Beneath the Howl of Hunger
Alaa Alqaisi
Long before hunger lays claim to the body, it loosens the scaffolding of language, erasing clarity, dismantling rhythm, and leaving behind the fragile debris of thought. What begins as a coherent paragraph soon dissolves into fragments, until all that remains is the involuntary tremor of a mind too starved to hold meaning. And so, before my language deserts me entirely, I write this, less to be understood than to remain traceable, to leave behind the shape of thought before it slips into silence.
I try to lose myself in work, to forget, even momentarily, this pain that coils around our small, besieged city. It is not simply the ache of spirit or grief, though there is plenty of both; it is a physical, relentless hunger that gnaws from within, rising with a low, constant howl that reverberates through the body like a second heartbeat. It clings to my ribs like a curse whispered too many times to be undone. No matter how I attempt to distract myself—by folding the same shirt again, by translating a familiar line, by stirring salt into boiling water as if that might change it—hunger resurfaces with quiet authority, like smoke seeping through invisible cracks in the floor. The letters on my screen blur. Words I once wielded with ease now evade me, slipping out of reach as if they, too, are trying to escape this place. I rise to pray, but the moment I stand, dizziness seizes me, sharp and sudden, wrapping its fingers around my throat. My legs tremble beneath me, and I wonder if I have become too hollow to stand before God.
Hunger develops its own language, a silent, corrosive one. It does not arrive with drama or noise, but rather seeps into the body and mind until both are softened, bent, worn. It lays itself down like dust: on thoughts, on memories, on the fragile shell of skin. George Orwell, whose words once seemed to belong to another time and place, now speaks directly to the private vertigo behind my eyes: “Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition… as though one had been turned into a jellyfish.” That metaphor, once grotesque and abstract, now feels precise. This is what I have become: structureless, adrift, incapable of anchoring thought to intention. I reach for an idea and find it dissolving before I can grasp it, leaving behind only a pale impression of what once lived in clarity.
There are moments when Gaza feels less like a city and more like the residue of a nightmare that belonged to someone else, some faraway spectator who dreamed it into being and then forgot to wake up. It does not feel like part of the world, not in the way cities are connected to rivers or nations or time. Instead, it feels as though we have been stitched into a parallel script, a myth reenacted endlessly for the benefit of those who watch without consequence. But unlike myths, this one has no moral arc, no catharsis. There is no end to the horror, no fade to black. The children here continue to age without ever growing up. The elderly speak of bread the way others speak of lost lovers. And somewhere, always, there is an audience asking how this story ends. But for those of us living it, there is no ending—only the slow receding of possibility with each day of silence.
The siege weighs heavily on language itself. Even my sentences suffer under it. Syntax buckles beneath the pressure of empty stomachs. Grammar is no match for despair. I sit before my keyboard and try to summon what once came so naturally, but the words scatter midway, like startled birds forgetting how to fly. It is not a matter of forgetfulness but erosion, a steady unraveling of everything I believed belonged to me. And yet I persist. I speak. I write. Because silence would be a deeper form of defeat. Testimony, even if cracked and uncertain, is the only offering I can still give. To keep it locked inside would be to let this hunger consume even the voice that names it.
Living in Gaza now requires a choreography of absence. We don’t walk; we drift. We don’t eat; we search. We don’t sleep; we remain alert, ears tuned to the sound that will send us running. Survival is a ritual of adaptation in a world that offers none. And yet, in the midst of these broken routines, I still encounter moments that remind me of our stubborn humanity. A woman tears her last piece of flatbread in half and offers it to her neighbor. A child draws bright flowers on a wall blackened by fire and soot. A grandmother recites Al-Fatiha over boiling water, though she knows there is nothing to add to it. These gestures are not illusions. They are acts of resistance. In a place where institutions and systems have collapsed, it is the human gesture—freely given—that preserves the sacred.
Hunger reveals truths no one seeks. It strips away every comforting illusion and shows what remains when there is nothing left to lose. I have learned that dignity is not a possession, but a practice—it emerges in the way one endures, not in what one owns. I have come to understand that memory, too, is a form of defiance. To name one’s pain, to record it faithfully, is to refuse erasure. I do not seek pity. Pity flattens. It turns Gaza into an object, a cautionary tale, a headline too often repeated to provoke response. What I seek—what I insist upon—is remembrance. Not simply of the hunger, but of the minds it has clouded, the hands that tremble over a final cup of tea, the eyes that scan the sky not for stars but for signs of fire.
Metaphors here are broken. Even beauty, in this place, arrives with a wound. But still, the cypress tree in our alley continues to bloom, defiantly red. Still, a child hums as she skips over puddles of ash. Still, I write. Because somewhere in this devastation, meaning survives. Not meaning as explanation—there is no justification for this—but meaning as record, as presence, as a refusal to be forgotten. We were here. We loved, we mourned, we thought. We built language from ruin, shaped stories from ash, and held onto memory even as it slipped through our hands like water.
And when the world finally turns the page—if it ever does—let it not say that Gaza was silent. Let it not imagine we vanished without speaking. We spoke with mouths filled with dust. We sang, even with broken teeth. We prayed from fractured knees. And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that remain.
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.
