11/15/2025
"This is a letter exchange between myself, a Palestinian-Danish-American psychologist and writer, and my friend Heba Al-Turk, a young mother living in Gaza. Our friendship and correspondence began in the fall of 2024 and has since evolved into a lifeline of witnessing and maternal testimony. We are writing as friends across impossible distances: I from safety, she from a war zone. The exchange captures the collapse of clinical frameworks, the disorientation of helpless privilege, and the intimacy of shared motherhood stretched across geopolitical cruelty.
We write to one another not just as individuals but as representatives of broader truths: about occupation, resilience, fragmentation, and the refusal to be erased. About a deep love we are building in a loveless world. ROOM has championed writing that is personal, political, and formally rich. This piece is about a feminist praxis of literary solidarity. Heba, despite every danger, insists on naming herself and her son, Ziad. She does not want her story anonymized. She wants the world to know they exist."
https://analytic-room.com/correspondence/mothering-through-genocide-by-helena-vissing-and-heba-al-turk/?fbclid=IwY2xjawOFi9hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyCGNhbGxzaXRlAjMwAAEevywkJ5zHrAJm9s0HUqNYQOdMFbkytBbcsqt29kBb2iuLs_5mEL3i0uO-5lM_aem_yDX8XcrlJsT7IQc2c4oLIw
A psychologist and a mother in Gaza write across war and distance — witnessing love, trauma, and the collapse of Western clinical frameworks.
