Voices on the New Diasporas - an MIT student journal
Submission deadline for Spring 2008 issue is March 15, 2008.
Copyright Notices
The works displayed on MIT's E-merging Journal are protected by copyright and other applicable laws and are made available by MIT's E-merging Journal for use by you, the individual accessing the E-merging Journal, solely for your own educational, non-commercial, non-monetary purposes provided you credit the author(s) identified on the particular work(s) and the MIT E-merging Journal for the material you use.
These works may be viewed on-line, downloaded, copied, distributed and displayed by you for your own educational, noncommercial purposes, or the URL of a document (from this server) included in another electronic document; however, the text of a work may not be published commercially (in print or electronically), edited or otherwise altered.
This is a summary of the license terms to you, the full text of which is available - Legal Notices.
Home is Elsewhere
by Farah Ghniem
Home, I have always been told, is elsewhere.
“It is not here, not in these narrow alleyways littered with overflowing plastic bags and inhabited by cats. Home is not in this dry air and infertile soil. This is the fifth year in a row that I try to make this cherry tree grow and it won’t grow. See? Two leaves don’t make a tree. And how do you grow a tree in a pot of dirt anyway? Home is not in these unsmiling faces. Not in the sour smell of corrugated metal. Home is full of fruit orchards. Its soil is fertile; its air is bliss. The women are beautiful the children are happy the men are strong and handsome. It is full of the mystery of the desert, the grace of the Mediterranean, the magic of the Red Sea. It contains the strength of a river and the calm of a lake. The gravity of the Dead Sea and the holiness of Jerusalem. Home is infinite and majestic, and it is not here. This, habibti, this is what temporary is. Because one day we will pack up and leave. And see? See this? This is the key that your grandfather brought with him when he walked across the border all those years ago.”
This is how my father’s grandmother used to speak of Palestine in comparison to the refugee camp in Jordan. She lived out of a suitcase from 1948 till the very day she died. The last words she muttered were her wish to be buried in Zakaria, the village she came from. There was nothing anyone could do to make her wish come true.
For the longest time, Palestine had been a myth to me. I had experienced Palestine through the words of people like my great-grandmother. I had experienced it through poetry and fiction, through television and pictures. Through patriotic songs. Through newspapers and history books. As such, when I learnt that we were finally going to be able to visit, I had foolishly thought I would have a life-altering experience. Spiritual almost. My expectations were too high. They were bound to be crushed.
I was thirteen at the time, and I found the experience overwhelming. I thought the country beautiful, but I was unable to connect to it spiritually. Apart from a few relatives we visited in Jerusalem, the trip was extremely impersonal. We were packed into a tourist bus and shown all the major cities, mostly through the windows of the bus. One by one we entered cities but were not allowed to linger, for security reasons. Sometimes I would fall asleep on the bus and miss a whole city. My mother, captivated by the scenery during the ride, would get upset when she found out about these misses later, but there was nothing I could do about it. My dad, normally as voracious and enthusiastic a reader as I am, forbade me to read on the bus: “Farah, put that book away.”
“But, babaa –”
“No buts, you are putting that book away and looking out the window. This is your country. Get to know it.”
I recall wondering how it is possible that songs about my country could move me so much more than the sight of it. The trip left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
September 1990: the month I discovered Islam and Christianity, and the fact that they are two different things. It was the first month of first grade, and our class was to be divided during Religious Studies. The Muslim girls were to be taught by Miss Reem, The Christian girls by Miss Samia. After the initial confusion of discovering religious identities dissipated, we all went in search for more. Over the course of the following weeks, the girls would inform each other where they came from. It got confusing at times. A lot of the girls would say something like: Mama is from Palestine, Baba is half Jordanian half Palestinian, but they told me to say I am Jordanian because that’s what Baba is because that’s what grandpa is. I felt like I was collecting identities. I was Palestinian; that much I had learnt as soon as I had learnt to speak. We came to Jordan because the Israelis are living on our land now. I was also Muslim; I belonged in Miss Reem’s class during Religious Studies. I committed verses from the Quran to memory, not the Bible.
As I grew older I became very good at guessing a person’s religion and country of origin from that person’s last name. Haddadin: Jordanian, Christian, from the city of Karak in the north of Jordan. Budeiri: Palestinian, Muslim, from the city of Jerusalem. Ghniem: (1) Palestinian, Muslim, from the city of Zakaria, (2) Palestinian, Christian, the city of origin currently eludes me. This data I never actively pursued but collected nonetheless through observation and overheard conversations.
The fact that such distinctions exist means that despite the common Arab identity of Jordanians and Palestinians, there is a difference. And the difference occasionally plays a part in people’s lives. For instance, whenever there’s a wedding in my family, the first piece of information sought out by all the aunties is this: Is the future spouse Palestinian? If not, there’s a great deal of tsk-tsking and head shaking. “Now why would she want to go off and marry a Bedouin?” Palestinians historically have been mostly merchants and farmers. The Jordanians, on the other hand, have been nomadic desert dwellers. Secretly, Palestinians think they’re superior to Jordanians, and vice versa. Yet there are more Palestinians in Jordan than Jordanians. This is where things begin to get complicated.
My parents’ political activism landed my father in solitary confinement at the Jordanian Intelligence Department. They were involved with the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) back in the early eighties, at the height of the Jordanian government’s intolerance of such political activity. The government’s main concern was preventing the Palestinians from launching attacks on Israel from Jordan, something that had happened in the past and resulted in the events of what is now known as the Black September in 1970.
I will not dwell for too long on the political events surrounding my father’s imprisonment. Suffce it to say that he was not involved in any armed movements. Rather, a more accurate description of his work would be human rights activism.
I was never told the story of my father’s imprisonment in full, and it took me a long time to put together small pieces of the story that I collected over the years. During my late teenage years, I was finally able to understand the full circumstances surrounding what happened to my father. I realized that I lived in a country that had welcomed me with arms wide open, as long as I forfeited my right to resist and unjust occupation in any form. I lived in a country where demonstrations condemning Israeli atrocities were swiftly and oftentimes violently diffused by the government. I lived in a country where I could be whoever I wanted, as long as I forced myself to forget who I could have been. In conversations today, I could bring my self to say “My home is in Jordan”, but I would never, ever say “Jordan is my home.”
Ramadan comes every year with its tastes and odors and speaks to me of home. It brings with it memories of my school days. I would come home from school to the smell of onions and garlic being sautéed in oil. My mother, home early from work, would ask me to chop yet more onions for her. “I took my contact lenses out; you know how onions make me cry if I’m not wearing them,” she would say. It was difficult for me to help; hunger would have already taken its toll on me by then. But the prospect of lying down and waiting for the sun to set made me feel guilty. My mother was fasting too, but there she was, on her feet, trying to ensure we had food ready when it was time to eat. So I tried to help my mother as much as possible around the kitchen. I would heat the soup. Toss the salad. Stir a stew. Check on the casserole dish in the oven. Squeeze the oranges. Set the table. There was never a shortage of things to do. My aunt, who lives upstairs, would come down and help my mother out with the cooking. Later, both our families would sit together in ravenous silence, as we waited for the call for the sunset prayer. Once we heard the first ‘Allahu Akbar’ in the distance, we ate and ate until we could not stand up straight anymore.
Three years into college, my friends and I decided to get together and cook every day during Ramadan. It was my junior year, and I was spending it at the University of Cambridge in England. Every afternoon, my friend and I would go shopping for groceries at Sainsbury’s Supermarket. I found that I selected things the same way my mother did: carefully poking tomatoes, smelling parsley and coriander, examining the color of chicken. Back in our dormitories, the smell of onions and garlic frying in a pan would take me back in time, back into my own kitchen in Jordan. One of us would lean back in her chair and proclaim: “This feels like home.”
A conversation I had with my mother when I was about ten years old:
“One day, if you have your own home…” My mother began.
“If, why if?” I interjected, slightly bewildered.
“Well, if you don’t marry, you will obviously have to continue living in your father’s home…”
“What if I want to have my own home but I don’t want a husband?”
“That won’t work. Not in our country. This is not America.”
“Why?”
“Well, a girl moves out of her father’s house. What are people going to think? What are they going to say? She loses her respectability. Rumors of late-night visits by men start getting circulated. You don’t want something like that happening to you, now do you?”
I recall being crestfallen, heartbroken even. It was my first encounter with the fact that I’m expected to simply move from under one man’s roof to another’s.
“So, like we said. One day, if you have your own home…”
So I moved to America. At seventeen, the US seemed to me this magical place where I can have my own home and no one will think that I’m prostituting myself. It was also a place where I was free to be my own self without having to adhere to societal norms and expectations. Now the conversations I have with my mother about home are of a different nature:
“Like we said, no PhD and no job in America. You finish your master’s degree and you come back home.” This has become one of my mother’s favorite lines. She uses it often, to verbalize her biggest fear: Her eldest daughter never coming back from America.
“What if I want to get some work experience in the US first?” Is my traditional counter-argument.
“No. No work experience. Over my dead body. You stay there long enough, you make a home out of it. And where would that leave us? Where would that leave your family? And how are you ever going to get married if no one here sees you and gets to know you?”
“What if I find someone to marry in the US?” I would weekly speculate.
My mother would turn to face my father at this point. “See? This is what I told you was going to happen. I told you it’s a bad idea to send your daughter away to college like this. But no. No one listens to me. Now she wants to live in America! Miles and miles away from her home. Miles and miles away from her family!”
Conversations such as this oftentimes end with tears. My mother would start crying out of fear – she doesn’t want to lose me to a country thousands of miles away. I would start crying out of frustration – how am I going to be able to go back and live with my parents after I have experienced making my own home? My father would try to comfort both of us, to no avail.
I have always prided myself on my ability to make a “home” out of almost any space. When I moved back to the United States this year, I spent about two weeks setting up my room. I painted all the walls, installed shelves and curtains, bought carpets, decorated, cleaned, arranged and rearranged until I got just the right vibe from the room. My friends had a great time making fun of the measures I was taking to make my room feel like home. “It is just temporary,” they would exclaim. But it wasn’t the first time I had gone through great pains to make my living space homier. It is something intrinsic to my nature. The more places I seem to live in, the more powerfully obsessive my desire to make each and every one of them feel like home.
Yet the more places I live in, the more I realize that what makes a home is something very elusive and difficult to define. Home is not in the curtains or the carpets. For home is not a fixed geography. Rather, it is a combination of sensory stimuli that inspire a vision of what we perceive as home. Sometimes it is the fragrance of a person, or the way that person makes us feel. Sometimes it is the taste of a certain dish, or the temperature on a given day. In fact, I now realize that home is not necessarily one place, or even a place at all.
I refuse to describe myself as Jordanian, yet my first home is in Jordan. Jordan is where my family is, where I learned to walk and talk, and where I have left precious things hidden in forgotten corners. How can it not be home? During my visit to Palestine, I felt alienated by the unfamiliarity of the place and the fact that it was technically now mostly Israel. But in the following years, whenever I visited a country on the Mediterranean, such as Lebanon or Italy or Greece, I felt a strong sense of homecoming. A strong feeling that I belong somewhere very similar to here. After a year in Cambridge University, that quaint campus felt like a home, and after three years at MIT, I almost don’t want to think of the day that I will have to pack up and leave.
Perhaps this is the curse and blessing of being a refugee, especially one with my temperament. I realize that I will always be afflicted by a wanderlust that results from a love for travel and the inability to live in a place where I feel I can completely belong. Yet the beauty of such an affliction is the discovery that it has helped me make: Home is not necessarily one place, it is not even necessarily a place, and sometimes it moves with me when I move.
© 2007 MIT E-merging Journal
