It feels like someone died in here.

*sigh*

I am now experiencing what it feels like to be a total stranger. I’m amongst my family -paternal and maternal, immediate and extended, yet I feel as though I know no one. It’s funny how the better I come to know my self, the more my self becomes alienated from those around me. Is it because I refuse to tag along? Is it because I no longer allow myself to go with the flow the way I used to when I was younger? Is it because I really am as different as my family makes out of me?

Just today, my aunt confronted me with how atypical I was. She wasn’t complementing me, mind you. It sounded more like bewilderment coming from her. You’re not normal, she kept saying. You’re not young, you’re not a girl. You don’t enjoy yourself. You know what spurred this round of accusations from my aunt’s side? Me expressing how much I hate stuffed animals. And no, I am not exaggerating. My cousin chimed in, slapping on how I don’t enjoy BBQ’s and sitting in coffee shops and what a waste of time I think both entail. I’m too nice. If I weren’t I would’ve voiced what I had in mind. I think they’re a complete waste of time when I have to endure them with your friends with their worthless babble and their empty chit chat, I wanted to say. They’re a complete waste of time when I have to die a thousand deaths watching how your guy friend tries to hook your girlfriend up and how she in turn plays the hard-to-get flirtatious temptress, I wanted to spit out. But I’m too nice, I’m too considerate of other people’s feelings so I say empty nothings that leave my aunt and cousin glaring their puzzlement at me. And I know they most probably will continue discussing ‘my issues’ behind my back because, well, I have issues. Apparently.

But I worry myself too. Because 25 years of being who I am has given me a pretty good idea of how I deal with things. Sure, I’ll laugh at my family’s ‘concern’ at my unusualness, I’ll even joke with them about it. When they question why I do things the way I do them, I’ll debate them. I’ll put the effort into making them understand. I’ll humor them so long as they humor me. But if they persist in trying to convert me into their ways, I know it’ll only be a matter of time before I explode. And I know I’ll sever many ties in the process. But I won’t care. Because if it’s anything that I hate, it’s the oppression that comes with the expectation of becoming another carbon copy of the typical girl. I won’t give in.

What bugs me the most about all this is how these trivial issues are getting in the way of the main reason I came to Amman. I’ve been waiting for this opportunity for a very long time now. And damn it, I don’t want to waste my time and energy on worrying whether any of my family is taking offense at my ‘individualistic’ behavior. The glaring contrast between talking to poor women about their miserable living conditions and the extreme ‘brat’iness of some of my relatives is too cruel to swallow.

Listening to some of these ladies, God it gets me thinking of all the extravagance I live in. All the wasted money, the bloated stomachs, the food that goes to the bin. The fact that we live in self-inflicted denial of this alternate reality that I was witnessing. How did this divide become so wide? How did we get so fat with apathy?

These women, I kept looking at their faces, their expressions. And sometimes, when trapped in the moment of where I was and what I was doing – when their voices dimmed and their eyes blurred and I got lost in a reverie of thought, it is then that I feel remorse of an intense kind. I think back at my family, my cousins, myself and I wonder what we did to deserve all the blessings God has given us and why we are still unable to be truly grateful and content. Then I look back at the women and find them looking back at me, an obvious stranger with my red-white sneakers, and I swear I can hear them asking themselves the same question I just asked myself.

But these women are strong. When they speak, it is because they want to change their lives. One of them lives with her husband’s family in one house. She has beautiful bluish-grey eyes of the saddest kind. I can fill sixteen pages with my own stories of my life with my husband’s family if you want, she jokes. We all laugh. It amazes me that they can laugh. Then the irony of my thought hits me because I, too, have fallen into the ‘we-them’ trap of mind. It could’ve been me sitting there with them. It could’ve been me forced into living in a house of 15 because my husband is responsible for his entire family and can’t afford a house on his own. I could’ve been one of those women but I’m not, at least now, and there’s a reason that I’m not and that I know that I’m not. I think I’m beginning to understand why.

And all he did was simply state the truth. Plain truth – free of embellishment.

Because he says it better than anyone else. From Fawaz Turki’s The Disinherited, 1974:

1. Flight:

I am aware that I have been stateless for nearly all of my twenty-nine years; that I have lived and grown up in a refugee camp on the edge of the desert; that except for those freckle-nosed bureaucrats in the West who from time to time endorsed a shipment of food and warm blankets to me, I did not (for all men and for all they knew) exist on the face of this globe; that I was robbed of my sense of purpose and sense of worth as a human being and was forced to line up obsequiously outside UN food depots each month; and that when for two decades I feared, I feared only the cold of twenty winters, and when I dreamed, I dreamed only of the food that others ate. I am also aware that this knowledge has mutilated my reality and impoverished my consciousness; that I lived, as a million of my fellow Palestinians lived, silently walking hither and thither along the muddy paths of DP camps, in a void, in a state of non-being because everything had been taken away from us, including our tangible abstractions; and that as a result, our beings were engulfed at times by lunatic extremes of hate and bitterness and at others by frustrated resignation.

With our memories of places and times we had known before, rational and good, floating in the space around us and within us, we existed not in the present tense, the tense of reality, but the future imperfect, when next year, next time, next speech, the wrongs will have been righted, the grievances removed, and our case justified. We lay, as it were, supine under a tree; but in a world where men will calmly use historical reality to suit their own issues, Godot, for whom we waited, never arrived.

My generation of Palestinians, growing up alienated, excluded, and forgotten, rejected this legacy; yet when we looked around us we could see either the desert to shed our tears in or the whole world to hit back at. Having nothing and with nothing to lose, we proceeded to do the latter. But our struggle was for our place in history, our right to glimpse a vision, to search for hope, to return to Palestine. We struggled for the phoenix, not the phantom, that is our homeland. As de Tocqueville observed in his commentary on the forces that led to the French Revolution: “Patiently endured so long as it seemed beyond redress, a grievance comes to appear intolerable once the possibility of removing it crosses men’s minds.”

*The above title was taken from Fawaz Turki’s ‘Soul In Exile’ ; it was the title of the very first article he wrote in exile, which came as a response to a provocation by an American Jewish woman who asked him where he was from and upon discovering that he was Palestinian, pointed out ‘that he belonged to no nation’.

Today is many things.

Today there will be people popping open their champagne bottles, dancing to the tunes of singers flown from worldwide to celebrate. Today there will be fabricated speeches spewed at the blinded masses. Faces alight with jubilation, hearts swollen with pride, eyes beaming with tears moved by the (apparent) significance of today. All gather up to celebrate, to commemorate, to rejoice our nakba. And the wedge between us is driven even farther apart.

Today is many things.

Today my father remembers. Or rather recalls – because he never forgets. And like him, a million other fathers. My mother, reading the newspaper with its special Nakba edition, inwardly sighs a million pained sighs. And like her a million other mothers. Between father, aunt, son, and grandparent – there is a collective ache that sears through us every time this day comes back with us still behind bars.

Dear Israeli, do you have any idea what it feels like to be gripped with an irrational fear every time you come face to face with a governmental authority? No one backs me dear Israeli. I am just a Palestinian. Do you know what it’s like to grow up feeling insecure seeing that your own father feels insecure because he lives, works, and strives not knowing if he ever will stand on solid ground? No one backs us dear Israeli. Palestinians have always been fair game for abuse.

So go on and celebrate your ‘independence’ dear Israeli. You have always given your back to us, save but a few of you who have a heart drenched in humanity. I’m not surprised. For 60 years, I have seen enough from you to immune me against your atrocities. Go on and dance in our streets, embrace our hills, breathe in our air, let our breeze caress your skin and live in our houses with the ghosts of our forefathers. For we will haunt you with our right, your injustices will oppress you – they will gather and form a burden, and it will kill you. That’s right dear Israeli, you are self-destructive. For every injustice that you inflict upon us, you inflict a greater injustice upon yourself.

Have mercy on your humanity and remember,

we will never forget.

Reflective

by A.R. Ammons*

I found a

weed

that had a

mirror in it

and that

mirror

looked in at

a mirror

in

me that

had a

weed in it

* “Reflective” from The Really Short Poems of A.R. Ammons.

Free writing is a technique I first learned in high school that was supposed to help me unblock all my thoughts and subsequently let them out on paper without even thinking about how logical or reasonable they may be just letting them all out aaaall out like a dam broken down to let all that water out I’m not sure this works well though because I seem to be more preoccupied by typing every word that comes across my mind without letting any go and sometimes I pause which I know is a big mistake when it comes to free writing because you’re supposed to write like you’re running for your life at least that’s what my teacher used to tell me but then in university in one of my philosophy classes my professor who was brilliant taught us this technique with a twist to it. He made us listen to a piece by someone I forget who will get the name later a piece that is purely instrumental and I remember what sounded like airplanes and car engines and everything mechanical which made sense then because we were talking about modernity and the impact of industrialization on our personalities and identities as human beings or machines or what have you so yeah my professor made us write on the notion of abstraction listening to that mechanically instrumental piece and it felt great letting all that energy out without thinking with just listening to your thoughts on the backdrop of machine sounds that felt very dry and cold yet warm and like they were embracing your thoughts the angry ones the confused ones the lost ones because that’s what abstraction and modernity are all about we all feel lost and swimming in a dark deep ocean aiming nowhere going nowhere because there are too many distractions that invite us but limit us because they’re just too many so what am I trying to say here this is so hypnotic I’m not even looking at the screen right now and am not sure where this is going but it sure feels liberating to just write what you think without having to worry that someone will be reading this and you have to sound intelligent and on top of things well I’m not right now I’m not on top of things and I don’t think I will be for a very long time until I figure out what it is that drives me my drive my niche what is it until I know I don think I’ll be together at all and I don’t think I’ll be adding value of any sort and it feels terrible to think that because I love writing and feels awful when I can’t contribute through words do you get me do you get me do you and I paused because I’m not sure you’ll get me through this I’m not sure why I’m doing this it just feels like the best thing to do given my state of mind at this point in my life at this moment that seems like it‘ll stretch for a very long time a very long time.

(to my late uncle)

My brother said, a good man in wild times.

And you were. And you are.

May you rest in scented grains; may they be your abode.

May His mercy envelop you; may it comfort your heart.

Your pain was not eternal;

may your bliss be.

Amen.

Rachel Corrie was 23 years old when she was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer on March 16, 2003. She was working with others trying to protect the home of a Palestinian pharmacist from demolition in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Palestine.

Today marks the fifth death-anniversary of Rachel ; activist, pacifist, human being. She was no legend, no pure genius that makes her any different from you and I. I imagine that if I had met her, we might have struck conversations on everything and anything – our favorite movies, food, war, people. That’s just what regular people do.

But what makes Rachel so special is, I think, the sincerity and passion that she had for restoring justice and her perseverance to fight for a people’s right to exist even though she had no connection to them – besides the humanity that binds them.
Martin Luther King said it best when he said, “..where there is an injustice somewhere … there is an injustice everywhere..”. Only when we realize that pain and suffering are not – should not be- private to the people enduring them, and that keeping quiet to them is as good as adding oil to fire, do we understand what Rachel meant when she said,

‘…This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world. This is not the world you and Dad wanted me to come into when you decided to have me. This is not what I meant when I looked at Capital Lake and said: “This is the wide world and I’m coming to it.” I did not mean that I was coming into a world where I could live a comfortable life and possibly, with no effort at all, exist in complete unawareness of my participation in genocide…’

This post sounds awkward to me. This tribute to Rachel is a meek attempt to put into words a message that is much bigger than any words can deliver.

May she rest in peace.