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Shrinking Language, Bursting Memory
By Alaa Alqaisi
Under siege, time is stolen piece by piece, and language shrinks to match the narrow space it is allowed. People abandon long sentences because every additional word must justify the power it consumes, the battery it drains, the risk it takes in that particular minute. “Bread / عايشين”? “Are you alive / “طابور الخبز”? These words stand in for entire chains of thought that there is no time to voice. Messages that once held jokes, memories, worried questions about the future, or small confessions are reduced to the smallest possible units of meaning, like language written in shorthand for a world that will not wait for full sentences. I scroll through conversations made entirely of fragments: “قصف قريب,” bombing nearby. “الشبكة راحت,” the signal is gone. “خلص الغاز,” the gas is finished. Sometimes, someone writes only a single name followed by a question mark, and we understand immediately that this is not a casual inquiry, but a search for life.
I often think that the first dictionary a child in Gaza carries is invisible and heavy. Before they learn the names of distant animals or the months of the year, they learn to point at the sky and say زنانة “drone.” They hear adults repeat هدنة “ceasefire” more often than they hear the word “holiday.” They learn المعبر “the border” and كواد كابتر “quadcopter,” words that belong to their everyday borders and sky, and they sit in their mouths as easily as “tree” and “street.” When I was small, I memorized multiplication tables with the same steady rhythm that I used to memorize the schedule of electricity cuts. Our children grow up inside a vocabulary that announces danger, counts interruptions, and describes control. Language in Gaza does not simply mirror reality. It builds the mental walls and map lines that occupation draws on our bodies.
I notice that words arrive too early, too sharply, and with no softness to cushion them. A toddler hears the buzzing of the drone and says “زنانة,” a word that should not belong to childhood, yet becomes one of its defining sounds, the background noise against which all other sounds must compete. A boy who barely understands geography talks about “نزوح” because he has already lived through displacement twice, and for him the word does not belong to history textbooks, but to the memory of mattresses on classroom floors and the smell of shared toilets. A teenager asks whether the “هدنة” will hold long enough to recharge phones and find bread, knowing from experience that the term rarely keeps its promise and that any pause may collapse without warning. Even “كاش” and “تطبيق” are loaded with urgency, tied to lists of aid, generators, gas cylinders, and the long arithmetic of survival that must be recalculated every day. The meanings of these words are not taught through books or explained by patient adults at a table; they are learned through hunger, through waiting in lines that never move fast enough, through the cold mathematics of what remains and what has already been destroyed.
Urgency governs our communication, and urgency is not only a mood; it is a structure that reshapes grammar and thought. After every explosion, phones vibrate in frantic pulses, each vibration a demand for confirmation of existence, a small digital knock on the door of someone else’s fear. A cousin writes, “لسه عايشين,” still alive, with no punctuation and no greeting, because punctuation suggests a luxury of time we do not have and greetings sound absurd beside debris. A friend sends “جعان” without a verb, because hunger itself becomes a verb, a continuous action that does not need grammatical completion. Language is stripped of adjectives, stripped even of grammar, until it beats like a heart forced to run, never fully exhaling, always ready to sprint again. Over time, that compressed rhythm moves from our devices into our bodies. We begin to speak, even face-to-face, in short bursts, as if the conversation itself might be cut at any second.
But the compression of speech is not only the result of technical limits or fear of the next strike. It comes from the overwhelming scale of reality, from the knowledge that no sentence can carry what people have seen and heard. Many people confess that they have no words large enough for their pain and cannot express themselves at all. They open the message window, write two or three lines, then erase them because the words look thin beside the memory of burned rooms or crushed staircases. They try again and delete again, watching language fail in front of them. Eventually they send nothing. Silence becomes its own heavy vocabulary, a language built from what cannot be spoken without collapsing. I read that silence with a fluency I wish I never had to learn, because in Gaza the absence of speech is rarely empty; it usually means that feeling has exceeded the available lexicon.
Culture, too, becomes compressed and fractured under this pressure. Every home in Gaza contains stories that do not exist anywhere else, stories that form the backbone of our oral history and the texture of our daily lives. A house is not only concrete and furniture; it is also a collection of repeated sentences, private jokes, and small rituals of address. When a house is turned into rubble, those stories lose their rooms. The lullaby tied to a specific bed, the duaa always recited beside the window at sunset, the teasing phrases exchanged on a particular staircase, the way a mother lengthens her child’s name when she is worried rather than angry, all of these linguistic rituals depend on place and repetition. “نزوح” removes bodies from homes and removes words from memory at the same time. A tent does not echo the same sentences that a family house once did, because people in tents avoid telling stories that would make the loss sharper. Oral traditions weaken under the weight of concrete dust and the constant need to improvise survival.
Yet new forms erupt from the cracks, concise and fierce. Graffiti on shattered walls becomes a compressed literature of survival, a public archive written in paint instead of ink. A three-word sentence, “حنعمرها,” we will rebuild it, carries more defiance than an entire formal speech delivered at a podium far away from here, because it is addressed directly to the ruins. Youth in shelter schools write rap verses where “قصف” and “هدنة” rhyme with hunger and hope, transforming catastrophe into meter and internal rhyme, building a beat that does not belong to any official anthem. Dark humor circulates quickly, adapting itself to the latest horror with ruthless intelligence. Someone jokes that the “زنانة” should be classified as an overworked civil servant who never gets a day off. These kind of jokes are not distractions from reality; they are the last functioning muscles of dignity, each punchline asserting that the mind can still make connections and produce meaning inside chaos, that thought has not yet surrendered to shock.
Still, I worry for the other Arabic that once shaped us, the one that did not have to lean so heavily on words of death and scarcity. The Arabic that could afford gentleness, that stretched out in long stories told on balconies with no endpoint except the pleasure of staying together a little longer. The language of slow storytelling, of long greetings that ask about every member of the family in turn, of playful exaggeration that turns irritation into comedy instead of conflict. I fear we may lose the register where children invent nonsense words during games, where a grandmother stretches a blessing into three lines simply because she loves the weight and sound of them in her mouth. I fear that those modes of speech will become archaeological layers inside us instead of living practice, something we refer to in nostalgia rather than use in the present. A teenager who can describe the mechanics of a bomb, the pattern of shrapnel and the types of aircraft, struggles to describe joy without stumbling, as if happiness were a foreign language they once heard but never learned to speak. Their sentences have been trained to testify, to bear witness for distant audiences, not to imagine futures for themselves.
As a writer, I stand in the tension between record and possibility, between the need to document and the need to preserve a space for other kinds of expression. During bombardments, my writing collapses, becoming lists: names of the dead, coordinates of destruction, the number of days without water, the last known locations of friends who have stopped replying. The language of these notes is dry and precise, the language of an archivist who understands that when bodies disappear, words must at least remember that they existed. Later, when I return to those notes, I feel how much life they failed to contain. A grandmother’s way of whispering the word “هدنة,” heavy with suspicion and a small, reluctant thread of hope. The tremor in a boy’s voice when he repeats “نزوح,” trying to sound knowledgeable while hiding fear behind technical vocabulary. The way hunger transforms the pronunciation of “خبز,” bread, into something between a plea and a memory, the lips lingering a little longer on the consonants as if taste could be summoned by sound.
So I push my sentences to expand, even when expansion feels like a rebellion against necessity and a refusal to obey the logic of siege. I write long paragraphs as a form of breathing, a way to give my thoughts the oxygen that daily life withholds. I allow adjectives back into the room, not to beautify reality, but to record its exact contours. I let a verb stretch its limbs, connect to subordinate clauses, pull in cause and effect, memory and observation. I describe the drone not only as a threat but as a sound that alters our physiology, a noise that shapes posture and posture shapes thought, training necks to tilt upward and nerves to remain half-tensed. I hold the word “قصف” under a magnifying lens and trace how its meaning changes when whispered in a crowded corridor, shouted into a phone, or turned by a distant journalist into the abstract word “airstrike,” a tidy term that erases the dust, the bodies, and the stairwell.
Writing becomes my resistance against the shrinking of what can be said, against the idea that our vocabulary must be limited to what fits inside headlines or humanitarian reports. If communication is forced to be efficient in order to keep us alive, literature insists on being human in order to keep us whole. It insists that our lives are more than alerts and notifications, more than coordinates and casualty counts. It insists that language can still hold details, hesitations, contradictions, tenderness, and complexity, even when the world around us rewards speed and simplification. To write is to refuse to let emergency speech be the only speech, to argue that even in catastrophe we retain the right to sentences that wander, examine, and return.
I want to believe there will come a day when children in Gaza learn the word “زنانة” only in a history lesson, and laugh at how strange it sounds in their mouths, disconnected from any personal memory. A day when “هدنة” describes a distant political concept in a chapter about past wars, rather than the fragile fabric of daily survival that can tear at any moment. A day when “نزوح” has no place in personal biography, no appearance in family WhatsApp groups, no role in the simple act of answering the question “Where do you live now.” Until that day arrives, I will keep stretching the limits of speech, sentence by sentence. I will keep returning softness to a vocabulary corroded by necessity, inserting small words of affection and ordinary detail into narratives that the world prefers to read only as tragedy. I will keep writing long, careful sentences in a place that tries to make every word short, because length itself becomes a declaration that we are still here, thinking in more than one line at a time. Language, even under siege, deserves air, and as long as I can place words on a page, I will refuse to let that air be taken from it.
Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.
