“And when we die,/ Our bones will continue to grow,/ To reach and intertwine with the roots of the olive/ And orange trees, to bath in the sweet of Yaffa sea. / One day we will be born again when you are not there.”
— Mosab Abu Toha, Palestinian poet.
When you exist within an apartheid state, daily surviving, or learning to “survive survival”, it is your pride that comes to your rescue in a celebration of the undying spirit, of hope and of love. As Mahmoud Darwish, the great national poet of Palestine, would say, “The homeland is distant and near, and in this everyday grief and everyday death, the writing gets written…” with pains of longing unremittingly transforming “the lyrics of loss into indefinitely postponed drama of return”.
You vaguely remember your village and the hope of retrieving all those childhood things you left behind in your room. In some of the most poignant lines in the poetry of dispossession, the poet Mosab expresses a feeling of saudade remembering his mother, “Do you still lie on your mattress,/ Reading from the Quran,/ Do you still use your reading glasses, or have they been blinded/ by the smoke of the bomb,/ Do you still drink your morning coffee/ With dad or have you run out of gas/ Do you still know how to make my favourite cake/ Last month was my 31st birthday/ You promised to make my birthday cake on the / Rubble of my bombarded house…/ You are my shelter/ when I am scared/ I am about to die/ Are you still alive?”
It is this longing for home and family that profoundly sustains the struggle of the people of Palestine. It is a sustaining impulse imbued both in their blood and their land. Many still remember in their hearts their childhood spent laughing and frolicking in the citrus groves in Yaffa or olive fields in Qumya. How can you keep people out of places where their mothers and grandmothers played freely?
The Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan’s lines echo in the soul of every Palestinian: “Enough for me to die on her earth/ be buried in her/ to melt and vanish into her soil/ then sprout forth as a flower/ played with by a child from my country./ Enough for me to remain in my country’s embrace/ to be in her close as a handful of dust/ a sprig of grass a flower.” Swaying tantalisingly between longing and despair, the dwellers walk along the shore picturing the sky full of birds and the waters warm and silent, but their hearts flooded with memories.
Darwish expresses the joy of the Palestinians seeing their flag flutter in the wind: “Flying on the horizon, the flag is a symbolic recompense for the humiliations of the past, a practical commitment to changing the present, and an epic aspiration for winning the future.” Returning from years of exile, the uprooted inhabitants under the shade of the flag imagine that they have finally arrived, “carrying the thirst of twenty years in their souls for the spring now under siege”. Their flag is indeed their identity, their truth, their history.
Justifiably, Palestinians have a dying pact of blood with their land, with their vibrant history of love, freedom and laughter, before the invaders came. Their resistance, their shared fears and hopes, their enduring struggle perseveres against the numerous barricades between the people and their right to return to a normal life. Besides the activists and poets who tell their personal stories in a carnival of optimism that abides in their very soul, there are many pro-Palestinian supporters across the world who have unswervingly demonstrated against the plummeting accountability of Israel to human rights violations, a serious lapse of all global institutions for the maintenance of peace and justice.
Truly “plagued” with crimes against humanity, the Palestinians daringly hold out against the threat of the arrogant and the inhuman in a struggle founded on radical notions of dialogue and participation. Their call for sacrifice, their valiant struggle and their stories supersede any political manifesto. Their fidelity to their homeland is deep and sturdy in the face of media misrepresentation and its complicity in collectively sidelining and silencing the people. The horror of decades of dispossession, and the gradual vanishing of a landscape are haunting and provocative signs that have motivated generations to fight for a transformative politics of hope, of freedom and recognition. No one will be silenced again.
The genocide we are witnessing in Gaza is the highpoint of over a century of European imperialism, European Zionism and American conspiracy and deception. The horrific crimes done to the people of Gaza can only be undone, if stakeholders and like-minded people become radically open, defiantly inviting and profoundly just. Rage will not help. Hardening of our hearts will not free the oppressed. And when the ongoing Nakba comes to an end and the fight against apartheid leads to a free Palestine, it is then that we humans have the legitimate right to celebrate freedom, autonomy, life and dignity.
As writer and activist Arundhati Roy optimistically remarked at the World Social Forum, 2003, “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
shelleywalia@gmail.com
