SAMBAC BENEATH UNLIKELY SKIES
by Heba Hayek
129 pp. Hajar Press, £12.50
To most people, the Gaza Strip is an abstract brutality. One skirmish at a time, only its tropes can be identified in fleeting newscasts. Heba Hayek remembers her hometown comprehensively. In Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies (Hajar Press, 2021), her narrator’s adolescence reflects the gravity of daily life in a place known solely for its days that become history. By telling of a foreground that is kept from headlines, Sambac proposes that the substance of any place is embedded in its most unnewsworthy events.
The book opens with one of these ordinary frames titled “Guns and Figs,” one of 22 short prose chapters. On a Friday in 1993, a primary school-aged narrator spends the afternoon on a family drive along the Mediterranean. Siblings scuffle for the front seat and barbecues line the shore. She breathes salty air while absorbing the sun through a moving window. After being pulled over at the Abu Holi checkpoint, the narrator’s father exits the car and reassures them that he’ll return momentarily. Hayek’s commitment to the unsensational maintains the scene with normalcy: I just found out that Reem and I wear the same panties, the narrator continues to her mother. Mama listens and peels figs, her daughter’s queerness trembling in the backseat. Baba’s return attempts to quell any nerves that his absence created. Just regular questions, nothing important. Mama pivots: Did you know your daughter showed her panties to her classmate? Fairuz echos on a cassette tape as they discuss proper behavior with their daughter. The Mediterranean stays beside them, but they don’t make it to the water. In the process of discovering herself, the narrator notices a more vigilant Baba on future drives. The title reflects his ongoing struggle to discern whether a distant object is another checkpoint or just a fruit cart.
Two or so decades later, “It’s Ohio, Sweetheart” describes a heap of laundry in an implicating second person. Before you even get the chance to put it in the closet, you read the news on Twitter. Now attending an American graduate school, the narrator views on a screen what was once outside her window. Returning to laundry, she considers an Occupy Wall Street T-shirt that she (you) got on Amazon, wincing at its imperfect aspiration.
This is not to say that Sambac is void of more familiar violence. In Ask Me Anything, the narrator shares that her school never trained students for emergencies–we just knew what to do. She and her classmates froze at the first signs of explosions, but after settling haphazardly under desks and being reminded by their teacher that the one you hear isn’t the one that kills you, there persisted a notion that despite (or beside) all of this, their lives continued. “Those ten minutes were ours,” the narrator says, describing her and her best friend Lubna’s strategies against fear. Their ritual involved taking turns asking each other questions, any questions in the span of minutes it took for the sounds to dissipate. In this concentrated flicker of time, they discussed everything from changing the shower pressure to how it felt to kiss someone. Hayek then cuts through characteristic tenderness with a reminder that the narrator’s reality rivals her resilience. Once, after the sirens stopped, Lubna was asked to the principal’s office, and her father’s name was broadcasted in the news that night. Without revealing whether he had lost his life, Hayek demonstrates how instantly thin the line between life and death can shrink in Gaza.
In another segment of the same piece, Hayek’s narrator sits in a future a therapy session and is asked if she has any questions. Her response follows a tangential thought about a handful of technical terms that therapy has taught her. New knowledge rationalized the anxieties she faced under that desk, and identified their consequences as diagnoses. Logic and psychology countered the mental safety that she and Lubna sustained as schoolchildren coping past moments of survival and extreme stress. The narrator shifts again to the thought of her aunt insisting that she doesn’t need therapy (only home cooking) and wonders which method is more effective before admitting, I don’t have any questions.
It is in such quiet moments of surrender that Hayek exhibits the depth of what her narrator has seen. Her tone becomes solemn in its knowing. It suggests that this is not a war story because telling one would fail to put ineffable things into gratifying language. Sambac fills in the diaristic blanks of the genre; the narrator knows war as a lens, not an event. For Hayek, war is both a setting and protagonist. It oscillates between slow death and vanishing into uncertainty. She is careful to balance the personal and anthropological throughout kaleidoscopic segments in Gaza, London, and Oxford, Ohio. In tracing a fragmented girlhood to the present, these memories cohere in a poignant logic of exile.
