For the past month I have been co-organizing the event Voices of Resistance with W.O.R.D.S and Students for Justice in Palestine . After being convinced to write a poem, even though I really don’t write poetry, and then being convinced to perform it, . Planning this event has honestly changed me in a lot of ways. I have witnessed the hostile reactions from people on campus about even having the event. Not sure if you all heard about the flyers that were posted over our event flyers asking U.S. citizens to report illegal aliens. I have learned so much about people around me, and about myself. So here it is:

Mama, they took our language,

Turned greetings of peace, Salam o 3alookoom, into terrorist slurs

They took my image of grandfathers house on the hills of Amman, and removed the green of the olive tree, the pink of the hibiscus flower, and the white of the snow that falls only in January

They took our colors mama, and they painted instead a picture of camels and sand dunes that even I couldn’t recognize

They took the crayon out of my hand and painted brown when I saw green

Black when I saw red

They painted a picture where we were either to be feared or pitied, terrorist or victim, so tell me mama, where do I fit in all of this?

I never held a knife at them mama*, so why do they look at me as if I (my identity) were a threat?

And No, I didn’t grow up in a refugee camp nor did your missiles fall on my house

Your bans didn’t restrict me; your walls didn’t close me in,

You missed me.

But, I won’t ever forget my fathers face as the debris settled on his furrowed forehead, as a bomb exploded two streets away from us

I can’t ever forget your hardened face as we stood in a crowd of people, watching, watching a bomb fall in the distance.

We were so young, destruction was so close, we could reach out and touch it.

Mama, I’m straddling the line between victim and observer,

I inherited a conflict I never asked for,

An anger I don’t know what to do with

A history that weighs me down

A suffering that has gone on for 60 years but it feels like a 1000

I need only look at the creases on your face to see the toll of violence compounded

I am reaching inside, trying to grab on to a pain,

To a sorrow that disappears as soon as I touch it

I’m trying, trying to see the world the way you taught me it could be

But, reality feels bitter

I’m slipping, mama, I’m loosing him

 

I enter their spaces, and feel their gaze on me. Am I white enough? Is my English good enough?

They ask for empathy, for understanding, and for reason, but I have nothing more to give them.

They probe me with questions that I no longer have the energy to answer, because their questions are beginning to hurt more than

Memories of shelling

Of mushroom clouds

And screaming mothers

Tell me how to answer their questions, mama,

When they built an open-air prison where Teta (grandmother) now lives, and left no place for my tears when she missed my graduation soft tone

When they sent their tax money to fund for the weapons that terrorized my baby cousins, and told me not to be angry

I have nothing left to say.

I no longer have the patience, to be deciphered and analyzed; my body, has become a battleground where they’ve waged their war;

A war, where I have no weapons, and all I can do is watch, waiting for them to find something in me that resembles them

Because maybe then it’ll be a little harder for them to send their soldiers to our house, with words of freedom and justice liberating us from an oppression that they made up

You told me to never forget where I came from; but you never told me it would be this hard to carry it all

You gave this to me, but I don’t ever remember asking for it

You showed me there was only one kind of violence, and that was the one that you could feel

But, mama it hurts all over

I’m look at my oppressor, like he holds the key to my freedom, as if he alone can unlock the gates of justice and equality

They taught us to smile through the pain, mama, but didn’t tells us how much it would cost,

They taught us to be tender fingers

Polite,

And kind,

To smile when the tears stung, smile

To laugh when they pulled us down, laugh

And to breath when they sucked out all the oxygen breathe

But there is no more air left mama, and I no longer have it in me to smile;

The weight of forced laughter has become too heavy to bear

Thank you for my American education, mama, but it feels more like a colonized and occupied education,

An education that politicized me, used me as a weapon against myself, without ever realizing it

My language, culture, history made foreign with a changing tied

My tongue has been stripped,

And mama, I knew more about their history before I knew about ours,

Because mama, we were taught to believe that our liberation could only come from their hand,

The war they’ve waged is internal, and our body and our minds, are the battleground

Tell me mama not to believe in their chains, tell me that this silence will not last

Tell me that the storm will not uproot us, that the wind will not dissuade us, and that like all things it shall pass 

Tell me that rooted to the earth we will stand firm

And, I will not break

While we live, let us live