Published in NewLines Magazine.
For Palestinian-Americans, nostalgia means longing for a home they’ll never know, and their parents can only dimly recall
have only seen my father cry twice. The first time, I was eight years old, and we were driving up to Boston, a trip we made every year at Christmastime to visit my mother’s family. My father was blasting Fairuz in our 1995 Volvo station wagon; her balmy voice seemed out of place against the relentless miles of icy, cracked highway and gray New England frost. My father sang along until his baritone voice cracked and his shoulders began to quiver. My mother reached over, ruffled his hair, and turned around to wink at me and my sister in the back seat.
“Baba, why are you crying?” I asked, leaning forward to catch a glimpse of him. “It’s just some old lady singing!” I don’t remember what he said.
The second time was several years later — January 2008. My father sat at the edge of his bed in our cramped, old New York City apartment, gripping the TV remote and staring at the screen with his brow furrowed. Israel had just launched Operation Cast Lead, which would devastate the Gaza Strip. Images of piles of dead bodies, explosions, and mounds of rubble flashed across the screen, scenes my parents wouldn’t even let me see in movies.
My father eventually stood up. He rolled up his sleeves and approached the TV screen like it was a window that he could pry open and climb through. But all he could do was grab the house phone and try calling his sister, who lived in Gaza City, to see if she was okay. Each time he would get her on the line, she couldn’t hear him.
“Hello?” I could hear her say, over and over again, her voice muffled by the distance. “Is anyone there?”
“Rawya!” he called. “I’m here. I can hear you. Can you hear me?”
I remember what he said to me that night. Eventually he pulled me over, pointed at the small TV screen, and, with the same shaky voice I had heard in the car years before, said, “That’s our home, baba.”
Until then, I had never thought much of what “home” meant, and as a 13-year-old, I rarely had to explain my background. We moved around a lot back then, and whenever anyone asked where I was from, I would shrug and name wherever we had just left. But after watching the destruction of my father’s home on TV and seeing the ruins of my aunt Rawya’s house, I started associating “home” with a place I had never lived in — a feeling I would later realize I share with millions of other members of the scattered Palestinian diaspora.
I was born in New York City, and although I spent several years living in countries across the Middle East, I only spent a short few months in Gaza and was far too young to remember it. I grew up listening to my father’s stories of what it was like “back home” — of clementine and olive trees, boys who sold dates on the beach, and, of course, war and occupation. Despite my physical distance from Gaza, it came to occupy an almost daily presence in my life, but it was Israel’s 2008 invasion that made me cognizant of the forces actively trying to erase part of my heritage, albeit far removed and unfamiliar.
From then on, I began calling myself Palestinian. I translated song lyrics to tie together my broken Arabic, read every history book on Palestine that I could get my hands on, and became deeply involved in advocacy for the Palestinian cause — the decades-long struggle for basic human rights, self-determination, and an end to Israeli occupation. Above all, I came to yearn for a “return” to the elusive home I had heard so much about over the years, and now, I am the one who can be brought to tears after hearing a few lines of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish or Tawfiq Ziad.
But how could their words, so intimate in their claims to the land and lives they lost, resonate with me — someone whose only connection to Palestine was through the stories I’d been told?
Read the rest in NewLines Magazine.