Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

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.

But all that is left of my father is a man who sings the Fattooma song and wipes the coffee table with Windex until he dies and fades into the looming absence of a face in the framed photo hanging on a wall in a long-abandoned Kuwait apartment in a country that abandoned us.

My grandmother cried like I’d never seen. She looked so small, vulnerable and helpless, the creases on her face filling with tears, like small rivers. As the men were leaving, she said in a quivering, tired voice, “Why, my sons? Why did you do this? This is haram, my sons. It’s haram. Why do you treat us like this?”

I thanked Abu Moathe as if he had not just raped me. He told me I was welcome as if he had not just raped me.

He refused to speak of what had happened to him, left his story embedded in the scars on his body,

I wonder what it’s like to be Norwegian. What’s it like to be a whale? To live in water. To be the biggest creature on earth, still vulnerable to a small man’s greed.

Even back in the seventies, 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.”