I smelled death within two years of my birth. As a matter of fact, I think I smelled death every time my dad cuddled me. I smelled death every time he cuddled me because of the bruises that the occupation forces left on his body while they kept him in their death-scented cells.
I smelled death every time at school when I had to answer my friends who asked about my dad. I smelled death because my father no longer exists; my father is a martyr. I tasted it the day our first-grade teacher asked us what our parents do? I said my mom is a beautiful strong doctor but my dad, but my dad whom I don’t remember… He was martyred two years after my birth. I smelled it with every shocked, curious look of pity on the other students’ faces.
But I was too young to understand what that smell and taste in my mouth was until recently during the ongoing genocide which uncovered the truth for me, that this smell was and is the smell of death. The smell is choking me like locked tears in my eyes… like death from a missile strike.
I have always wondered why I was depressed until I knew that this was because of the death smell under my nose all these years to the point that the smell blinded my brain from feeling any other pleasant thing. I always wondered why I didn’t remember anything from my early childhood, yet now I realize that the smell of death, fear, and wars was so strong that it blocked my temporal lobe from functioning and blocked my childhood memories with it.
I tasted death no greater than the day when I saw our neighborhood surrounded by rubble and tanks. I smelled death every hour of the first siege on Al-Shifa Hospital, wondering if my mom — who was a volunteer health worker at the hospital — would live, wondering if she would have a sip of water today or not.
But now I realize it is more than a smell or a taste, it is as our grandmothers say “a rock on the heart.” And this rock has been pressing on my heart since I was a kid. It had been pressing so hard that I started to suffocate. And I realized that this rock was clinging to most Palestinians’ hearts, and it is immovable.
When I was asked to write about my mother’s horrifying experience in the Al-Shifa Hospital’s siege in November 2023, I smelled death which made me want to run away from writing. I became angry and defensive. I noticed that my body was screaming at people, but I wasn’t. I remembered the 10 days my mom was besieged in Al-Shifa Hospital where I tasted death again. But how can I explain to my friends that I was shouting at this world not shouting at them? I was cursing for the 10 days my mom spent in Al-Shifa Hospital while I was wondering if she had any luck getting a sip of water. I was frustrated from my helplessness in those 10 days I spent on the couch in Cyprus, thousands of kilometers away from my home, from my mother, lying down while the smell of death was suffocating me, watching the tanks getting closer to Al-Shifa Hospital live on TV, watching the soldiers acting in their made-up orchestrated bloody theater handing out boxes that show to the audience “Medical Aid,” “Baby Food,” while all I read from these boxes is “Death.”
How can I explain to them that while I know that my mom is there, in that very building on the TV of that theater, I know too that it is possible that she could be the next execution victim and could be named as a “targeted terrorist” in a hospital?
How can I explain to them that while I was helplessly lying on the couch watching the news at 3 a.m., I was expecting any moment the call that would inform me of the death of my mother and that I was actually ready for it as if I already knew?
How can I explain to them that besides that alarming smell of death all around me, my rotten death-smelling body was forcing me to sleep while the tanks were getting closer and while I was watching the quadcopters maliciously shooting at people as if it were in an animal field and this was hunting season.
How can I explain to them that the Zionist occupation army bombed Al-Shifa, hungered babies, fathers, and mothers, and then they came with clean white boxes written on them “Aid”…oh the white privilege! It is what I was shouting about — that white privilege or as Ghassan Kanafani said, “They steal your bread, then give you a crumb of it … and demand you to thank them for their generosity.” Oh, their audacity! They bombed houses and stole them, then they came with white tents written on them “UN” and boxes labeled with “Aid,” and expect us to accept them happily or worse, thank them.
My body at night rebels from all the deaths and anger. I drip sweat. I wake to my sweat like a waterfall on my body and I smell death. I try to wipe my sweat from my face but I smell it more.
I try to turn on the AC but my body laughs as if it’s a matter of temperature. It laughs so hard, mocking my foolish lies, and it screams at me ,“Wake up! It’s the smell of death. Wake up! It’s the anger in you dripping down. Wake up! It is the hunting season.”
At night before sleeping I lay down knowing I will dream about our house surrounded by death and rubble. I smell it all around my exhausted body from those war nightmares about those deaths and that unidentified baby’s body under the rubble. I smell it in the videos I watch during the day and when my coworker passes by and sees my face has turned yellow and asks, “Are you okay?” I wipe my face trying to hide the smell of death and say, “Yes, I am fine.”
I remember asking my mom how the situation was at Al-Shifa Hospital before the siege. She answered, “It smelled like blood everywhere.” And as I write these words my death-smelling sweat starts to drip down my body, and I get angry again the next day because I smelled death.
During a university seminar on grief, I smelled death and fear as my heart started pumping when I heard the professor stating the definition of grief. I started feeling pain in my chest and the death attack was already starting to get me. But what am I grieving for? The ongoing genocide? The four other wars that I lived through as a child in Gaza? Or the loss of my father who they took in my early years so that I don’t remember him?
During an interview my mom was invited to give after the siege, she said, “I remember there was a 12-year-old girl without her parents in Al-Shifa Hospital, having burns all over her body and as I was touching her to comfort her she was telling me, ‘Doctor! Please lay beside me.’ But I could not and I told her so, so I held her hands till she passed away by dawn while holding my hand. I cannot forgive myself for not laying beside her, till now I can smell her burnt skin, I can feel her burnt skin against my hands!”
But how petty of me to say that my chest was hurting while listening to that seminar or that I smelled death whereas my mom felt it, held its hand, saw it, and smelled it.
The professor in the seminar said grief takes on average two years to process. But did any Palestinian ever have any break to grieve? We were born grieving…. We were born to death, the baby’s first cry after birth in Palestine is due to the smell of death. Did I have time to grieve over my father when I was roughly born to his death? How can I grieve over memories that the smell of death scared away?
“Collective grief,” according to this professor, is when a whole community grieves over a crisis. And “disenfranchised grief” is when a person feels guilty for their grief because someone else’s loss is more worthy. However, it is important to remember that no suffering is more valid than another.
All I thought when I heard this definition was that I was pitiful and silly. How could that professor say that my suffering is as valid as my mother’s or as Hind’s, the six-year-old who was alone, locked up with martyrs’ bodies in a car and surrounded by death and tanks, while I’m thousands of kilometers away from death locked in my room with the TV news. I do not think any psychologist or professor of psychology would understand that my feelings are indeed not as valid as hers!
Home is where someone belongs, and I once belonged to my home in Gaza, which is surrounded by wars and death. The occupation that created these rotten memories for us, has now decided to wipe Gaza off the earth. I no longer have a home. All I have from home is the smell of death and death is where I belong.
Editor’s note: Majd dedicates this essay to her mother, Raja’a Nour, in recognition of her struggle raising her and her brother as a single mother, and to the memory of her father, Raed Musleh, who was captured during the First Intifada and tortured for three years, resulting in his martyrdom.
