“Water without name” is an original piece by Abdaljawad Omar for Communis. Its Spanish translation can be read in «Agua sin nombre», also on Communis.
“We have normalized what should never have entered the archive. We have done it, and done it well. But everything crashes in that unguarded instant when you find yourself alone on a train—Amsterdam to Utrecht—and the leaking begins. Oh my fucking god: there is a world without checkpoints. A world without locked doors. A world where the sea is simply visible, where all that is required is the mustering of your body, nothing more. Of course, leaking occurs without other men, especially Arab men. And yet there it is—leaking on a train like a child who has just discovered what death is.”
— Abdaljawad Omar
I find myself not unraveling so much as leaking—an undoing without spectacle, without the drama of collapse. Water without name, without credentials, undecided as to whether it belongs to grief, or to that disorientation inflicted by an overwhelming force that inscribes itself upon the body. There is an echo between the tear and the disoriented—each blinded, each refusing clarity, each longing for something, for some clarity. Vision clouds, turns, but not toward the landscape, not toward the other. Instead, it veers inward, questioning commitments, fumbling for anchors that once sustained, that once guaranteed meaning, only to find them corroded, rusting under the unbearable weight of what leaks. The disoriented interrogates, hesitates; the leaker only leaks, without question, without thought.
Tears make the world tolerable, but only for an instant. They release, they empty—like that moment when your eyes lock into another’s, too long, too deep, and you find yourself slipping outside your own body. Except here, the movement is reversed, in an inverse exodus: not an escape, but a return into the density of what cannot be borne. It is as if what empties allows you to return to yourself, gives you permission to cross back. The tear delivers a reprieve, yes, but only for a moment—and even that provisional relief demands a reckoning. A reckoning with what has already vanished, irretrievable; with a present that sustains itself only by disappearing; with the loss of the object, the person, the familiar world. Even the trivial kiosk that once dispensed the best coffee in town returns as a wound. Moreover, one is forced into reckoning with the impasse itself: the stasis where movement refuses—neither thrust forward nor recoil backward. It is here, in this interval where time falters, that the self begins to leak, to seep away, leaving nothing but the residue of its suspension.
I live with tears already stationed at the edges of the body, awaiting their assignment. Should this be named, inscribed in the lexicon of pathologies? Or is it merely the normative reaction to a world obscene in its cruelty, a minor leak against the excess of the real? My outward casing—what friends, family, the surround receive—is the posture of control. Or so I like to think, the young man rehearsing his masculinity. Yet masculinity itself often proves heavy, a burden I would rather live without. Meanwhile, the interior leaks. I leak often, and in secret. Sometimes the leak convulses into laughter, a laughter that folds back into the leak, undecidable which one authored the other. It is an oscillation, a circuit of leakage and recoil, that also speaks to the social theater we inhabit.
As when a friend was taken in the night—hauled off by Israeli soldiers, who else, dragged, beaten, tortured, abandoned into the silence of isolation. A hundred days of interrogation: stretched past the ritual seventieth, an ordeal elongated into theater, performed as excess, in the typical fashion Israel tries to outdo itself. When he stumbled back, it was legible, written across his body—the enormity of the pain, the cry arrested mid-throat, despair entwined with the stubborn compulsion to go on. He bore the face of someone returned from hell, not from any allegory. But between men we do not allow ourselves the leak. No trembling, no tear. The ban is enforced, policed by the codes of virility. Instead we hone the arsenal of deflection: the joke, the smirk, the smothering tease, a tease edging toward cruelty. Mastery is measured in the sidestep, in the disavowal of sentiment. We cannot confess the regressions, the childish residues—desire, love, fear, horror, betrayal, failure. Fragilities too embarrassing, too already inscribed in a lexicon we claim not to speak, though it seeps through every pore, every stumble of voice. We pretend not to know the words, even as we perform against them, even as they mark us with their baring imprint. And so it becomes comical—how horror is converted, mid-air, into ridicule.
I have excelled at this—an inheritance from my father—sometimes playful, sometimes wounding. Listening to a friend recount his hundred days in prison—tortured, isolated, threatened, abandoned—I deflected the tear with jokes. This is how the masculine sustains itself: without tears, without the leak that would undo it. The body trembles, ready to spill, yet laughter is conscripted as prosthesis, deputized to shoulder what grief refuses to bear. And so, with an offhand comment—“So they fucked you, haha”—I sealed the tremor, complicit in this embargo on tears. Fascinated, perhaps, because when men finally do leak, it registers as Event: a rupture in the system, a disclosure otherwise outlawed. In Arabic we name this with a weight that exceeds description: baka al-rijāl. The crying of men.. Masculinity itself wept, and with it collapsed the fiction that it had no leak.
My friend recounted his ordeal, but what seared was not the words, never the words—it was the silence, the lacuna that announced itself in their interstices. Not what he said but what was withheld: those moments locked away, barred from narration. Nakedness, exposure, suffocation, incapacity—states we recognize too well, that we await almost masochistically, while pretending, with violent insistence, that they do not occur. In those intervals he was not merely lonely but utterly alone, abandoned to an extremity of solitude, stripped of the minimal recognition that sustains a self. Deprived of voices, of the other who could affirm existence, he hung suspended in that void (the dungeon), where even the possibility of address collapses, where being is starved of witness. And then, the other theater: Israeli interrogators manipulating his body like a stage prop, installing him as object of spectacle, scripting the choreography of humiliation. There comes a moment when resistance no longer holds—when exhaustion supersedes defiance, when the subject folds into sheer depletion. What form of life, I ask, requires survival through cruel jest? What mode of endurance authorizes itself only in mockery, in parody, in the semblance of play? As though the only permitted seepage of self had to be rerouted, smuggled under laughter, encrypted in irony—never direct, never confessed, never allowed.
We have normalized what should never have entered the archive. We have done it, and done it well. But everything crashes in that unguarded instant when you find yourself alone on a train—Amsterdam to Utrecht—and the leaking begins. Oh my fucking god: there is a world without checkpoints. A world without locked doors. A world where the sea is simply visible, where all that is required is the mustering of your body, nothing more. Of course, leaking occurs without other men, especially Arab men. And yet there it is—leaking on a train like a child who has just discovered what death is.
Leaking is a saturation that announces the impasse: to stand outside the world, forehead against the glass, without breaking through. To not press hard enough—or perhaps to press too gently—leaving the glass intact and the body suspended. The impasse of not being heroic enough, the ache of not wanting to die, in a world (in Palestine) where truth is validated only by martyrdom, where death enunciates sincerity. I must confess: I arrived at writing through cowardice, by way of refusal, by way of not stepping over.
Leaking is a current of unthinking that precedes thought. Neither mourning nor catharsis, but their suspension—an interval in which existence drips away, drop by drop, refusing to cohere into meaning. These days, I leak everywhere. On the road. Between errands. Beneath the weightless hours. Most of all before sleep, if sleep comes. I do not resist it; I let the overflow swell, refusing the command to speak, to bind the water with words. Perhaps it is the only fidelity left: to let the leaking persist, unclaimed, unredeemed. Or perhaps it is betrayal—to leak while others fight, to sit while others stand, to long for the moment when the current of unthinking takes over, so that you no longer have to think, no longer have to bear the unbearable weight of disoriented thought.
The only thought that arrives after I leak: what propelled my porousness today? Was it the men awaiting their chance at Israel’s deadly roulette, seeking food? The child who lost a limb? The staked homes above each other that fell during the last bombardment? Or the whispers that circulate among children about the permanence of death? Or perhaps the world itself, already ethically bankrupt, already in ruins? Or more and more as time passes the non-comfort in the temporary comfort of being within and outside the genocide? Naming my leaking is always belated, a stammering afterthought. It comes after the excess—excess that resists containment, that outpaces my preparedness. The tear—if it is a tear—runs interference against reason, insisting on an overflow before any concept can catch up. I ask too late, or perhaps too early: what was that leak about?
Sometimes I leak because I feel dirty, because I circle back obsessively to the smallest betrayals, the debris of everyday life. That time I yielded to temptation. The other time I refused to help a friend, blinded by a passing anger. Or the promises I allowed to rot, unkept, unredeemed. Or the casual judgment I passed on a distant other. They return not as memories to be narrated but as stains, bleeding at the edges of the present. I leak not because the world demands tears, but because I cannot wash away the sediment of failure that clings like residue. The leak stages itself as confession emptied of content, an act without witness. There is no priest, no tribunal, no register of absolution. Only the trembling before an archive that will not remain sealed. The tear thus becomes a ledger of debts that can never be balanced, an accounting system without closure. Each error exceeds its site, proliferates, seeps into the present. The leak is not catharsis but reminder: the past is not buried in the past, it returns as a leak.
And yet this private archive of fault collides with the public calculus of violence. When Israel justifies its genocide in Gaza by declaring that there are no innocents, I confess to myself that I would be the first to go. Who, after all, can ever claim innocence? Only the children—and even they are not spared. I am not speaking of innocence as they define it, juridically, bureaucratically, until it touches the scale of everyone. But if they cosplay as God, why not embrace the punishment? To live under their decree is to inhabit a world where judgment precedes existence, where guilt is inscribed in advance, innocence outlawed from the start. My leaking registers this impossible inheritance: condemned not for what one has done, but for having been at all. Existence itself criminalized, punished at the level of ontology. And yet humans—pliable creatures—bend, narrate, stitch. We embroider stories around wounds so they may become bearable, legible. Perhaps I bind the two in one confession: I am killable because I have failed, and my failure is confirmed, sealed, by the fact of being so easily killable. A Möbius strip of accusation: fault and mortality folding back on each other until the distinction dissolves.
I have leaked often by the sea—on the rare occasions I was able to sit before it—as though the sea itself might be enlisted, as though my tears could lure it into struggle, recruited as a vast, oceanic militant in our Intifada. I leaked again beside the grave of a martyred friend, weeping for forgiveness, for a voice that might whisper: it is all right not to be me. I leaked, too, at the crossroads where redemption collides with indignation—until, at last, I laughed at the absurdity of the tears themselves. Mostly, I leaked alone. Once, I leaked with others—at a funeral, when the real struck my face and death revealed its weight. And then I laughed again, and again, at the absurdity of the tears.
I realized, at some indeterminate point—I cannot recall when—that I am not manly enough. Perhaps too sensitive, too porous, too fragile for a world that scripts men as heroes and demands they perform accordingly. After all, I keep leaking. Too broken to summon the courage expected, too weary to sustain the role assigned, too exposed to shelter behind the walls of formality and pretense. Too conflicted, too hysterical, too imperfect, too guilty. But above all: I leak here, in writing. For what is writing if not a sanctioned leakage, a seeping of the self onto the page? To write is to stain the surface with what should have remained contained. The sentence leaks what the body withholds; the page records what the voice forbids.
Perhaps it is too self-indulgent, too self-focused what I am writing here—and that, too, makes me leak, though I have grown accustomed to forging ahead despite the leak. I can always summon the laugh. Don’t take life too seriously, I remind myself. Yet recently I leaked from the excess of longing—and in that moment, I felt alive again. Rare, to feel alive at all. But this time the laugh did not follow. It did not call for that recursive affirmation of absurdity. For there is nothing absurd about longing. To long is to orient toward what has not yet been named, what still might come, what should come. To long for the ordinary: gestures unburdened, habits unmarked, a single breath without heaviness. To long for someone near yet far, for a conversation without judgment, for someone to see you—all of you. To breathe you in and out. To laugh when you laugh. To long is to demand recognition, the right to be alive. I take longing seriously, perhaps too seriously. It is not surprising, then, that the motto of the day in Palestine has become: we want to live. For some, the phrase signals only the minimal: to endure life stripped of politics, of dignity, reduced to bare existence. In this register, we want to live translates as we do not want to die. Submission to the present. A life without longing. And it makes me leak, because these thoughts invade me too: a life without being seen, yet still breathing, still going on, still riding the taxi with legs splayed too widely, as men do. For others, the same motto stretches differently—toward the horizon of longing, beyond the hellscape of the present. We want to live as aspiration, as excess, as the refusal of reduction. And then I leak again. In truth, I weep—intensely. It begins with trickles, then pours. Because longing can betray, can delude, can summon a world that will not arrive. It gives you an image of the future—sometimes imageless, most often an image without content. And yet, still. It tears you from the present, reorients while disorienting. It is like riding a wave, only to be struck by the next, and then again.
But what unsettles most—what triggers the leak most violently—is the framing of the choice itself, our so-called choices. Whether to evacuate to the south of Gaza, under Israel’s summons, obedience masquerading as survival—only to discover that survival, too, has been enlisted into the machinery of death. Whether to leave or to stay, when to leave is to inhale the stench of betrayal. Whether to become other, to disavow the world and retreat into the habits and gestures that shield against its obscenity, or to take the world in whole, without anesthetic, to confront its excess directly. Whether, like my friend, to return to Palestine and risk arrest, or to remain suspended in exile, condemned to the non-life of never coming back. Whether to stay with a lover whose body is already inscribed by an Israeli ID card, or to wager that they might survive while you march toward annihilation. Whether to eat without thinking, or to refuse intake altogether. Whether to draw close to a girl already on her way back to prison, or to stay at a distance—imagining that distance might spare you the heartache. Whether to recount the past, to murmur to yourself: I have had enough experiences, enough laughter, enough ruptures against the imposed norm, enough playfulness. Or whether to pour words into the present, to continue leaking into text, aligning and realigning the self on the page. Or to give up writing altogether, to refuse the work of shedding. After all—am I not only preaching to the choir? A choice of choicelessness, a performance staged for those who already know the script.
And then, to be a man again—or whatever tatters remain of that designation—I stage the cruelty on myself. I bully myself back into line, savagely, with a kind of perverse delight. I curse insistently, almost rhythmically: ya ḥimār, ya ghabī—“you donkey, you idiot”—as if insult could overwrite the tremor, as if the curse could retroactively silence what the body had already confessed. The tongue becomes executioner, forcing the leak back into its cell, punishing the body for having spoken before speech. And I laugh once more, even as I confess to myself: I hate pretending to be a man. Perhaps that is why we are the last to be mourned. Perhaps it is well deserved. Who else, if not men, could inhabit the world through that pitiless pas de deux of cruel jokes and cruel silences?
Featured image: View of the sea from a train glass window. Photo: Varvara Galvas at Pexels (Free download).
