“Every Moment Is a Life”: susan abulhawa on the Authority to Narrate

You’ve previously approached reality through fiction, yet in this book you turn to direct testimonies, diary entries, and documentary forms.

Has Gaza led you to conclude that certain experiences can no longer be adequately represented within the framework of fiction?

Fiction requires a distance that an ongoing genocide cannot offer. Most novels are structurally achieved in retrospect. Novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy were shaped by hindsight, after years of metabolizing history. That’s a formal problem before it’s a philosophical one. You can’t achieve fiction’s requisite compositional distance toward a moment that hasn’t stopped happening to the people telling you about it. 

Testimony and diary traditions have historically filled this space. Take, for example, The Diary of Anne Frank, or Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo by Zlata Filipoviċ. But this does not amount to the verdict that fiction is inadequate to narrate atrocity. My own novels are already fictionalized forms of testimony, built from real Palestinian history and family accounts. What is different with this anthology is more about who has the right or the standing to narrate this specific, ongoing history.

The statements I make in the introduction are about the authority of this book, not the genre. A novelist writing invented Palestinian characters in Gaza from outside an ongoing genocidal siege would be exercising imaginative authority I have no right to take with a “still moving” atrocity. Unlike historical fiction — written in retrospect by not only those who lived that history, but the generations that followed whose lives were shaped by that history — narrating an ongoing genocide proposes a set of ethics of who gets to narrate that cannot be sidestepped. Narrative authority must be handed to the people who hold the only legitimate claim to it — the only people who truly understand it. That’s what I aimed to do with this anthology.

Narrative authority must be handed to the people who hold the only legitimate claim to it — the only people who truly understand it. That’s what I aimed to do with this anthology.

The book refuses the temptations that often accompany literary witness to atrocity. It does not sanctify or console. The stories keep the writers' vanity, anger, impatience, and desire intact alongside their grief: a woman who wants to look elegant, a father exhausted by provision, a writer who admits she wants to leave Gaza and not look back. Huzama Habayeb explains how editing the Arabic version over WhatsApp for months was itself part of the book’s presence; that editing was a kind of vigil — watching for gray ticks to turn blue, sometimes getting news of a death instead of a revision. Nor do the stories offer redemption. They do not resolve into a verdict or a moral lesson. The book is simply a collection of moments, achingly human moments, a beauty that implicates us all in atrocity.

In the face of violence that constantly exceeds the capacities of language, what, in your view, fundamentally resists narration?

Witnessing Gaza, however briefly and however limited, taught me the limitations of language. In fact, I’d say the utter insufficiency of language. I have learned that some things can be so extreme and terrible, so shocking and painful that they actively destroy language and place the mind in a prelinguistic state. One must rely on feelings for which there are no words because the feeling itself is disorienting, untethered, previously unfelt and unknown, and too vast for any vocabulary. Maybe this is where the “distance” I mentioned previously is necessary. The resistance to narration is perhaps that these intense events must sit and wait for words that can only come with the passage of time.

This explains why the generations who lived through the Nakba or Naksa were slow to talk about it. It was only with the passage of time that these oral testimonies could be adequately captured and younger generations could put them into narrative form.  What resists narration is the human experience that exists outside common experience, and therefore common language.

In the process of collecting and editing these testimonies, where did you locate the ethical boundary between remaining faithful to the raw intensity of the witnesses’ accounts and preserving their human dignity and psychological integrity in the final text?

I don’t think there’s a fixed line, but something negotiated case by case, in real time, with the storyteller as the final arbiter. I saw my job as giving them narrative “tools” to make their own creations. I tried to push them past the metacognitive version of their stories — the flattened, already processed account they’d told many times (our house was bombed, they pulled me out of the rubble, then…) — toward the raw sensory fragments underneath it (a flash of red light, a weight on my back, gravel in my mouth), because that’s where the actual charge of the experience lives, not in the summary. 

Before the workshops, I collected stories and testimonies from women recovering in a hospital in Rafah. I pressed them for the sensory details, but I also drew a line when it came to their agency and ownership of their stories. Some of them only wanted me to take notes. Some allowed me to record their voices, but not video. A handful invited me to record them fully. I reported on this process briefly when I returned and drew criticism from Western feminists who accused me of “making them relive their trauma” without being a trained therapist. They accused me of harming my friends to extract their stories. But here is what Westerners do not understand: they assume singular legitimacy for their model of one-on-one therapy. But there are other forms — indigenous, communal circles of processing. I grew up in a family where women’s circles were common: cooking, baking, gossiping, crying, grooming, and healing circles — and they make intuitive sense to me. So what these Western critics saw as opportunistic extraction was in fact facilitated grief, done in their own words, on their own terms, inside a circle of women who shared their experiences.

The dignity and authority of the material wasn’t protected by softening the stories, but by making sure the person telling it never stopped being the author of how it was told.

This isn’t to say that I wasn’t negotiating boundaries between fidelity and literary merit — or [careful] not to steer the stories into spectacle to be consumed rather than witnessed. In practical terms, that boundary was held by two things. First, ongoing consent. An example of that would be Huzama Habayeb corresponding with the contributors for months, revising in collaboration with them and absorbing further loss mid-edit rather than treating the manuscript as fixed once collected. Second, the dignity and authority of the material wasn’t protected by softening the stories, but by making sure the person telling it never stopped being the author of how it was told.

Global movements, such as #MeToo, have been built on the principle of believing survivors. Yet in the context of Gaza, we have witnessed a form of silence or selectivity among mainstream strands of Western feminism regarding the suffering and violence endured by Palestinian women.

How do you understand the ways in which these emancipatory movements have reproduced the very structural and racial biases they theoretically oppose?

Western feminism assumes a universal female subject who looks, dresses, and behaves in a way that is legible (ironically) to Western men, and specifically to Western colonial-patriarchal geopolitics. Women outside of those parameters are carefully selected for solidarity.  

When the solidarity of Western feminists requires them to implicate their country’s geopolitical ally; when it requires them to expand the sisterhood to include the agency of Muslim women or women of “otherized” cultures; when it requires them to interrogate the veracity of Western men (and women) in these instances — then their feminism collapses.

Western feminism only works for Muslim or Arab women when the violence against them comes from Muslim or Arab perpetrators. In other words, other women can be included in the sisterhood only when their suffering affirms Western ideas about those women.

Take literature as an example. The books about Eastern women that were championed by Western feminist book clubs in the United States, Europe, and Australia are novels like Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and A Woman is No Man. These books became literary sensations and sold millions of copies throughout the West. Of course, they’re beautifully written novels, but not more beautiful than hundreds of others. What they have in common is that they all affirm Western ideas about Muslim women being oppressed by Muslim men, Muslim societies, and perhaps by Islam itself. Each of these novels reinforces the idea that Muslim women need “saving” from Islamic ethos. This framing confirms the civilizational hierarchy baked into Western feminism, rather than threatening it. In these examples, Western feminism and colonial-extraction rhetoric are on common ground, so that “protecting women” then becomes a vocabulary that both states and feminists deploy together against Muslim populations.

But that call for protection of women is withheld when the violence is inflicted by the West, of which Israel is included despite its physical location in the heart of SWANA (Southwestern Asia and North Africa). Gaza has revealed this hypocrisy in real time. When the perpetrators are Israeli — including either individuals or the state apparatus — and the survivors are Palestinian women enduring sexual torture, starvation, displacement, and the murder of their children, there’s either total silence or the kind of language that never reaches the register of atrocity or outrage.

When the alleged perpetrators were Hamas fighters, a tidal wave of Western feminists organized quickly and forcefully around “believing survivors” despite the fact that not a single Israeli victim has ever been credibly identified, nor has a single piece of forensic evidence been presented. Some even felt the response was too muted and launched the “#MeToo unless you’re a Jew” campaign, a typical charge of Jewish persecution while the so-called “Jewish State” was executing a literal genocide for all to see. 

The selectivity you’re pointing to is a structural feature of how “believing survivors” gets operationalized along racial, cultural, religious, and ideological lines by Western feminists. What Gaza exposes is that the movement itself operates inside a prior hierarchy of whose national or religious identity makes their pain legible as pain. 

An emancipatory framework of feminism built to unsettle one axis of power (gender) clearly does not unsettle another (empire, colonialism, race), unless it was built with all in view from the start. Transnational feminists like Angela Davis, Nawal el-Saadawi, and the authors of Feminism for the 99% have argued for exactly that expansion for years, often against resistance from the more single-minded strand of Western feminists.

When courts and international institutions fail to halt the machinery of war, how does your new book, with its insistence on the value of “every moment of life,” redefine the role of literature in sustaining the idea of justice?

Although international courts and institutions were built on lofty ideals of universal justice, they have functioned in practice as tools of extraction and control by wealthy nations against the resource-rich Global South. The evidence is clear in the court dossiers going after African, West Asian, or South American leaders while the greatest war criminals of our time — the likes of George Bush (both of them), Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Keir Starmer, and so on — remained free to ravage our planet and the life it holds. 

These institutions further traffic in the abstractions that make atrocity legible to law — casualty counts, ceasefire violations, ICJ provisional measures, the endless deferral of “plausible” findings. Narrative, and by extension the anthology, does not appeal to the abstract. It does not peddle sensational headlines, political arguments, or numbers. It insists on a different unit of account: lived moments of real humans trying to survive a genocide.

The anthology asks what it felt like to boil hard-to-come-by coffee, wait in a breadline, give birth in a hospital corridor, mend a shoe, hunt for diapers, against a background of unfathomable colonial violence.

The book’s title is itself an argument against a discourse that renders Palestinian death as aggregate and Palestinian life as background. It insists each moment carries its own weight and does not need to culminate in martyrdom or verdict to matter.

That's the task of literature: not evidence-gathering in the juridical sense, but a human form of accounting. International law asks what happened and to whom in categories that can be prosecuted or denied. The anthology asks what it felt like to boil hard-to-come-by coffee, wait in a breadline, give birth in a hospital corridor, mend a shoe, hunt for diapers, against a background of unfathomable colonial violence.

Reema Abu Mousa's story turns ration coupons and a mother's plate of beans and rice into what one reviewer calls "a map of humiliation." Diana Islayh takes the reader into a makeshift toilet where "privacy, water and bodily dignity have been annihilated." These are not the details a tribunal weighs, but they are the ones that make genocide legible as lived experience rather than statistic, which is the actual mechanism of genocide: turning small routines into day-taxing ordeals, every basic need into negotiation, and every quiet moment into terror and loss. 

Literature numbers what passive voices cannot. It gives names, sound, color, and texture to what the Western mind has only perceived (if at all) in cold, two-dimensional aggregates.

In his essay “Unmournable Bodies,” Teju Cole identifies a structural distinction between lives whose deaths are publicly mourned and those whose deaths are rendered invisible. In your view, what linguistic and narrative mechanisms does Western media use to reproduce this distinction in its coverage of Gaza?

Cole's essay identifies something like a grammar of grief — how certain deaths register as tragedy, while others register as statistics or as background noise to a "conflict,” itself an insidious word that creates parity between the powerful vengeance of the colonizer and the existential resistance of a captive indigenous people. 

The passive voice is the most cited example. "Palestinians died" or "civilians were killed.” The killer is hidden, as though the estimated 680,000 human death toll in Gaza is the result of the weather and not Israeli decisions to mercilessly bomb, starve, and destroy. 

On the other hand, Israeli deaths are individualized. They have faces, names, ages, occupations, photographs, people who loved them, while Palestinians are numbers reported by “Hamas-run Health Ministry,” the kind of reporting that not only dehumanizes the real victims, but also makes you doubt the veracity of the numbers themselves.

Western media has rendered the first livestreamed genocide as “collateral damage” resulting from “legitimate self-defense,” a framing that beggars belief, logic, and language. It is precisely the kind of reporting that removes a moral cost. This framing does not provoke the conscience; it invokes a sense of justice, however tragic or dark. The language is intentional, especially when juxtaposed with the clear reporting on Ukraine or the emotive reporting on Israeli deaths. 

Other mechanisms involve internal media style guides. The Intercept reported in 2024 on leaked NYT and CNN guidelines that reportedly restricted terms like "genocide," "ethnic cleansing," or "occupied territory" while permitting "war" and "self-defense" more freely. Instead of saying Israel “dropped bombs” on “family tent encampments,” they use the inert “military operation” against “Hamas targets.”

There’s also the temporal framing. The clock only ever starts on October 7 in Western reporting — the context of eight decades of violent colonial occupation doesn’t exist. Israel’s genocidal blockade since 2006 is erased, its endless “mowing the grass” bombings of Gaza never mentioned, nor do we read about how Israeli snipers murdered hundreds of unarmed protestors demanding a dignified life with the full menu of human rights.