Susan Abulhawa - Mornings in Jenin (2006)

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For I'll keep my humanity, though I did not keep my promises.... and Love shall not be wrested from my veins.

Susan Abulhawa
Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian?

Susan Abulhawa
Amal, I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell.

Susan Abulhawa
I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her.

Susan Abulhawa
Love is what we are about, my darling," she says. "Not even in death has our love faded, for I live in your veins.

Susan Abulhawa
Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

Susan Abulhawa
An instant can crush a brain and change the course of life, the course of history.

Susan Abulhawa
We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her

Susan Abulhawa
A persistent breeze lifted the thin curtains, fluttering a few moments of tranquility into the turbulent day.

Susan Abulhawa
Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation.

Susan Abulhawa
We're all born with the greatest treasures we'll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart.

Susan Abulhawa
I watch life trickle from the bullet wound of a sixteen-year-old "example" and marvel how things weak, even words, will turn vicious and merciless to gain power, despite reason or history

Susan Abulhawa
For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

Susan Abulhawa
How can one find the first moment of love? When, in what instant, does the night's dark sky become blue?

Susan Abulhawa
Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another?

Susan Abulhawa