Previous | Next :: In the Presence of Dreams and Distress : Gaza City | September 15, 2014, 8:09 pm

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I was having lunch with Rosalind Nashashib an artist sometimes associated with Insight ……… she started to speak about her experiences having recently returned from Gaza ……… She said things I expected of the difficulty of life there ……. of poverty …… and of social and cultural complications …… and she said things I did not expect ……. she spoke of it almost as a magical place ……. hidden and very hard to access …… almost like the mythical realm’s in fairy stories …… for a moment I pictured in my head the barbed wire and fences that lock the people in as if it were an impenetrable forest of childhood fairy tales ……..

Gaza with the people as dwellers in a forbidden and enchanted land ……… this thought sort of jars drastically with some of my ultra real experience there ……. and yet there is something compelling in this line of magical thinking ……….. the dwellers in the land of Gaza have a culture and shared experience of only this place …….. they are locked in by land and by sea ……. behind the impenetrable guarded walls live a people cut off from the outside world …..

This is a land peopled by dreamers …….. People who dream of homes they have never seen …… Dream of their fathers house and land in what is now an unrecognizable suburb of Tel Aviv ….. a house that once was ……. and dwells only in memory and in stories passed from the old to the young ……. there are dreams and haunting memories of olive groves and shady courtyards …… of lives that might have been……… contained inside the impenetrable forest of razor wire a magical place of dreams, of bitterness and longing ….. a place that functions through the yearning for and the magical belief in return ……

Cheers Jez X

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You have a splendid dream that precedes poetry

and a sea call that precedes rhythm

As if tonight were the private rendezvous

between creator and created

Be the master of your attributes now

My son, you have a dream

Follow it with the night given to you!

And be one of the dreams attributes

Dream and you will find paradise in place!

Mahmoud Darwish

From : In the Presence of Absence

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