Bal'a - بلعا: Palestinian Mother

A LOVE LETTER TO MY MOTHER
Rana Abdulla ? Newfoundland, Canada
I am sending this love letter today to my mother - a letter with simple words that come straight from my heart.
My mother, "Im-Salim" had a tremendous influence on my life. She was a charismatic person. People were drawn to her wisdom and counsel and delicious `maamoul`, an anomaly in the Arab culture, and devoted to the family that my father gave her.
My mother would never let us leave our home unless we were neat and clean. She always told the seven of us, "People do not know what is in your stomach, but you are judged by the way you dress and appear to the world, so always be neat, clean, and strong".
My mother was an extremely kind and compassionate woman. When I was young, our neighbour`s son fell and hurt himself on the concrete curb. The child's mother was standing across the street, yelling at him. My mother ran, picked up the little boy, cleaned and bandaged him. I told my mother that the family across the street did not like us. She said: "He is a child. His heart is pure from hatred and in the face of hatred, you must offer peace and love. Hatred reaps hatred and only destroys people and offends God". So you see, Canadians and Americans who celebrate Mother's day, and who know a little about our principles and our love of family, nations, and people, terrorism is not natural for me.
I was expelled from my mother's womb to struggle with the pains of my homeland. We have a just cause, one that is as just as the plight of African Americans in the civil rights movement, the refugees of Tibet, Cambodia and elsewhere.
Yasser Arafat once said his best weapon was the Palestinian mother's womb. This is because the so-called free world is afraid of the Palestinian womb. Israeli ministers call it a demographic threat.
No child in history ever emerged from a mother's womb with hatred in his/her heart - it grows because of the imbalance of justice.
My dear mother, I cannot completely understand how you survived - how you, the sister of Al-Shaheed, Mahmoud Hamshari dealt with the loss of your beloved brother, watching it on the television screen - the television that was then shut down for years, in mourning. His death in Paris was front page news. Normal day to day life was cast aside. January 9th of every year was a frenetic day for you.
As a child, I searched for answers, with my inquisitive mind and adventurous spirit asking you constant questions. My uncle's death has been the defining feature of my life. It is this outrage that has fuelled my life - the hysteria of my grandparents grieving the loss of their son, stunned as they stood in front of their vandalized home in Tulkarem; and having to endure the humiliation of the occupation.
I found answers to some of my questions. I was not searching but they were thrust upon me in the news and in your death poems. I didn't tell you but I started documenting. I wrote on napkin papers, on cardboards, in my school books, and on anything I could find and at the age of twelve, became a creative writer.... It caused me such pain to see you suffer with memories of your dear brother, and you had not forgotten the 1948 catastrophe.
My life changed because it was then that I came to understand and experience what occupation was and what it meant. I learned how occupation works; what its impact is on the economy, on daily life, and its grinding impact on people. I learned what it meant to have little control over one's life and, more importantly, over the lives of one's children.
Months ago, I was invited to reflect on my journey as a successful immigrant at Memorial University in St-John's. This journey continues and shall continue until the day I die. My voice has been suffocated for too long in this war-stricken planet.
Another defining moment in my life and journey occurred when I realized I was the child of a Palestinian mother who filled our home with love and optimism, although punctuated at times by grief and loss. For my mother, Nationalism meant bearing witness, railing against injustice and foregoing silence. But it also meant being compassionate, tolerant, and willing - to insist that we question what we did not know or understand. These were the ultimate Palestinian values.
As the child of a brave Palestinian mother, I always wanted to be able, in some way, to experience and feel some aspect of what my mother endured, which, of course, was impossible. I listened to her stories, always wanting more, and shared her tears. I documented her stories and heritage songs. My collection is as big as Toronto`s telephone directory. My mother asked us what does it mean to run for one's life and to lose one's house, and irrevocably extinguish an entire way of life? I would try to imagine myself in that position, but it was unfathomable and well beyond my reach.
Joy and harmony is absent in many homes. Sadness and depression is being passed on to the children, when they need a peaceful and happy home to grow up in.
Dark, merciless shadows hover around my homeland, hurting the innocent and the defenceless. Israel, blameless, kills with no remorse, ripping a mother's womb with its gloved hand: A newborn in her crib dying tragically as the ceiling falls over her head, a child shot while playing football, a mother's heart torn apart as she sees her child lying dead, a father in a shocked state. The older people are all cried out observing the foe continue with its savage slaughter for 60 years.
I have some pain when I write about Mother's Day. Although Palestinian children cannot buy flowers or gifts for their mothers, they have always shown how they care for their mothers - these bereaved mothers, with tearful eyes and pain inside, who have had to say farewell to their children.
Many mothers are the mother of a son who became a martyr, or the wife of a martyr, or women with their men in Israeli jails, or vice versa. The mother's heart is full of pain. Palestinian mothers have wept for the past 60 years... carrying within them anguish, heartache and sorrow.
A Palestinian mother who loses a child looks around but cannot find other mothers nearby who cry because every mother waits her turn to receive the corpse of a child. Children are taken from their mothers while being denied any sympathy. The child's corpse becomes a number. Do we mourn these children? The humanity of Israel does not exist - the world has no pity.
My eyes well with tears every time I see a Palestinian mother on a news clip. I have never experienced the suffering Palestinian women undergo every day, every hour. I don't know the kind of violence that turns a woman's life into constant hell. I have never personally had to endure the daily physical and mental torture of mothers who are deprived of their basic human rights and needs, of privacy and dignity - whose homes are broken into at any moment of day and night, whose houses are demolished, deprived of their livelihood and of any normal family life.
The irony is that I, as a privileged and westernised Palestinian mother, am so far away from the violence and oppression that my compatriots endure and try to survive, on a daily basis. Why are so many of our youth, our future, maimed and martyred while so many of our mothers weep?
The world is a disgusting place in its inaction. It is difficult to swallow. I am helpless. I have no power, mama. I can only silently watch Palestine's history slowly fading away.
All I can do is continue to write and voice the truth about the power that prevails in the world which lives by the laws of the jungle; a world where the killer of civilians is considered a victim and the one who defend himself is a terrorist..
I write to the media. I write to my Member of Parliament. I do as much as I can possibly do. I don't care who is in power - Hamas or Fateh. I am a Palestinian.
I have no fear, mother, of losing more. I remember Nakbeh in 1948, Nakseh in 1967 and beyond and I am unwilling to concede more. What more is there to concede? We have already lost everything. Would my blood bleed any redder than that of the children of Palestine? I can never be silenced.
My home is Palestine. I will return.
Rana Abdulla