by Nicoletta Bortolotti
The words lie. Betray. They hide. The images, on the contrary, nail to the truth of the bodies. The red truth of the Madri di Gaza, appeared yesterday, March 19, 2025, Day of Father’s Day, on the Republic on the front page.
Those mothers do not cry their children killed in the atrocious “ramadan of blood”, as Netanyahu called yet another massacre. The white sheets that cover its void cries, it fascia in mocking bird appearance. In the cradle of no longer. Because this is what remains when nothing remains. “Learn that nothing remains of what we love the handkerchiefs aside,” writes the poet Araba Widad Nabi. And the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah denounced, already several years earlier, the Israeli choice to use announcers to transmit the news on the death of the children killed by the war on television, because a voice of a woman appears the anguish of viewers.
The words run away shameful, they take refuge behind the skirt of a mother, when every saying on her pain is a falsification. But silence is even worse, a surrender to habit. As if those mothers are basically accustomed, they are the ones that your own sea see it “from the opposite shore” As Niccolò Fabi writes, that your same birth cross him from an opposite blood, a blood used to losing, to die before he dies. As if it is different for them, that their pain is less in a minor body.
I, mother, was able to choose the hospital where to give birth to my children, where to stage the prodigy of coming into the world, I was able to monitor their mystery to grow up in ultrasound, listening to the beat that pumps their lives frighteningly. Of those mothers on the opposite bank of my own sea I don’t know the names. The image is silent. And what are the children called? If they don’t have a name, they don’t exist? Perhaps they are called Hadeel, as in the heartbreaking poetry of Auntadah, who reads: “Hadeel is nine years old / no, sorry, Hadeel was nine years old / had Hadeel this morning was nine years old / (…) but who / who will say it to the mother of Hadeel / intent on cooking bread and z’atar / that doves will no longer want on Gaza”.
And where do children come from? It is not known in Gaza, perhaps they come no side, the only thing we know is where they go. In Gaza it is said that the children, if they die “die for fake, then return”. Or maybe, however, some are lucky enough to be included in the “Food for Gaza” program of the Italian government, which creates a bridge between the Regina Margherita hospital in Turin and the young oncological patients of the Strip. Even the Child Jesus of Rome and many other Italian hospitals are solidarity in lending immediate assistance. Some humanitarian associations not only try to offer children a shelter from the cold, hunger, lack of drinking water, diseases, bullets and bombs, but try to find them a safe place where they can see the cartoons.
Yes, because if a child dies, not only the mother of an amputation that will bleed her forever, the imagination of the entire world dies. That “imagining today that helps to live tomorrow’s reality” dies, of which Gianni Rodari spoke. For Gaza mothers it is difficult if not impossible to access routine controls in pregnancy because hospitals can only provide survival treatments. If they have to undergo a cesarean cut they then return to “home” immediately in a corner of the plastic tent. Some take drugs to spontaneously induce labor, so that the child cannot be born while they are fleeing. But some children have a strange habit. That of being born where nothing is born.
Some mothers, from the opposite bank of the sea, have an even stranger habit. That of dreaming of a womb again, even if their womb, like the night in Gaza, is filled with iron.
