Palestinians in short do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be transmuted and dissolved into essentially negative images.
—Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map: Essays
2003 I walked miles & miles & miles in Gaza
Even went to the beach one day
(Most Palestinians were prevented from even going
If the beach was close to Jewish-only settlements)
Sat on the floor in many homes
Some simple and plain
A few bourgeois homes too
Class divisions in Gaza just like here
Ate hummus & falafel
Foule & rice & maqluba
Drank 300 cups of shay
Smiled my thanks at least that many times
Conversed with men and boys
Some had good or excellent English
Made them grin
When I muttered
Bush majnoon
(“Bush is crazy”)
Stood for what seemed like hours
In the remains
In the rubble
Of what was once such families’ homes
Bulldozed
Blown up
Listened to people
Of many walks of life
Taxi drivers & engineers & professors
Priests & shaykhs & doctors
From Gaza City
Down to Rafah
Disarmed by the serene smiles
Of two young girls both named Lubna
The same name as one
Of my brilliant students back home
Went to the shahaeed tent
To offer condolences to yet another family
Whose son or father or husband
Was now a martyr in the struggle for freedom
Staying with the Gazans who had some of the same dreams as us
For education, pleasure, travel, long life, belonging
Learning from the Gazans who were soon to become the inhabitants
Of the world’s largest open air prison
Being present to the Gazans
Like the man my age
Who proudly beamed as he told me
“One wife, 17 children…
You must return to your home
And start having children”
His wife was doing her heroic part
In the demographic battle in Palestine/Israel
It was a very short time to be there
Six weeks or so
(It took me eight years
To write a novel of 200 pages about it)
We arrived on October 31
Just a couple of weeks after Operation Root Canal
(What bureaucrats think up these names?
Do they get pay raises for such corrosive cleverness?)
Thousand people homeless
Scores killed
Tents all over the place
Still a conviction in the air
In their eyes
These Gazans:
We are human beings.
We are not giving up.
