Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

liked the interpreter, who was short and dark, like me, and wore red Converse shoes with fourteen black dots on the white rubber toe caps. One dot, then a group of nine dots, then four dots: 194, the code we used to evade Israeli surveillance.

At first I was confused. The 194 method only works with written messages. We couldn’t count, listen, interpret, and speak at the same time. Then I realized Lena was tapping her pencil on certain words as she translated. She must have recognized the moment I figured it out because she smiled slightly. The words she kept tapping were variants of “eat the note,” “mouth the paper,” and “notepad food.”

But now even that no longer moves me. Nothing can move in confinement, not even the heart.

I DON’T REMEMBER the first time I danced. Women of my generation were born dancing. It was just something we did when we gathered. We’d form a circle, clapping and singing as each of us entered the middle to roll our hips.

Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. If you don’t learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language.

I feel they are colonizing me and all Arab women who are the keepers of our traditions and heritage.

Mama kept a box of black-and-white photographs from her life in Haifa. Her family had been well-off, but European Jews stole everything when they conquered Palestine in 1948—right down to their furniture, books, and bank accounts. Her family became penniless overnight, then scattered to different corners of the world or died. She didn’t like to talk about it. “What’s the point of picking at scabs?”

Palestinians learned the first time in 1948 that leaving to save your life meant you would lose everything and could never go back.