Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

“The future can’t breathe in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense for hope. You are being offered a chance to liberate the life that lies dormant in all of us. Take it.”

I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city’s viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conquered, razed, and rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiarity in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable title, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes,

Oh, you who passed by and waved with the hand You marked the secrets of love in my heart I heard your voice when you talked Like a bird singing on top of an olive tree Oh, flying bird in the high sky Say “hello” to the dear sweet one Your name, my soul, will stay in my mind Written on my forehead between the eyes

she was too tender for the world she’d been born into,” I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, she loved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe from the tragic rains of her fate.

Love cannot reconcile with deception. And it cannot become inured to an existence paid for with the currency of another’s misery—my mother’s misery.