Atef Abu Saif, The Drone Eats with Me.

A Gaza Diary.  (2014)

Read by Jane McArthur,

Corsock, 16 April 2020.

This is one of the few translated accounts of the effect on the lives of ordinary Gazans – the real victims of this war told from the perspective of a Gazan rather than a foreign journalist or an Israeli.

Abu Saif is remarkable for his restraint and his ability to process and relate so tangibly the violence, loss and fear as well as the grinding drudgery of living through such destruction. Choosing the diary form is expedient as it allows for quick writing. This doesn’t mean writing without thought or instant writing, but this genre does not by its nature require a complex structure and a settled place to write in, appropriate in this time of war against civilians. Short entries can be made when the opportunity arises; when the bombing ceases, when there is electricity to fire up the laptop, when his children are in bed and when the act of writing can overcome or perhaps subdue for a short time the emotions Abu Saif expresses in this matter-of-fact account of survival.

Atef Abu Saif, is a writer and teacher from Jabalia Refugee Camp, his accounts of the 2014 Intefada were published in The Guardian and The New York Times and across the Arabic world. He has published novels and short stories and teaches political science at the University of Al-Azhar in Gaza.

The Drone Eats with Me begins on Sunday 6th July 2014 ending on Tuesday 26 August 2014.

Read on Friday, 27 February 2009