Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

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

Both possessed an air of recoil that recognized itself in the other, and each, at a young age and in his own world and language, had found refuge in the pages of poets, essayists, and philosophers.

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.

“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.”

Snuggled in luxury on the threshold of a world that brimmed with as much promise as uncertainty, I was starting a new life. But like the scar beneath my hand, the past was still with me.

I spun in cultural vicissitude, wandering in and out of the American ethos until I lost my way.

We were naïvely full of dreams and hope then, blessedly unaware that we were the world’s rubbish, left to tread in its own misery and excrement.

Their enslaved culture had given birth to rock and roll, I learned—a kidnapped race that came to define the entire culture with its music.