Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

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.

Less than six inches separated their bodies, and in that space fit nearly twenty years, a war, two religions, a holocaust, the Nakbe, two mothers, two fathers, a scar, and a secret with wings flapping in the slow butterfly way.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin.

But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. “Never let them know they hurt you” was their creed.

“What we have done,” the voice declared, “is to make the world realize that the Palestinian is no longer refugee number so and so, but the member of a people who hold the reins of their own destiny and are in a position to determine their own future.”

Our innocent deliberations that evening revealed the minutiae of our dreams. “A real bed.” “No soldiers.” “A playground.” “A garden.” “A bicycle.” On went the list of our simple wants. We wrote them out, checked the top three, then compared our choices.

“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.”

I 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. It has been conquered, razed, and rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiarity in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors.

My father had wanted an education for me and I had obediently planted my life in the soil of his dream. I simply wasn’t conditioned to plan for a distant future.

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.

“Thank you,” I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. “May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift”; “Beauty is in your eyes that find me pretty”; “May God extend your life”; “May Allah never deny your prayer”; “May the next meal you cook for us be in celebration of your son’s wedding . . . of your daughter’s graduation . . . your mother’s recovery”; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere “thank you” an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful.

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.

“Doktor Majid! Doktor Majid!” the children called out, and he caught the surprise in my face. I had not taken him for an educated man. I had viewed him with Amy’s eyes. This he saw. And I lowered my eyes, embarrassed by the judgment he knew I had made in our initial contact.

“Ismallah, ismallah!” I took my baby niece with great care, my heart tiptoeing in that house of love. Her small mouth opened in a delicate yawn and I moved closer to drink her scent. 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.

I placed my niece at her sleeping mother’s breast and watched my brother, turgid with affection, look back and forth from his wife and to his newborn daughter. In that refugee camp, which Israel would label a “breeding ground of terrorists” and a “festering den of terror,” I bore witness to a love that dwarfed immensity itself.

My memory can read the movement of his lips but cannot hear the words now: “Baba and Mama would have danced today,” Yousef says.

“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...

Their lives merged, and she cherished the smallest details of marriage to him. They brushed their teeth at the same sink; they ate and prayed together. They wrote their names in the sand like young lovers, holding hands all the while. He shaved her legs while she nibbled on his neck. She trimmed his hair and he washed hers. They took nothing for granted. 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 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.

I was a woman of few words and no friends. I was Amy. A name drained of meaning. Amal, long or short vowel, emptied of hope. 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? My life savored of ash and I lived with the perpetual silence of a song that has no voice. In my bitterness and fear, I felt as alone as loneliness dares to be.

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

He looked on in silence at the proof of what Israelis already know, that their history is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians. The Europeans who came knew neither hummus nor falafel but later proclaimed them “authentic Jewish cuisine.” They claimed the villas of Qatamon as “old Jewish homes.” They had no old photographs or ancient drawings of their ancestry living on the land, loving it, and planting it. They arrived from foreign nations and uncovered coins in Palestine’s earth from the Canaanites, the Romans, the Ottomans, then sold them as their own “ancient Jewish artifacts.” They came to Jaffa and found oranges the size of watermelons and said, “Behold! The Jews are known for their oranges.” But those oranges were the culmination of centuries of Palestinian farmers perfecting the art of citrus growing.

The irony, which sank its bitter fangs into my mind, was that Mama, the mother who gave birth to David, also survived a slaughter that claimed nearly her entire family. Only the latter occurred because of the former, 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.

Alas, her heart was not of ice at all, but of a roiling lava contained by her own will, held back with her iron jaw and tireless fluttering hand, and the contents of that heart were seldom betrayed. Perhaps what made reality fade from her mind was not the unending string of tragedies that befell Palestinians, but rather, an immeasurable love that could not find repose.

In Ari’s office, we were three generations hauled together by the willful drag of a foreclosed story swindled by fate but gathered in that moment to demand to be told. 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. It was a tale of war, its chilling, burning, and chilling-again fire. Of furious love and a suicide bomber. Of a girl who escaped her destiny to become a word, drained of its meaning. Of grown children sifting through the madness to find their relevance. Of a truth that pushed its way through lies, emerging from a crack, a scar, in a man’s face.