Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

In May 1948, the British left Palestine and Jewish refugees who had been pouring in proclaimed themselves a Jewish state, changing the name of the land from Palestine to Israel.

Soon Jordan, Iraq, and Syria gave out a few tents, and a refugee camp sprang up in Jenin, where the villagers of Ein Hod could stand on the hills and look back at the homes to which they could never return.

right. Zionists succeeded in getting rid of the British and most of the Arabs. He and Jolanta saw the birth of Israel.

grandfather made his heart curl around itself in sadness.

The hurt in my heart was as big as the universe and all its planets.

clandestine

that Irish inflection that curls the end of a sentence up into a question.

“We’re all born with the greatest treasures we’ll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. And the indispensable tools of those treasures are time and health.

When I was a child, Haj Salem told me that answers can be found in the sky if you look long and hard enough. He told me that the arrangements of stars were divine hieroglyphics that could be deciphered by faithful hearts.

As the moon smiled in the sky, I begged the night to sweep me up by surprise with a dream that was my own. For in my life, I had not yet dreamed my own dream.

I think of those years with nostalgia. It is true we had no heat to warm our nights or our weekly bathing water, but we had much of the stuff that warmed our souls. We were friends who doubled as mothers, sisters, teachers, providers, and sometimes as blankets. We shared everything from clothes to heartaches.

repudiation

vicissitude,

I can explain this, but it would break the glass cover on your heart, and there’s no fixing that.

vestigial