Mixed with wet mucus
I knead the earth and eat it
In hand-fuls
And arm-fuls.
The video camera zooms in
as I slowly swallow the soil;
Engrossed and joyful.
My logic drew a continuous circle
from the time my mother told me
we’re made of mud, as God said in the Quran,
to the place by the loquat tree
Where I gulp dirt, water and tears.
————————————————
At lunch, my father is always angry.
Most of the time he is angry with his brother
Selling the land:
the plants, the dirt, the rocks, the worms
And the skies above the ground,
He sold them all,
So he can pay for his sons
To become doctors who, years after
graduation, won’t be able to save a life spent
smoking under the shade of the fig tree.
My father arrives home from the market,
garnishes two plates of hummus with fried meat
And be angry about this.
And that
And the loss of a fertile valley
Passed down our family,
for ages.
He declares over lunch:
“I would rather beg for money
Just like bedouin boys from neighboring villages
and girls who lurk through the wall’s fence
with their toddler-sibling dangling at their hips,
rather than sell a bead of my soil.
It’s not about Palestine, really-
but about value.”
———————————————————
It’s the first music lesson on a Thursday
and I’m already weary.
We don’t have any instrument
my teacher sings and we repeat;
the old, stone walls also repeat-
a cacophony of sounds
celebrating the land- al ard
During the month of March,
When we watered the ground
with blood in the shape of seven martyrs.
The principle hears us from the hallway
his bald head barges in telling us to keep it down
because even walls have ears
And they talk to the ministry of education
About a rebellious wind in a forgotten village
That is rapidly becoming a crowded town.
—————————————————–
We always get stuck in traffic at the Southern entrance
That leads to the meadow behind the mountain
On which my morphing village sprawls.
Dad exhales his smoke and mother
holds her breath for a long time;
Just like I do when I swim in the pool-
Although we don’t have a pool in my village,
But I hold my breath when we go to the Jewish moshav.
Brown, green and yellow along the eyesight
The meadow stretches from Arrabe to the mountains of Nazareth
that collapse towards the lake of Tiberias.
As we drive into this battered out, patched carpet of land
I wonder:
How does my dad know
Which land is which?
There are no fences, no walls, no demarcating lines.
What if he works his cousin’s land
And another cousin works in our neighbor’s land
Then the watermelon will be watered twice
And we will till the land thrice
And it won’t be good.
But my dad is not encumbered by this;
He inhales his smoke
and this time my mom doesn’t hold her breath-
She is already positioned next to a furrow
Of watermelons, that needs to be turned
And untangled from its neighboring plants.
My brother plays with the juicy fruit covered with dirt
And he hurls them across the horizon;
I laugh and run to escape his catapult-shot
While my dad urges us to work, instead
I thrust a handful of dirt at my brother
Hoping to shower him with soil
And announce a baptism of some sort,
But a hidden, white, firm stone hits his head,
he bleeds and my mother shouts and looks at me
The commencement of guilt
now.
————————————————
Years later, I left
the village and moved to the city
on the mountain by the sea.
The air is not clean here
Bur the streets are
And they are big and spacious;
I found an apartment at the legs of the Carmel mount
And to practice “home”
I grow flowers and plants all over the house;
Everything that fits my balcony like mint, zaatar and tomatoes.
Until I realize that I’m missing soil
I can’t find dirt in this God-forsaken city!-
Stripped of my beginning of things
I don’t have a patch of dirt
That can bear the lushness
Of the basil I’m planning to plant
Nor the abundance of the parsley
I’m planning to grow.
In the spirit of compromise and modernization,
I take the bus to the market and
The moment I pay the blond woman many coins
For a 70L bag of dirt, I cry inside.
This is the commencement of
loss.
AICHA BINT YUSIF 