PERSPECTIVES: “Beneath Gaza’s Stars” and “Midnight Thoughts in Gaza” rewire my associations with my own memories

This piece is a companion to the article: “I want people to understand”: Writers in Gaza publish zines through volunteer-led Coastal Lines Press

I read Coastal Lines Press zines Beneath Gaza’s Stars by Heba Ali and Midnight Thoughts in Gaza by Mohammed Al-Bardawili with a deliberate slowness, trying to build pictures in my mind, trying to open my heart further and further like training a muscle. 

I needn’t have tried so hard. Their words surrounded me with their sights, sounds, and thoughts in a way that rewired my associations with my own memories. 

Pain, when woven into language, becomes a bridge to human hearts, writes Ali.  

The cover of Ali’s zine, illustrated by Karan Rathod, shows a sketched sky of plump clouds and stars. Some of the stars are white; some are inky black. A woman stands beneath it, robed with hair covered, her back to us. 

I write to carry my people’s suffering on the wings of truth—raw, urgent, and unafraid.

The zine is filled with 14 poems. The first — The Day The Sky Lied — remembers the rupture of October 7th. It disorientingly begins with the tender moments of any soft morning: gentle light, the sense of birth that new days bring, the vague curiosities that begin its unfolding, that Ali paints as tiny seeds breaking through soil, still wet with hope. These rhythmic pulses of life then shatter bluntly in the poem. The imagery of October 7 becomes recognizable to me in her next lines — of the fire, missiles, and carnage the news on my phone showed me. Her writing is so immersive that I read over and over the opening of the tender morning, inhabiting its foreign and sanctuary-like space. I feel I can stay stuck there if I read it on a loop and refrain from reading beyond it, in a lull of anti-history. Its softness is so visceral it feels easy to imagine a new history lying latent there, writing itself, one that was not the beginnings of genocide. Even as her first line warns, October 7th was not an ordinary morning — it was the kind that tricks you. 

Can I now ever revisit my own memory of October 7th without thinking of her soft morning? I’d written in my journal that I was about to miss my bus to school that day. I’d run out the door with shoes untied, whipping a scarf around my neck, almost forgetting to lock the door, the key’s cold teeth digging into my palm. I checked if I had my phone and saw the flash of a red BBC notification. I thought of Palestine, dimly, like a quick surplus of air in my lungs, like a distant awareness stirring from a slumber, and sent a brief prayer that everything would be okay. Ali’s poem chronicles it: But then the sky cracked/ And what fell wasn’t rain/ It was fire. 

This poem inevitably sets the foundation for all those that follow. 

The poems describe her dreams: of a transcendence to a state among the stars, of a safe life where days brim mundanely, of yearning for her father. The poems describe her current life: of the cruelty of living in tents and the mercy of the communal love found within, of burning books to nurse fires for warmth, of planting trees in every crevice of dirt left unmarred. The poems are filled most of all with her contemplations: how these three years are too much for her eyes to hold, how hope and insistence remains, how Gaza’s sky has been “rewritten”, blurring the line between stars and the beginnings of missiles. She writes, in her introduction: These words were born from the chaos of broken days /  From nights when silence feels louder than bombs / And maybe, somewhere, in some forgotten corner / They’ll find someone who needed them too.

I was marked most of all by her poems Another Face of Life and I Dream of Eyes that Aren’t Mine. 

In Another Face of Life, she writes of her father. He supported her and cheered for her; they had shared daily walks to her university, a simple stability. She describes him now as conjoined with her breaths: His memory clings to me like breath, refusing to leave so long as I’m alive. She writes of the quiet, all-encompassing strength he brought her: If anyone could’ve softened the edges of these harsh days, it would’ve been a father.

There is little detail in her poem about the memories that formed this bond. But I am extremely close to my father; its meaning needed no explanation to me. I thought of my father’s black fleece jacket — sewn by my mother — that I take with me everywhere. It is thick and oversized, the sleeves massive and the hem hanging near my knees. I always wear it when I’m stressed, lonely, or vaguely in need of comfort. It brings him near like a permanent embrace. Can I wear my father’s jacket now without thinking of her bond?

In I Dream of Eyes that Aren’t Mine, the last poem of her zine, Ali describes the beauty that a safe life allows the heart to live in. A smile, a child’s laughter, a celebration that stretches deep into the night, a glance that changes everything. It is an unrequited love letter to life. It is so bursting with love, painting the mundane sacred with her yearning, that it seems impossible that this dream does not come true, it feels it is thrumming right beneath the skin. She writes: I dream of eyes that aren’t mine / Lend me some of that light! 

What do we do, those of us who wear the eyes of which Ali writes? 

Do we remember to love the gifts of our life the way she would? Do we think of her whenever we do? And if we think of her often — and of Gaza — are we doing all that we must to give her the eyes she dreams of? 

***

Midnight thoughts in Gaza by Mohammed Al-Bardawili is filled with ten titled pieces of prose. They log displacement, routines amidst genocide, agony, and bewildered contemplation. 

The cover, illustrated by Casper, shows stencilled tents crammed against a darkened city. The sky above is smoky and studded with stars. 

These words are the essence of two years of war, Al-Bardawili writes. In the shadow of a genocide, you cease to be human made of blood, flesh, and feeling if you choose to play the role of the deaf and the mute. 

His voice is blunt and intimate. To read felt like living in the corners of his mind, memory by memory; the more slowly I read the more the details of his reality seeped into me.

Schools no longer recognizable as schools, filled as sites of displacement; the only remnant of their identity are the children’s drawings on the walls. Scouring every place he could for his mother’s epilepsy medication and finding it nowhere: watching her shudder from seizures as air raids blasted around them. Fear upon residing in displacement near a hospital, aware that they are targets. At 3AM, unable to sleep in the tent because his skin itches with burning pain. Routines in Rafah that begin at 6AM: standing in lines for water, for wood to burn for cooking, reading novels in the evening, and falling asleep on the floor of a tent. It is this image that I will think of now when I remember the banner EYES ON RAFAH, drawn in the colours of the Palestine flag with a motif of bleeding eyes, that hung from my campus during the encampments for Palestine. 

Al-Bardawili asks Is it a curse to be Palestinian?. It is the most physical embodiment of apartheid I have ever read, how Al-Bardawili describes the body subjected to endless anguish — no water, no food, no shelter, no warmth, no shred of physical sustenance — because it is a Palestinian one. In Deep in the Dark, he contemplates what allowed this: I tried desperately to understand them and their logic…everything makes sense when I think that they consider us even less than animals. This truth I arrived at after all this suffering hurts me more than you can imagine. It struck me how his zine is woven with instances where he tries to understand them. I stopped trying two years ago out of my own numb inability to fathom it. 

In Echoes of the Lost, he writes: How many dreams, how many wishes, how many desires, how many love stories, how many emotions, how many feelings, how many memories have died with those who died in this war in Gaza? It is really unfortunate that I’m asking the world for permission to live. 

He remembers the suffering and despair in Gaza before the genocide. The suffocating siege, the polluted water, the poverty affecting 80% of the population. He writes of how this past seems like a “paradise” now. 

In Even the Dead Cry, he writes what took the breath from my lungs:

 I don’t want my scattered body parts to be collected in a plastic bag and weighed. I don’t want that. I know it’s necessary for you to determine the number of casualties, but I don’t want it. How can we accept and live in a world where every 70 kilograms of body parts are placed in a bag to count the dead? 

I rely heavily on statistics. I try to thread my journalism with them to make sure it is accurate, persuasive, and provides context for the personal stories I try to honour. Did I think of the logistics involved in producing those statistics as I repeated them? I can never repeat them again without his voice in my head. I may not even be able to repeat them at all; I may repeat his words instead, which are repeated far less. 

My soul is being torn apart, thrashing and clawing like a caged beast, desperate for even a moment’s peace. The agony is unbearable, a torment that feels like death itself —yet death would be a mercy compared to what I feel.

The first thing I learned about these zines was that their writers — Heba Ali and Mohammed Al-Bardawili — were married months ago, on June 3 2026, while displaced in Nuseirat, Central Gaza. They are both graduates of English from Gaza’s Al-Azhar University.