Brown Furniture: Notes on Gaza from a Diaspora Cousin

My mother died recently, so I’m still in her home taking care of details. I’m also developing an increasing dedication to several pieces of her furniture: a tall cabinet, the dinner table, and a credenza where we stack the plates. Or maybe I should say, harboring an indecision. These three are a matched set in maybe cherry wood, I’m not sure. I think of them as friends but also wonder if the impulse is too dutiful. Rather than find my own décor, my own life, I’m going to set up a shrine to my parents and just be the secretary of their museum? 

What dawns on me later is how fortunate I am: I get to have a full stomach and contemplate furniture, family, and the passage of time from the sprawling comfort of a large gray velour sofa. It’s a luxury to grant the dining table and credenza special powers, making them almost human, bestowing upon them character arcs and stories, practically giving them birth certificates. It’s a way to keep my mother present. And it’s ironic, too. Because the exact opposite is happening to an entire civilian population in Gaza. These past five months, the average Gazan’s personhood has been reduced to furniture. 

I have a lot of relatives in Gaza. Some of my cousins are still there. Other cousins, evacuated to Cairo, watched their homes get bombed on television. There’s always been family in Cairo, it’s where my father was born. One of his sisters was a doctor. She married a Palestinian, also a doctor, and they worked in Gaza City, had children and grandchildren, were esteemed for their professional accomplishments. My dad, aunt, and uncle are long gone and I’m relieved they don’t have to witness what is happening, because witnessing is all I can do, and it’s overwhelming. 

My German mother caught the beginning of this genocide. I think it destroyed the part of her that remembered a hungry childhood in an enemy city during a world war, relying on airlifted food and supplies. Every few minutes those planes would land. She couldn’t stand sweet potatoes for the rest of her life, because it reminded her of the instant sweet potato powder her mother would get from the airlifted food. My mother grew up in a Berlin reduced to rubble. I think a part of her didn’t want to live anymore, after she saw that the bombs on Gaza weren’t stopping. That the food supplies into Gaza came to a standstill. She knew exactly what that meant. 

*

It gets messy as a diaspora cousin. Where do my loyalties lie, if any? I’m loyal to the questions I have to ask myself. Mostly I wonder, how do all of my cultures measure up in the face of this genocide? I watch Germany carefully, unimpressed at its every move. Denialist, stodgy, arrogant, utterly missing the point. I feel sorry for Egypt, always struggling to strategize with some imperialist power, hoping for a cozy deal with big Western boys. Egypt has been in an unwinnable situation since the British Occupation, and probably even before that. But the United States is the hulking, sweating palm in all of this, and it is clenched in greed. I have never been more filled with revulsion at what I’m being asked to accept from my government. The blasé replies I received from my representatives to whom I sent ceasefire letters; the hollow, legal-loophole catchphrases that are repeated robotically. So much aphasic buck-passing. It’s exhausting.

I was a baby then, but I refer in my mind to my ambient knowledge of the Vietnam war, where U.S. soldiers were slicing up schoolgirls. I see flashes of our wars in Iraq, Afghanistan. It’s really no stretch of the imagination that the United States supplies the weapons for Gaza Nakba 2.0. 

What does it mean that I am the diaspora cousin? It means I need to rely on metaphors, because my family is intangible. Distance makes us two-dimensional to each other. We can interact on Facebook, sometimes chat on other apps. So I need to talk about brown furniture because I am over here, a citizen and taxpayer in the country supplying state-of-the-art weaponry. I’m unsure how to carry myself in this situation. What is the correct etiquette for having family on opposite sides of a bomb, both maker and receiver? I think regret is a proper place to start. 

I wish I had visited Gaza City before its destruction. I wish I had seen where my cousins and their families lived, where my aunt and uncle had worked and cooked meals and celebrated weddings, and swam in the sea. I know it was beautiful. Even just watching a recent before-and-after reel on Instagram from a Gazan journalist, I can see how lovely it was. 

Sinister messaging is the standard procedure: I was obligated to perceive my own family through an American, imperialist, racist lens. Especially because I had never been to Gaza and couldn’t fill in the mysterious blanks with personal experience. As an American, I was trained to fear and demonize that name, that word: Gaza. Wishing to demonstrate my belongingness, I made myself small. I was accommodating. You learn that, too, when you’re partly Arab. You always have to play the bad guy. 

I feel sorry now, not just for what I got wrong and where I kept silent, but also for all I missed out on. 

*

So, furniture helps. Movies, too. They give me something to work with. I reach first for a blurred synthesis of Vietnam war movies where the central character is of course a U.S. soldier, because the people being slaughtered and pillaged are never the central characters. They are brown. They are figments in the dark, beads on an abacus for the white man to move around as he performs the calculations of his fluctuating perceptions of himself. He’s fighting his dark side, and these locals just happened to get in the way. Abacus beads through which the white soldier comes to terms with his inner Lawrence of Arabia. Vietnamese villagers being sliced up and murdered have no names and stories in these soldier movies, because they are furniture. Brown credenzas being moved around to reflect back to the soldier what he already could have intuited, but doesn’t, and instead comes to the faulty conclusion that the jungle made him do it. The desert, the jungle. Being far from his western civilization made him a killing machine, and it frightened him to realize he enjoyed it. But that’s just a movie mashup, not a real specific film. 

In real life, there is more brown furniture in Gaza, and it is a fire sale. 

On the socials now I have unwillingly come across a different genre of soldier movie: IOF soldiers playing with Gazan women’s undergarments, wearing bras and nighties over their uniforms, draping them across their military vehicles. They create TikTok videos of mock school lessons in bombed-out classrooms and curl up in the broken cribs of displaced or dead Palestinian children. It is the most ghoulish of soldier movie, these cheerful little snippets of savagery. The Palestinian inhabitants are ghosts, and the broken residue of their furniture is used as props to mock them on Instagram, X, all the platforms. Someone on Twitter/X said it is akin to a minstrel show, and they aren’t wrong. 

Those soldiers embody a quenchless disregard for human life. Pantomiming in racist disdain as a form of amusement, hoping to get clicks of approval from strangers somewhere out in the ether of social media. I pause at the emptiness of this exchange.

I know I moved quickly from the example of an American soldier to an Israeli TikTok-ing soldier, but that’s because they serve the same entities and overlords, the same superpowers and their military industries. Geopolitics dressed up as religion started this: God said I’m better than you and I should have your house, and by the way we’re going to build a natural gas pipeline here as well. So let’s test out some new weaponry before we build the pipeline, shall we? It’s a win-win for the big moneymakers of western civilization. And as for the global south, those people are disposable. We’re here to make money, you chumps. Get over your distaste for carnage.

Move the furniture, chop the furniture up, cut its legs off, drive it to the dump, make a pile of furniture over at the very edge of the property. In this case, down by Egypt. Push the furniture over to the other side. Ask other countries to come pick up some furniture. It’s a fire sale, after all. The powers that be want to remodel the store to cater to a different demographic. 

*

Here’s a different movie. Scrolling through my social feed, I catch a glimpse of a displaced Gazan family living in a tent, decorating for Ramadan, hanging a string of lights around the tent’s entrance at dusk. There are children smiling shyly at the charm and magic of the lights, and maybe it’s enhanced in the video with filters but I don’t care. I want to feel it too. I want to participate in their small moment of happiness. It registers as a victory. I want to witness the moment for their sake, because I want to feel like people matter again. Real, average nobodies with humble desires can matter, and just go about living their lives. We don’t have to be mere servants to the soulless wind tunnel of geopolitics and its hectic billionaires. We can live our lives, string lights for special occasions. This is what we’re here for. 

I keep scrolling. A Gazan praises a cup of tea and a piece of bread. He hasn’t had tea in months. The video is a closeup of the cup, steaming. In all these videos, I am witnessing a person in peril nevertheless reaching for gratitude, somehow experiencing a moment of joy. That’s my kind of social media post. They’re embodying spiritual qualities in these clips, not aggression or hatred or disdain for anybody. Gratitude for being alive, for hot tea in a Styrofoam cup. A Gazan instructs how to cook a Palestinian dish from inside her tent, or circus performers somersault in the air to entertain children who are traumatized, hungry and dysregulated beyond all measure, but still clap and get lost in the excitement of the moment. I feel changed by witnessing Gazan civilians who respond with dignity and joy and manage to survive, even as key world leaders throw them away. I’ve seen the horrific, devastating images that keep coming out of Gaza, too. I’m not sure of the current fate of my cousins still in Gaza. All this witnessing, this watching. No amount of horror is enough for the leaders in question to say that now vilified word, ceasefire. But it is for me. Khallas, enough. 

And I decided: I’m keeping my mother’s dining table, and the rest to match. It is a privilege to maintain a connection to my lineage in the face of so much destruction for another part of my family. I cannot let go of these pieces of her life. I’m lucky to have them: intact, beautiful and priceless. 

by Rasha Refaie