What do you think she would say? What diaries would she write?
Fear and terror at getting killed, kidnapped, or sent to the notorious prisons of the state that raped her country and made her a refugee-for-life. In her own native Palestine, hunted by foreigners with strange names who do not speak her language, who burned the original village of her grandmother along with its olive and orange groves, sent her family off fleeing on death marches as refugees in their own land, to settle in some squalid refugee camp. Those are the stories the many Palestinian Anne Franks would write in their diaries. Their own stories and the stories of their grandmothers who still hold the deeds and those big bulky keys to the ancient wooden doors of their ancient stone houses.
The Palestinian Anne Frank is being hunted down by a self-declared superior and moral Fascist militia for the past seven months, indeed for the past eight decades. From refugee camp to refugee camp. Not in the comfort of a golden prison in a cozy attic in Amsterdam.
Eating one meal every other day, after waiting for hours in long lines for a tin can of watered soup. Not with food delivered every day by kind hosts. Carrying jerrycans of water for half a mile whenever water is available.
The Anne Frank of Amsterdam had the luxury of writing a diary, of pondering the situation and her feelings. The Palestinian Anne Frank may not have that luxury, as her family moves on donkey cart from one desolate landscape to another under the constant barrage of American-made 2,000-lb bombs kindly gifted by the generous government of the land of the free and the home of the brave.
The Palestinian Anne Frank would tell in her diary, which she writes on candlelight, of how her father was seized by the Fascist police, stripped to his underwear, forced to crouch in the sun under the grinning laughter and humiliation of Fascist soldiers holding guns. She would tell her diary that her father never came back. She still remember his face, but the image is fading a little day after day.
She would tell stories of dead bodies littering the streets as her donkey cart travels up and down the Gaza Ghetto-concentration camp. She would tell of body parts strewn all over this wasteland that long ceased to be a hometown. She no longer has a hometown. Her hometown is the back of this donkey cart. Her bed is this torn blanket she has been carrying around for months. She has no place to hide the diary she might have written.
She would tell how, should she survive the war, she will have her face and body repaired by doctors who will remove the dozens of shrapnel that now dot her face and body.
The Palestinian Anne Frank would say in her diary that when she had her first period, she thought she was hit by shrapnel from one of those magnificent bombs that Americans make to fall from the sky on innocent civilians.
She would tell how her grandmother gave her the old key to the ancient wooden door of the family's ancestral stone house in some beautiful valley in the lost paradise that Palestine used to be. She hopes to preserve that key, despite the constant moves from refugee camp to refugee camp.
Had she had a normal life, she might have read Anne Frank's diary, visited the house where she hid in Amsterdam, and learned to empathize with ordinary people subjected to the horrors of wars by madmen who read too many Torahs, Gospels and Korans and who take their imagined fictions literally.
No comments:
Post a Comment