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When my nails were strong and I weighed more than now, I tried to mark time as prisoners do, one line on the wall for each day in groups of five. But I soon realized the light and dark cycles in the Cube do not match those of the outside world. It was a relief to know, because keeping up with life beyond the Cube had begun to weigh on me. Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation. The Cube is thus devoid of time. It contains, instead, a yawning stretch of something unnamed, without present, future,
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I wished she had written something about Bilal. Some news. Or just his name. Or simply the first letter of his name. B is alive and well. B sends his love. Or just B.
I probably looked exactly how Westerners imagine a terrorist—unkempt, hairy, dark, ugly.
Nothing can move in confinement, not even the heart.
My life returns to me in images, smells, and sounds, but never feelings. I feel nothing.
I knew early on, by the way people watched me, that the way I danced was enchanting. When the music plays, my body moves as it wishes. I never tried to control anything. It was complete surrender to music and all the unseen, unknowable forces it inspired. I let rhythm rub against my body and wrap around my breath. Maybe that’s what people saw, because dancing is the nearest I’ve ever come to true faith.
Eastern dance, what people who don’t know better call “belly dancing,” might look like controlled, orchestrated movement, but it’s exactly the opposite. Our dance is about chaos and anarchy. It is the antithesis of control. It’s about relinquishing power over one’s body, bestowing autonomy on every bone, ligament, nerve, and muscle fiber. On every skin and fat cell. Every organ.
I suppose this is true of every form of native dance, but all I know are the rhythms of the Levant, Babylon, el Khaleej, and North Africa. This is the music that rooted in my body as it matured from infancy, then settled in my bones. The lyrics of Um Kulthum, the plaint of a ney, the melody of a qanuun or the rasp of an oud are the sounds of my life. They echo inside me, through time and with the stories those ancient instruments made. As much as I love the sounds of India—the complex resonance of the sitar or the high-pitched strings of a tumbi—or the deep percussion and multilayered rhythms
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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. This is why foreign “belly dancers” have always bothered me. The use of our music as a prop to wiggle and shimmy and jump around offends me. Eastern music is the soundtrack of me, and dancing is the only nation I ever claimed, the only religion I comprehend. When I see women “belly dance” to music they do not understand,
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Unlike Mama, she’d never really left her village in Palestine. Just as I do now in the Cube, my grandmother roamed Ein el-Sultan in her mind.
The guards are accustomed to the conversations I have with the walls. I know I’m alone here. I’m not delusional. But the way memory animates the past is more real than the present. I see and feel and hear Jehad, Sitti Wasfiyeh, Mama, Baba. Most of all, I am with Bilal here.
I endured and waited, because that’s what girls do. Even bad girls like me. We endure and wait, and cater to the whims of men, because sometimes our lives are at stake… until we get even.
Each bought a little piece of me and took it away forever. I remember them all.
You take what you can get from them. They have all the power in the world, but it’s possible to have power over them.
I find that reporters and writers who come here don’t actually want to listen to me or hear my thoughts, except where I might validate what they already believe.
I had not understood the extent of our subordination until I knew what it meant to be respected, not in spite of being Palestinian but precisely because of it.
I had watched my mother embroider now and then over the years, but I’d never paid much attention to it. To my young eyes, embroidered caftans belonged to another generation, and I foolishly thought them unrefined compared to modern European clothes. But in Amman, in the haze of my exile and idleness and through the lens of loss, the spectacular intricacy of tatreez crystallized as I watched my mother create gorgeous caftans, and I finally realized hers was a masterful testament to our heritage and her own artistry. She would spend hours upon painstaking hours hunched over her lap, needle and
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I looked at Mama’s face, that thing in my chest squeezing again, and it occurred to me that she had been around my age when she was forced out of her home in Palestine. She had come to Amman then too, before journeying on to Kuwait with my father. It seemed to me that fate was inherited, like eye color. I wondered if she had felt the same disorientation that now ruled my days. Had it been all she could think about—the incomprehensibility of forced, permanent displacement?
Maybe it was finally getting through, or some spiritual call from my ancestors, but I was overcome with relief—and something akin to belonging—when I emerged on the other side of the crossing terminal. The landscape, topography, weather, and smells were no different from the east side of the Jordan River, but Palestine was nothing like Jordan. There was an immense silence just beyond the bustle of people milling about, waiting among parked cars, taxis, soldiers, handcarts. I gazed toward the unfolding land, where rolling hills met the sky. Images began to converge in my chest, deepening my
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Samer assumed the tone of a tour guide, showing me around the room, which was no more than a few paces in each direction. It seemed a bit ridiculous then, but now, in the Cube, I understand how much space and story one can fit into the smallest footprints.
Honor is an expendable luxury when you have no means or shelter in this fucking world.” My legs began trembling, making it hard to stand still, and my voice shook now with suppressed tears. “We are not all blessed to receive a good education and inherit what it takes to live with some dignity. To exist on your own land, in the bosom of your family and your history. To know where you belong in the world and what you’re fighting for. To have some goddamn value.” I put my face closer to hers.
I lingered on the words our spot. Now, in this Cube, this chamber of timeless nontime, I ponder why those words touched me as they did. Was I so starved for a place? For a physical and emotional ground that included me? Or maybe what moved me most was to know there was a little clearing on this planet just for Bilal and me, for “love.” Love, B.
He pulled a second tea glass from his knapsack, and we went through the motions performed millions of times through the centuries in this part of the world. Managing a hot kettle on an outdoor fire, adding tea and sage leaves, spooning honey or sugar, pouring, inhaling the warm air hovering over the glass, sipping, feeling hot liquid slide down the throat into one’s core. The sweet minted hot tea with sage warmed my insides. I was content to just sit there in the splendid silence of the hills, where the quiet amplified small sounds—the wind rustling trees; sheep chewing, roaming, bleating,
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The familiar feeling of being alone and lost in the world, unsure of the path forward, had returned to me since that day in the underground. Only bluster and pride concealed the loneliness expanding in me. But now I was overwhelmed by Bilal’s pain, the guilt he must have carried, the impotence I knew he felt seeing those settlements, the anguish over his brother, his mother, the years in prison, the torture, the inability to move, teach, or practice his profession. I wanted to take him in my arms and fix everything. All I could do was help carry the tea glasses as we bade Jandal good night.
I take these blindfolded walks regularly now, but I don’t know how often or for how long. As I’ve already said, time is immeasurable in here. I can, however, tell you that sometimes I am taken outdoors, other times somewhere indoors. The light and darkness of this earth are different from that of a building. The first time I felt the sun on my skin, I thought I would sell my soul to feel it again. But I didn’t have to. They let me visit the sun again. Even blindfolded, it is glorious.
Sweet, kind, gentle Jandal was gone. I recalled the last time I’d seen him, the day before I left Palestine—his shy smile, the way his flock responded to his voice and to the music of his ney. The goats that had chased each other in a game of tag that day were likely gone too. Jandal had given continuity to an ancient Palestinian tradition. That was also disappearing, and maybe it was the point of killing Jandal and his animals. He knew those hills like he knew his own body. He would not have wandered into a firing zone, even though Israel endlessly carves out more and more Palestinian spaces
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THEN, THERE IS the space between. I lie on my bed, facing the ceiling, trying to remember sky and stars and sun and clouds. In moments like this, time seeps in from the outside and weighs heavily on me. Even when there are no plans or ambitions, no initiatives, intentions, deals, or hope, there remains an irrepressible instinct to account for life. I improvise calendars, wander in and out of them, destroy and reinvent them.
Your grandmother passed away. A new sort of grief burrows into me, a cloistered, unreachable, immutable ache. I can’t see, smell, or embrace it. It just lodges in me, taking up space, a thing within a prison within a prisoner within the Cube.
I would like to take a shower, though I would give up ever showering again just to hear music. The silence of solitary confinement is altogether different than the soothing, promising silence of the sky. The quiet here has a sharp, jagged edge that tears at my mind. I try to take refuge in the sounds on the other side of my skin—conversations and films, stories and cries, sniffles, and fires in my mind. I conjure songs I know. And I dance. But memory, however practiced and refined, is no substitute for actual music. I start praying, bowing and prostrating. There is no adan in the Cube. I pray
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If I’m honest, I was glad we’d had that confrontation in the underground. It allowed me to lay bare my life, right on the tip of my middle finger. But that no longer mattered. I suppose Jandal’s passing had transformed us all.
Vivid wild poppies dotted the landscape, announcing the coming of spring. In a few weeks, they would multiply to carpet the land in burgundy velvet. The sky was already streaked with the red and orange ushers of sunset. We took in the beauty of the land, a metastasizing settlement sprawling ever closer, threatening to swallow it all.
I would like to tell you that I was swept away with passion, but it was not so. The disquiet deep within me, an insecurity or fear so constant I barely knew it was there, arose. As our kiss deepened, became more expressive, thirstier, I was overcome by a desire to weep. No one had ever kissed me with such love, and it occurred to me that happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.
We worked as a team and remained loyal to one another through the worst of surprises. The trust that evolved from that had weight—an immovable thing, like the hills around us, full of stories they’ll never tell and life they’ll always nurture. Or that’s just how I experienced it.
I started toward Bilal, but was pulled to the dance floor just as the DJ slowed the evening with the music of Fairooz. The first notes of her song “Ya Tayr” always move me. They are simple melodies played on the flute. But they sound like time. Like all that was good and lost. Others on the dance floor linked their arms and began to sway and sing the lyrics. I closed my eyes, the better to soak in the music. Fairooz has the kind of voice that gathers up the heart and takes you somewhere else. I was transported to another time, where I sat on the shores of Kuwait, my bare toes digging in the
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Although Bilal and Ghassan were angry initially at having been cheated, by the time we all met again their outlook had changed to optimism. I suppose that’s what made them revolutionaries. They were all-in, with everything they had, and that meant rummaging through defeat and disappointment to find a new plan and cause for hope.
“It’s important to understand that deterministic doesn’t mean that it’s predictable. And unpredictable doesn’t mean random. The weather is an example of chaos theory. The stock market. They are deterministic, they have repeating patterns and constant feedback, and they’re self-organizing. Unpredictable, but not random. A butterfly flapping its wings in Japan could initiate a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. That’s part of chaos theory.” Bilal thought for a moment, and added, “You see, Nahr? You were right. Dancing is a good example of a chaotic system, and I believe you are also right that
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They could put Jandal and thousands like him in their crosshairs and pull the trigger, but we were not powerless. The possibilities for creative armed resistance were vast.
A symphony of crickets filled the darkness as my anxiety rose. Alone in the open outdoors, the memory of Kuwait came back to me, the long-ago place in a long-ago time on the beach, when a broken shard of glass dug deeper and deeper into my back with each thrust of the man on top of me. I felt shooting pain from the scar that marked that night on my body forever, and it occurred to me how much my life had changed. Two frightful nights alone in nature, one fraught with despair and a sense of endings, the other ripe with possibility, life, love, anticipation, and power—both personal and
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I was engrossed in a robotic rhythm of picking, my mind emptied of thought. The ability to become vacuous was a skill I had honed over years. The slow stream of sweat trickling down the groove of my back brought me in and out of awareness. I was there, but not there.
Bilal’s rearrest, the torched fields, and Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s hospital stay made the hours stretch and fold in on themselves, holding time hostage to different iterations of the same day that would not end.
I did love Bilal, though those words seemed too small for his expansive presence in my heart. He saw me in the fullness of my shame and broken parts, and didn’t look away. Through his eyes, I saw and maybe became another version of myself—a thoughtful, powerful, intellectual woman who could love, be loved, affect the world, and maybe be touched again by a man.
For the first time since my girlhood in Kuwait, I fantasized about a life of my own making, a story Bilal and I would create on our own terms. I dared to imagine a forever with him. I dared, even, to wish for a child, a life born of love, to be loved hard and always.
I could feel his ribs beneath the sweater, but he was the whole world in my arms. He whispered in my ear, “You are everything, Nahr.”
But mostly we didn’t speak much, especially in the first few days of his return. You are everything, Nahr filled all the rooms and the silence echoed with those words when we were together.
“… if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.” “Do you think that’s how we’ve survived?” I asked. He put the book down, thought for a moment, and looked at me. “I don’t see how else anyone can survive colonialism. Understanding our own condition, I think in saying ‘loved each other,’ Baldwin doesn’t just mean the living. To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from,” he said,
“There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men.
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Baldwin and Kanafani were contemporaries thousands of miles apart, who never met but lived parallel lives. They wrote with the same passion, the same irreverence and defiance; with overlapping wounds and bottomless love for their people. Baldwin was forced into self-imposed exile and Kanafani was assassinated by Israel. To be committed is to be in danger.
Those weeks cloistered together in the house, alone, unable to leave or receive guests, having to sneak into the garden for fresh air and a bit of food, were perhaps the most profound honeymoon anyone could ask for. We packed a few years into a couple of months. We roamed inside each other—our memories, insecurities, and dreams. We explored each other’s bodies, inching toward an enchanted precipice that was both frightening and irresistible.
I think it was the first time I desired a man truly. My body desired him emotionally, psychologically, intellectually, and, at last, physically. We made love many times before we made love.
I danced first for him, but quickly, as always happened, I danced for the music, for the sake of dance, for the sake of my body, the air, and the night. For the sake of memory and the moon. For love of Bilal and longing for my family. It felt good to dance. I gathered up the hours past with my hips, rolled them into my body. Bilal’s hands brushed against me, but I wasn’t yet ready for him. I wanted time with the music. It had been too long since I had danced. I shed my clothes, my dishdasha falling with a swoosh to the floor. Naked now, but for the kuffiyeh Bilal retied around my hips, I
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