Yasmine Jarba – My travel was just an impossible dream but it became a reality, I had the chance to travel to the country of the arts (Italy), to support the project to build the International Women’s Home in Gaza – it was a awesome transformation journey in just one month. I realized that we were in Gaza we knew nothing about the world, and that we are governed by the laws of Gazan life from wars that drained our energy and daily life battles from For a living, and for our most basic rights to security and safety, the simplest things in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs.
The first night in Italy I did not hear the sound of the drone that was buzzing in our heads all the day in Gaza, the calm was strange to me. I did not hear the sound of missiles waking us up in the middle of the night and shaking our small bodies and filling them with terror, as much as the sound of a wonderful was the planes of passengers everywhere and other types, not like the Israeli occupation planes, which resemble the hungry black crow that pounces on its prey and takes pleasure in killing and terrifying them. At this moment, I felt how much we need this peace in our daily lives.
The streets were almost not full of people. If you see an old man or an old woman with her dog, they goes out for a walk once in the morning and once in the evening, rather than The streets of Gaza are full of people, especially children who play in the streets, adding life and a nice light luster when you pass in front of them.
Rome, the quiet princess sleeping in the morning and awake at night, has a charming ambiance at sunset with the breeze of yellow leaves lying quietly in its streets crowded with cars more than people, here I realized that climate change in the world has started from here, After Rome took off its military uniform, and put on the robe of the ancient cities, whose streets brought sorrow, and the winds roared in its streets, wailing tales and legends.
Milan is like the express train of life. You sit down for a day until you find that it is the end of the month. The days passed and when I was walking around, I could hardly find a child. I asked an Italian friend where the children are. They laughed and told me here that they do not think about giving birth because of the high cost of living and the great responsibility of raising a child, as if the dog was easier. In addition to political situations concerning their country I did not go in depth.
As random as the Gaza Strip is in the buildings and houses due to the population density, as the houses and buildings in Italy are arranged with a ruler, everything is so arranged that you are afraid to cross the street without a traffic light as if I were inside a Mario game.
Frowning faces and gloomy black clothes. I don’t know why it is a country of fashion and beauty everywhere and within them painful stories that prompted them to rebel against the reality in their country. As it happens in Gaza, but here in my homeland they wear the finest clothes and floral colors such as red, green and bright yellow, keeping pace with the modern fashion more than them, and they sing life with smiling faces, but we know that there is something behind this decoration, but it is a simple attempt to adapt to life and try to challenge it. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish said, “We love life as long as we are able to find it.” We offer our lives every day to the martyrs and the wounded for the sake of the homeland and we try to hold on to life and laugh madly to conquer injustice and the enemy.
Their light is yellow, not like our dull white LED light, which has weakened due to its frequent consumption of energy from exhausted car batteries, which is why we have headaches and poor eyesight and always hate the night. It bothered me at first the yellow light, but with the days I knew that it was the light we want in our lives, like bright sunlight, While Gaza was in darkness due to the lack of fuel for power stations to impose a collective punishment on us by the Israeli occupation.
For me as a woman who left Gaza for the first time and goes to a far away and not an Arab place, a victory for myself, my life, and the other women who want to leave Gaza and communicate their ideas and culture, and that the Palestinian woman is capable of everything from travel, education and taking her full rights.
Some of the ideas and limits that society set for Palestinian women have disappear, as some of the customs and traditions of society that oppress women must be changed, And try to raise it in their culture and their lives. I met several feminist organizations. Which defends women’s rights and defends Palestinian women in particular, In light of the violence of the Israeli occupation and the Parental authority that is still practiced to this day unfortunately.
Like us, there are victims every day, as one of them told me that there is a statistic that there is a victim every day of Italian women in their country, where this percentage is almost more than our announced statistical percentage only, but we know that every day hundreds of women are violence by their husbands or their families, Whether it was physical or verbal violence?
Moreover, I met the Arabs applying for asylum in a small place called Lamberta, where they found no shelter and slept in the streets, and I saw that their situation is very bad, like the situation of camps, where there is no work, family, and no life as they lived before, but they say we afford for an honorable life more than our country and unjust governments.
The Italian people and our Italian friends, especially our friends from the Free Gaza Style Foundation, we did not feel that we were in a strange country. On the contrary, they were our friends with heart and love the Palestinian people and support the Palestinian cause. Nor racism in all its forms and they seek to achieve a just life for all and to convey the voices of oppressed peoples as a human and their legitimate right to restore our land from the filth of the Zionists.
Therefore, I felt that Italy is my second country only. We need more communication to advance our ideas and achieve a decent life for the good citizens, and in the end we live in more than one world and not in one world as we think.
As for the arts, I found myself among the richest and best art country in the world, where the architecture, sculptures and ancient paintings of the greatest artists all brought me back the passion in my artistic life after I decided to abandon it after the May 2021 war, but when I communicated with my Italian friends in Gaza and practiced art again, but all this provided me with energy for a hundred thousand years, as the arts are the language of mutual understanding between peoples and are easier and closer than other languages, and here I conclude my words with other verses of poetry by Mahmoud Darwish (Did we not believe that Rome had a moon and that Rome had trees, were we not to travel on this journey?
by Yasmine Jarba
