Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

The music was mostly pop Khaleeji, Egyptian, and Lebanese. But they played some of the classics with a takht orchestra and some instrumental taqseem. There were enough of us from the Levant that they even played a jafra, and we lit up the dance floor, stomping out a high-stepping dabke.

No therapist or clergy can substitute for the confidence of a whore, because whores have no voice in the world, no avenue to daylight, and that makes us the most reliable custodians of secrets and truth.

There was something alluring about living on the margins, in secret disrepute. It freed me from the drudgery of respectability—the low-paying jobs, social pretenses, children. I could have some autonomy without a husband. I could be my family’s breadwinner, the powerful woman who took care of others. And all I had to do was what I loved most of all: dance.

One of the “improvements” Israel made was to lower the volume on the alarm. When visitors come to survey the Cube, they are shown this feature to demonstrate how conditions are adjusted for my comfort and convenience.

I waged my fight for writing utensils on the north wall. The guards had ignored all my requests for pen and paper until I used bodily fluids to write on that wall. In menstrual blood I wrote: Long live Saddam Hussein, and in feces: Israel is shit.

Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.

Mama was fluent. She knew which patterns came from which village, what they meant, and how that meaning might change next to another pattern.

had to become another person, someone at the other end of disgrace, rape, and exile, to fully appreciate that my mother, a simple widow with an elementary education, was an extraordinary artist. My mother was a maker of beauty, a brilliant custodian of culture and history. And I was the ungrateful daughter who had not understood until now.

“When I was very small, my father used to lift me on his shoulders so I could pluck my own figs.” In another photo, she and one of her sisters were teenagers standing in the Al Aqsa compound in front of the Dome of the Rock. “In those days, we could take a bus right to Jerusalem, or we could go by train straight to Beirut, or Damascus, or Cairo even. The world was open.” She stared a bit more. “If only we knew then.”

Bilal spoke of Areas A, B, and C as the sun began making its way to the sea, painting the sky, land, and life in the colors of its wake. I knew these were designations created by the Oslo Accords, but I couldn’t remember their distinctions. He explained that we were in Area C, which was being heavily colonized by Israel, and that my in-laws’ home was a prime target. It was the only remaining house for some distance in the village. The nearest homes had been torn down, Bilal told me. “Israel has a lot of excuses. Lack of permits, illegal wells, relatives of fighters, whatever they want.”

Bilal had been released under the Oslo agreement, but his freedom was conditioned on his never practicing his profession as a chemist in any capacity, not even teaching. He was forbidden to travel outside a specified radius without authorization from the local military authority, could not write or publish any political material, could not under any circumstances enter Jerusalem and, if he ever left the country, could not return.

During Eid and for special occasions, people would buy lambs for sacrifice. But Bilal insisted on hiring his own butcher to perform the ritual halal traditions for his sheep. “Because people terrify these animals before killing them. Few butchers actually adhere to halal requirements anymore,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I hate that we even eat meat as much as we do. Sheep, cows, fish, whales, goats—they’re nations unto themselves. They too deserve to be free.” The primacy of humans was only one assumption I had never questioned until I met him.

Finally we arrived in Haifa. People call it a “mixed city,” but that isn’t true. It was clear where Jews lived compared with Palestinians; there was no mixing.

On the branch where the fruit had been were jagged lines. I pulled away some vines and more fruit to reveal the rest. The noise from the street was growing louder as I made out the words: Rashida, habibit Baba. Rashida, Daddy’s girl. That’s how my grandfather had referred to my mother. This was her fig tree. This tree was a member of my family. I belonged to it. All the trees in that garden were my family.

saw Bilal ahead, reading under that old olive tree, resting his head on the belly of a sleeping sheep, man and beast completing each other in perfect laziness.

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.

Western do-gooders were trying to bring Palestinian and Israeli kids together, as if our condition was just a matter of two equal sides who didn’t like each other, instead of the world’s last remaining goddamn settler colonial project.”

“Israel’s occupation is pretty much what you see on the news. But they don’t show our weddings, cafés, nightlife, shopping, art and music scenes, universities, landscape, farming, harvests. It’s not what I imagined. At the same time, it is everything I imagined.”

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.

I had a vision of us all being tortured in Israeli prisons, the entire neighborhood razed and taken over by settlers, excavated as yet another Disneyland Jewish archaeology site, the city renamed, its natives ghettoized somewhere else.

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.

“I think you’re brilliant,” he said. “You have a deep intelligence and natural insight that can’t be taught.”

The sun went down and rose again, as if nothing had happened, indifferent to Bilal’s and Ghassan’s absence, to the knowledge that they were being harmed in ways we couldn’t bear to imagine. There was no charge. No trial. Both were held in “administrative detention.” All of this just to secure a bit of water for the trees.

Arthritis had taken the vigor from Hajjeh Um Mhammad’s hands and her movements were fitful, but she insisted on prepping the meat with spices herself. “You have to coat each piece separately,” she said, rubbing the spice mixture into the lamb. “And recite Quran in your heart when you do it… or at least think about blessed things. Give thanks to God and to the animal whose life will nurture us. O Lord, bless this day. We thank you for all things. Praise you, Lord.”

We knew that Israelis were especially menacing during the harvest season. They know olives have been the mainstay and centerpiece of our social, economic, and cultural presence for millennia, and it infuriated them—still does—to watch the unbroken continuity of our indigenous traditions. So they came with their big guns, and the colonial logic of interlopers who cannot abide our presence or our joy.

Some internationals came to help pick olives and offer their bodies and cameras as shields against another attack. They came again on the third day, but could do nothing but film when masked settlers arrived, once more protected by soldiers.

Years before, when the almonds were dying off, Bilal had changed the configuration of the trees so most of the water-intensive almonds were replanted behind the more drought-resistant olives to prevent Israel from seizing the land on the pretext of dying trees. The irrigation tubing he’d devised ran from the center outward, so most water went to the almonds, and now they appeared healthy again with delicate white flowers, although not yet with nuts. The cousin who had taken over Jandal’s job brought the sheep to graze regularly to ensure the soil would get enough nitrogen. Even the burned patch was showing signs of life, with weeds sprouting here and there. We had wrapped the burned trees with white cloth—a bandage to reflect the sun and hold in moisture—and I extended a hose to the area to soak the soil as much as possible from the water tank, which we were still siphoning from the settlers’ water pipe. Trees aren’t much different from people in that way. You protect the burned parts from the elements, keep hydrating and nourishing the body, and wait for life to heal itself.

Their deceit, once planted in the public imagination—like the epic fabrication of a Jewish nation returning to its homeland—had grown into a living, breathing narrative that shaped lives as if it were truth. Heroes, Palestinian and Israeli, were made from their lies that day. Israel honored its fallen soldiers and decorated Itamar for killing two Palestinians. Haj Ayman could hold his head high in the country now because his sons had chosen the righteous path of resistance and died martyrs. People came to pay their respects and honor his fallen sons. The community’s blessings lessened the pain of watching Israel demolish his home and make of him a homeless old man.

The five of us ate breakfast on the terrace—Sitti Wasfiyeh, Mama, Jehad, Bilal, and me together in Palestine. The winter rains of December and January had been heavier than usual, ushering in a dense and diverse cover of wildflowers across the hillside. Red, white, and purple anemones and pink and white cyclamen carpeted the eastern hills rolling around us. Poppies, buttercups, and red everlastings overlapped in random pockets. Rare wild tulips rose here and there. Bull mallow, Jerusalem sage, mustard, and thyme found their places around rocks and boulders. Soon the blue lupine and yellow corn marigold would replace the anemones. The crocuses and squill were waiting dormant in their bulbs to bloom in summer. The honeysuckle had already begun creeping over the bushes and trees, and the hyacinths, daisies, and narcissus bloomed on the higher ground.

Mr. Baldwin tells Big James: “Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.”

As Abdel Halim Hafez sang from the speakers the lyrics of “El Hawa Hawaya,”

“Deir Yaseen wasn’t just a massacre, an abstract word with numbers and grainy photos of a long-ago time. To me, Deir Yaseen is this little boy. There are stories like this for every pogrom they committed against us,” he said. Bilal surrounded himself with stories, stacked shelves of them to collect people’s pain and paste it into historic events and political analyses.

sang, even though I don’t have a good voice. I started with “Yumma Mweil elHawa,” to set the mood. The judge admonished me. I waited a while, then sang every Abdel Halim Hafez song I could think of. “El Hawa Hawaya” followed by my favorite, “Qariatol Fingan.”

‘… His wife is a whore,’ he said. But when challenged that Palestinians consider her a revolutionary as much as her husband, the general laughs again and says, ‘A revolutionary whore.’ ”

But American warplanes and war plans followed her to Iraq years later, under a US president who was the son of the president who bombed Iraq when we still lived in Kuwait. This time they reduced Babylon, that once splendid, sophisticated, ancient civilization, to nothing. They made beggars of her teachers, taxi drivers of her doctors; and they made off with her treasures and artifacts. Um Buraq had arrived in Jordan in that thick human stream of refugees in the spring of 2003. “Americans are the devil,” she said.

“Do you think it means anything that we both ended up imprisoned?” Um Buraq asks. “It means fate lacks imagination,” I say, but I sit with the question. “Or maybe it just proves the state will always find a way to imprison those who are truly free, who do not accept social, economic, or political chains.”

“No matter what happened, we’re still Arabs. We’re still brothers and sisters. Despite everything, I still love Kuwait, and consider myself Kuwaiti despite the revocation of my citizenship. We’re all part of each other. When you see what the Americans have done to us, what they’ve done to Iraq, Libya… And it breaks our hearts, all of us. That’s how you know we’re incomplete without each other,” Um Buraq says, reminding me of Bilal when he spoke of pan-Arabism and pan-Africanism.

“There was a part of me that wasn’t afraid of your blackmail because I think I knew you wouldn’t show those pictures to anyone. I made the choice to go along. I wanted the validation and worth that came with having a bit of money and being able to help my family. I liked breaking rules I had no say in making, at the same time that I hated how I did it.” I take her old face in my hands. “You don’t need my forgiveness, but if you want it, consider it granted.”