Histories have a vector character.

I have written this in the midst of feeling and so it will not be perfect. I’m attending and online event to listen to the author of Olive Growing in Palestine: Stories of Everyday Forms of Resistance, Juman Simaan

 A question of ties to land

..... someone talks about the way that violence ripples across time. I wonder if this is why I felt the genocide so much more deeply than the people around me when it first started happening. Sitting in my basement garden apartment in Edinburgh, Scotland at the time. Is this why the woman calling from the gym during the first ICJ session was confused by my rudeness. I said “how can you call about this at such a time?”. Or why my brow furrowed so deeply when the taxi driver asked “why do you care?”. They must all know this is the day that the world may finally say ‘no more’. They were just having a normal day? Is this why I decided it was better to be in the United States and that it was time to leave Scotland. When I realized international students and even academics were being made to leave the country because of supporting Palestine. Is this why I chose my voice over staying in a country I had worked so hard to finally live in. Why was I willing to give that up for a people I didn’t really know. This is not normal. This is not what normal people do, I thought. But I had to go.

Is this why I was in tears, trying stutter out something someone could understand between gasps to my cohort, “I think we are obligated to say something”. Is this why meeting their silence felt like such a betrayal. Is this why I couldn’t understand why a project given two million dollars to address children’s rights stayed silent. Because my blood is still traced to the Levant. Is it still tying me to a land I never knew? Is it possible that my ancestors blood, a blood made of the land carries in it things I can’t understand. Staying vital through its transversing to the islands of Sicily... it still calls to me. Is this what makes it impossible to turn away the way others seem to be able to. Is this why I feel separated from civil conversation because I want to scream that I feel it in my bones! That I feel it in a way that feels too deep for a body that has never touched the land. But what is land if it is not histories, inheritances of past affects. Histories are not material, they travel, they have a vector character, they bring things from there to here, they gain intensity. perhaps the blood of my ancestors keeps me honest to myself, in ways that I sometimes wish it didn’t. I don’t want to get in trouble even when it is good trouble. It is lonely, but I cannot resist it. The land the people, they call to me. I am made from them. Even now I want to come onto the chat and tell them what I am feeling. But my tears stop me. I hear other people who I think have more of a right to feel sadness, and maybe it isn’t the right time to yell out that I can feel a life reaching for me across time. An echo a haunting that makes me realize that things are not finished. That my heart remains uncomfortably, sometimes unwillingly wide open for the people of Palestine.