By Talla Hamouche

My Superpower: Honorable Mention

I hiked toward the border south of the Litani River, my feet dusted in red earth. Strange men in blue vests stood tall against a backdrop of tanks and uniforms that didn’t belong to us. The blue vests felt like a theatrical shield, one I’d seen fail to protect the older men in my family. But still, I made eye contact, furrowed my brows, let out a breath, and turned back around. As I walked downhill, a quiet smile crept across my face. Whenever I left the porch and moved closer to the fences, my acts of confrontation felt like small victories. Deep down, I knew I relied on my invisibility to approach the armed and the armored. I hid behind an unthreatening frame. My boldness was real, but so was the cover I moved under. The settlers usually looked through me, but in those rare moments when their gaze seemed to settle, I realized they were focused on the land I stood on and that I was no more than a landmark. 

When I was younger, I assumed my superpower was invisibility. I could slip out of photographs and pass through family gatherings unnoticed. As a girl, I’d sit cross-legged at tables taking polite sips of Arabic coffee, listening to women decades older than me talk about everything and nothing. They lamented broken engagements, shared stories that danced between generations, and interpreted the thick trails left behind in overturned coffee cups with the seriousness of prophecy. I rarely understood the full arc of what was said, but what I did understand was the cadence of their language. I was pierced by unselfconscious poetry in stories of women, many of whom were illiterate, and whose closest brush with literature were the verses of Imam Ali, recited in reverence during religious gatherings. 

The supernaturally beautiful children too moved through life in lyrical ways. They stitched with screws scavenged from rubble, clasped hands with whoever was nearby, and sang lullabies passed down by women who’d never seen a stage but harmonized with the metallic drones that hummed above them. The threat of violence, murmuring in the background like an old, familiar song, seemed to be the very rhythm that taught them how to sing and dance. 

At some point, I understood that poetry wasn’t just something recited. It was a way of existing. In a region where stories are so often interrupted by war, by exile, by erasure, we’ve learned to tell them beautifully because that’s how they last. Pain becomes palatable when shaped like a poem. In a place where our very language renders us violent, liberating ourselves through metaphors strung together beneath fighter jets gives us one thing that cannot be destroyed. Indirect expressions of sorrow, of devastation, masked in strength, became our way of preserving what mattered. I imagined the days where our rhymes return to describing burning candles on cake, streams tumbling into rivers, and blooming fireworks. Suddenly, my blurred presence, the way I was neither drawn into conversation nor pulled into play, revealed itself to me as my greatest power: the ability to witness.

My superpower is witnessing with my whole self. To witness is to honor, to remember, and to keep safe what might otherwise be forgotten. In a world that often silences voices like mine, bearing witness is the first step toward resistance.

This power has followed me across oceans and into rooms where stories fracture and reassemble in glances, half-phrases, and silence. I’ve learned to listen between breaths, to catch meaning before it slips away. I stood in the corner of the clinic where I work, wearing scrubs too big, with a clipboard the size of my torso, and watched as a girl two years older than me tried to utter the word abortion. In classrooms, I clock the pursed lips on the faces of those in my peripheral vision, so I raise my hand and ask our professor to reiterate. I return to the same instinct: to observe and interpret. I think of that girl I once was, small and watchful in rooms full of women, preparing to carry stories that were never written down. When you know what it’s like to be dismissed, to fold yourself smaller just to be tolerated, you learn to protect what others overlook.

I try to be a voice, or at least an echo, for those who are not free to speak. The sun sets and rises. Traditions continue. Children are born. And we witness until it’s our turn to tell.