hunger that defeats language
Hunger That Defeats Language may 2025 by By Husam Maarouf.. image: hunger, lisboa, portugal 2011
via david wengrow tweet [https://x.com/davidwengrow/status/1939335824547434664]:
Another month passed since this was published.
notes/quotes from article linked [https://arablit.org/2025/05/30/hunger-that-defeats-language/]:
I never started writing as a writer. It was never my intention to define myself by a profession or a literary identity. I simply wrote because writing was the air I could breathe. It was a way to shape my day, to organize the overwhelming emotions inside me, to carve out a fleeting space of stillness amidst endless chaos. Writing wasn’t a window to the world – it was a window onto myself. And when I gained language, it felt like I had finally found a friend on this brutal planet: one who listened without fleeing, who made the world feel momentarily escapeable.
What I never expected was that one day this friend would fall silent. Not because I wanted to stop writing, but because I no longer could.
And the reason?
I am hungry.
Since the genocide began in Gaza, I’ve questioned everything.
War is a strange thing. It doesn’t just destroy homes; it pulls the ground of certainty from beneath you, wipes away the tiny sense of security you once arranged in your room to comfort yourself.
But you know what does this more than war?
Hunger.
It’s not just an empty feeling in your stomach. It’s a numbness that spreads from the gut to the brain. It blurs memories, weakens vision, and turns every thought into a deep excavation that the mind can’t bear. Hunger steals the simplest human abilities: concentration, patience, sensation, the desire to say something. Thinking becomes a luxury. Words become weights that cannot be lifted.
The hunger I feel inside now, swallowing me whole, is an evacuation of comfort, of inner peace. It’s a redefinition of the self, now on the verge of disappearing.
Hunger in a genocide is more than physical deprivation. It is the dismantling of the self. A slow extinction of your will to live.
I fear hunger more than death, for it takes you in slow, devouring waves until you become a disintegrating shadow, unable even to scream.Will anyone read this?
Will anyone believe that a writer could no longer write because he had nothing to eat?
Will anyone care that, in a corner of the world, people are starving so completely that their souls are silenced?
Husam Maarouf is a poet from Gaza and the co-founder of Gaza Publications. He’s published two poetry collections, Death Smells Like Glass and The Barber Loyal To His Dead Clients and the novel Ram’s Chisel.
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we need a means to get to the root of problem
ie: a nother way
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. to facil the thing we’ve not yet tried: the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake..
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
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be you. 