“The Homely and the Beast” is an original piece by Abdaljawad Omar for Communis.

“I am not sure what home is, but perhaps it is where stories are told, narrated in whispers, carried as hidden transcripts. The kind of fragments that circulate at night, exchanged in kitchens, or pressed between friends who know not to repeat them. And yet these same fragments are later replayed, distorted, weaponized—the Israeli intelligence officer reciting them back to you in interrogation, as if memory itself were contraband. Home becomes both the origin of the story and the place of its betrayal, the ground where words are born only to be turned against you.”

— Abdaljawad Omar

Last year I parted with what remained of my furniture—not so much a gift as a dislodging, a quiet exile enacted inside my own rooms. He took them—a man from Gaza, caught in the long aftershock of theṬūfān, stranded in Ramallah without papers, a body suspended between two erasures. The beds, the table, the small things of use, banal in their repetition, suddenly bore the charge of inheritance. They passed from one precarity into another, no longer mine, not fully his, belonging instead to that unresolved interval where objects begin to echo with the weight of their departures. I return to the gesture, and it returns to me. Did I give away what was already slipping from my hands? The furniture waits, inside another man’s waiting. It waits in rooms I will never enter, under the quiet discipline of necessity, each chair carrying the sediment of gatherings that are no longer possible.

Objects are not inert; they keep the shape of hands that have known them, the quiet argument of arrival and leaving. For a while I slept on one of the couches I owned—an exile from a bed that was simply too large for a single body—and in that displacement the furniture acquired a new kind of gravity. The couch held the arc of my nights like a ledger, adding fingerprints and sighs, and slowly the room learned to be less a place and more a witness. That’s where the magic lives: in the things that remember us when we cannot remember ourselves. In his room they do what objects always do: perform their function; but they also carry an accretion—another history grafted atop mine, another chronology that unsettles the clean line of ownership.

The furniture testifies to its own uselessness, speaking before it is silenced, before it is carried into the suspension of erasure. Chairs accumulate, tables extend their surfaces, but there is only one body left to move between them. They stand like witnesses awaiting the return of guests who have already vanished, their absence multiplying in the weight of wood and steel. Once, these rooms carried the tumult of many voices, the echo of all, and I mean all, but that sound has been broken, dismantled into smaller orbits of retreat. Each enclosure pulls back into its own gravity, waiting, suspended, or already absorbed by that other presence which refuses release. Some have disappeared into the parallel time of prison cells, others into the heavy silence of the martyrs’ non-place, where the gathering persists without end, beyond the reach of furniture and its false promise of return. Some made it on the outside with their tales and joy of success circulating with the agony of their absence. And most bid their farewells, and crossed over to the work of marriage. I see them sometimes with their newborns learning to undo themselves to raise another.

For almost a year the apartment has remained sparse: desk, bed, a small kitchen table, one chair. An arrangement of necessity, though even necessity carries a language. The missing couch has become its own presence. At first, it was a matter of delay—an unfinished errand, a decision postponed. But the refusal hardened. Comfort was suspect, indulgence felt dangerous. The provisional became permanent. What does it mean when furniture becomes political? The absence of a couch speaks not only of laziness or hesitation, but of a condition—the impossibility of comfort under the weight of a world that resists softness. Do you buy the new when the apartments fall like a stack of cards in Gaza? Or do you maintain this imposed minimalism, one that would demand very little, if your building is to become the next target.

I indulge these dark thoughts; they return the favor. No other ear remains, only the room, which guards its secrets in the marble stones, in the fabric of cushions that sag without witness. They sit across from me like guests who overstayed their welcome, waiting for a meal that will not arrive, rehearsing absence in its most patient tongue. I answer them as one might answer a relative across a wall—half-hearted, almost embarrassed by the proof of being alive—then withdraw again into the silence that thickens around me. Do not mistake me—I love my solitude. Perhaps too much, perhaps with the kind of hunger that makes a prison taste like refuge. But even in solitude, the child that lingers inside me knocks at the door, demanding the simplest affirmation, a nod of recognition. What comes back is only the echo’s cruelty: it repeats me faithfully, but strips away the warmth of reply, returning only what lacks. After all, solitude sometimes is cover for loneliness.

It is fair to say that my relationship to this apartment is not gentle. It is uneasy, sometimes even hostile. The space resists me as much as I resist it. Its size is a daily reminder that I live alone in a city where solitude is rarely chosen. In Ramallah, apartments are built for families—for the density of domestic life, the layering of voices, meals, quarrels. Families need the space; they fill it with noise, with the ordinary weight of living, even if that weight can also press too heavily on those within. I do not. So the rooms remain hollow. They echo my presence, amplifying it until I feel both too much and not enough. What was meant to be a home becomes instead a record of subtraction—furniture given away, comfort postponed, a future imagined but never realized.

But to me it is not this downward excavation of trauma, not the careful work of psychoanalysis with its scalpel of remembrance, of cataloguing patterns as if they might explain the wound. I do not believe home is reducible to diagnosis, nor to the fatal repetition of what Ziad Rahbani warned: from woman to woman, you are only moving backwards. Although all of that is true for me too. For me, it is less about tracing the pathology than about the pulse—how the house insists on living within me even when I try to abandon it. Home is not merely an inheritance of pain, though it contains it; it is also the fragile rhythm of survival, the moments when hunger is met with bread, when silence is broken by the clatter of dishes, when devotion is expressed in gestures too small for history to record. Home is not the psychoanalyst’s case study, nor the martyr’s monument, but something in between: a fabric always fraying, always rewoven, a word stretched thin between anguish and tenderness, collapse and endurance. Where else can one collapse without shame, if not at home? Where else can one bleed his truth, unmediated, unadorned? And where else can one peel off the masks—those heavy, performative masks demanded by the world outside—except in that place that reveals more than it conceals?

And it is precisely because of this pulse that the ruins resist archiving. What lives in us refuses to be flattened into neat catalogues or memorial stones; it scatters like dust, it lingers like breath in the chest of the living. The destruction of homes in Gaza—entire neighborhoods folded into rubble—cannot be grasped by statistics or by the cold repetition of numbers. Loss here is not only magnitude but intimacy: the pillow still carrying a head’s imprint, the pot that once boiled the best lentil soup in the world, the child’s shoe lodged in broken concrete. And the slippers mothers used to throw at naughty children. What cloud, or archive, can house these? To scale them up risks erasing their pulse; to scale them down is the only way to honor their truth. And yet even the smallest things carry the memory of intrusion. For every object that testifies to tenderness, another bears the mark of force—the broken latch, the splintered doorframe, the threshold that no longer separates inside from out.

To me home is also the chronology of the many times the Israeli army entered, broke the doors that sheltered what was inside from what was outside. My first home, the one where my childhood was shaped, had many of those barragings. Some unfolded before I was born, others continued after. One of those stories lingers with me, lodged within me as an image of what I should be …

“The pounding on the door was enough to freeze every man in the room. Whispers died in throats, and the bodies of three young men frooze. They all knew who it was. Soldiers. Chairs scraped, papers shuffled, panic rising. Someone muttered, “We’re finished.”

Then one of them stood. Calmly—too calmly. He looked around, then at the table. His eyes fixed on something none of those present understood at first: two dusty bottles of cheap cognac.

The door shook again under heavy fists. He reached for the bottles. No explanation. He uncorked one and drank—fast, reckless, half a bottle vanishing in a single breath. He passed the other to his comrades, urging them to drink as well. The irony was sharp: the so-called communist infidels, as the Islamists named them, clinging to cognac as if it were a fragile amnesty, a fleeting anchor, a passport out of the moment’s dread.

His comrades horrified. Only then did he smile, swaying slightly. “It’s my birthday,” he whispered, as if reminding himself. His ID would prove it. And what else are we here to do but celebrate the birthday.

When the soldiers burst in, rifles raised, the air was already thick with alcohol and forced laughter. What they entered was not a clandestine meeting, but a staged revelry—just as the comrade had intended. And for that night, at least, prison reeked only of cognac: its bars closing on the one they came for, while the others slipped away untouched, their freedom bought in fumes and irony.

Later, at the central prison in Ramallah, the Israeli intelligence officer would wait. He would scream at the soldiers, he would certainly scream, because they were fools—utter fools. They had not followed instructions, had not grasped the smallest detail of what was demanded of them. His rage filled the corridor, his voice ricocheting against the stone walls.

And I ask whether Abu Mazen still hears it—the voice, not his own, but authority breaking against itself. The soldiers’ confusion, letting some slip away; the intelligence officer’s rage, refusing release. Does it still reverberate beneath the present drapery, the presidential banners straining to overwrite stone? The prison, renamed a palace, cannot be remade so easily. It carries residues: cries stored in its walls, doors slammed into memory, boots pounding the stairs upward—an archive no title can erase.

But this is also the danger—the deadly lure—of small victories: they make the great victories seem thinkable.  And yet, when we resist, there is always that residue: scattered fragments of triumph, fragile and fleeting, but undeniable. Trickery, cunning, the small sabotages carried out as guerrilla gestures. Debris of narratives that slip into memory, carried as trophies in whispers, in jokes, in the sudden laughter that erupts even under the shadow of a new settlement and another martyr.

They lure you into the Ṭūfān, into what my professor—one of those rare lights in a darkened world—called the interval. The interval of the past two years, the interval of unbecoming, wagered on the chance of becoming. As if all the small victories, besieged, impoverished, left to rot beneath the sun, refused to vanish. Instead they thickened, accumulated, until they swelled into an overflow. To dwell there is to surrender to a current without shore, to feel the unmaking of what you thought yourself to be. And yet, in that suspension, in that fragile wager, a horizon flickers. Not yet arrival, not yet ruin—only the trembling space where the possible insists on itself.

Haven’t I already told you that absence is the mood of the day? It lingers like dust in the air, refusing to settle. It is the boy who lost his childhood, violated in prison at sixteen, condemned to growing into the shadow of what might have been. It is the cynicism of a friend, his only armor against the rot of the world—though even cynicism sometimes betrays him, too sharp, too concentrated, when it might have been diffused, softened, even overcome. It is the eyes that do not turn away but hold your gaze, and in holding it, remind you that listening too is an art we have forgotten. After all, how do you listen—really listen—to the voice within, or the voices without? The gunshots have become background noise. The news of another martyr arrives like weather. The arrest of your neighbor barely registers, the disappearance of your friends, their hunger in prison, their humiliation—fails to touch you fully. How do you listen when the world insists on deafening you? How do you listen to memory, to those fragments of things that did not unfold? The gestures aborted before they reached completion, the words swallowed before they could become sound, the futures suspended and left to wither in the air. How do you listen to what remains only as residue, as if absence itself were speaking?And how to you inhabit the prison house of home when it is also already shackled by men with “fatigue” clothing.

I am not sure what home is, but perhaps it is where stories are told, narrated in whispers, carried as hidden transcripts. The kind of fragments that circulate at night, exchanged in kitchens, or pressed between friends who know not to repeat them. And yet these same fragments are later replayed, distorted, weaponized—the Israeli intelligence officer reciting them back to you in interrogation, as if memory itself were contraband. Home becomes both the origin of the story and the place of its betrayal, the ground where words are born only to be turned against you. These damn phones, sucking at us, pulling us in. Addictive spies, each one. Addiction not only to the glow, the endless scroll, but to the surveillance already embedded in their circuits. Devices that undo us from without, reaching inside as if they knew our pulse better than we do. Every call, every message, every photograph—collected, archived, played back against us. What we thought was connection is already confession.

Home is strange here. Indeed, it is. Quite homely, intensely homely. It suffocates you with stories, memories and laughter so thick you cannot step outside them, memories that hold you close, whispering don’t leave. And at the same time it suffocates you with trauma, pressing against your chest until all you can think of is escape. To stay is unbearable, to leave is unthinkable. Home is both cage and embrace, both anchor and exile, binding you in contradictions you fail to untangle.

The other day I counted the tiles—tile by tile—the sweaty walls, drop of sweat by drop of sweat. I am not crazy; I simply had time, nothing to do inside the endless stream of writing. I counted tiles and sweat until I knocked on my own door. Funny: the bell no longer rings. Why fix it? No one will knock. Neither soldiers nor friends.

I have been shaken awake twice in the recent past: once at five in the morning, once again around ten at night. The first time it was an Israeli captain and his men. It was during COVID; I had been sleeping on the old couch I’d give away later because the bed felt too big. The captain stood over me, mask taut across his face, boots still wet with the stairwell’s dirt. Behind him the soldiers shifted; their rifles leaned against the doorframe and their silence spoke louder than any order. I pulled the blanket up—not from cold but from the absurdity of being found like this: half-awake, half in dream, dressed only in boxers. I was oddly relieved for the boxers; though I doubt I would have been much more ashamed without them. The captain’s eyes skimmed past me as if I were furniture, as if the couch had sprouted a body. The soldiers’ quiet pressed in heavier than their rifles. For a second I thought it might dissolve, a fever dream I would wake from. The damp of their boots on the floor said otherwise. They took me, even after I met their eyes, after the face-to-face encounter. In that instant I thought, what a fool Levinas was.

The second time it was 10 p.m., and my doorbell—rusted from years of disuse—suddenly rang. I froze. Who the hell would show up now? My mind flickered through possibilities: who would demand of me the tedious ritual of small talk, the forced smile, the obligatory brewing of coffee—or worse, herbal tea? For a moment, the absurdity almost eclipsed the fear. But here, a knock or a ring is never just a visit. It is always the beginning of an ordeal.

And perhaps that is why children weigh so heavily on me. Their knocks are different. Their laughter interrupts the silence we have grown used to, and it unsettles us more than soldiers’ boots. Children ask and we fail to answer. Children play and we fail to smile. Children speak truth to power all the time, and the world pretends not to hear. Their laughter cuts sharper than argument, their games expose what speeches conceal. Perhaps that is why even child’s play unsettles—because it holds a mirror to our silences, because it names what we cannot bear to name. Isn’t it worth returning, sometimes, to that inner child?

The doorbell rang—and no one was there. This could have been sad, if it had not come as relief. Better the empty stairwell than the burden of hospitality, better absence than intrusion, better children transgressing than soldiers gambling with life and death. Here, even silence can feel like mercy, even emptiness like a gift.

The uncanny, Freud said, is the return of the repressed—the familiar becoming strange. But what if the familiar was never safe to begin with? What if the strangeness is not a return but the ground itself? The sweaty tiles, the broken frame that I hesitate to fix, so I can remember the energy of youth, and the bullying of friends.

Home is uncanny already. Its walls sag with memory, its silence swollen with absences—laughter and cries congealed in the air. The beasts move within and without, haunting like drones, circling, firing at will. Once as a reminder that home suffocates because it resembles you too closely, and again because it resembles you not at all. Sometimes the walls speak in Hebrew; other times they pronounce ح (ḥ) and ع (ʿayn) with unsettling precision. At times, home is a heap of ruins—both real and visceral—and at others, it is shelter from the cruelty outside. Sometimes it is empty with you besides your own echoes, and other times it full of the screams of young men throwing stones at military vehicles from the outside. Sometimes it is your future, and other times, it is what you bid farewell too, not knowing whether you will see it again. Sometimes it is tent, and other times it is prison.

Home suffocates with intimacy; it suffocates with threat. Freud thought the uncanny was a matter of doubling—of ghosts, dolls, and repetitions. But he never sat through the repetition of blindfolds on a chilly spring day, or the doubling of soldiers at your door, each one your doppelgänger; the ghost of your own name read out in interrogation; the threats of an angry intelligence officer. For Freud, the strange interrupted the ordinary. For us, the strange is the ordinary. The uncanny is not the familiar made strange, but the impossibility of telling them apart. The homely and the beast collapse into one another. The knock at the door: friend or soldier, prank or raid, child’s play or arrest, death by burning, or death by the skies. The uncanny is not a philosophical puzzle—it is the mood of the landscape.

Featured image: Red fabric is draped over a destroyed wall in the Mossa family home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, Feb. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana). Courtesy of AP.

Abdaljawad Omar