For me it’s essential to reject death, Even though my legends die. I am searching in the rubble for light, for new poetry. Oh, did I realise before today That letters in the dictionary, my love, are stupid? How do all these words live? How do they increase? How grow up? We still nourish them with memories’ tears, With metaphors - and sugar! So be it. — Mahmoud Darwish, from “The Rose in the Dictionary,” The Music of Human Flesh (Heinemann Educational Books, 1980)
In 2013, the media circulated moving photos showing a garden created by the residents of Bilin on the West Bank. Residents planted flowers in used tear gas grenades that were fired at protesters by Israeli forces. The pictures also show Sabiha Abu Rahmah, whose son Bassam was the leader of the protests who died in 2009. The garden is meant to commemorate him and other victims of the Palestinian fight for their land and symbolize life that will blossom from death
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وفي عام 2013، تداولت وسائل الإعلام صورا متحركة تظهر حديقة أنشأها سكان بلعين في الضفة الغربية. وقام السكان بزراعة الزهور في قنابل الغاز المسيل للدموع التي أطلقتها القوات الإسرائيلية على المتظاهرين. وتظهر الصور أيضًا صبيحة أبو رحمة، التي كان ابنها بسام قائد الاحتجاجات الذي توفي عام 2009. وتهدف الحديقة إلى تخليد ذكراه وغيره من ضحايا النضال الفلسطيني من أجل أرضهم وترمز إلى الحياة التي ستزهر من الموت.
Performance in Dar Al Tifel, Jerusalem, 1975 - Photos of Palestinians at home and in the diaspora by National Geographic foreign editorial staff writer and photographer Thomas Abercrombie (1974-1975).
exterior of the monastery of st catherine in the sinai peninsula, egypt. this church of sinai monastery was completed in ad 565 under the orders of eastern roman emperor justinian i. this makes it the world’s oldest continuously inhabited christian monastery.
Which country do you love more? The question asked of each one of us young travelers of the diaspora, children with shiny shoes and English textbooks. At this checkpoint no travel documents will do, only testimonials of praise in perfect syllables gutturals and glottal stops recited with conviction to the cheering crowds. On summer pilgrimages we are delivered to the embrace of relatives, the scent of their skin a heavy musk in the heat, indistinguishable from the cumin and clay of the garden where our fingers loosen glimmering shards beneath green shade of geranium leaves. No time for deep breathing or personal space—here the senses are overwhelmed, here the air overflows with the sorrow and story of love fattening on the vine, and the longing, always the longing for what is no longer here nor possible. In this land of a thousand mirrors reflections of everyone we must and could be, mirage of our selves fragments on the horizon. Let us in they beckon Let our stories slip under your fingernails Let our language collect in brushstrokes across your furrowed brow. Stay. Stay longer. More tea? With mint or sage? Consider carefully, every herb a cure for one ailment and companion to another. Here our portraits find their frames, the bells in our laughter find echoes. With enough time and tea between us the bridge of my nose becomes an heirloom from ancestral villages, your curls a heritage of defiance, the shape of our fingers a flag. Stay a while longer there is so much more they will tell you. Linger with us in the infinite hours their invitation echoes. Let the day lift its veils from the sky, let the embers of sunset burn slowly, let night drape its stars over the hills.
