Basim Khandagji, a Palestinian prisoner who grew to become a author in jail: “Writing, for me, is an act of existence” | Culture | EUROtoday

No phrases have been wanted for Basim Khandagji (Nablus, West Bank, 42 ​​years previous) to search out out in April 2024 that he had gained the International Prize for Arabic Fictionprobably the most prestigious award in Arabic literature. The Israeli jail guards took it upon themselves to inform him with beatings and torture. “They started treating me like a fugitive, they broke my glasses and told me I had caused something big outside. That’s how I knew I had won,” explains the Palestinian creator. He had taken the heart beat of the cells by which he had lived for 21 years—half of his life—and had managed to put in writing secretly and in Arabic. A masks the colour of the sky, a political manifesto within the type of a novel just lately printed in Spanish by the publishing home Hoja de Lata.

“Today I no longer believe in nationalism, nor do I believe that the resistance should be militarized; I defend a new Palestinian literature as resistance to Israeli colonialism,” he explains from a lodge in Egypt, the place he has been exiled since his launch in October as a part of the prisoner trade agreed upon within the first part of the Trump’s proposed peace plan for Gaza. A member of the Palestinian resistance, Basim Khandagji was accused of facilitating an assault in Tel Aviv that left three lifeless—an act he doesn’t deny, though the United Nations denounced an illegitimate trial—and imprisoned. Swallowed by the Israeli jail system for greater than twenty years, a wiry, shaven man has emerged together with his pen as a brand new weapon cast silently within the bowels of his oppressor. He has written three collections of poems and two novels previous to the one which obtained the award.

“What Israeli hostility and fascism want is to erase our humanity. Writing can perhaps restore my dignity, my identity and my humanity. Writing for me is an act that affirms my existence,” he says. A masks the colour of the sky tells the story of Nur, a younger Palestinian with a quite Ashkenazi bodily look – Jews from Central and Eastern Europe -, pale pores and skin and neat Hebrew. A twenty-something who goals of changing into an archaeologist and writing profitable historic novels. The protagonist sooner or later finds an Israeli identification doc. After forging the blue card, he manages to maneuver freely round Israel and begins engaged on an archaeological excavation underneath the title Or Shapira. This impersonation of the occupant’s identification and the abyss that separates these realities provokes an inner battle that threatens to erase its true historical past. “I want to know you so I don’t become you. I want to use you to get rid of you,” the character says.

This metamorphosis displays that of the creator himself. “The main objective [de los israelíes] It is erasing our identity. My main battle has been how to create my identity by getting closer to theirs,” he explains. His solution was, in addition to converting the cells into his creative space, to graduate and specialize in Israeli studies as “an act of transgression against the oppressor.” He explains: “There is a big difference between my identity when I entered and when I left. Prison gave me the opportunity to have access to the collective mind of Israelis: to know how they see us and how they create the relationship between them and us. It was an opportunity to better understand that colonialist mind,” says Khandagji.

Before the October 7, 2023, date of the Hamas assault that sparked the Israeli offensive in Gazathe prisoners had sure situations that improved their keep behind bars: “We had access to paper, pens and books. Everything changed after October 7. If the jailer found out that you were writing, they isolated you and made your life impossible. They threatened to hurt my family and my people. Writing [y el contrabando de los textos] “It was a secret operation,” he details. He prefers not to reveal how he did it to protect the Palestinian prisoners who still continue with this clandestine activity.

He learned about the conflict that started in 2023 and changed the world outside — also his inside the prison — from the new prisoners. He had news of the “great international solidarity” that he now finds himself with, much greater than that which existed when he entered prison 21 years ago, and which he celebrates, with a special emphasis on the position of the Spanish Government: “I informed my mates in jail: ‘Maybe Spain is the one Arab world on this planet. Maybe they’re the one individuals who acknowledge that there are human beings in Palestine.’ Today I think about Spain one other aspect of Palestine.”

That doesn’t stop him from disagreeing about probably the most accepted answer to the battle: “As a Palestinian intellectual and writer, my ambition is to have a State between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.” This assertion implies a break with the two-state answer primarily based on the 1967 borders, which is extensively defended at this time by the worldwide neighborhood (Spain included). “I don’t think a state can be established in the West Bank because there are more than a million Zionist and Israeli settlers,” he argues. “We are suffering from this colonial regime of apartheid. There is a state [Israel] that declares itself the only democracy in the Middle East, but there are two regimes: one only for the Israelis and another colonial, full of biopolitics against us.” Regarding Trump’s agreement that facilitated his departure, he ditches: “It’s theater. “I don’t think Americans, least of all this president, can resolve this conflict.”

Freedom came to him in the form of a ticket to immediate exile to Cairo and with a mixture of “happiness for being a free man” and “sadness for the friends” he was forsaking. “I am unable to return to my homeland. I miss my mom’s hug.” Nor can his mother, who lives in the West Bank, go to meet him without Israeli authorization, which also denied – at the last minute – his brother Youssef’s trip to Spain to present the award-winning book. “All that is revenge. Our phrases are a hazard to them, and this exhibits it,” says the author.

In A mask the color of the skythe protagonist talks about the cell and the occupied land. For Khandagji, the former is just a laboratory of oppression. “Many experiments are done in prison, policies are tested and, if they work, they are used outside,” he explains. And he speaks of the tactic of mass incarceration as a cultural “genocide” that seeks to control the life, “ages and identity of the Palestinian people.” “There are holidays that we rejoice or faux to rejoice, and others which might be celebrated on the expense of our time. The Israelis create the occasions and ages of the Palestinian prisoners. Times that haven’t any relation to actual time; they’re totally different occasions,” he remembers, still in the present, with the hangover of his imprisonment.

After his release, the writer is still looking for his place. Interviews, diplomatic meetings and a flood of emotions have robbed him of the time he had left over for so many years. “Until now I haven’t had the opportunity to sit alone with myself,” he confesses. “I try to reset myself and ask myself what happened in these 21 years and what is going to happen.” Stranded in Egypt, he doesn’t know what his next destination will be: “There are many choices. Sometimes they are saying Spain, typically Qatar, typically Turkey… I simply know that I stay right here now.” If returning home is not a viable alternative, the option he likes the most is the Spanish one, which would also allow him to fulfill one of his dreams: going to the Bernabéu to experience a Clásico and support Real Madrid. “Maybe I’ll get it soon,” he says.

His only certainty is that he will continue to use his word as a weapon: “I thank prison because it turned me into an author and now I am an intellectual who tries to find new meanings in my writings about the relationships between myself and others.” He already has his next novel in mind, based on the life of a fellow prisoner of his. “I take into consideration that jailer who did not need me to put in writing. Today my Palestinian and human phrases attain the entire world.” It is the primary victory of their new combat.