“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”.
