Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

The aimlessness of captive dispossession warped his mood and bent his posture. The string of broken promises and UN resolutions, not worth the paper on which they set down demands of return, wore at his spirit and made him taciturn, and he shuffled about with the qualities of a man defeated by the wait. Defeated by the quiet nag of his hands wanting things to do.

But in our camp, his story was everyone’s story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel.

have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city’s viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand.

In the process of trying to steady my gait in a life that shook with uncertainty, I learned to make peace with the present by unknowingly breaking love lines to the past. Growing up in a landscape of improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt temporary to me. Nothing could be counted on to endure, neither parents nor siblings nor home.

We all crawled from the pits of dispossession and tried to survive as best we could under Israeli occupation. Our greatest pleasures were moments of normalcy. A crush on a boy. A card game. Telling dirty jokes while we washed our clothes by hand on the roof of the five-story building. Words of encouragement from a teacher. The bond we forged was molded from an unspoken commitment to our collective survival. It reached through history, straddled continents, spanned wars, and held our collective and individual tragedies and triumphs. It was girlhood letters or a pot of stuffed grape leaves. Our bond was Palestine. It was a language we dismantled to construct a home.

There is nothing quite so pure, as if pieces of God live in the faint breaths of babes. In Falasteen’s yawn, I caught a whiff of divine promise, bequeathed even to us.

am an Arab son. Born of Dalia and Hasan. My grandfather is Yehya Abulheja and my grandmother is Basima. I am the husband of Fatima, father of two. I am a haunted man, possessed now by their corpses. A storm brews inside me. I do not sleep and I cannot see the sun. Demonic wrath bubbles in my veins. May it lurk after I am gone. May you taste its vinegar. I seek vengeance, nothing more. Nothing less. And I shall have it. And you shall see no mercy.