I knew from the moment I could speak that I was Palestinian and that it was a very special thing to be. I remember tiny moments, like a gathering at a sunny park in Kuwait where I chased glistening bubbles in a grassy field and posed for photos with other Palestinian kids, all relatives or close friends who had known each other for years. I remember being handed an orange and told what a shame it was that is wasn’t a Yaffa orange like we used to cultivate bi yom sitti in my grandmother’s day.
I remember there were elders lounging comfortably in the shade, just on the outskirts of the group of parents, gently pulling smoke from a water pipe or quietly thumbing a string of prayer beads in their laps. I remember going to concerts where there was singing and chanting. I remember looking around at adults wiping moisture from red rimmed eyes and feeling like I was missing something as the wave of emotion was obviously an aftereffect of lyrics I was still too young to understand, but I knew it was always, ALWAYS about homeland.
I remember what felt like lavish birthday parties with giant bowls of fresh homemade tabouli and artfully frosted cakes that inevitably erupted into joyful dance circles with clapping and zagreet calls echoing throughout the small apartments. These moments, while fewer and further apart in time, magnified in importance after leaving our lives behind in Kuwait during the bombings and magnified even more once we landed an ocean away in tiny Rhode Island. It was here, alone and apart where I struggled to root my Palestinian-ness into something tangible, something present and not just of the past. It’s only now, all these decades later that I finally understand those tiny moments were always adding up to something much bigger than me.
I started undergrad in fall of '02. The US was already bombing Afghanistan and by sophomore year it was bombing Iraq. I joined a small but determined group of student activists in antiwar protests, teach-ins, movie nights, and organizing. By the time I was 19, I was fully burnt out, but it wasn’t because keeping up with courses while working and being an activist did me in. It was the growing weariness that came with being the only Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim anywhere I went, especially while the world was falling apart yet no one around me seemed to notice. As a child of a parent with borderline, I was already used to being gaslit, but this felt like I was gaslighting myself.
A pattern was cementing that would take me years to remake: my life felt like it was all giving and zero receiving. I am not sure when it became clear to me that something major needed to shift in my life, but it was sometime after my eyes filled with bitter tears between drags of shared cigarettes during fruitless attempts to put words to my feelings of emptiness. It was sometime after a waspy white lady tried to convince me I was white in an anthropology class and I wanted to burst into blue flames. It was after I decided to end the off and on again relationship with my high school boyfriend whose parents’ increasingly anti-muslim fear became directed towards me. That was why in the spring of my sophomore year, despite my mother’s attempts at control, I applied for a study abroad scholarship and got it. By August, I was off to Cairo, the city that-yet unbeknownst to me-raised my Baba, the city that every woman in my family got to see except me. The city that grounded me and gave me new eyes.
