I came across this while I was organizing my computer. It was written in January 2008 when I was in Nablus. I do not mention the name of the boyfriend in the piece because we are ex and do not speak so the more anonymous the better. Here it goes:
I just came back from a month in the Occupied West Bank and Israel. I haven’t written my usual blogs because everything was either too personal or either unremarkable to me. Many aspects of the Occupation and daily life in Palestine have become unremarkable to me because I am used to them. They are probably remarkable to most people who have never been to Palestine, as Palestinians refer to Israel and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
I was an attraction there. I spent much time away from Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, where I usually spend almost all of my time. Instead I spent about three of my four weeks in Balata Refugee Camp in Nablus and in the village of Kufr Dan near Jenin. In both places, word spread that there was an American girl at a certain house, and not only that, but she could speak Arabic! I was coffee-ed and tea-ed, mansaf-ed and fasoolia-ed, msakhan-ed and maglooba-ed (think of it as a Palestinian Muslim equivalent of wined and dined) and sooner or later, sometimes sooner rather than later, I was asked questions. There were two questions. The first one was: “Which is better, here or there?” (meaning Palestine or the US) The second one was an extension of the first. It was: “How is it different there?” These discussions would usually lead to other questions like the puzzled query from the women of Kufr Dan why American women bore so few children or the same question from Abu Tawfiq, the sheikh who lived on the top floor of my building in Balata. Once, with an intellectual, Maher, my answer about the differences between the US and Palestine lead to him asking me why so many Americans get divorced. Which I answered through a discussion of the rise of Spectacular Capitalism in the 1920’s that corresponded to the spike in US divorce rates.
Basil was the first person to ask me where life was better: in Palestine or in America. I answered in Palestine. He contradicted me. So I asked him, “What is life?”
“Life is going from one city to another and not having to worry about getting shot or having to cross checkpoints, life is having decent economic opportunities, life is having a healthy economy.”
“Well, if that’s your definition of life, then, of course, life is much better in the United States,” I replied, “But if life is the strength of the social structure, the fact that people take care of each other, take care of their elders; the fact that children can run around on the streets and wander into neighbors’ houses, then life is better here!”
We agreed that what in Palestine the negative opportunities for economic life were made up for by its strong social life. Basil pointed out that in Palestine the Israeli occupation made it challenging to stay alive. Just then, his cellphone, previously resting on the arm of his chair, danced. On its face there was a picture of his brother who was killed by Israeli forces.
On the Muslim new year, which fell several days after the Gregorian new year, a group of university students and internationals led by Professor Abu Hijleh from An-Najah University in Nablus gathered at the cemetery right after nightfall. My boyfriend and I hurried to meet them. We had been buying candles at the store across the street from the cemetery and he was feeling poorly. Would eight candles be enough? he had asked me. I had said yes. What do I know? I had thought. I’ve never lit candles in a cemetery before. But I said yes anyway. He needed someone to tell him that he was doing the right thing.
At each grave the Professor would lead a small prayer and say who it was underneath the raised white stone and how they died. Several of us would drip candle wax on the grave and put the candle snuggly in the warm wax, fixing it on the grave. We were lighting candles on martyrs’ graves. Some were killed by bullets, others by tank fire and bombs. There was a whole family of eight who were crushed to death when an Israeli armored D8 bulldozer pushed their house on top of them. Flames from the candles one by one formed a circle around that large grave, as if the little flames linked their warm hands around that family. There was a man who was shot and then left in the country to be eaten by the wild dogs. There was another man who the Army beat and then pushed him from a moving Jeep. He died from the fall. Orange lights waved in the wind for him.
I found myself lagging behind the group. I was shooting a few photographs of the candles and the graves. All the graves were raised stone boxes with headstones. The headstones usually bore a photograph encased in glass of the deceased. Qura’an usually covered the grave where the martyr’s belly would be. Candles were lit at the grave of a mother. Further on there were smaller graves, graves of children. Why? I asked the dead. “Why?” I asked the martyrs, “Why are you not here and I am walking among you?” And the graves gave me an answer: I must live every drop of blood stronger because they were not alive; because they died, I must live. They died so that I may live.
I realized something about Christ then. I realized that Christ was fundamentally a martyr. His message, as the Christians interpret it, is the martyr’s message: “I died to give you life.”
I caught up with the group and lagged behind again. First at the grave of a man in his twenties for whom the glass in his picture’s frame was broken like it had been shot and second I sat at the grave of a little girl. Then I ran to catch up with the group. I photographed more. Gathering my courage, snapping the message the dead had given me with my shutter. As they shed their life, I would take it. It was a gift they gave selflessly, as I witnessed it, tiptoeing between the graves, the candles breathing quietly, I knew I had to take that gift; I had to respect their lives by living my own to its fullest. Because they couldn’t now. I tread more purposefully, my high-heeled feet sinking slightly in the mud, pine needles becoming stuck onto that mud on my shoes. I took pictures. And as we walked back through the main street in the cemetery, the path formed by candles; flames on the graves of martyrs, those who died of unnatural causes, of the Israeli occupation. So many. So, so many. My boyfriend had said sometimes that he was dead. Most of his friends were dead. Looking at all these people, I finally understood. I had understood the meaning of his words before. That witnessing nine of your friends martyred deadens you, I had understood. But now, in the midst of the graves, listening to each individual’s death, seeing the face of the body that I knew must be bones by now underneath the stone, hit a place of despair in me and I wept. Tears down my cheeks in the same paths, making arroyos and canyons in my cheeks. Wadis. He sat down with me on a grave. Part of me, I felt, was dead too. “So many so many,” I told him.
“Now you see what I mean?” he asked softly.
I could explain my sorrow to him but I kept the martyrs’ message to myself. I felt that it was too sacred. Or maybe that he’d laugh at me. How do the dead talk to you? Especially dead that I have never known? Maybe it was just the thing a foreigner would do: to think the Palestinian dead gave her a message and then weep. I had felt like I was balancing between the elation of the martyrs’ message and the despair of their loss. I also felt that if I told him what they had told me that he would tell me that I misunderstood, that martyrs were really some other way.
So I dried my tears and we moved on to join the group.
