What Hind really likes to do, though, is
write poems, sleep in late in the mornings, and have uninterrupted
music sessions. She’s also addicted to glittery clothing, yogurt,
and a persistent need to defend Palestine. In her closet, you can
find her first thesis feature film,
Carencia
, and her first
poetry book
More Light than Death Could Bear
published by
Xanadu. She is now finishing up the first draft of her new film and
looking for someone brave enough to publish her second book.
(For Palestine, who defies geography)
Dubai, November 2008
Smiles, freeze, drop off the faces of
strangers who
try their pick-up lines on trains through
France, who see a redhead
made up in tight clothes that show off the
curves
international, woman, all throughout, and
they inevitably ask, where
are you from, and watching the eyes
widen,
in dismay sometimes, sometimes in
respect,
often in pity, always a controversy,
always an opinion, I’m with you, I’m with
them, you don’t exist,
they should never have existed, but you’re
so pretty, said with surprise, like
I am supposed to be ugly,
how strange, your accent is all perfect
and
you don’t look funny, and by funny,
they mean swathed in black mourning and
veils,
wailing murder and disease and misery,
and if I smile in secret knowledge of the
beauty of my
ancestry, do not hold it against me, for
there
is little left of that today,
this day of tragedy and humiliation,
this black morning that won’t cease, those
clouds of doom
that won’t blow,
and when someone asks where your aunt
is,
and who’s this uncle, and how come you live
alone,
aren’t you an Arab young woman, why are you
traveling so far from home, and where were you born, and what
passport
do you hold, and how come your accent
is all fucked up, different words
in different situations to the rescue, you
play the card at every given chance to
make sure you get by, you get the best, in
this racist
test of endurance, you say,
you’re from here, but born there, and you
don’t know
where your uncle is, and you haven’t met
all your thirty-three cousins,
and there is a grandparent who never saw
you,
and you speak not the same language as your
sister-in-law,
nor do you run into the same family name,
and when the villages
of your friends are their retreat for this
Christmas
or Eid, or this or that festivity,
you keep your head down, you look up plans
on Expedia
for an itinerary as random as
you wish it to be, for your village might
have been
bulldozed flat by those powers that be,
that you know inside out,
cannot be, should not be,
and yet they are, here, and were, and will
stay,
they think,
eternally.
And you grieve,
daily,
and you did not hold your father’s hand when
your mother
died, and you did not go to the funeral of
the only
grandmother you ever knew or loved
and you may not make it to the wedding of
your
favorite cousin, and you cannot tell if they
will grant you
the visa for that scholarship
you deserve and need and you don’t know
if you can remember all the names of
family,
distant, and you cannot remember how your
father took the news
of his own parents dying,
years after the fact, because no one
knew
where he was or how to tell him,
the news
over the telephone your life is lived,
and emails become your heirlooms of
jewels,
and pictures are what you make do
with night after lonely night
of absence,
and you wish,
you wish you held your father’s heart
when your mother died, but he was not
there,
and you could not remove that hurt stare
he has on his face, every moment of
silence
since, and what do you say to your aging
father when he cries at the news,
when he says, he is helpless, we
are helpless, these children on TV beseech
us,
on borders left to rot in the
putrid air of war and warfare and the
powers
universal that don’t care,
and what to say, how to wash away the
childhood
spent witnessing the massacres of bloodied
bodies
strewn about here and there,
and your mother tried, she tried all she
could dare
to give you innocence, the persistence
of memory is such that the bloodied
limbs of your ancestry are
always there and what does it feel like you
say?
Well,
you wake up everyday
and you wished visas and passports didn’t
take precedence
over the need in your center for
the family reunion
and that safe
loving presence,
and you spend lifetimes in lands distant
astray,
and your rights are given to you by
governments alien
and democracies you cared for not,
with not an olive tree in the vicinity and
yet you
are thankful, grateful, jubilant even that
your kids
are accounted for, asleep in their
bedrooms
with their crayons and dolls, and
so you stay, year after year in exile,
you stay. You grind your teeth at night, and
take your blood pressure medication
and weep into the phone,
and weep into the letters that are the only
way.
And so,
stranger on a train who thinks I’m sexy,
who thinks I’m American
in my Levi’s jeans and blue tie-dye T-shirt
and purple
lipstick, and my Walkman blasting the
prodigy, for teenagers are the same,
everywhere, this is where I’m from, and
you,
you, every single one of you who asks me
about my way,
you who think
I’m young and filled
with mystery and exotic lands
and an alluring sense of oriental
tragedy,
this is what it is,
this is our way,
and now picture this,
put yourself in this image and imagine
away,
to be from where I’m from,
this is how it is, I
say,
do not see your children
for years
if you knew where they were
to begin with,
do not bear the news for another day,
do not whisper a word when you need to
scream out what they’ve made
you and who’ve you become
and how it is to be questioned at every
turn
about the political activities of your
uncle
whom you never met
who ran a pastry shop
and the opinions of your aunt
from the other side of the family whom
you never met,
and forget,
you will forget that a family is a normal
unit
of harmony and people just get on planes
and marriages are joyous occasions not
reasons to panic
and feel robbed of your rights,
count not the tears that are shed in
nights
when you cannot tell
why one should hold on to their name,
and know that this is what it’s like to not
have an answer
to where you are from,
for you are from everywhere,
and nowhere,
and you have a home,
but it is not there,
it was never there for you,
you were never allowed to see,
you were born a refugee,
and this is what it is to be
Palestinian. This is what it is to be
Palestinian.
This is what it is to be, and be and be,
and not be.
Apology Because We Love Life . . .
_PHOTO
Raneen Jeries is a twenty-nine-year-old
Palestinian woman from the village of Kfar Yasif in the northern
Galilee. She currently lives in Haifa where she is pursuing a
master’s in clinical social work. Raneen has been active in
feminist and human rights organizations for a long time, and
currently works part-time for Zochrot, an organization concerned
with increasing awareness of the Nakba—the catastrophic and violent
expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people from their
towns and villages in 1948. She has been documenting Nakba
testimonies for several years, specializing in women’s
narratives.
* * *
I thought a lot. How can I tell the story of
Palestine in a few lines? How can I tell the story of the ports of
Haifa and Jaffa in a few words and the story of my grandfather who
died after his land in Galilee was confiscated? “It was called the
land of Tantour,” my grandmother would tell me. “Your grandfather
planted it with grapevine to convince the Israeli Army that
grapevines cannot become a military zone, but it did, and your
grandfather died.” She tells me the same story on every visit, the
same choking and the same anger, and my grandmother is growing
older.
I am not going to tell you the story of my
grandfather and the grapevines or the story of my grandmother
moving out of Haifa in 1948. “We were the last to leave,” she would
repeat to make sure it penetrated my memory. “The city was
completely empty of people and noise and children and ghosts. We
went to Nazareth, and I came back a few days later to pick up what
was left of our house, and it was in ruins.”
I will tell my own story, the story of one
and a half million Palestinians living in the same place at a
different time, and between place and time, sixty years of
waiting.
My name is Raneen. I adore Haifa where I
live. In my eyes, it is life and challenge, and in the eyes of my
grandmother it is ruins and departure. Between my grandmother’s
eyes and mine, I live my daily life with its endless
contradictions.
I wake up in the early hours of the morning
to catch the train to Tel Aviv. I make my coffee in a hurry and
open my window. I get a whiff of Haifa, and I look at it intently.
It’s there, soaring in blue and white, looking at me mockingly, and
I hear it say, “Don’t wear yourself out. There will no longer be a
Palestine. Don’t bother documenting the memories of the departed
about their Nakba, and don’t exhaust yourself teaching a child who
has not reached the age of three to read of Palestine, which you
wrote for him using all your skills and senses to interest
him.”
I close my window quickly and go out to the
train station. The guard looks at my features, looking for fear in
my eyes, searching my bag and talking to his colleague about their
achievements in Gaza and in South Lebanon and the West Bank. “Why
don’t we do to them what the United States did in Hiroshima?” He
says it and looks around anew, perhaps to smell an Arab nearby.
I enter the train quickly, angry, revolted,
and impotent. I close my eyes to hear Fayrouz singing for love. I
don’t want to see hundreds of soldiers on the train with their guns
on their way to Gaza, to death. It’s the train of death, full of
violence and rifles and soldiers competing for the number of their
victims, and Fayrouz sings.
I look out of the window and count the
abandoned villages, searching another era and a dying memory. The
way from Haifa to Tel Aviv has become covered with sand and shrubs,
covering up the stones of their houses. An Israeli boy sitting next
to me and watching in silence asks his grandfather, “Where did all
this prickly pear (cactus) come from, Granddad?”
“It’s the miracle of nature, my son.” [This
kind of cactus used to surround Palestinian villages—Ed.]
Finally, I arrive at the village of Sheikh
Mouannes, which is Tel Aviv University today, the largest
university in the country. With every new building on its campus,
the village shrinks by one building. This is my university, which I
attended when I was nineteen as I came from a little village in the
Galilee to discover for the first time that I live with oppression
and racism, to discover that I am an unwanted creature, and to wake
up my identity, which was asleep for nineteen years.
This state has tried to wipe out my identity
and negate me all these years. It taught me the history of the Jews
and their catastrophe; it taught me the aims of Zionism and their
importance; it taught me that this is the Promised Land and that
Arab countries are the enemies. I remember when I was eleven, I
asked the history teacher, “If this is the land of the Jews, who
came to live in it when it was empty? Where did the million
Palestinians in Israel come from?”
My teacher smiled and said, “I will explain
it in the next course.”
I didn’t realize then that the next course
would be eight years later when I entered Tel Aviv University.
There is no room there for my Arabic language, no place for my
ideas and dreams. Even my smile is a danger to them.
The Jews at the university would test my
loyalty to their state every day, to make sure I am not one of
those terrorists in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.
I remember the day of my graduation as the
students were chanting the Israeli national anthem,
Hatikva
(hope). I left the hall because this anthem is my death anthem, and
their Tikva is my catastrophe.
One of the students followed me and said,
“So, you are one of them. Go to Gaza and the West Bank; your state
is there. Here is the state for the Jews and only Jews.”
I remember my university and through it the
Second Intifada, tens of demonstrations on the campus, shouting,
arrests, and expelling of students from the university. How could I
forget the day I raised the Palestinian flag.