Re-Membering!!!

“Asks the Possible of the Impossible, “Where is your dwelling-place?” “In the dreams of the Impotent,” comes the answer.” Rabindranth Tagore

On the eve of the 6 year anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie, I am reminded of the importance of Re-Membering!  Rachel Corrie stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer in a civil disobedience attempt to prevent yet another demolition of a Palesitnian home in Gaza.  She was wearing a bright orange vest, and with blond hair and blue eyes surely she stuck out like a sore thumb.  She was confident that the driver of the bulldozer would stop, to the horror of all eyewitnesses the soldier drove forward and continued to crush her with his CAT bulldozer, reverse and then drive over her again.    http://www.rachelcorrie.org/

This past Friday Tristan Anderson, an American, was hit in the head with a cannister of tear gas and is currently in critical condition in the hospital.  He was part of a peaceful demonstration in the West Bank village of Nillin to protest the construction of the Separation Wall that will break up the village and take away land from the Palestinian population that lives there.  http://palsolidarity.org/2009/03/5324

Being here in the West Bank trauma speaks to you in so many ways and is most visible in the body language of the people you see.  Often times it is as obvious as missing limbs or crippled bodies, other times in haunted and sunken eyes and hunched shoulders.  As a Palestinian American who has been mostly disconnected from this land I often find myself wanting to discuss what is happening with the locals.  I am met with various responses, for some it is a desire to not want to talk politics, because the political has been way too intimate and personal for comfort.  And for others they will tell you their traumas as if you are engaged in small talk.  It is such a normal thing here, to have family members in prison or dead, or to have been shot or beaten.

Currently in East Jerusalem 1700 homes, including a school, are slated to be demolished under Israeli orders.  If the plan is executed then 17,000 Palestinians will be homeless.  Refugees become refugees again and again.  The supposed reason for the demolitions is that they do not have the proper Israeli permits to be there, yet many of these houses have been there since before there was such a thing as an Israeli permit and home demolitions have been a trademark of the Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian land.  In the place of some of these demolished homes and buildings are plans to build a park.

Recently I have been contemplating a lot the refugees of Palestine, both within the state of Israel, in the Occupied Territories and all over the world.  The number is currently up to somewhere around 6 million.  Their stories haunt me.  My father for instance, was studying in Egypt when Israel took over the West Bank and he automatically took on refugee status simply because he was not physically in the country.  Overnight he became homeless, stateless, no country no place of origin to return to.  I can only imagine how traumatizing that must have been for him!  Now to enter back to his ancestral homeland he must endure being questioned and interrogated by Israeli airport and border police.

A week ago I came into the country through the Israeli airport and the second the woman at customs looked at my passport (without even asking me anything) she gave my passport to a security official and I was taken away to a “special” room.  I was questioned for two hours as to why I was in the country, what would I do, where would I stay, all those sorts of questions and my bags were scanned separate from everyone else.  In addition to all of this it turns out that my entire family is in their database, pictures and everything!  I saw pictures of my grandfather and pictures of my uncle.  In fact they seemed to know more about my family than I did.  One of the airport security asked me my grandmothers name, I was very young when she died and accidentally told him the wrong name and he so kindly corrected me.  I found it strange that my whole family would be in their records like that, as no one in my family has ever hurt a Jewish person.

Growing up I always felt as if I did not belong anywhere, as if I did not fit in.  I can look back on that now and see that some of its roots come from being the daughter of a refugee.  And in the midst of all of this I am contemplating two things:  what is home and why do traumas continue to haunt and repeat themselves?

It still baffles me to think that the Jewish people once sufferred such horros and yet some people from this lineage are able to carry out and support the displacement, murder and traumatization of another group of people.  It reminds me of the importance of acknowledging the displaced and mutilated parts of myself.  Those parts that don’t always look so nice and perhaps in my comfortable American life style became easy to shove into the dusty corners.  I am learning how to sit with all these traumas, how to love their disconfigured faces, how to hold and nurture them unabashedly without fear.

~ by deemadabis on March 16, 2009.