Novelist Said Abu Ghazah has set love against death in his new novel, ‘Forbidden Letters’, written while he was living in the devastated and besieged Gaza Strip. Through the story of a married couple separated by a sudden absence, the work seeks to protect emotional memory from erasure and recover the intimacy, capacity to dream and hope that war destroys within people.
The 13th novel under bombardment
The novel is the 13th literary work in Abu Ghazah’s career and the fifth he has published amid what he describes as genocidal crimes. The novelist says he continues to write under exceptional circumstances in order to turn the human experience under bombardment into literature that transcends the boundaries of the present moment, rather than merely recording the loss, destruction and survival taking place.
Abu Ghazah does not treat writing about love as an escape from war, but as a path towards restoring people from within. While scenes of death and collapse dominate much of the writing coming from Gaza, his epistolary novel, rooted in emotion, turns to another form of resistance to annihilation: holding on to feeling, memory and what remains of the reasons for carrying on.
Kamal, Wisal and letters that arrive too late
‘Forbidden Letters’ revolves around Kamal and Wisal, a married couple separated by a sudden absence that opens the way to doubt, waiting and heartbreak. Kamal begins writing letters to his absent wife, but they do not reach her. His words carry a mixture of reproach, longing and accusation, while he remains unaware of what happened to her or of her fate. The husband dies heartbroken before learning what became of his wife.
The novel then reveals that Wisal did not flee from him or betray him, but suffered a sudden illness that led to her being placed in a psychiatric hospital in a distant city. When she returns home, she finds the letters Kamal wrote during her absence, but they arrive after a direct reply has become impossible. Wisal in turn begins writing letters to the spirit of her late husband, recalling through them the memories of the love they shared and responding to the reproaches, accusations and questions he left in his letters.
Through this structure, the novel becomes a postponed dialogue between a lover who died before the truth emerged and a widow who arrived too late, after words failed to reach their destination in time. Abu Ghazah divides the novel into two parts, the first titled ‘The Lament of a Heartbroken Man’, containing the letters Kamal wrote during his wife’s absence.
The second part, titled ‘Memories of a Loving Widow’, presents Wisal’s letters after her husband’s death. The letters do not appear in the work as conventional correspondence; instead, they form the structure through which a complete novel is built from two perspectives.
The narrative moves between the present and memory, comparing what people imagine to be true in moments of pain with what events later reveal. Through Kamal’s and Wisal’s voices, Abu Ghazah addresses separation, loyalty, betrayal, hope and pain, and raises the question of whether love can withstand misunderstanding, forced absence and death.
Abu Ghazah turns love into resistance to death
Abu Ghazah explains the motivation behind writing the novel: ‘In Gaza, we do not write about love as a luxury, nor do we flirt with our beloved to escape the horror of bombardment. We write while in the eye of the storm because we understand better than anyone else that love is the only objective equivalent of death.’ For him, literature becomes an attempt to recover the human being from among the rubble of war.
He adds that writing about love is an ‘unquestionably revolutionary act’, because it declares that life continues and rejects reducing the people of Gaza to mere numbers in news bulletins or skeletons beneath the rubble. In the novel, love is not limited to a romantic relationship; it becomes a means of confronting loss and holding on to what remains of life when the odds of absence outweigh the chances of meeting.
Abu Ghazah chose to remain and endure in the Strip rather than travel and leave Gaza after the war began, and lived through its bloody chapters. Drawing on that experience, he describes love as ‘an existential strategy and a spiritual shield we adopt to protect ourselves from the fragments of nothingness’. He sees it as an act of defiance through which people declare that they still love, smile, feel pain and weep because they are human.
Paper letters build the novel’s inner world
The novel uses dense, poetic language in which letters blend with interior monologue and memories. It also gives intimate places, such as the home, balcony and small garden, a role in shaping a complete world of love and waiting, set against an external world dominated by war and death. Domestic details become vessels for memory and for the trace left behind by those who are absent.
‘Forbidden Letters’ brings back into focus a literary form that is almost in retreat in the age of electronic messages and social media platforms. In the work, the paper letter is not merely a tool for conveying words, but a space for confession and disclosure, and a means of postponing a conversation that will not be read until after absence. Abu Ghazah thus seeks to restore the letter’s status as an intimate act that preserves its writer’s imprint, even when it cannot reach the person for whom it was written.
The novelist believes that every letter he writes during wartime is an attempt to resist erasure. He says: ‘We search for life in the labyrinths of death and shelter in the warmth of love to withstand the coldness of killing and loss,’ adding that every letter written is a cry of protest against the rubble and an attempt to repair what has been destroyed within people before their homes.
Although the novel is directly connected to its author’s experience during the war, it does not become a narration of the war’s details and daily repercussions. Abu Ghazah explains that the war remains in the background as an existential context, while the text focuses on the impact of brutality on people from within, and their need for love, memory and writing to preserve their sense of humanity.
Abu Ghazah summarises the value of writing over the sound of guns and missiles by saying that people love life ‘not because it is easy or beautiful, but because it is the only thing we possess in an era of genocide, and which we strive desperately to wrest from the jaws of death’.
From this perspective, the novel becomes an emotional record of people’s ability to create meaning amid collapse, as well as a work belonging to romantic literature. The novelist describes love as the private space that the occupier cannot defile, and ‘the green oasis’ where seeds of hope are planted despite the scarcity of water and the abundance of blood.
He says that writing about love confirms that memory is stronger than forgetting and that feeling can stand against the machinery of war. In its construction, the novel goes beyond the love story of a man and a woman, making loss, waiting and memory questions about the meaning of survival, what remains of a person after their departure, and whether love can cross death when words arrive too late.
Abu Ghazah describes his work as living testimony to the word’s ability to withstand annihilation, considering ‘Forbidden Letters’ a cry of life against nothingness in a place where every second has become a possibility of departure.
