery position. I think as a journalist, it’s a way of turning the tables. Now I’m the one studying other people.
I’ve never actually met someone else who was studied as much as me. In many ways, I had a very similar situation to you, but it seemed to have an opposite effect. I went to creative writing and the humanities to get away from that sort of objectivity. I’ve tried to do journalism, and I fail miserably every time I have to be objective because it just feels so unalive to me.
It’s funny because I read your essay on this when you reached out to me, and I’m literally getting upset thinking about it. I was so upset when I read it. I couldn’t believe it, but I got a migraine and vomited after.
I want to say I’m sorry, but I also want to say thank you. So often, people say, “It’s not like they hit you with a frying pan.”
I hate that people say that. When I think about those experiments, I get upset. And if you ask me about my experience being studied, what I’m articulating to you is ideas I came to later. On an emotional level, I have no response. It’s like, because we were children, it’s so normalized at the time. But when you have any kind of distance from it, it is totally weird. Anyway, it’s really interesting to hear how you had this very different experience of a kind of similar dynamic. But to answer your question, I derived pleasure from it in a bunch of different ways. I liked that part of it was physical. Somebody sitting there, looking at me. It’s an experiment room. There’s nothing else going on. It is like a sacred space to me. And so just having that protracted, focused attention—I think I write in the book that it felt like love.
Also, I enjoyed pleasing the scientist by answering their questions cleverly, which was not possible with my mother, who was just generally unhappy with being a mother. I experienced it as kind of a game. I think I felt like I was special to be there.
“It’s a Rainy Day in My Normal Life” by Habiba Masoud
Habiba: It’s raining today. We hang up our laundry on the wall to air-dry because there’s no other place to put them in the “house” we’re currently in. Now most of our clothes are wet/unclean. We can’t re-wash it until the water comes back every four to five days. We also can’t cook today, as the fire would go out because of the rain. I feel helpless. I keep thinking about what I could be doing now if I was in my home, in my bed.
Jesse: What do you think you would be doing if you were at home? Would it help to imagine a normal day of life if this wasn’t going on?
Habiba: So, it’s Wednesday and it’s a rainy day in my normal life.
I would think about skipping my class, my 8 a.m. class, and staying in my bed.
My mum would be making she’reya, which is like sweet noodles. It keeps us warm and it’s sweet. I would be lying in my bed with my cat, Taymoor, next to me.
I don’t know what happened to him. We left him in Jabaliya. In reality, my fiancé went to our home, and he couldn’t find Taymoor, so I don’t actually know if he is dead or alive, if he’s eating or if he’s hungry. But you can’t feel sad about a cat, when all those humans are being killed.
“Provisions, Pots, and Firewood: Feeding Our Neighbors in Gaza” by Mustafa D. Batnain
Within a week after the bombing of Gaza began, I was forced to evacuate my home in Khan Younis for the first time. I went to my friend’s house, where I ended up staying for a month. He presented the idea to me of distributing food to people who were displaced and had lost any consistent source of income. He suggested that I follow the example of previous wars, when I’d volunteered to help the displaced, the injured, and people in shelters. I gathered with three other people, including my friend’s father-in-law, to discuss the idea of feeding displaced people.
The idea was to collect money from some neighbors who were well off and donations from anyone who could offer something to help us cook. My friend’s father-in-law is a cook and has a lot of cooking tools. I’m not a cook; my role is as an organizer. We bought wood to start a cooking fire. We also bought rice, sauce, spices, salt, and anything else needed. We decided that we would try it the first day by cooking one large pot of stew. We found an old house with a large courtyard. We went around to the homes where the displaced were staying and told them to come with their pots and utensils in the afternoon for food.