Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

Attachment to God, land, and family was the core of their being and that is what they defended and sought to keep.

The old folks of Ein Hod would die refugees in the camp, bequeathing to their heirs the large iron keys to their ancestral homes, the crumbling land registers issued by the Ottomans, the deeds from the British mandate, their memories and love of the land, and the dauntless will not to leave the spirit of forty generations trapped beneath the subversion of thieves.

How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors’ toil, without mortal consequence? Somehow that raw question had not previously penetrated the consciousness of the refugees who had become confused in the rank eternity of waiting, pining at abstract international resolutions, resistance, and struggle. But that basic axiom of their condition sprang to the surface as they lowered Yehya’s body into the ground, and night brought them no sleep.

Life was mercurial and fickle, not to be trusted.

“We’re all born with the greatest treasures we’ll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. And the indispensable tools of those treasures are time and health. How you use the gifts of Allah to help yourself and humanity is ultimately how you honor him. 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.”

“Amal, I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell. I see your confusion. Consider fear. For us, fear comes where terror comes to others because we are anesthetized to the guns constantly pointed at us. And the terror we have known is something few Westerners ever will. Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our own emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

“The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones weep. And the way we love is no exception, Amal.

“It is the kind of love you can know only if you have felt the intense hunger that makes your body eat itself at night. The kind you know only after life shields you from falling bombs or bullets passing through your body. It is the love that di...

“Please, Majid. Please, habibi, come with me,” I begged him. “Habibti, you know I can’t just leave. Soon people are going to need doctors more than anything. I can’t turn my back on them.” I wished then that my husband was a coward. “If anything happens, I promise to live at the hospital. Even Israel will not bomb a hospital,” he reassured me, and pulled me close.

He had left his soul to rummage through Sabra and Shatila, where his wife and daughter lay in a mass grave beneath a garbage dump, under the impunity of their killers, under the broken promises of superpowers and under the world’s indifference to spilled Arab blood.

I no longer possess myself. I drown in a sorrow you cannot fathom, and a rage you cannot imagine presses upon my heart.