Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.

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.

She would spend hours upon painstaking hours hunched over her lap, needle and thimble pulling and pushing threads in and out of fabric, creating patterns that told the stories of our people in a pictorial language conceived by Palestinian women over centuries. Mama was fluent. She knew which patterns came from which village, what they meant, and how that meaning might change next to another pattern. She’d tried to teach me when I was a little girl, but I had wanted no part of it. Now, in the Cube, I recall the day she gave up trying to teach me. She said, “I don’t blame you. If I had a chance to go to school like you, that’s what I would have done instead. You’re a smart girl. Someday you’ll have a desk job, not like me, who only knows how to embroider a past we cannot recover.”

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.

The first books I received preceded the first visitors by three bowel movements. One book was about blue whales, one on the cosmos, and another a bad translation of a badly written Western romance novel. I devoured them before the visitors arrived and had begun rereading about blue whales. Such extraordinary creatures. True gentle giants, full of mystery and romance, like the ocean itself.

Can something expected still be a surprise? 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.

“Come, let’s try it on,” she said. As I moved to pick it up, Mama explained her creation. “I thought a lot about this and decided to use the basic patterns of a Jerusalem thobe, because we’re being erased from her story and her stone,” she said. Even the way she described her embroidery was poetic.

There were others in the world who, like us, were seen as worthless, not expected to aspire or excel, for whom mediocrity was predestined, and who should expect to be told where to go, what to do, whom to marry, and where to live. 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.” Bilal continued reading, but my mind lingered on that sentence because I knew that, despite everything, I was loved. I was loved hard. At once and forever against the loveless world. I missed my family. Um Buraq too. But I was home here. “Habibi, I’m sorry, can you reread that last bit? I was thinking about previous lines.” “I know what you mean. Reading Baldwin ought to be slow. Every sentence beckons not only the mind, but also one’s heart, history, and future.” He paused. “… if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.”

He put the book down, thought for a moment, and looked at me. “I don’t see how else anyone can survive colonialism. Understanding our own condition, I think in saying ‘loved each other,’ Baldwin doesn’t just mean the living. 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.

“I 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.”

I told him everything. Not then, but later. I wanted him to know what I could never tell anyone. All of it. I couldn’t stop myself. Abu Nasser, the panty sniffer. Abu Moathe, my rapist. Saddam Hussein, my savior. The money. Um Buraq, my procuress, my friend. How I hid it from my family. Why I did it. Why I stopped. Why I went back. I told it as I tell it now. As if it were someone else’s life, something distant from me. I didn’t feel the shame, pleasure, or trauma of it. I wasn’t holding back tears. There simply were none. Bilal listened, intermittently stroking my hair, without sympathy or empathy. With patience, and at times maybe with judgment, though he didn’t say. It grew dark. We had missed the television news and didn’t eat. Finally I got up to go to the bathroom, but he pulled me back. “I love you all the more for what you survived, what you did to support your family, and for trusting me,” he said.

I love you, Nahr. You’ve given me the best days of my life. Those words bounce around in my head now; their letters fall apart and float in my eyes, behind my face, in my throat, and I scramble to reassemble it all, afraid I have forgotten the sound of Bilal’s voice or the thuds of his heart in my ear against his chest. I lie on my bed in the Cube, concentrating to put it all together to replay: I love you, Nahr. You’ve given me the best days of my life. Sometimes I can’t and am seized by panic. I’m terrified of forgetting.

seeing the newspaper clippings dissipated quickly. Feelings erode in here. Memories wear off. All that’s left are facts without the emotion that once accompanied them. I don’t cry in this place. There isn’t room enough for the heart to move. There are no winds to rustle it. Silence here is not the absence of sound, but the presence of a dense, unshakable stillness. Like dark matter in space, silence here is a living force that slides into all corners and seams. I have come to depend on it.

The park isn’t really a park, but an open landscape of hills and valleys dotted with trees and rocks. It looks so much like the landscape of Palestine. Like the view over the orchards Bilal and I used to look upon. I indulge an illicit fantasy of a world that would have allowed us to simply live, raise children, hold jobs, move freely on earth, and grow old together. I allow myself to imagine that the dignities of home and freedom might be the purview of the wretched of this earth. Bilal and I would be in a place like this, perhaps hiking with at least one grown child, a teenage girl. Her father would teach her the names and benefits of all the plants we’d encounter. I would listen to stories of her life—her friends, romantic interests, dreams, and plans. We would eat together as a family and go home tired after a long day of being whole and free on earth. I feel the loss of what we never had, and it feels good to know that my heart stirs.

Khalida Jarrar, Ahmad Sa’adat, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Albert Woodfox, and members of the MOVE family. In particular, I wish to thank Janet Holloway Africa, Janine Phillips Africa, and Ria Africa, who were recently released after being imprisoned for more than forty years, and who graciously spoke to me about their lives in prison.