Holding space open: Wor(l)ding the ruins of Gaza

Abstract

Witnessing the erasure of spaces and landscapes in Gaza reveals as much the ethical and ontological necessity to narrate as it does the limits of writing. In this commentary on Lubna Abu Sitta’s intervention, we grasp this tension by thinking with her how embodied writing can narrate what seems impossible for words to capture. Abu Sitta’s writing in-place and through lived ruination voices affects, attachments, vulnerabilities, losses, and exposures that circumnavigate bodies, while importantly holding space open for memory and life in a way that resist immense spatial erasure. This urges us to think embodied displacement geographically, bringing attention to ways of inhabiting the ruins and destruction with makeshift infrastructures, memories, and narrations of survival. These ways and the losses they carry might not lend themselves easily to academic narration, but they are nevertheless carved into bodies, memories, affects, atmospheres, materialities and landscapes—to spaces and bodies that are worlding the impossible in the ruins of Gaza.