Entering Bab al-Shams : A Narrative Photo Essay From Palestine
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“Her hands measure the barricade
Her eyes look over the wall
Oh Al-Quds! Your daughter came,
but was left long awaited.”
“A country isn’t oranges or olives, or the mosque of El Jazzar in Acre. A country is falling into the abyss, feeling that you are part of the whole, and dying because it has died. In those villages running down to the sea from northern Galilee to the west, no one thought of what it would mean for everything to fall. The villages fell, and we ran from one to another as though we were on the sea jumping from one boat to another, the boat sinking, and us with them. No one was able to conceive of what the fall would mean, and the people fell because everything fell.” (Gate of The Sun, إلياس خوري)
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“Oh father! Where is father?
He is there on the other side
“What’s your number?”, my father was asked,
“Where’s your house?”, they wondered,
Oh daughter! Your father,
comes home late tonight.”
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“This is my house, this is my garden, this is my lemon tree. This is my family: my wife, my son, my grandson. This is the house my family was born and nursed. I have lived through the First Intifada, the Second Intifada, the Battle of Jenin. And I’m not leaving this place.”
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“Where is the bluest of the sea?
Where is the yellowest of the sun?
In the lost city of Akka,
Salt melts over pebble way,
In the lost city of Akka,
little boy yearns for a mother’s call.”
We went to the Naqab in search of a Bedouin village soon to be demolished. We met a young Bedouin man working for an Israeli organization in support of coexistence between the Israelis and the Bedouins. But he himself does not believe in coexistence, “How can we coexist when one is the master and the other is the donkey?” The young man’s front tooth was broken during a protest against house demolitions.
The young man is going to spend four months in prison this summer for assaulting an Israeli police during a protest in 2013. He himself was beaten by seven police officers in the same protest. But who will go to jail for that? “I guess I’ll have a lot of time for push-ups, Bedouin style,” he joked.
His name is Rafat, from the Bedouin town of Lakiya, where the women weave till the sun leaps the green field.
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“Hear, hear, big people!
These are the faces that you defeated,
These are the rubbles your bulldozer built,
Look at what you did to our children,
Now they are under the sun.”
“I miss the aroma of mother’s bread,
buried in the ashes of our taboun
I miss the aroma of mother’s coffee,
wrapping our bed those early mornings
I miss mother’s walks through the green field,
tracing the fence of forbidden land.”
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“Jump, jump jump far away,
the children of Silwan,
the “little terrorists”!
Hearing gunshots in the neighborhood,
my brother runs away.”
“No one knew your secret or entered Bab al Shams, which you made into a house, and a village, and a country.”
(إلياس خوري)
