Mornings in Jenin

by Susan Abulhawa

“My Lord Allah, let Your will be done on this day. My submission and gratitude is Yours,”

“So these immigrants will let me stay on my own land?”

Anticipating the conflict that lay ahead, Hasan said, “If the Arabs get the upper hand in the Old City, go to my aunt Salma’s house. You know where it is. She has a big house and you can hide there.”

Where are the Arab armies while these dogs kill one town after the other?

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

The Associated Press reported that Israeli planes and infantry had violated the Palestinian truce by the unprovoked attack,

The same men who had received the offering of food now marched through, pointing guns at the people who had fed them.

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.

Count Folke Bernadotte, stated, “It would be an offense against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who had been rooted in the land for centuries.”

“I just hope the Jews didn’t mess up my house too bad.” “I don’t care. I’ll fix my house. I just want to go home.”

Count Folke Bernadotte, was assassinated by Jewish terrorists.

“Those people don’t know a damn thing about olives. They’re lily-skinned foreigners with no attachment to the land. If they had a sense of the land then the land would compel in them a love for the olives,”

“How big do you love me?” “I love you as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and all its birds. As big as the earth and all her trees.”

We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her.”

“Huda, I think this is Judgment Day. It’s just like it says in the Quran.”

I had an odd desire to be a fish. I could live inside water’s soothing world, where screams and gunfire were not heard and death was not smelled.

“I worked faithfully for those yellow-haired, colored-eyed men, and in return they brought us foreign Jews who stole my furniture.”

Now our waiting was for freedom. The original hopes to return home became pleas for elemental rights.

There, on the spongy foam and worn gaudy colors of her mat, on the floor, against the chipping bare wall of our little shack, in the makeshift nation of the forgotten, Mama had died alone.

My eyes vented quiet tears. I cried, not for this woman’s death, but for my mother, who had departed that body years before.

I cried because, hard as I tried, I could not find in the small pale body the woman whose womb had given me life.

She cried because she loved me and had felt a great void in her life since I had left Jenin. I cried because although I loved her, too, I could not feel it with the same intensity as she.

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.

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,

Palestine would just rise up from my bones into the center of my new life, unannounced. In class, at a bar, strolling through the city. Without warning, the weeping willows of Rittenhouse Square would turn into Jenin’s fig trees reaching down to offer me their fruit. It was a persistent pull, living in the cells of my body, calling me to myself. Then it would slouch back into latency.

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.

Even after so many years, I longed to make my father proud. Wherever he was. I looked out the window and saw that the sun was making its ascent, and I got choked up for the force of light, Baba’s smile, coming into the room.

“If anything happens, I promise to live at the hospital. Even Israel will not bomb a hospital,”

This was a mass killing, an incident—how easily we used the word “incident” in Lebanon—that was also an atrocity. It went beyond even what the Israelis would have in other circumstances called a terrorist atrocity. It was a war crime.

“How much must we endure and how much must we give?” he wailed like a child. “Fatima! My darling, Fatima! Did you see what they did?” he asked, screamed, and he answered himself, “They ripped her belly, Amal!”

I wanted the pain to last longer, to become more intense, to kill me, too.

Forgive me, Amal. It is time they taste a small dose of the heaps they have fed us all our lives—Yousef.

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.

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

I was twenty years old and they gave me total power over other human beings,

You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion. In the complicity of siblinghood, of aloneness and unrootedness, Amal loved David instinctively, despite herself and despite what he had done or who he had become.

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.

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.

And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved.”

“Since when does ‘the world’ give a goddamn about us? You have been away too long, Amal. Go to sleep. You sound too much like an Amreekiyya.”

I close my eyes, the wholeness of my life flickering, flashing, and taking form. I have made so many mistakes. I have not loved enough. I have not loved enough.

I am delirious with love for my daughter. My precious little girl. Sara. My life’s loveliest song. My home. I am too exhausted to move. I whisper to her, “I love you.” I dream of growing old to the pitter-patter refrain of Majid’s and my grandchildren she might bear someday.

She died in a whisper, as if death itself was humbled by the unfolding of a wounded heart and did not want to spoil that tenderness by announcing its presence. As if death had sung for her a lullaby.

“You look so much like him,” Amal once told her daughter. Do you remember when you told me that, Mommy? I do. I was five.

I am terrified, because now I have the ultimate proof that you love me more than you love life. I wonder what you are thinking. I need your forgiveness. I need you, and I beg God not to take you. Not now. Not like this.

He gave them food and enough to drink while the siege continued, but not enough to wash a mother’s blood from her daughter’s skin.

Does he tell you stories in heaven now?

He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?

It was the only body she could bury.

How does one carry this burden? How does one live in a world that turns away from such injustice for so long? Is this what it means to be Palestinian, Mother?