When a Palestinian woman falls in love.

I have never fallen in love, or at least, I dont remember that I have. If I have, the feeling did not linger with me for long.

Today, taking the van from East Jerusalem to Bethlehem, while I waited for the van to fill up, a man in his 40s, got into the van, gave a cup of Arabic coffee to the driver while they chatted. The smell of smoke, and not the coffee, being shared with the rest of the traveller waiting for the van
to fill up.

Outside of the van, the hussle and bussle of East Jerusalem remained, though not as much as before in terms of numbers of people, but never in the quality of such a state. A woman with their head covered, wearing a jilbab, dragging one child by one hand, and the other following them, while she carried another bag after shopping. Young female high school students, dressed in their school uniforms unique to the Schedemit girls school, were in the streets, after having finished a school day. The young boys from Frere High school, in their own uniforms, had their backs against the walls, watching the school girls, saying some comment about the girls. The busy father, dressed in his warm coat, talking on the cell-phone, planning what to bring back to his home in Beit Hanina. And, fallahat (peasants) were still at the sides of the roads, with their produce, having brought it from far away villages around Jerusalem and even from the West Bank, were still hoping to sell parseley, prickey pears, apples and bannanas, even though the evening was soon coming. Young sellers never failed to also put their goods out in the streets, bras, underwears, next to plates, glasses, batteries, razors, children clothes. And, women bargained for the best deals on those "bastat", the mobile small markets. Has East Jerusalem changed since I last visited her, last left her, for visinting and leaving seem to be the same many a time?

It is me who changed at each encounter. When I first returned as westernized Palestinian, having been educated in the United States, filled with the mixture of nostalgia for what I had left behind, and yet rejection of what is still present and has not changed, I remember having been in love, with the garabage filled alleys of the Old City, the crumbling roofs of the small houses in the Muslim and Christian quarters in the Old city that always seem to welcome all members of a family, however that number might be, the unattended to children that play on the roof tops of the Jewish quarter in the Old City, the old men who were selling the same goods in the market of the spices, the meat.

And yet those markets came to be the hallmark in the Old City directing any inhabitants, and with that were the sellers- Abu Muhammad (what a man would be called with an older son whose name is Muhammad), Abu Ramzy. Toursits navigate through the Old City with their maps and names of roads that the inhabitants of the Old City dont know, and for a good reason, too. For the inhabitants live there, and have a different way of marking, locating and directing travellers: their way is- people, relationships and stories. The most precious commodity that I have taken away with me from East Jerusalem to wherever destination I find myself headed: in the Old City, a road had a historical name, probably named by a western archelogist who knew the history of every rock, but not its personal story. Yet on the other hand, a road in the Old City had a personal name, probably named by an infamous indigenous person who knew the stories of the people living on that road. The stories have been passed down, and so the inhabitants navigate by the remembering the stories, the heritage, the generations- all hidden in the name of Abu Muhammad.

Yes, I have never fallen in love with a person, but rather with Ibn Abu Muhammad, who lived on the street of Abu Hamza, near the seller Abu Marwan, where my grandma used to buy us candy.
Thus, I have fallen in love with an entire city, an entire people, and an entire nation.

Love is a blissful curse for a Palestinian woman. Necessary, and yet never easy. ...