Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

Strange, she thought, the things you think about in the district between life and death.

Just a melody, its center carved out and filled with silence, as if the nye were crying.

In the sorrow of a history buried alive, the year 1948 in Palestine fell from the calendar into exile, ceasing to reckon the marching count of days, months, and years, instead becoming an infinite mist of one moment in history.

Age-dappled and rough, his farmer’s hands were infused with the melanin truths of those hills.

We lay that way, in the quiet of a foreboding for which we knew no words.

Those who had fled had become refugees once again, in another human junkyard dotting Israel’s brief history.

He cloistered the pain, letting it tangle with powerlessness.

I have tried to use my mind and my heart to keep our people linked to history, so we do not become amnesiac creatures living arbitrarily at the whim of injustice.”

“The future can’t breathe in a refugee camp, Amal. The air here is too dense for hope.

We were enfolded in each other like the last word of an epic poem we had never imagined would end. A childhood story we had lived together line by line, hand in hand, was ending and we knew it would close the moment we unraveled our arms.

My father had wanted an education for me and I had obediently planted my life in the soil of his dream.

Our bond was Palestine. It was a language we dismantled to construct a home.

Our sadness can make the stones weep.

The comfort was strange and pleasing, the darkness vast and punctuated with stars, the moon halved, pouring on the water.

Theirs was a raw intimacy, unabashed, the kind of love of which Fatima had spoken, that dove naked into itself, toward infinity’s reach, where the things of God live.

I saw despair now where authority had been in the faces of the heavy matriarchs, still passing the days in the shade of habit on their porches.

Such was history’s name.

I prayed and prayed. As Dalia had prayed in another time and another place. In another war.

That week in September, starting with Yousef’s telephone call, is the mantelpiece of my life. It is my center of gravity. It is the point on which all of my life’s turning points hinge at once. It is the deafening crescendo of a two-thousand-year-old lineage. It is the seat of a demonic God.

Even through the telephone wires, there was enough agony in his voice to break the sky. I can still hear it shatter the wind when I walk.

At the base of his voice I heard the silent howl of wrath burgeoning in him, the raw substance of despair and rage concentrating into resolve.

He had traversed the burning abyss, before which I still cowered, and landed on the calm, detached shore of vengeance.

If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more, we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song.

She is the reason for all promises.

Only practical language could pass the lump in my throat, formed there from love that meanders in the soot of a story that almost was. And anyway, what words can redeem a future disinherited of its time?

She was the brilliant color in the middle of the gray desolation of my world, the point where all my love, my history, and my pain met in a perfect blossom, like a flower growing from barren soil.

Majid is the dream that never left me.

At the other side of the world, Amal cradled her anguish like she should have her own child.

She attempted to explain that, for her, he had lived in the mist of other people’s memories.

I understood that Dalia, Um Yousef, the untiring mother who gave far more than she ever received, was the tranquil, quietly toiling well from which I have drawn strength all my life.

The story of one family in an obscure village, visited one day by a history that was not its own, and forever trapped by longing between roots and soil.

Why do dignity and honor hinge on stone and soil? Generation upon generation disembowel the earth, building monuments from her entrails to mark their time, to mold the dream of some relevance in an immense universe, to manufacture a significance from utter randomness, to attain immortality by seizing, stamping, gouging an immortal earth.

Still, the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year of 1948.

How unnatural it felt to pick up strands of a past I had abandoned long ago.

Some fantastic desire, which neither of them could afford. A familiar oasis between two strangers, calling to them both.

The adan comes from the sky like a bouquet of sad lilies.

Sometimes time is immobile like a corpse and I lie with it in my bed.