How Many Times Must the Phoenix Burn? entries from the rupture | Heba Hayek

This commission is a written response to trans[*] glocal, a participatory performative gathering hosted by intrans___ (Intersectional Network for Transglocal Solidarity) in October 2024 at the Battersea Arts Centre, London. 

Through trans[*]glocal, intrans___ examined practices, languages, and contexts to grow potential new ecologies and alternative presents within local and cross-border contexts. More information and resources created around the gathering can be accessed here.

Heba Hayek’s piece is a reflection on the themes of the gathering, drawing from her reflections on the meaning of the words ‘here’ and ‘there’, through her lived experience as a writer split between London and Palestine during the genocide of her people.

Listen to the piece read by Heba Hayek.

How Many Times Must the Phoenix Burn?

entries from the rupture

“I said that it’s a portal, because it is a rupture and an opportunity for us to think twice about a return to a ‘normality’ which was absolutely unbearable for so many people.” 

Arundhati Roy

_before, there were two worlds: here and there.

Here was a city so thick with layers it stretched all the way beneath its surface, where more life emerged. Wednesdays were the longest days in my first semester at uni. Around six p.m. on November 14, 2012, I was swallowed by the bottom of an engineering building for three hours, attending an introductory practicum for drawing and model making. The room was filled with focus and precision I once found so delicious. You could hear the swipe of a pencil on thin cardboard when a murmur started to get closer. Out, it said. Everybody out. The city split in seconds. We’d done this so many times you’d think we knew what to do with the panic. Dark smoke filled the air as cars and people marched in opposite lines, sounds distant and concerned as the girls and I exchanged hugs and goodbyes. I waved east and a taxi slowed down. Yaffa Street, I desperately shouted. I can get you as far as Al-Saha, the driver said, not fully stopping the car. Here, wherever the driver dropped you, there would be someone you knew in the area. I jumped into the car and arrived near my auntie’s house with two cousins who had also found their way here. We gathered around an old TV balanced on a low stool, news broadcast streaming. My auntie moved frantically between the living room and kitchen, a phone pressed to her ear as she called one home after another, desperate to know where her children had ended up, as she handed us eggs and potato sandwiches.

Here was not everybody’s cup of tea, but that didn’t really matter. The city was always carried in a bluesky light no matter how dark the smoke got. It moved at a necessary sinuous pace, its people coiled up around its fingers, and in the crevices of its roads.

There was everything else. It resembled a distant territory people in the here wondered about, and each time they fought to stay, a blow of thick smoke covered their homes, countless of losses stacked in its belly. 

That was the order of things. We didn’t own the gates of our here, but sometimes we locked them up behind us, maybe as an act of rejection to the notice we were handed. Inhabitable, It said, a war-torn graveyard, a demolition site. When the rupture started to get bigger, things slid in and out of here and there and that caused some chaos that soon turned into alienation, the type you’d feel in colder cities, and in the buried parts of your chest. 

“The language we have to stretch and drain to capture the filth of

zionism becomes a butchered victim itself.” 

Hanan Habashi

_ lately writing has felt like a mirage, an elusive dream that only holds possibility if I am nowhere near it. When I think about writing, a knot in my throat twists around itself. How do you write this grief? How do you write in this grief? There is a whole new wrenched reality between me and my words. Things I never thought could happen, people and places I don’t fully realise are gone. What once felt like an endless possibility for world making and bending, a shift, and a mischievous attempt to break out, is now shrouded with shame and doubt. I remained in denial about it all of these months. Two weeks into the rupture, I found myself there, forced to carry the hefty weight of my careless grief. I sometimes imagine myself reaching to carry it even though I didn’t want it. I bent my knees and I looked at my reflection in it and all I saw was indifference that scared the hell out of me, and since then my reflection always seemed broken. I sat in astonishment as I watched the muzzle get tighter around my jaw each time I tried to say something. There were eyes around me, friendly, loving, even motherly eyes that told me it is for the best that we do that. Just for now, it’s hard to guess what you’re going to say next, just in case you say something you regret, and the muzzle kept getting tighter until my voice got buried down in my throat while I watched my city burn and my beloveds catch the fire alone, without a help in the world. How do I explain this grief? In my previous writing attempts, I had to teach myself a lot about my voice. I found myself drawn to beautiful things. I found the soft edges in the sudden turns, in the smashed doors, in the city’s boney knuckles,and its unwarranted withdrawals from me. The crackdown on voices of liberation was no surprise, yet it shook us to our core, forcing most of us to remain confined within the lines the state had drawn for us. We searched each other’s eyes for answers, fumbling through bursts of tears and choked attempts at understanding, but the muzzle only tightened. There was a rotten ugliness in that specific fear—not because people weren’t supposed to be scared, but because silence came with the illusion of safety. How could anyone justify such complicity? You couldn’t.       

The language we’d learned told us that there was a light at the end of that tunnel of darkness, so certain sentences had to end a certain way. Our here was engulfed in sorrow so deep we’d spend the rest of our lives reckoning with, but there was nothing we could do from there. We had to bear our choices, and that was the first slip up. 

We tethered ourselves to a relentless cycle: Saturdays were for marching in police assigned lines, Sundays for nursing the sting of Saturday’s failures. Mondays demanded we relearn how to be employed, Tuesdays loomed with deadlines, and Wednesdays left us utterly spent. Thursdays came as a sharp reminder that rent was due, and Fridays—Fridays were for remembering. They took us back to the afternoons spent nestled in our grandmothers’ arms after prayer, certain as the sunrise that we would never drift away.    

I sometimes catch myself drifting, looking around for beauty. The stained glasses in the cafe I am in makes all the sharp cuts soften, involuntary, like brokenness had nothing to do with that window of light. Sheer red yellow and blue, unafraid to dilate in your eyes each time you break a glance. My fingers feel heavy; between each sentence, they fall to the page, panting. I realise I don’t breathe when I type, perhaps that’s why. My thought process is slow and slightly amused. It’s like I’m begging for coherence, but it keeps flinching at me.

I loved writing because you were all I wrote about. Like a restored faith in God, you were the clearest vision I’d been gifted. Your fire at the edge of many worlds, continents, and nations brought you back to life each time because no one could bury you. I wrote about you because I wrote what I wanted to see, even when I was right there with you. There, I wasn’t so struck by the presumed order of things or the indifference people rubbed against each other. I was struck by your absence perhaps more than anything else, even in the imagination of those who claimed you. It felt like I’d lived on the peripheries of my own self, searching for your familiarity in a place that couldn’t be more different. When I went to protests and I attended organising groups dedicated to you, you were treated like a medium, sometimes an afterthought, rather than a reality where flesh burned and screams fainted. You were either legendised for consumption designed particularly for them to quickly move on, or a mere victim in the invitable road they wouldn’t step foot in. Sometimes, I felt heartbroken by their refusal to see you, or their insistence to think about you as the sacrifice for their own personal and academic epiphanies about liberation. Other times I loved having you for myself, your company on slow summer nights, unphased by the wide open windows, when the sun held up until the last drop of the day, reluctant to let go of your embrace. Don’t get me wrong, there was love in there, and I hated when people pretended like that wasn’t the case. What else could make the rot so so vulgar? Our eyes softened at the private acts of love and care; we wished we could hold them longer. We knew they were not enough even in their fullness and aliveness. Not because they were not enough in themselves, but because that silence, that helplessness we managed to settle in, left us always incomplete. These contradictions weren’t a new thing to me. Here was truly a canvas for that type of thing. I learned it very early on, when we held birthdays during military escalations and were quenched by your salty sea. When little trembling bodies had to learn how to reassure adults, while adults had to bury the little ones. 

“Who can halt the relentless march of time? For it is not mere

minutes that are dripping away, but my very blood… and it is not

the hands of the clock that are soaring, but the souls of my

comrades.” 

Walid Daqqa

_ there, my eyes followed two birds that moved at a brisk coordinated pace. They sprinted up and turned swiftly at the touch of the curve. I couldn’t help but smile. It took me a moment to recognise the sound – they were speaking to me. The same young, scheming giggles I grew up and shared potato and egg sandwiches with. So this is your London? One of my cousins said. I remembered the times we traced our dreams with our fingers on our home’s roof, the sky crowded with our plans.For a moment everything in the train station I was at appeared still, except for their movement. They were like most of us, dreamers. I recognised them so well, the questioning voice, the unrecognised freedom in it. I tried to squeeze away the thought of their bodies stuck under the rubble, or in part, buried under the clementine tree in our garden. I can’t believe you’re here, I don’t get many visitors on this side. I found myself mumbling my thoughts, my eyes tried to remain fixed on the birds, afraid to lose them.

Before their final departure, those taken from us in the here must pass through this portal of possibilities we all built within ourselves. Funerals are for the living, I tried to assure myself. But death stared back at me, silent and unyielding, as if I had offended its rituals. Once, I told my father—who had lost his mother, eldest brother, aunt, nephews, nieces, and their children to the rupture—that death only hurts the living, that they are in a better place. He gave me the same look then, sharp and protective of his pain. Don’t say that. They were never meant to leave like this, he said. It terrified me to realise I had feebly tried to make sense of this loss by stating the weight of my grief, a crushing, all-encompassing grief that refused to be lifted by arbitrary philosophical revelations or by poetry itself. Only life, more life, can stop the madness. My eyes felt like two packs of charcoal had been stuck in them, the kind so hot it burns blue. I kept shutting and opening them, trying to shake off the sensation that slowly muted everything around me as the cousins disappeared behind a birch tree and I navigated my way to a seat on the train.

On the overground, a man walked through the aisle and interrupted the silence as he proclaimed, the future doesn’t exist because this is the past. At first, his voice reached my consciousness almost indistinguishable from the birds’, but he kept repeating it until it settled into an unnerving clarity, like a riddle I thought I’d solved but hadn’t. The other passengers avoided him, as if that might tether their world back to its rhythm. After all, things were in the same supposed order there, disruptions weren’t welcomed. His words lingered, like a ripple in a pond that refused to settle, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something deeper had shifted.

On 14 November 2012, I hurried past the towering phoenix statue at Al Saha, the heart of eastern Gaza City, as the car sped away, carrying me and the other passengers towards our safety. Safety here meant making sure that if death touches one of us, we’d all be circled around it by the end of the day. It was an unspoken pact: we would live or die as one.

But most recently, when they shattered the city into a million pieces, creating a rupture within it, dividing it into squares, stealing its natural compass, and dismantling its geography, that shared understanding of safety was too forced to change. The chaos of evacuation orders that only them had to challenge, ended up separating most families between the North and the South. A new language emerged, born from directions that no longer pointed true, in the disfigured alleys of once familiar neighbourhoods and camps that no longer stood.

Today, the keepers of the map meet at the rupture, determined to stitch it together with their own flesh, on foot. As the world attempts to swallow them further south, they are heavy with permission only they can give each other. What comes at the cost of what seems like an incomprehensible steadfastness is a risk they are willing to take, and a risk we must rise up to, as the hands of the clock keep turning and random bullets steal the souls of our comrades.

How many times must the phoenix burn before the fire catches up?

Heba Hayek is a palestinian london-based author, workshop facilitator, and communication consultant. Rooted in de-colonial and indigenous practices, Heba’s work pushes the boundaries of supremacist norms, engaging in various exploration of what lies beyond these constraints. She is committed to cultivating liberatory conditions amidst a backdrop of deep individualism and desensitization. Positioned on the other side of the Canon, Heba seeks out the stories of those who reject the limitations of traditional archives and resist imposed terms of visibility.  Heba is also a communication consultant who is passionate about projects that centre the nourishment and cultivation of working class, immigrant, queer, and global majority folk. Heba holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Miami University, Ohio, where she taught composition and rhetoric, as well as creative writing, for two years. In 2019, she moved to London to pursue a Master of Arts in Social Anthropology at SOAS University. Heba’s debut book Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies won the 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a 2021 Book of the Year by The White Review, Middle East Eye, and The New Arab.

This piece is supported by Arts Council England and Necessity Fund.

Main image credits: Phoenix statue at Al Saha, eastern Gaza, where Heba grew up. Courtesy of Heba Hayek.