SUSAN ABULHAWA

An excerpt from her novel Against the Loveless World (2021).

THE CUBE, EAST

I LIVE IN the Cube. I write on its glossy gray cinder-block walls however I can—with my
nails before, with pencils now that the guards bring me some supplies.

Light comes through the small glass-block window high on the wall, reached only by the
many-legged crawling creatures that also reside here. I am fond of the spiders and ants,
which have set up separate dominions and manage to avoid each other in our shared nine-
square-meter universe. The light of a world beyond, with a sun and moon and stars, or
maybe just fluorescent bulbs—I can’t be sure—streams through the window in a prism
that lands on the wall in red, yellow, blue, and purple patterns. The shadows of tree
branches, passing animals, armed guards, or perhaps other prisoners sometimes slide
across the light.

I once tried to reach the window. I stacked everything I had on top of the bed—a bedside
table, the small box where I keep my toiletries, and three books the guards had given me
(Arabic translations of Schindler’s List, How to Be Happy, and Always Be Grateful). I
stretched as tall as I could on the stack but only reached a cobweb.

When my nails were strong and I weighed more than now, I tried to mark time as prisoners
do, one line on the wall for each day in groups of five. But I soon realized the light and dark
cycles in the Cube do not match those of the outside world. It was a relief to know,
because keeping up with life beyond the Cube had begun to weigh on me. Abandoning the
imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the
absence of hope or anticipation. The Cube is thus devoid of time. It contains, instead, a
yawning stretch of something unnamed, without present, future, or past, which I fill with
imagined or remembered life.

Occasionally people come to see me. They carry on their bodies and speech the climate
of the world where seasons and weather change; where cars and planes and boats and
bicycles ferry people from place to place; where groups gather to play, eat, cry, or go to
war. Nearly all of my visitors are white. Although I can’t know when it’s day or night, it’s
easy to discern the seasons from them. In summer and spring, the sun glows from their
skin. They breathe easily and carry the spirit of bloom. In winter they arrive pale and dull,
with darkened eyes.

There were more of them before my hair turned gray, mostly businesspeople from the
prison industry (there is such a thing) coming to survey the Cube. These smartly dressed
voyeurs always left me feeling hollow. Reporters and human rights workers still come,
though not as frequently anymore. After Lena and the Western woman came, I stopped
receiving visitors for a while.

The guard allowed me to sit on the bed instead of being locked to the wall when the
Western woman, who looked in her early thirties, came to interview me. I don’t remember
if she was a reporter or a human rights worker. She may have been a novelist. I appreciated
that she brought an interpreter with her—a young Palestinian woman from Nazareth.
Some visitors didn’t bother, expecting me to speak English. I can, of course, but it’s not
easy on my tongue, and I don’t care to be accommodating.
 ISABELLA HAMMAD

An excerpt from her novel Enter Ghost (2023).

I expected them to interrogate me at the airport and they did. What surprised me was that
they didn’t take very long. A young blonde female officer and then an older, dark-haired
one took turns in a private room to ask me about my life. They particularly wanted to know
about my family links to the place, and I repeated four times that my sister lived here but
that I personally hadn’t returned in eleven years. Why? they kept asking. I had no
explanation. At points the exchange seemed to come bizarrely close to them insisting on
my civic rights. Of course they were only trying to unnerve me. Why does your sister have
citizenship and you don’t? Right place right time, I shrugged. I didn’t want to bring up my
mother. They unzipped my bags, investigated my belongings, opened every play, flipped
through my appointment diary with its blank summer months, and the two novels, one of
which I’d finished on the plane, then led me into a different room for a strip search.

Surely this isn’t necessary, I said in a haughty voice while a third woman officer ran her
detector over my bare flesh, as though I might have hidden something under my skin, and
dawdled over the straps of my bra and knickers, which I had matched in preparation, blue
lace, and as she knelt before my crotch the laughter began to quiver in my stomach. I put
my clothes back on, surprised by how hard I was shaking, and ten minutes later they
called me to a booth, where a tall man I hadn’t seen before gave me my passport and told
me I was free to enter, Welcome to Israel.

I passed a seating area and recognised two glum-looking Arab men and a young Western
woman in red lipstick from my flight, still waiting to be questioned. Their eyes followed me
to the automatic doors, and as the doors sighed apart I checked the time on my phone and
saw only an hour had passed. This left me two more to kill, since my sister Haneen
wouldn’t be back in Haifa until half past six. I made a snap decision and asked a taxi driver
to take me to Akka. I had an idea I should see something beautiful first.

My adrenalin faded slowly in the car. As it did, the shadow of my bad winter returned, and I
watched the passing farmland, the hills of the Galilee, through its darkness. My whole life
I’d been aware of Haneen’s stronger moral compass; it made me afraid to confide in her
until the very last moment, until I absolutely needed to. I also wanted to resist her, the way
a child resists a parent and at the same time absorbs their wisdom; I wanted to sulk in her
second bedroom and feel better with the secret muffled gladness that someone was
holding me to account.

I may not have locked eyes with this fact yet, but I wasn’t only here for Haneen. After an
hour and a half signs appeared for Akka, and my blood thumped a little harder, and then
we turned off the motorway and drew up by the arches of the old city. I paid the driver and
wheeled my suitcase down an alley, and when I saw the blue sky burning above the sea
wall I stopped. I stared at the ancient stonework, at the dazzling water. I hadn’t prepared
myself for this bodily impact, the memory of my senses. A few red chairs and tables were
arranged beside the pier. I approached the wall, leaned my bag against it, and stayed there
a moment. The sun heated my face, my hands. My armpits began to sweat. I reached for
the top of the wall and pulled myself up onto it.

Some forty feet below me, the water crashed against the parapet, foaming and jolting
back. Where the wall curved on my right, a group of boys stood in a line. All elbows, hands
on hips, shifting their weight from leg to leg, watching each other, waiting. Two were small
and skinny, barefoot, with brown sunlit shoulder blades. Most of the older ones wore
sneakers that left dark marks on the stone, and necklaces of drops fell from the seams of
their shorts. The first in line took a running start and leapt, knees up. He seemed to fall for
a long time, his body unfolding. Then he cracked the water and disappeared. When his
head bobbed up again, the other boys didn’t react. I guess I was expecting them to
applaud, or something. The diver flicked his hair and swam for the rocks.

I had a vision of my own body flipping down from the boundary. My thin cotton trousers
ballooning, stiffening on the air like sails, receding as my figure plunged to the water. I both
saw and could feel the wall scraping my forearms through my shirt. Legs parting, one hand
reaching out, smashed in an instant and bloody on the rock.

The boys gathered closer together and were talking, eyeing me where I sat. Down below,
the water drank the stones, leaving black circles dilating on their surfaces. In the distance,
tank boats cut through the waves. The sea noise calmed me. After a while I jumped back
onto the ground and dragged my bag away to hail another taxi. Could you take me to Haifa
please? I asked in English for some reason. Maybe because I couldn’t be sure he was
Palestinian, not even in old Akka, or maybe because only two hours ago I’d been
emphasising my Englishness in the hopes of smoothing my passage between the border
police. The car was stuffy with the old day’s heat. The radio was playing an Arabic song. A
string of cowrie shells hung from the rear-view mirror.
‘Wael Hejazi. You know him?’ said the driver.

‘No. Is he famous?’

The driver laughed. He sang along for a bit. ‘Holidays?’

‘I’m visiting my sister.’

‘Jewish?’

I pretended I hadn’t heard. I think he had guessed I was Arab or I doubt he would have
asked. I didn’t like these dances between drivers and their passengers, testing origin,
allegiance, degrees of ignorance. In the final move before the jingle of change he would
probably burst out with some story of loss and political alienation. I resisted the idea of
being bonded to this person. I put a hand up to where the window permitted a hiss of air,
the words on my lips to ask him to open it wider, but then if I spoke the language one thing
would lead to another and I didn’t feel like getting into it with – Layth, said the licence in
Latin letters beside the Hebrew, under its cracked lamination, suspended on the taxi wall.
A young photograph, a little smile, the moustache black, grey in the mirror, where his eyes
flicked again to me and back to the road.

‘Would you mind opening the window?’ I said in English.

The breeze sliced through the taxi. Palm trees spiked the roadsides. Pine forests. Pylons.