ASK ME ABOUT PALESTINE
Words are how I make sense of the world. Maybe mine will make sense to you.
But I felt it anyway
I would have loved to have you break my heart.
Caution, I am no fool. I know your intentions. I know what lies ahead. I know it is a barren terrain but that never really mattered in the presence of such affection.
I would have chosen to love you unconditionally. Like a moth, I cannot help but be attracted by the flames. Several rounds of gut-wrenching pain did not rid me of this desire to burn.
Exile and Love
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” writes Edward Said. He defines exile as an unhealable rift, a forced separation between a person and their native place, between the self and its true home.
Perhaps this is why it becomes almost instinctive for a refugee to fall in love with profound vulnerability. A refugee will not merely love you as a person but as the embodiment of a forbidden homeland. Love, then, is not only personal, it is homecoming.
On Violence
I was reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s White Nights by the seafront of the Municipal Sports Stadium in Saida, a place that encapsulates all the contradictions of the city and mirrors the turmoil of my own feelings toward it. Notably, this was the very first work of Dostoyevsky I had ever read, despite being an avid reader.
