Mornings in Jenin (17 page)
Huda threw her arms around me when I poked my head into the kitchen. Predictably, she started to cry, and both Osama and I poked lighthearted fun at her sensitivity.
They took me to little Amal’s crib. She was a chunky baby, olive skinned like her mother, downy black cotton for hair. I sized up each roll of fat on her legs, neck, and belly with gentle pinches and kisses while she slept, and I warned Huda and Osama that I was looking forward to revealing their past shenanigans to little Amal as soon as she was old enough to get into trouble herself.
“Do whatever you want,” Osama begged, “but please don’t wake her!” They exchanged a look that betrayed a romantic interlude that had been interrupted by my visit.
The three of us reminisced and got caught up on the camp gossip. Ammo Jack O’Malley’s replacement was a kind but distant Englishwoman named Emma who rarely stayed overnight at the camp. Ammo Darweesh had been caught selling souvenirs to tourists in Jerusalem without a permit and was serving a three-month jail sentence for that offense. Huda had become good friends with Fatima.
“Silly girl,” Huda said of Fatima, “she has refused every suitor.” And it was understood, but left unsaid, that she would have no man but my brother.
Osama went to bed around 2
A.M.
, leaving us to “girl talk.” Whatever he thought that to be, he wanted no part of it. Huda struggled to stay awake, but eventually she fell to the call of sleep and the lull of my hand stroking her hair. But something in me, apprehensive and expectant, kept me vigilant through the night and sleeplessness could not tame the foreboding, which grew as my future crept closer.
Anxious, I walked out into the darkness and climbed onto the roof of Huda’s dwelling. In the hot summers of our childhood, she and I had spent countless nights sleeping on the cool roofs of our shacks, exchanging stories, giggles, and gossip. From that vantage point, the United Nations refugee camp stretched below me in one square kilometer, so many souls packed in for the long and stubborn wait to return to their Palestine. Soon, the adan beckoned its first call for Muslims to pray while the sun inched toward the sky from behind the hills. The melodic resonance of the adan wrapped itself around me as if it were Baba’s strong arms and the dawn’s breeze fluttered on my skin like Mama’s silk scarf. The sun rose behind the Israeli tanks and lookout post and orange flooded the sky, illuminating the part of my life that was irretrievably gone. I felt an ache for my days in that refugee camp. But a usurped life was my inheritance and I claimed it then and there with all the force of my confusion and longing, while the cocks crowed the announcement of another day.
I left a letter for Huda by the coffee in her kitchen, knowing that would be the first place she’d go when she woke up. Inside the envelope, I placed a necklace with a gold charm bearing the inscription of the Kursi Surah that Muslims believe bequeaths divine protection. It was a gift I had brought for little Amal.
I started toward the nearest crossing into Israel, where I hoped to catch a taxi back to Jerusalem. I took in the aroma of fresh falafel hanging in the still air trapped in the alleyways of the cramped architecture. A cage of canaries sang from someone’s balcony, and I could hear the faint cries of babies waking behind the thin walls. A few people shuffled about, beginning their day, and roosters pranced along wherever they could find space. I felt dizzied by the task of departure while my legs commanded me toward Haj Salem’s door.
There he was, the marrow of my childhood’s merriment, moving about at his front door. I stopped too far away to be seen, watching as he made futile attempts to sweep away the pervasive dust at his threshold. My back leaned against a wall and I let my body slide into a fold as Haj Salem pushed the broom with arthritic motions. Holding my knees close to my chest, I imagined approaching him with a touch to his leathery skin, to cadge just one more story from our stolen Palestine. Maybe the one about the hardheaded shepherd from Khalil who went all the way to Akka looking for his sheep.
“I’ve seen it all. Those Khalili folks are so hardheaded, I think that’s how come Allah put so much granite in Khalil. Else they’d break the mountains with their heads,” he’d say, and laugh his magnificent toothless laugh.
Tears welled in my eyes and I pulled my knees closer. “Damn dust,” I heard him say in a tone of routine frustration as he turned back into his home. The constancy of his comical daily battle against the dust and daily defeat by it made me smile, and I pulled myself to my feet at the bang of his metal door closing.
Back in Jerusalem, I went to retrieve my bags from the orphanage and to say good-bye to that city and all it had come to mean to me. Reaching into my pocket, I found a sealed envelope and grinned, knowing it was a letter from Huda. I placed it in an old tin box given to me as an Eid present by a charity from one of the rich Gulf States many years earlier. It was scratched and dented and it held my most precious possessions—Baba’s pipe, the chest piece of Mama’s prized thobe, her faded silk scarf, the dice Lamya had guiltily returned, and a stack of letters from Muna Jalayta, accumulated over my four years at the orphanage.
Even though we lived in the same dormitory, Muna and I communicated the goings-on of the orphanage and our secrets through letters. It was a way to conquer the isolation and boredom of our lives. As it turned out, these letters would become the chronicles of times we shared extra food, picked bugs from our meals, and combed lice from each other’s hair. They painted the colors of friendships born of mutual need for survival and kinship. They contained tales of the “white comb,” silly games we invented, and our adventures breaking into the art studio and clinic to steal paints and nursing supplies to give to Layla. In those letters she also wrote often of the boy she loved. His name, ironically, was Osama. I used to joke that I felt pressure to marry someone by that name since both she and Huda, my two best friends, would be married to Osamas.
I think of those years with nostalgia. It is true we had no heat to warm our nights or our weekly bathing water, but we had much of the stuff that warmed our souls. We were friends who doubled as mothers, sisters, teachers, providers, and sometimes as blankets. We shared everything from clothes to heartaches. We laughed together and carved our names in the ancient stones of Jerusalem.
We all crawled from the pits of dispossession and tried to survive as best we could under Israeli occupation. Our greatest pleasures were moments of normalcy. A crush on a boy. A card game. Telling dirty jokes while we washed our clothes by hand on the roof of the five-story building. Words of encouragement from a teacher. 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.
1973
FEELINGS OF INADEQUACY MARKED my first months in America. I floundered in that open-ended world, trying to fit in. But my foreignness showed in my brown skin and accent. Statelessness clung to me like bad perfume and the airplane hijackings of the seventies trailed my Arabic surname.
“It’s okay. Haven’t you ever seen an escalator before?” asked a pretty redhead at Philadelphia International Airport.
So, it was an “es-ka-lay-tor.”
“You must be Amal.” She extended a soft manicured hand. “I’m Lisa Haddad. My mom is just parking the car. We’re your host family.”
Lisa was younger than me but far more sophisticated and pretty.
“Hello,” I said, looking at her with embarrassing envy.
“I decorated the guest room for you,” Lisa said energetically on the short car ride from the airport to their home. It was easy to like her—difficult, in fact, not to. Her world was pastel colored, emotionally cushioned, financially solid, and politically inconsequential. I thought it odd and thrilling that she should seek my favor and approval.
“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. I gazed at the cityscape. Ribbons of concrete and asphalt stretched and looped under more cars than I had ever seen. Row homes, factories, and warehouses overlooked the interstate, and smog blurred the clustered skyline of downtown Philadelphia. The scent of the city seeped into the car. Street vendor cheese-steak hoagies, greasy fries, diesel truck fumes, and car exhaust gave my nostrils a full-bodied welcome. It smelled like the irretrievable loss of white madonna lilies growing in the limesinks of Palestine, the bereavement of my country’s camphires, which would burst forth each spring into fragrant flames of white and yellow clusters, delicate and fiery.
Lisa’s mother, Angela Haddad, spoke softly, pointing out the Museum of Art, the William Penn statue, City Hall, Independence Hall, and other monuments that meant nothing to me. She kept her neck perfectly straight and her long fingers wound tightly on the steering wheel of her Mercedes as she drove through the city. She had an impenetrable elegance, and though she was extremely generous and kind to me, I found it difficult to relax in her presence.
“Mom, is Dad coming home this week?” Lisa asked her mother.
Lisa’s father lived with his girlfriend and came to visit his family occasionally. I thought it was an odd arrangement until I met him. He was a tall, swashbuckling parvenu who had married an heiress, Angela, and used her money to subsidize expensive womanizing, a cause he championed in Philadelphia’s finest gentlemen’s clubs. “She your mom’s new project, sugar?” he asked Lisa, nodding his head toward me on the one occasion that he arrived to take his daughter “out.”
“This is Amal, Dad,” she answered uncomfortably.
“Hello, ‘Omar.’ Name’s Milton Dobbs.” He extended his hand and I shook it. “That’s what I love about your mother, sugar, she’s always trying to save the world. It’s why I married her in the first place,” he said, raising his voice to reach Angela, who stood ignoring him behind the kitchen counter.
“No, you married me for my money,” Angela retorted in classy, unaffected dryness.
“I’m not sure if he’s coming this week or not, darling,” Angela answered as she continued to point out notable Philadelphia sights. “And this, Amal, is your home for the next three weeks, or longer if you wish,” she concluded, slowing her car into the long circular driveway.
At the door, my eyes widened to take in the enormity of their home, the likes of which I had never imagined. Money flaked off the air of its oversized, immaculate rooms, and I could barely comprehend that Lisa and her mother lived alone, with part-time domestic help, in that expanse.
What I recall most vividly of my first night in the United States was sleeping for the first time in a real bed. Not a mat or a bunk. I stretched my limbs in a large, soft sea of white linen and down soaking up the fatigue from my jet-lagged body. Over the bed, Lisa had hung a poster of a man with leather hair and a leather jacket unzipped in a comically seductive pose. Lisa loved him, she informed me, calling him “the Fonz.” Leaning against the wall was a gift for me: a 1973 baby-blue Schwinn bicycle, which Angela taught me to ride in the coming days. As if to brace myself with context in that big bed, I reached to the past, moving my hand over the mangled skin of my belly. 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.
In Philadelphia I wandered among the contrasts of wealth and poverty, a desperate smile plastered on my face. I found no commonality with the men and women who walked with purpose and self-possession, nor with the human beings asleep on the city sidewalks. I marveled as these self-assured Americans went about their daily business. They bought groceries, walked to work, ate dainty foods, and chatted in outdoor restaurants. I felt diminished, out of place, and eager to belong.
Angela helped me with the daunting paperwork that had to be understood and completed before I could commence my first year of study at Temple University. I had never dealt with so many papers and forms for health insurance, library registration, school ID—and on went the list. But I was ready before classes started and with Angela’s help, I moved into the dorm.
Elana Rivers, a wisecracker with a massive bosom, asked our dorm mother if there was a form to register her boobs. Within the first months of classes she was well established among the upperclassmen as easy prey, a distinction that earned her invitations to the “right” fraternity parties. She often staggered loudly back into our dorm in the wee hours. She made no attempt to speak to me, though she referred to me not infrequently as “the Arab,” pronounced “ay-rab,” or as “the rag head.”
One evening, I watched her taunt a drooling pizza delivery boy in the foyer of our dorm. Dumbstruck by Elana’s lasciviousness, he ogled her with a comical hang-jawed expression that made me chuckle in passing. At that, she turned sharply toward me. “Oh my God!” She burst into laughter. “The ayrab thinks this is funny.” Swift fear flushed my face, draining away my amusement as Elana came toward me. “Have you ever had sex?” she asked unctuously.
I froze. I had never even kissed a boy. Thankfully, a disgusted voice behind me intervened, “God, Elana! Do you ever stop?”
It was Kelly Mason, a pre-med student whom I knew from science classes. “What? I’m just making conversation,” said Elana. But Kelly whisked me away, pushing herself daringly in front of Elana, who did not bother me again.
Save the occasional lunch with Kelly, my first year in college was friendless. It was an isolated and busy year. My accent was a social handicap, or at least I regarded it as such. So I did little more than study and ride my bicycle all over town. Whatever attempts I made to participate in the social arena were clumsy and unsurprisingly ignored or snubbed. I was left with books, and the payoff was a perfect 4.0 average for both the fall and spring semesters.
I found my place eventually and settled comfortably among a small group of friends with whom I shared a house until graduation. It was a run-down three-story brick row home that became known in our junior year as “the Outhouse,” after sewage backflowed onto the floors.
I remained on solid academic ground throughout college, but the Palestinian girl of pitiable beginnings was trampled in my rush to belong and find relevance in the West. I dampened my senses to the world, tucking myself into an American niche with no past. For the first time I lived without threats and the sediments of war. I lived free of soldiers, free of inherited dreams and martyrs tugging at my hands.
But every house has its demons.
I metamorphosed into an unclassified Arab-Western hybrid, unrooted and unknown. I drank alcohol and dated several men— acts that would have earned me repudiation in Jenin. I spun in cultural vicissitude, wandering in and out of the American ethos until I lost my way. I fell in love with Americans and even felt that love reciprocated. I lived in the present, keeping the past hidden away. I did not write to Huda, nor to Muna or the Colombian Sisters. Nor to Ammo Darweesh, Lamya, Khalto Bahiya, or Haj Salem. But sometimes the blink of my eye was a twitch of contrition that brought me face-to-face with the past.
Walking downtown once, I thought I saw my mother, the gust of a ghost breezing through my reflection in a store window. I paused, starring at my mother’s daughter. Dalia, Um Yousef, had bequeathed to me the constitution that could not breathe while holding hands with the past. She could isolate each present moment while existing in an eternal past, but I needed physical distance to remove myself. I thought at that moment that no other soul could understand me as she might.
The undercurrent of my life in America was a sense of shame that I had betrayed my family—or worse, myself. But I consigned myself to American mores and subscribed to their liberties.
There were, however, moments that prodded me to look into the abyss separating me from those around me. During the sewage incident that gave our college house its nickname, the commotion provoked memories of Jenin, where the open sewers sometimes overflowed and we would scramble, gathering old clothes and towels to plug the joints of our dwellings. Vile as the experience and subsequent cleanup were, Huda and I could not contain our excitement and anticipation at being allowed to sleep on the roof to escape the foul odor. Other children did the same, and we filled the air with calls, jokes, and giggles of young refugee souls. 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. There, on the flat rooftops, we offered up our wishes and secrets to the starry Mediterranean sky. There were no soldiers then, before the war of 1967. Our wants were simple, but they could not have been more complicated. Always we thought about returning to Ein Hod. We thought it was paradise. Those untroubled nights on the rooftop hang in innocence. The evening call to prayer was our blanket and we slept in a little-girl embrace, Huda and I, until the dawn came with whatever book Baba chose to read to me. The foul slosh that glistened in the alleyways was, as far as we were concerned, a temporary inconvenience that offered a delightful escape.
So, in Philadelphia, while my housemates made frantic calls to their parents, the landlord, the health department, and insurance companies, I was unperturbed. While they acted as if their world had come to a shitty end, I felt a sweet nostalgia and longing for old friends.
The divide could not have been greater, nor could it be bridged. That’s how it was. 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.
I worked two jobs through most of college. The university hired me as a peer tutor and I worked “under the table” on weekends at a twenty-four-hour convenience store in West Philly, a “bad neighborhood” where white people ordinarily did not go, especially after dark.
“You’ve got a death wish,” my housemates said to me. “You’re pressing your luck working in that area.” They were sure I would turn up a rape victim, or at least get mugged. “You don’t know this country well enough yet. I’m not being racist. It’s just a bad place.”
But each Friday, I set out on my bicycle through the hurried energy of Broad Street, turned right to the fine homes on Spruce, all the way to the dilapidation of West Philly.
Opportunity
took a detour around Thirtieth Street, and
Liberty for All
slouched in its chair like a lazy student. In West Philly, nature and architecture hunkered down with the ghost of slavery, letting litter and urine move in the place of flower bushes. Young men loitered in bell-bottomed jeans and Afros. In the beginning they whistled, called me “mama,” and made references to my backside. But as my face became a constant part of the weekend landscape, they called out my name in a rhythm that whistled, acknowledged my backside, and welcomed me, all in one word. Old women, imposing matriarchs, gossiped on their porches and kept watch over the neighborhood as best they could. They too eventually turned their mistrusting expressions into generous smiles when they saw me coming. Little girls, their hair chained in obedient cornrows, played double dutch in spectacular displays of coordination. It seemed to me that black folk brought a beat to every task. In a day, they restored a church by the coincidence of their song. 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.
Sometimes there were killings and muggings. Drug pushers and pimps. Perhaps foolishly, I felt no fear in the darkness of West Philly. The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys. So the frightened teenagers with a gun, who once held up the store for forty dollars, weren’t scary at all.
