Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

I’m not going to ask those sons of bitches for permission to go home. I have underwear older than the Zionist entity.

“Let them think they own the land. I know better. I know the land owns us, her native children.”

Here is where we began. Where our songs were born, our ancestors buried.

“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.”

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.

“For the ones we love, nothing is ever trouble, and everything is never enough.”

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,”