Susan Abulhawa Quotes & Sayings

No matter who you are, no matter what greatness you've achieved in your life or what gifts you've given to the rest of humanity, if you criticize Israel, you must expect to become persona non grata. You should expect an utter onslaught of attacks ... — Susan Abulhawa

Do you know, Mother, that Haj Salem was buried alive in his home? Does he tell you stories in heaven now? I wish I had had a chance to meet him. To see his toothless grin and touch his leathery skin. To beg him, as you did in your youth, for a story from our Palestine. He was over one hundred years old, Mother. To have lived so long, only to be crushed to death by a bulldozer. Is this what it means to be Palestinian? — Susan Abulhawa

Still,
the refugee camp of Jenin remained as it had been, a one-square-mile
patch of earth, excised from time and imprisoned in that endless year
of 1948 — Susan Abulhawa

Predicament crystallized with every passing year, the — Susan Abulhawa

It is the kind of love you can know only if you have felt the intense
hunger that makes your body eat itself at night. The kind you know
only after life shields you from falling bombs or bullets passing through
your body. It is the love that dives naked toward infinity's reach. I think
it is where God lives. — Susan Abulhawa

She bore an uncanny resemblance to my mother, but the same beauty bloomed differently in each of them. My mother's fairness was exquisite and untouchable, roaming alone in an abandoned castle. Khalto Bahiyas' beauty took you in immediately. Hers was easy and disclosed hordes of laughter stolen from wherever it could be found. Gravity, sun, and time has scrawled on their faces the travails of hard work, childbirth, and destitution. — Susan Abulhawa

An instant can crush a brain and change the course of life, the course of history. — Susan Abulhawa

Our wants were simple, but they could not have been more complicated. — Susan Abulhawa

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed. — Susan Abulhawa

As the people of Ein Hod were marched into despossession, Moshe and his comrades guarded and looted the newly emptied village. While Dalia lay heartbroken, delirious with the loss of Ismael, Jolanta rocked David to sleep. While Hasan tended to his family's survival, Moshe sang in drunken revelry with his fellow soldiers. And while Yehya and the others moved in anguished steps away from their land, the usurpers sand "Hatikva," and shouted, "Long live Israel! — Susan Abulhawa

El-Khan to the villagers. Overlooking Beit Daras were the remnants — Susan Abulhawa

Praise be to Him who brings our loved ones home from el ghurba (exile) — Susan Abulhawa

How was it that a man could not walk onto his own property, visit the grave of his wife, eat the fruits of forty generations of his ancestors' toil, without mortal consequence? — Susan Abulhawa

We come from the land, give our love and labor to her, and she nurtures us in return. When we die, we return to the land. In a way, she owns us. Palestine owns us and we belong to her — Susan Abulhawa

For I'll keep my humanity, though I did not keep my promises.
... and Love shall not be wrested from my veins. — Susan Abulhawa

He looked on in silence at the proof of what Israelis already know, that their history is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians. The Europeans who came knew neither hummus nor falafel but later proclaimed them authentic Jewish cuisine." They claimed the villas of Qatamon as "old Jewish homes. They had no old photographs or ancient drawings of their ancestry living on the land, loving it, and planting it. They arrived from foreign nations and uncovered coins in Palestines earth from the Canaanites, the Romans, the ottomans, then sold them as their own "ancient Jewish artifacts." They came to Jaffa and found oranges the size of watermelons and said, "Behold! The Jews are known for their oranges." But those oranges were the culmination of centuries of Palestinian farmers perfecting the art of citrus growing. — Susan Abulhawa

Death, in its certainty, is exacting its due respect and repose before it takes my hand. — Susan Abulhawa

Amal,I believe that most Americans do not love as we do. It is not for any inherent deficiency or superiority in them. They live in the safe, shallow, parts that rarely push human emotions into the depths where we dwell. — Susan Abulhawa

I know she is crying. Her tears fall on the wrong side, into the bottomless well inside her. — Susan Abulhawa

Thank you,' I answered, unsure of the proper American response to her gracious enthusiasm. In the Arab world, gratitude is a language unto itself. "May Allah bless the hands that give me this gift"; "Beauty is in the eyes that find me pretty"; "May Allah never deny your prayer"; and so on, an infinite string of prayerful appreciation. Coming from such a culture, I have always found a mere "thank you" an insufficient expression that makes my voice sound miserly and ungrateful." (169). — Susan Abulhawa

Strange, again, I am unafraid of death. Perhaps because she knew, from the soldier's blink, that she would live. — Susan Abulhawa

Always" is a good word to believe in. — Susan Abulhawa

Dr. Shammaa's story was a dreadful one and her voice
broke as she told it. "I had to take the babies and put them
in buckets of water to put out the flames," she said. "When
I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning.
Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours." Next
morning, Amal Shammaa took the tiny corpses out of the
mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into
flames. — Susan Abulhawa

The land and everything on it can be taken away, but no one can take away your knowledge or the degrees you earn — Susan Abulhawa

We're all born with the greatest treasures we'll ever have in life. One of those treasures is your mind, another is your heart. — Susan Abulhawa

In the process of trying to steady my gait in a life that shook with
uncertainty, I learned to make peace with the present by unknowingly
breaking love lines to the past. Growing up in a landscape of
improvised dreams and abstract national longings, everything felt
temporary to me. — Susan Abulhawa

But in our camp, his story was everyone's story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one's humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel. — Susan Abulhawa

We were
existing somewhere between life and death, with neither accepting us
fully. — Susan Abulhawa

Words and stories washed ashore on that ancient way of the sea, and we made of them new songs. The sun came again, casting shadows that we peeled off the street to make of them new clothes. — Susan Abulhawa

How can one find the first moment of love? When,in what instant, does the night's dark sky become blue? — Susan Abulhawa

Love is what we are about, my darling," she says. "Not even in death has our love faded, for I live in your veins. — Susan Abulhawa

Under the broken promises of superpowers and under the worlds indifference to spilled Arab blood. — Susan Abulhawa

Arab society revolves around the extended family.
No one had "no family." But Palestinians, who became scattered and
dispossessed following the Nakbe, proved so many exceptions to Arab
society. — Susan Abulhawa

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. — Susan Abulhawa

A persistent breeze lifted the thin curtains, fluttering a few moments of tranquility into the turbulent day. — Susan Abulhawa

Stories matter. We are composed of our stories. The human heart is made of the words we put in it. If someone ever says mean things to you, don't let those words go into your heart, and be careful not to put mean words in other people's hearts. — Susan Abulhawa

At last everything was falling into place. Falling into love. — Susan Abulhawa

I watch life trickle from the bullet wound of a sixteen-year-old "example" and marvel how things weak, even words, will turn vicious and merciless to gain power,despite reason or history — Susan Abulhawa

They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land. — Susan Abulhawa

Would words shatter the immensity of life and death so close to one another? — Susan Abulhawa

How fate is stubborn and holds to habit. — Susan Abulhawa

The soldiers in my life had raised the bar for bad guys. — Susan Abulhawa

"But I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport." - Chris Hedges — Susan Abulhawa

She loved beyond measure, When I was young I thought her cold. But in time I came to understand that she was too tender for the world she'd been born into, I said. Sorrow gave Dalia an iron gift. Behind that hard shelter, she
loved boundlessly in the distance and privacy of her solitude, safe from
the tragic rains of her fate. — Susan Abulhawa

I love you as big as the ocean and all its fishes. As big as the sky and all its birds. As big as the earth and all her trees. — Susan Abulhawa

I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity ... On September eleventh, I faced the last moments of your father's life. I saw him in every person who tried to jump and every body they pulled from the rubble. And I saw myself as I was never allowed to be, consoled, understood, and loved. — Susan Abulhawa

I feel sad for him. Sad for the boy bound to the killer. I am sad for the youth betrayed by their leaders for symbols and flags and war and power. — Susan Abulhawa

Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme. — Susan Abulhawa

When I was a child, Haj Salem told me that answers can be found
in the sky if you look long and hard enough. — Susan Abulhawa

Life had collected her pieces and returned her to love's source. There had been no coincidence. — Susan Abulhawa

Our bond was Palestine. It was
a language we dismantled to construct a home. — Susan Abulhawa

Nima Shirazi is a rare voice of rational analysis and political insight that provides an eloquent counter to the pervasive absurdities that make up popular political discourse. — Susan Abulhawa

Love cannot reconcile with deception — Susan Abulhawa

You and I are the remains of an unfulfilled legacy, heirs to a kingdom of stolen identities and ragged confusion. — Susan Abulhawa

I loved her in spite of myself. I loved her immeasurably.
Infinitely. And I feared that love as much as I feared my own fury at the
world. — Susan Abulhawa

The roots of our grief coil so deeply into loss that death has come
to live with us like a family member who makes you happy by avoiding
you, but who is still one of the family. Our anger is a rage that
Westerners cannot understand. Our sadness can make the stones
weep. And the way we love is no exception — Susan Abulhawa

the reverse side of love is unbearable loss. — Susan Abulhawa

Though they lived with the indignities of dispossession and military
occupation, Huda sang with an unassailable freedom that comes only
to those with unwavering faith. — Susan Abulhawa

He took in a premeditated breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled into the nye at his lips, playing a new tune.
It was not the sad music of waiting. Nor
was it a melody of his heritage. It was a call to the earth. To Allah. To
the country within him. — Susan Abulhawa

No one spoke much, as if to speak was to affirm reality. To remain silent was to accommodate the possibility that it all was merely a nightmare. The silence reached up to the cathedral ceiling and cluttered there, echoing sadness an unseen mayhem, as if too many souls were rising at once. We were existing somewhere between life and death, with neithe accepting us fully. — Susan Abulhawa