Gaza Held in Time: A Tapestry of Two Lives is a powerful recollection of memories – of all the things that have been lost, or rather taken. The book is a resounding, honest call in a world that’s silenced Palestinian voices for the past seventy-seven years. It acts as a hand reaching out – for empathy, for understanding, for humanity. 

Teenage writers Tareq AlSourani and Yara Nasser beautifully blend their voices to recount the stories of their motherland from two perspectives: Tareq’s from exile in Egypt, and Yara’s from home. With both individual and conjointly written chapters – each signed off with the name of its author – the book, as Yara puts it, shows “two versions of survival trying to meet on the same page.” 

Through a series of event accounts, prose-style reflections and recollections, poems, and essay-style writings, Yara and Tareq’s words aim to reflect the conflicted feelings of young Gazans. They recite the anguish of loving a motherland that’s suffering. What once were “clean streets, busy cafes, big supermarkets… bakeries, and beautiful trees” now lie under rubble. Their writing serves as a way to immortalize what once was, what can never be returned. Their words act as a beacon of truth, a shared responsibility. 

Yara’s voice is haunting – her prose juxtaposes the horrors of genocide with the beauty of the things that make Gaza her home. The blooming flowers planted in her family garden, uprooted carelessly by Israeli soldiers who invaded and ransacked her family home. The thorough erasure of Palestine – its cities, its culture, its people. A motherland that can no longer protect its children, and yet, as Tareq wonderfully puts it, “leaving still feels like exile.”

After being forced to flee with his family to Egypt, Tareq dutifully shoulders the responsibility of immortalizing Gaza and its people through his writing – describing its citrus trees, its strawberry fields, its historical sites, its cafés by the sea. He recounts the vibrant details of Gaza’s main market, and the smells of the neighbourhood’s bread and falafel. He gives voice to “the naked truth,” as he says, and this truth is that Palestinians are suffering, and it shouldn’t be ignored any longer. 

Tareq and Yara’s words make us as readers realize how complicit we all are in this genocide, and how normalized this kind of violence has become, how desensitized we have become to it. They ask us, what are you going to do about it? And urge us to resist – to carry the heavy responsibility of sharing the truth, however harsh it may be. 

Gaza Held in Time reminds us how necessary community is, especially for  survival. As Yara tells us, Palestinians are raised on the proverb “My shoulders are your subsistence and supply; my tears are your water.” It is our turn now to hold out our hands. To gather in empathy and community with one another. To resist. To share the truth. To not let others censor it. 

In Yara’s words: “People talk of resistance as if it were a choice. But when your life is made unlivable, resistance is breathing.” It is refusing to let the world pretend that they don’t see what is happening, that we’re not all victims of the same oppressors. 

Yara and Tareq’s voices ring loud and clear. And we must listen.mRb