Erasing memories
I couldn’t avoid watching this series on TV Palestine, for Maher Shalabi from Palestinian Refugee Camps,,, and bypass it from my mind like any tv show. From the first day of Ramadan, the show was broadcasting, reflecting a harsh reality that only continues to get bitter and sour.
Maybe the host’s immediate response to what he is witnessing makes it easier for us to watch and react because we distinguish him reacting; even when attempting to keep pragmatic, we can’t but undergo his bitterness.
Palestinian Refugees are a continuous transgression for humanity. For more than sixty years, our leaderships, governments, aid organizations, peace political activists, and organizations rushed to find a solution for these people and often, if not always, soliciting on their accounts. Each is prospering on his way ………on the back and lives of these people.
And they; stripped from not just a town or a village, a home or a shelter, but from identity.
I look into those faces and observe their thrash about refreshing that memory for what once was a dream of a home, of a homeland.
They are besieged to remember a name of a city or a town or a neighboring village. An older generation of traumatized and shattered-down dreams and constant nightmares of nonending wretchedness. A younger generation scarcely apprehend that a Palestine exists … knowing only the despondent HERE they live in. In a situation they were likely portrayed as something coming from a dusk division of an ancient past, where the sixty years never moved.
Memories of a past erased with an unfortunate reality existed for a bit of survival, for instance. Memories of a nation that would rather not exist …
Because to those faces, if it existed, they wouldn’t be living in this uncomfortable reality.
Nadia Harhash
29-8-2010