Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

color-coded ID documents that identified Palestinians according to their religion and the area where they lived along with various permission papers for travel east, west, north, or south. Special permission was required for medical treatment, commercial movement, university passes, such that a single individual ended up carrying piles of pink, yellow, and green slips, crumpled and tattered from persistent fingers, sweat, and the constant unfolding, inspection, and refolding.

Ummmm... Is this not how it started for Her in Europe, and then they turn around and do the same to another group of humans?! WTH?

“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.”

We stepped through the double doors into the open air and were instantly embraced by the moon.

She looked alluring and exotic, her eyes part tiger, part human.

Favorite metaphor ever, I think

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.

Huda learned to love what she had and to take what sweetness she could from life, her memories as pillars of strength. The refugee camp was good enough. She found solace in the bonds she forged by the strings of her own heart. With faith and prayer she could manufacture serenity, even after soldiers ransacked her house in their endless search for “terrorists.” As long as she could return to the arms of love at the end of each day, that was all that mattered to her.

Shouldn't we all learn to love like that?

parvenu

Money flaked off the air of its oversized, immaculate rooms, and I could barely comprehend that Lisa and her mother lived alone, with part-time domestic help, in that expanse.

Flaking money.... The most grotesquely picturesque descriptor I've maybe ever read

Sometimes there were killings and muggings. Drug pushers and pimps. Perhaps foolishly, I felt no fear in the darkness of West Philly. The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys.

What I knew for sure was that people in West Philly thought I was beautiful, not different, and my accent was not a call for mistrust. The very things that made me suspect to the white world were backstage passes in the black neighborhoods.

Arabic profanities are often nothing more than a gratuitous reference to the anatomy of a female relative. Simply the mention of it. “Go, fool! Your mother’s pussy.” Another, “Are you waiting for the red carpet to move your damn car? Your sister’s pussy!” And there’s always “Curses upon your father and your father’s father!”

You, my dear . . . are not a flower, something that blooms one day and wilts the next. You are the beat in my heart.”

<3 <3 <3

My husband’s words at the airport the day I had left Beirut. They remain in my mind, like ashes in an urn. The glory of love, like life, quite simply reduced to dust.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and he bends you with his might that his arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so he loves also the bow that is stable.

I can explain this, but it would break / the glass cover on your heart, / and there’s no fixing that.

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

underscoring for me the inescapable truth that Palestinians paid the price for the Jewish holocaust. Jews killed my mother’s family because Germans had killed Jolanta’s.