My piece ‘Mother’ – performed at Norwich Writers Rebel Open Mic

I run Norwich Writers Rebel and every year we hold on an open mic in the Quakers Meeting House. Every time, I go through the customary panic of worrying that not enough people will come (they always do) or that they won’t enjoy it (never the case.) I like to have a mixture of music, poetry and prose and so whilst some of it is curated i.e. I ask a few folk to come along, most of the performers are part of the Norwich Writers Rebel collective or they’ve seen posters around the city and ask for a slot.

I also wanted to add an extra element this time around and asked for my family’s advice on how the audience could participate in some way. We decided to provide everyone with a slip of paper and a pencil or pen beneath their seats. In the introduction, I asked people to write something on the paper that inspired them during the course of the evening or that stood out for them. I read some of these beautiful responses at the end of the night. One person even wrote, I feel more hopeful after this evening.

Here are just a few of the many wonderful words people wrote down:

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To weave together the terrible and the wonderful.

I try to nurture the green bird in my heart.

Look for the pockets of Joy.

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I’ve always wanted to perform myself but, because there are always a number of people wanting to share their work and it always runs a waitlist, I never do. This time however, I’d felt a piece brewing in my bones for some time before the event and I decided I would share what I’d written. And I feel, also, that it’s a shame to just share that piece once at the open mic without others being able to read it, as I spent quite some time writing it. It was in a piece in three stages, and I asked my close friends Cata and Kim to come up on stage with me to read the first two parts.

It doesn’t really need much of an introduction, as I think the words speak for themselves.

MOTHER

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It is Mother’s Day and I am lying on the ground outside Waterstones with a white sheet draped around me to look like a body bag. My husband is lying next to me and we stick our arms out awkwardly from underneath and clasp hands, reassuringly winding our fingers around one another’s. The latest war on Gaza has been raging for a year and a half and we have come here on this sunny April day to honour the mothers of Palestine who have lost children. Too many mothers. This is surreal. We can hear flyers being handed out above and around us and the footsteps of people walking past us on the street, a strange soundscape of exclamations, support and irritation. I feel exposed, a dead person alive on a city street. I hear one man close to my head tutting before he says ‘Bit much, isn’t it?’  I want to jump up, sheet wrapped around me and stand like a spectre in the street not ravaged by war; where people can shop and walk in safety and cry ‘Yes! It is a bit much that our taxes are killing children in their thousands. It IS a bit much.’ But I don’t. I continue to lie there, hands intertwined with my husband’s, the sensations washing over me of shame at what is happening and relief that today I am dead, but really, I couldn’t be more alive.

I did not expect to become obsessed with a peregrine falcon. I knew that she was sitting on a nest at the top of Norwich Cathedral, but somehow I went from that vague knowledge to having the webcam up on my browser to checking in on her multiple times during the day. Even as I type this, I have her on half the screen, her grey feathers ruffled in the wind and her sharp yellow beak tucked into a wing. Behind her spreads Norwich’s skyline, a tapestry of rooftops, playing fields and church spires. On a number of occasions, I have even found myself checking  the webcam before I go to bed, the screen dimmed to nighttime mode and I just stare, marvelling. It is compulsive. On the rare occasions she moves from her position to fly away for food, I see four eggs, smooth as pebbles. I wonder how many other people are watching her.

This is motherhood unlike anything I have seen before, her devotion to these eggs; the way she sits here beneath the pouring rain and fierce sun and gusty winds. That instinct to protect and, in doing so, bring forth new life, is powerful. And then, one hatches, a tiny ball of helpless cotton wool. And then another. If I was transfixed before, it has now climbed to a new level. There is a feeling sometimes that too much tenderness, too much love, will break me, break some hard, protective outer layer. And I am fragile right now – I am not sleeping enough and the echoes of Gaza’s dead rattle relentlessly along the length of my bones. And yes, sometimes watching this peregrine falcon mother has moved me to tears. She helps bring me back to the present. She helps quell the fear and grief that surge through my body. I think, she is instinctively protecting her offspring.

I think, this feeling is so familiar with my own three children.

I think, so many will understand it – this desire to keep one’s children safe.

And yet.

And yet.

And yet.

No matter the ferocity of that instinct, the mothers of 18,000 children in Gaza have been unable to protect their young.

Her name is Shahd Alnaami. I made contact with her last year after reading an article she had written in Al Jazeera about the destruction of Gaza’s libraries. I couldn’t stop reading it, for libraries have shaped me my entire life, ever since I was a small child, wobbling on my bike to the mobile library that stood beside the park, clutching my precious stash of plastic green tickets which I exchanged to be granted portals to different worlds. In the words of Shahd, ‘I have never been out of Gaza before, yet I carry the whole world in my heart.’ I am not her mother. I have three beautiful, brave teenagers I am mother to. But still, I feel a mother’s protectiveness towards her. I often think about Shahd’s own mother and what a wonderful woman she must be to have raised such a kind, compassionate and courageous young woman. I also cannot begin to unpick the grief she must have experienced when Shahd’s thirteen-year-old sister Rahaf was killed in a bombing; how great the desire must be to keep her remaining three children safe and how fragile that must often feel.

So no, I am not Shahd’s mother. Her mother is called Nisreen and she is only ten months younger than me. And not only am I not her mother, but I will probably never know what it means to fear for the lives of my children in that way; of not knowing whether a bomb will come in the night or the clutch of hunger will not be able to free them. When my own children were small, I bought them a book called We are all born free. It was a book in pictures of the points of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By showing this to my children, I was saying to them This is how we as humans have a right to live. Don’t accept any less. And yet, pulling this off my bookshelf again recently, I was struck as I turned one beautifully illustrated page after another that for Shahd and the people of Gaza, not a single one of these declarations holds true. Not one. I stop at a page that reads: ‘We all have the right to a good life. Mothers and children and people who are old, unemployed or disabled have the right to be cared for.’ But we are not caring for these mothers and children, for the elderly, unemployed or disabled from a land far from here who we have othered. And we are not questioning the government who funds the manufacturing of the fighter planes and the bombs that will fall from the sky to maim and kill them.

We hear mainly of the human toll in Gaza. But what of the toll on Gaza’s land and ocean and more than human beings? Raw sewage pours into the Mediterranean as marine life chokes in its murky waters. Once-fertile soils are ruined. The land has been stripped bare of trees and Gaza’s animals have not been spared from death, starvation, trauma and disease.

Shahd has no idea how this story will unfold for her, but she keeps looking forwards. ‘There is always hope’ she has said on more than one occasion. ‘There is always hope.’  I do not know what to do. I feel such shame. So I do what a friend does for me: I read to her, short chapter instalments on WhatsApp from a book she’s always wanted to read. She does a tick symbol when she’s listened to that section and then I can read another. It breaks me, this way of communicating with her. It breaks me and it fills me. Sometimes, when she sends me voicenotes, I am struck by the bird song in the background. So yes, the birds still sing in Gaza. As I continue watching a peregrine falcon and her young, it binds me with a young woman from my privileged place of peace to a land of such suffering that I feel myself unstitched, untethered to reality. To humanity. Yet if Shahd has hope, then I, too, must allow hope to infuse my spirit. Let us speak their names. And I will begin with the name of one trying, desperately, courageously to survive: Shahd Alnaami.

It is Mother’s Day. Today, I am dead. But really, I am very much alive.

Thank you for reading this 🙏🏽 Compliment it with reading about how the first online writing workshop with Shahd Alnaami went here and do join us for her next online workshop at the end of this month.