In My Mother's Footsteps: A Palestinian Refugee Returns Home

by Mona Hajjar Halaby

“I’m afraid of what I’ll discover. I’m afraid I won’t be able to contain my grief. What if I cry all the time? Or worse, what if I can’t shed a single tear?”

“Where do you come from?” asked my mother, a question she always threw out at people she met, as though where they came from superseded what they’d become.

During the First World War, almost concurrently with the Balfour Declaration, British political representatives in Cairo were organizing an Arab rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, with Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, leading the efforts. The British had promised the Arabs independence from the Ottomans, in return for support against the Ottomans during the war. In other words, the United Kingdom was creating a head-on collision, promising both the Jews and the Arabs statehood in Palestine.

“Refugees are like seeds that scatter in the wind, and land in different soils that become their reluctant homes.”

It was only years later that I came to understand that identity is where your heart lies. It is not the product of official documents, or genealogy. In my case, it was fashioned by love, by stories, by a sense of belonging, all inspired by my mother, who like the lonely loon paddling on the lake at night, sang her mournful song about Palestine from the day I was born.

Jerusalem was known to be one of the most tolerant places in the world, where different cultures and religions lived side by side, and respected one another, living in balance and harmony.

Once a refugee, always a refugee. I had appropriated her memories and had made them my own. Is that what children of refugees do?

I remembered thinking then that even though I had not been personally driven out in 1948, I was being driven out now. After I recuperated from that woman’s rejecting remark, I wondered what it takes to belong to a place—citizenship? Falling in love with a place? Getting married? Residency? Genealogy? Owning property? With my colorfully international background, I was clueless.

It’s the spirits of all the past owners and not the tectonic plates that will one day make the earth rumble, because those spirits are alive in their houses, and are intertwined in the wrought-iron fences, cast in the stone wall and balconies.

On the boardwalk a poster, hung from a lamppost, listed the chronological history of the town. Not once did it mention that Jaffa has been an Arab city. Erasure is a form of oppression.

She reassured me that she’d be back in a few weeks, but that was the last time I saw her. Like in all wars, we thought that once the fighting subsided we would be returning home. Little did we know that we would be losing our homes and our homeland forever.

Sometimes at night when I can’t fall asleep, I say to myself, “Zakia, let’s return to Jerusalem. Let’s walk its streets.” I do this to see if I still remember all the streets. Sometimes I come to a dead-end street and I say, “Now, do I turn right, or should I go left?” And finally, I fall asleep.

“Suitcases always open the floodgates,” my father said wisely. When you’ve lost your country, when you’ve experienced being a refugee, suitcases mean you have left a little piece of yourself behind and you can never be whole again.

Later I sectioned the fruit and brought back to California some of the seeds, which I planted in my garden. They have grown into big bushes now, but have not yet borne any fruit. Perhaps like all refugees, they struggle to blossom and bear fruit in a foreign land. I call them my Peace Grove.

“Maybe there is no difference at all, Mama. Maybe we defy the traditional definition of time and space, and can live simultaneously in the past, present, and future.”

I used to think that being sick was the toughest part of illness, but during this journey I began to see that “recovering” was a lot harder, because it pits the person you used to be with the one you’re becoming.