Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

Abandoning the imposition of a calendar helped me understand that time isn’t real; it has no logic in the absence of hope or anticipation.

Eastern music is the soundtrack of me, and dancing is the only nation I ever claimed, the only religion I comprehend. When I see women “belly dance” to music they do not understand, in clothes of a people they do not know—or worse, disdain—I feel they are colonizing me and all Arab women who are the keepers of our traditions and heritage.

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.

when you don’t react predictably, it throws people off, hopefully long enough for you to get the upper hand.

“May God bless you, my daughter. You are worth more than all the gold in the world,”

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.

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.

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 on our heads from American warplanes.

Sometimes I imagined I really was her. I thought it was the closest I would ever come to being loved by a man.

I will carry his broken dreams for the rest of my life.

“O God, my Lord, destroy the Jews for making us endless refugees and condemn Yasser Arafat for causing another Palestinian exodus. O my Lord, burn the Americans and burn the Jews. They are behind all these wars.”

and for the rest of the night, even in my dreams, I thought of my grandmother, her anguished life in a world that could not spare a space for her.

Now the land had been pulled from under my feet and I wobbled in the unsteady terrain of refugees, struggling to carry on.

They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.

But in Amman, in the haze of my exile and idleness and through the lens of loss, the spectacular intricacy of tatreez crystallized as I watched my mother create gorgeous caftans, and I finally realized hers was a masterful testament to our heritage and her own artistry. 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.

not like me, who only knows how to embroider a past we cannot recover.”

I 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.

I looked at Mama’s face, that thing in my chest squeezing again, and it occurred to me that she had been around my age when she was forced out of her home in Palestine. She had come to Amman then too, before journeying on to Kuwait with my father. It seemed to me that fate was inherited, like eye color. I wondered if she had felt the same disorientation that now ruled my days. Had it been all she could think about—the incomprehensibility of forced, permanent displacement?

We take what God gives us, good and bad, and trust in His wisdom.”

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

“Someday, enshallah, when Jerusalem is liberated, we will all once again be able to visit our holy city.”

“carried the scent and spirit of my home and youth in Palestine.”

Images began to converge in my chest, deepening my breathing. Memories of two trips we’d taken as children with Baba; Sitti Wasfiyeh’s tales about Ein el-Sultan; stories from Mama, Baba, neighbors, and friends about Haifa. The ones I thought I’d discarded, tuned out, dismissed. They were all there to greet me, enfolding me in the embrace of our collective dislocation from this place where all our stories go and return. Here is where we began. Where our songs were born, our ancestors buried. The adan sounded from unseen minarets. It floated through me, raised the hair on my arms, made me close my eyes and inhale the call to prayer.

She was nearly blind and possessed the limitless generosity and kindness that often accompanies sightlessness, as if one’s love for the world increases as the ability to see it diminishes.

I stepped into the lush space of our absence. These were the trees my great-grandfather had planted for his children and grandchildren. My grandfather would have planted some for me and Jehad had our destiny not been stolen.

This tree was a member of my family. I belonged to it. All the trees in that garden were my family.

Their friendship revived and spread roots in the terrain of a grief particular to martyr-dom, where the anguish of loss mixes with pride, resolve, the desire for vengeance, and camaraderie.

“A mother’s dua’as are precious to God’s ears,” she would say.

The first time I felt the sun on my skin, I thought I would sell my soul to feel it again.

I had not understood until then how humiliated my mother had felt by her life. The simple dignity of a “desk job,” as she called it, had transformed her. I should have said it again, that her embroidery was more special than any “desk job” could be; that she was an artist; that Western images of professional women don’t have to apply to us; that concepts of respectability and modernity are manufactured.

It was deliberate. Jandal had been murdered. And as with thousands of Palestinians just like him, there would be no accountability for his killers.

The ceaseless accumulation of injustice made me want to fight the world, to lash out somehow, scream.

happiness can reach such depths that it becomes something akin to grief.

The trust that evolved from that had weight—an immovable thing, like the hills around us, full of stories they’ll never tell and life they’ll always nurture. Or

“You have to coat each piece separately,” she said, rubbing the spice mixture into the lamb. “And recite Quran in your heart when you do it … or at least think about blessed things. Give thanks to God and to the animal whose life will nurture us. O Lord, bless this day. We thank you for all things. Praise you, Lord.”

“You’re such good girls, you two. God has given me the daughters I never had. Praise Him. Praise His wisdom and His mercy.”

“O Lord in your infinite mercy, bring my son home soon. O my God and my Master, please clear his path of the evil and malice of those people.”

He went first to his mother, kneeling to kiss her feet as she struggled to pull him to her face. He kissed her hands, then her forehead, then her cheeks.

“Let me kiss your face, my son. You are as dear to me as Ghassan and Jandal, God rest his soul. Praise God for your safe return, my son. Praise God,” she said.

The continuity of these traditions helped bridge the spaces between dislocation and the home I had forged in my birthright homeland, but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another.

“May God brighten your days and clear your path of wickedness, my daughter. You always check on me. May God’s angels always check on you. Amen,”

My father says it’s wrong to beat a tree that’s giving you blessings.

but to stand and watch the land burn would have been more painful than the burns on our skin and smoke in our lungs.

“One must always be grateful to God for one’s fate, alhamdulillah,”

I did love Bilal, though those words seemed too small for his expansive presence in my heart. He saw me in the fullness of my shame and broken parts, and didn’t look away. Through his eyes, I saw and maybe became another version of myself—a thoughtful, powerful, intellectual woman who could love, be loved, affect the world, and maybe be touched again by a man.

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

I thought there could never be words big enough to hold such love and desire for one person. His arms circled around me, and I put mine around him. Love eclipsed propriety this time. I could feel his ribs beneath the sweater, but he was the whole world in my arms. He whispered in my ear, “You are everything, Nahr.”

You are everything, Nahr filled all the rooms and the silence echoed with those words when we were together.

Verse twenty-one from Surat el Rum in the Quran. A prayer for marriage.”

“And of His wisdom is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy. Indeed, for in these are wisdoms for those who think.”