Two of her novels are on Bookshare.
Abulhawa: For 36 hours I was detained on a dirty bed in my homeland, then
deported
Susan Abulhawa on November 4, 2018
Susan Abulhawa, speaking in 2017. From Facebook.
After being deported from Israel for the second time in three years, Susan
Abulhawa posted the following statement to the literature festival she was
unable to attend, on Facebook yesterday.
Statement to Kalimat Palestinian Literature Festival:
I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Kalimat Palestinian
Literature Festival, Mahmoud Muna in particular, and to the Kenyon Institute
of the British Council for inviting me and undertaking the expense for me to
participate in this year's literature festival in Palestine.
As you all know by now, Israeli authorities have denied me entry into my
country and I am therefore unable to attend the festival. It pains me
greatly not to be with my friends and fellow writers to explore and
celebrate our literary traditions with readers and with each other in our
homeland. It pains me that we can meet anywhere in the world except in
Palestine, the place to which we belong, from whence our stories emerge and
where all our turns eventually lead. We cannot meet on soil that has been
fertilized for millennia by the bodies of our ancestors and watered by the
tears and blood of Palestine's sons and daughters who daily fight for her.
Since my deportation, I read that Israeli authorities indicated that I was
required to "coordinate" my travel with them in advance. This is a lie. In
fact, I was told upon arrival at the airport that I had been required to
apply for a visa to my US passport, and that this application would not be
accepted until 2020, at least five years after the first time they denied me
entry. They said it was my responsibility to know this even though I was
never given any indication of being banned. Then they said my first
deportation in 2015 was because I refused to give them the reason for my
visit. This, too, is a lie. Here are the facts:
In 2015, I traveled to Palestine to build playgrounds in several villages
and to hold opening ceremonies at playgrounds we had already built in the
months previous. Another member of our organization was traveling with me.
She happened to be Jewish and they allowed her in. Several Israeli
interrogators asked me the same questions in different ways over the course
of approximately 7.5 hours. I answered them all, as Palestinians must if we
are to stand a chance of going home, even as visitors. But I was not
sufficiently deferential, nor was I capable of that in the moment. But I was
certainly composed and - the requirement for all violated people - "civil."
Finally, I was accused of not cooperating because I did not know how many
cousins I have and what are all their names and the names of their spouses.
It was only after being told that I was denied entry that I raised my voice
and refused to leave quietly. I did yell, and I stand by everything I
yelled. According to Haaretz, Israel said I "behaved angrily, crudely and
vulgarly" in 2015 at the Allenby Bridge.
What I said in 2015 to my interrogators, and which was also reported in
Haaretz at the time, is that they should be the ones to leave, not me; that
I am a daughter of this land and nothing will change that; that my own
direct history is steeped in the land and there's no way they can extricate
it; that as much as they invoke Zionist mythological fairy tales, they can
never claim such personal familial lineage, much as they wish they could.
I suppose that must sound vulgar to Zionist ears. To be confronted with
authenticity of Palestinian indigeneity despite exile, and face their
apocryphal, ever-shifting colonial narratives.
My lack of deference in 2015 and choice not to quietly accept the arbitrary
decision of an illegitimate gatekeeper to my country apparently got appended
to my name and, upon my arrival this time on November 1st, signaled for my
immediate deportation.
The true vulgarity is that several million Europeans and other foreigners
live in Palestine now while the indigenous population lives either in exile
or under the cruel boots of Israeli occupation; the true vulgarity is in the
rows of snipers surrounding Gaza, taking careful aim and shooting human
beings with no real way to defend themselves, who dare to protest their
collective imprisonment and imposed misery; the true vulgarity is in seeing
our youth bleed on the ground, waste in Israeli jails, starve for an
education, travel, learning, or some opportunity to fully be in the world;
the true vulgarity is the way they have taken and continue to take
everything from us, how they have carved out our hearts, stolen our
everything, occupied our history, and tamp our voices and our art.
In total, Israel detained me for approximately 36 hours. We were not allowed
any electronics, pens or pencils in the jail cells, but I found a way to
take both - because we Palestinians are resourceful, smart, and we find our
way to freedom and dignity by any means we can. I have photos and video from
inside that terrible detention center, which I took with a second phone
hidden on my body, and I left for them a few messages on the walls by the
dirty bed I had to lay on. I suppose they will find it vulgar to read: "Free
Palestine," "Israel is an Apartheid State," or "susan abulhawa was here and
smuggled this pencil into her prison cell".
But the most memorable part of this ordeal were the books. I had two books
in my carry-on when I arrived at the jail and I was allowed to keep them. I
alternated reading from each, sleeping, thinking.
The first book was a highly researched text by historian Nur Masalha,
"Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History." I was scheduled to interview Nur
on stage about his epic audit of Palestinian millennia-old history, told not
from the politically motivated narratives, but from archaeological and other
forensic narratives. It is a people's history, spanning the untidy and
multilayered identities of Palestine's indigenous populations from the
Bronze Age until today. In an Israeli detention cell, with five other women
- all of them Eastern European, and each of them in her own private pain,
the chapters of Nur Masalha's book took me through Palestine's pluralistic,
multicultural and multi-religious past, distorted and essentialized by
modern inventions of an ancient past.
The bitter irony of our condition was not lost on me. I, a daughter of the
land, of a family rooted at least 900 years in the land, and who spent much
of her childhood in Jerusalem, was being deported from her homeland by the
sons and daughters of recent arrivals, who came to Palestine a mere decades
ago with European-born ethos of racial Darwinism, invoking biblical fairy
tales and divinely ordained entitlement.
It occurred to me, too, that all Palestinians - regardless of our
conditions, ideologies, or the places of our imprisonment or exile - are
forever bound together in a common history that begins with us and travels
to the ancient past to one place on earth, like the many leaves and branches
of a tree that lead to one trunk. And we are also bound together by the
collective pain of watching people from all over the world colonize not only
the physical space of our existence, but the spiritual, familial, and
cultural arenas of our existence. I think we also find power in this
unending, unhealed wound. We write our stories from it. Sing our songs and
dabke there, too. We make art from these aches. We pick up rifles and pens,
cameras and paint brushes in this space, throw stones, fly kites and flash
victory and power fists there.
The other book I read was Colson Whitehead's acclaimed, spellbinding novel,
"The Underground Railroad." It is the story of Cora, a girl born into
slavery to Mabel, the first escaped slave from the Randal Plantation. In
this fictional account, Cora escapes the plantation with her friend Caesar,
their determined slave catcher, Ridgeway, on their trail in the Underground
Railroad - a real-life metaphor made into an actual railroad in the novel.
The generational trauma of inconceivable bondage is all the more devastating
in this novel because it is told matter-of-factly from the vantage of the
enslaved. Another people's collective unhealed wound laid bare, an
excruciatingly powerful common past, a place of their power too, a source of
their stories and their songs.
I am back in my house now, with my daughter and our beloved dogs and cats,
but my heart doesn't ever leave Palestine. So, I am there, and we will
continue to meet each other in the landscapes of our literature, art,
cuisine and all the riches of our shared culture.
After writing this statement, I learned that the press conference is being
held at Dar el Tifl. I lived the best years of my childhood there, despite
my separation from family and the sometimes difficult conditions we faced
living under Israeli occupation. Dar el Tifl is the legacy of one of the
most admirable women I have ever known - Sitt Hind el Husseini. She saved me
in more ways than I suppose she knew, or that I understood at the time. She
saved a lot of us girls. She gathered us from all the broken bits of
Palestine. She gave us food and shelter, educated and believed in us, and in
turn made us believe we were worthy. There is no more appropriate place than
Dar el Tift to read this statement.
I want to leave you with one more thought I had in that jail cell, and it is
this: Israel is spiritually, emotionally, and culturally small despite the
large guns they point at us - or perhaps precisely because of them. It is to
their own detriment that they cannot accept our presence in our homeland,
because our humanity remains intact and our art is beautiful and
life-affirming, and we aren't going anywhere but home.
sjabulhawa
About Susan Abulhawa
Susan Abulhawa is the author of the international bestselling novel,
Mornings in Jenin (Bloomsbury, 2010) - www.morningsinjenin.com - and founder
of Playgrounds for Palestine - www.playgroundsforpalestine.org.
