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.

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.

“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 wanted her to taste my breath. “Some of us, Madam Honor, end up with little choice but to Fuck. For. Money.”

I packed my bags. The belonging and acceptance I had found seemed an illusion. Palestine was my mother’s world. It belonged to Sitti Wasfiyeh’s stories. Palestine did not want me, nor I her any longer. I was again untethered and vulnerable, a stranger in a place that had felt like home.