12. 14. 2024

Bloodlines

Malika Sharma

A little more than one year ago, I had a miscarriage. I was almost 12 weeks pregnant with what would have been my third child. My personal grief was but a small island in the ocean of collective grief being experienced by people around the world, with bombs orphaning, maiming, and killing Palestinian children. Shortly after my miscarriage, I put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as it were) to try to make sense of my grief. At the time it was fresh and raw, a wound that still bled if you pressed too hard. With time, my grief has settled into scar, like a keloid that itches at night, my body reminding me that yes, there was pain and blood here, and that the work of healing is never quite over.

While my grief has muted, our collective grief has become an unrelenting roar. On the first of November in 2023, the day before I was no longer pregnant, Israel shelled Al Hilo Hospital, a key maternity hospital in the Gaza Strip. In the weeks following my miscarriage, there were 4506 dead children in Gaza, with hundreds more missing beneath the rubble. Today there are more than 11,000 children dead – with estimates of over 186,000 total deaths in Gaza (including both adults and children) if counting “indirect” deaths due to starvation or lack of healthcare access. At the time of my miscarriage, there were estimated to be more than 50,000 pregnant people in Gaza, with more than seven people giving birth every hour. Today, a year later, pregnant people in Palestine are still delivering their babies in harrowing circumstances. They have limited access to healthcare, many forced to deliver in shelters, at home, at checkpoints, or in the beleaguered and overwhelmed remaining healthcare facilities. Miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births have increased in the past year – unsurprisingly, in the context of living under violent occupation. Malnutrition among children and pregnant or lactating mothers has worsened dramatically. Curtailing reproductive mobility and freedom remains part of settler colonial projects, in Canada as in Israel. 

Even prior to the last year’s atrocities, there were gross inequities in maternal mortality across the territories controlled by the Israeli state. A decade ago, maternal mortality in the Gaza Strip was 30 per 100,000 live births, compared to 20 per 100,000 in the West Bank and seven per 100,000 in Israel. Maternal deaths were most commonly due to sepsis, pulmonary embolism, or hemorrhage – routinely considered healthcare system failures when they occur. For a healthcare system to fail, however, it has to continue to exist, whereas currently almost all hospitals in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Those still operating do so under severe limitations. As healthcare workers have noted, “This reproductive violence is not just a consequence of the military assault – it is a deliberate outcome of policies that restrict access to health care.” 

When I first sat down to write a year ago, I felt unmoored, with only my children anchoring me to place and time. My loss felt both dwarfed and amplified by the losses in Palestine. I had loved this almost-baby, and had started to imagine my family’s lives with them in it. If I loved this almost-baby with this intensity, what could I imagine of the mothers in Palestine, their love and grief as they searched for their children? Of the families trading children with their relatives, so that if and when the bombs come, at least some of their bloodline might persist? Those actual babies, living breathing children who knew their mothers’ faces in the morning and fathers’ faces at night, who drew pictures and played football and snuggled their siblings. In the months after my miscarriage, my grief would be triggered anew as Israeli shells struck fertility clinics and destroyed thousands of embryos, killing future birthdays and playdates and playground visits in one fell swoop, or when a mother lost 14 members of her family – including her five-month-old twins – or when a mother and her four-day-old twin babies were killed by an Israeli strike while their father went out to pick up their birth certificates. Or when, or when, or when.

The night I had my miscarriage, my husband was out of town. Yet I knew he could hop on a flight and be here in hours. We were faced with no telecommunications blackouts, no blockades, no closures of ports of entry.  A dear friend took me to the hospital and we crossed no checkpoints, experiencing no delays. I had access to nursing care, physicians, my choice of emergency rooms, open, operating, functional. I had running water. I had access to medical equipment. All this while in Gaza, hospitals operated without fuel and water, remaining open only through sumud, the tenacity and steadfastness of their staff, refusing to abandon their posts. I was offered pain medication. I was offered comfort, what little could be had. In Gaza, women have had caesarean sections without anesthesia, and occasionally without electricity. When we went to the hospital, my children were safe at home with my mother. This is a safety not afforded to the parents or children in Gaza. The week after my miscarriage, Gazan children held a press conference begging for their continued existence. These contrasts lay bare that those who support or remain neutral about the ongoing genocide have collectively allowed some lives to matter less. But this is not an inevitability, and it is not irreversible.

The night I had my miscarriage, I called my friend. She arrived wearing her keffiyeh. When I started bleeding, I sat with my head in my hands as she stood in front of me. Staring at those threads woven in Palestine, I thought: this is what community looks like. This is what it means to stand by, to support, to be in solidarity with someone. Solidarity also means calling for an arms embargo, and demanding that the institutions that claim to represent us divest from investments that fuel bloodshed. Solidarity means boycotting, refusing to let our money support the murder or maiming of someone else’s child. Solidarity means protesting against an Israeli ban on international humanitarian workers. Solidarity means marching together, refusing to let our calls for freedom be misconstrued as acts of violence, recognizing the violence that lies in silence itself. My small moment of deep connection with my friend is connected to a larger sense of collectivity, one that demands an end to occupation, that demands a ceasefire, that demands freedom.

In my heart, I had named this almost-baby Noor – which, in many languages, including Arabic, means light. Our collective calls for freedom are a light in the darkness, the only way to see ourselves through. I am in no way trying to compare my loss to the catastrophic and generational losses being experienced and re-experienced by Palestinians. But I am saying, I am with you. I am saying, I am sorry. I am calling out: freedom. I, we, are calling for light in the darkness.