Fariha’s Reviews > A River Dies of Thirst: Journals > Status Update

We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception

We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute from being beaten up in the streets

We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba

We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer's belly

We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognises the importance of small details

We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: 'Our country is loftier and more beautiful!'

We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others

We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinne

We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan's gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial

But we have a difficult mission to perform: mediation between God and the Devil to get them to call a brief truce so that we can bury our martyrs.

They don't know if they will return safely to what remains of houses encircled by bulldozers and tanks and smashed cypress trees. Life is so indifferent it seems to be no more than a rough draft of some stubborn urge to have one's presence registered: equal rights with jackals to enjoy a safe cave.

The news searches for their names under the rubble. Apart from that, abnormal life appears to be running its normal course. The Devil still boasts of his long quarrel with God. Individuals, if they wake up alive, can still say 'Good morning,' then go off to their normal jobs: burying the dead.

Low pressure area.Northwesterly winds, heavy showers. Grey wrinkled sea. Tall cypresses. Today the autumn clouds let thirty martyrs fall in the north of Gaza, among them two women taking part in a demonstration to demand a share of hope for their kind. Clear skies. Calm blue sea. Northerly winds. Good visibility.But the autumn clouds—the symbolic name for killing—wipe out an entire family, made up of seventeen lives.

The astrologers said: 'It is the chaos of existence at the door of the last judgement.' Luckily or unluckily for us, foreign historians, experts on our destinies and our oral history, were not here, so we don't know what happened to us!

, and when they opened their windows they saw spiders spinning their webs in the snow and went blind. When they tried to hear what was going on, storms arose, whose wild sounds were unfamiliar to them, and they went deaf.