Tasting the Sky: Historical Note–Part I

The fight over the Holy Land, or the areas various people call Israel and Palestine, is at the heart of the current Middle East conflict.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the most difficult of modern times because both peoples, from inside their respective contexts, have justifiably strong attachments to the Holy Land.

It is also an international conflict, fueled by religious and ethnic rivalries as well as a variety of economic and military interests.

A genuine solution must allow not only freedom and security for both Israelis and Palestinians but also room for both peoples to heal from having been victimized as well as heal from having victimized others.

Together, these stories can show us how all people are interdependent and have the same basic needs.

An army jeep is parked sideways to block the road. Soldiers in another jeep look on with their guns. They are ready to shoot. A barrier that punctures tires stands near the stop sign.

Are the homes all bulldozed down? And the people? My father and my family, will I find them? Will they wait for me? Fear is a blizzard inside me. A thousand questions clamor in my mind.

I want to open my mouth and let my feelings escape like birds, let them migrate forever.

He counts us, then takes out a radio and speaks. I don’t understand, and I am somehow content that I do not. I do not want to know what he says about me or the bus, or what he plans to do.

He means the prison-court military compound on the way to Ramallah. It sits on the ground like a curse: large, grim, shrouded in mystery.

The compound feels like the carcass of a giant animal that died a long time ago.

Its exterior is drab, bonelike, and hostile.

We take out our IDs. Two soldiers collect them to determine if any of us had been caught in previous confrontations with the army.

The orange-colored plastic covers, indicating that we all are Palestinian, pile up on the table like orange peels.

The boy’s laughter is dry and trembling. Worried. I know what he feels. He wants to cry, but in spite of himself, in spite of the soldiers and the guns, all he can do is giggle.

He looks at us as though we are only suitcases in his custody.

I will distract myself from my hunger, for I have not eaten all day.

And I will record details to give to my mother in order to avoid her wrath—if Ramallah is not really gone.

Mother tells me not to speak about politics. She is always afraid that something bad could happen suddenly.

I never even learned how the colors of the Palestinian flag are arranged. Sometimes I glance at the outlawed flag during street demonstrations. I see it for seconds only, before the hand that holds it is shot at by Israeli soldiers.

Walk by the wall. Do not draw attention to yourself. Be invisible if you can, is her guiding proverb.

I love to go there, dig the key out of my pocket, turn its neck around, open the door, then slowly let my hand nestle in and linger, even if the box is empty. I wish I could open my postbox every day. I feel that my hand, when deep inside it, reaches out to anyone on the other side of the world who wants to be my friend.

Paper and ink, poems and my postbox are medicines that heal the wounds of a life without freedom.

His country is not occupied, and he does not have a strict mother like mine.

She loves Gulliver's Travels and Emil and the Detectives, books that I, too, love, because Gulliver and Emil remind me of myself. Gulliver knows exactly what it is not to be free. And both Gulliver and Emil form fond friendships with strangers.

I have many pen pals: tourists, Holy Land pilgrims, and students who join pen pal programs to see the world through other people’s words. Some write only once in a long while. Others write often. But all of them send me scraps of their lives translated into English, which I have been studying for six years, ever since I turned eleven.

Making words in Arabic is like planting a field with seeds, growing an orchard—words hang on the vines like grape clusters, leaves throw shadows of meanings to the ground.

I am eager to answer all my pen pals’ questions about language. But when they ask me about my childhood, suddenly I have nothing to say.

What would my pen pals say if I told them that I am standing at a detention center because I went to open my postbox for their letters?

Now, gazing at the ground under my feet, I remember that I need to make up something ingenious to convince Mother that I did not go to Birzeit to talk to college boys or do anything related to Palestine or politics. I usually cannot convince her of anything. She is cleverer than I am.

“Mothers and soldiers are enemies of freedom. I am doubly occupied.”

I want to wander the streets after school, walk forever, walk away from a world I do not understand, a world that tells me daily there is no place in it for me.

He does not know that I read him the way I read a street sign, and that I watch for him every day the way I watch for the snipers on top of the large buildings in Ramallah. They, too, watch how we walk and what we do. Without looking at them, we know exactly where they are. When my father walks behind me, as if he thinks he can outwit me, I feel sad.

“Why do you challenge me?” he shouted. I opened the door and walked right up to him. He only shook his head, blamed my defiance on my schooling, and blamed himself for sending me to school.

My love for language and words seems to come between us. It takes away his authority over me. The books, not he, are my references.

Father knows that they, not he, are the ones who control every one of us. We are not free to be a family the way he wants, with him a lion in our lives. He is like a lion in the zoo. Any of us can be taken away any day. No one can stop that, no matter how hard he roars from the fenced space allotted to him.

My father has no language for the pain and loneliness he feels. Is that because he has lived all his life not knowing freedom?

Tears are my secret ink, in the absence of real ink. Liquid stories. On the air that comes into and leaves my chest, I write all the things that happen to me.

“When a war ends, it does not go away,” she says. “It hides inside us.” She knows. “Do not walk that road,” she warns me. “Insay. Insay.” “Just forget!”

I cannot follow her advice. I want to remember.