Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

Almost daily, Mama and Sitti Wasfiyeh would gather with the women in our building who remained in Kuwait. They’d bake bread rather than wait in the bread lines. Despite the uncertainty, people socialized without the weight of financial responsibilities. Iraq’s occupation had the effect of a natural disaster—it allowed us to take a break from the contrived necessities of money. There was a deeply felt dignity in the sense that one’s shelter and sustenance were not mortgaged. We went where we could not have afforded before the invasion, walked into homes where we’d never have been invited, and into establishments that would not have welcomed us during normal times. No one was poor. No one was

rich. We just were. And

we shared. We ate. We drank. We laughed. We danced. We cried. We dreamed and imagined a better world. Then we waited for fate to fall...

But it was Sitti Wasfiyeh who persuaded my brother it was pointless to try to make us flee. She had been listening to us, uncharacteristically quiet, then she asserted, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m tired of being chased out of wherever I am in the world. Out of Haifa, then out of Ein el-Sultan, then Jordan, and now Kuwait? No. I’ll just die here instead of facing another exodus.

I’m too old for this shit that these shit people keep doing to us. Shit. All of it—shit!”

“Thank you!” I said, contemplating the difference between us. He was not much younger than me, but I was already much older in those days when I was still in my twenties.

“There’s no need, because I’m not transporting guns and ending up in some Jewish gulag.”

“Those destitute refugees from Iraq and Ethiopia you like to talk about with such feminist fervor—do you know what they do in Amman? They sell their daughters and sons. 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 wanted her to taste my breath. “Some of us, Madam Honor, end up with little choice but to Fuck. For. Money.” My head spun behind my eyes. I thought I would faint.

Bilal began rubbing his brow. “You think resistance against a colonizing military occupation is like dancing?”

the company of her sisters and dearest friends. I thought of my mother and Sitti Wasfiyeh, Um Buraq and all the women of our hara in Kuwait who had endured these traumas of colonialism.

He smiled at her, repeating an old saying: “For the ones we love, nothing is ever trouble, and everything is never enough.”

“Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.” Bilal continued reading,

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, and after a silence for both of us to soak up that thought, he continued reading.

don’t think that’s necessarily what Baldwin is saying. I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”