I explained to my kids today about the happenings in Gaza.

They had heard a clip on NPR about a little boy that had died in his mother’s arms after he had been shot by a bullet. My daughter kept asking over and over again–Why? Why? Why? Before I could get even a few words of explanation out, she’d cut me off, Why? Why, Mama, why?

I explained colonization in 3 sentences (Edward Said would be proud!) and nationalism in 4. I talked about how we already knew that horrible things happen to children who lived in the middle of war zones and that this was the reason why Mama spent so much time working with women of color and writing on the computer and forcing them to march in parades that were way too long for their little kiddie toes.

But I didn’t want the kids to think it was all as easy as good side/bad side, violence/no violence, rocket attacks/F-16s. There are no choices in those binaries–and I have raised my kids to always look for the choice nobody talks about.

So I told them about how there were some men who thought that fighting in wars would make them more manish. That the only response to everything was violence and that other men, even if they were right, were struggling to find a way to be right and so forgot the life around them.

And then I told them that there were other men who thought there were different ways, who had found different ways.

And I told them about the group of men who, last summer, blew up a fence instead of people.

I made sounds of a fence collapsing to the ground, and then told them about hungry people gathering their baskets and their coats and running out for food.

My daughter laughed, and my son, my baby, my stubborn little monster of a child, cried joy, tears oozing out of his eyes while he laughed with his sister.

It’s a moment so easily forgotten in the deafening chants of protect, defend, protect, defend, protect, defend…a forgotten moment made up of hundreds of forgotten moments of violence, starvation, devastation, destruction…

resistance, hands, resistance, hands

But when the destruction reigns down, there’s nothing else to remember that does not tear up the soul with anger and horror. Nothing else that does not violate the last tiny shred of hope left.

And so I remember that moment

hands, resistance, hands, resistance

with my children and my son cries and my daughter laughs and for a tiny space in the middle of hell, I am happy and proud.

I know what kind of human beings my children are. I know what is most important to them.

My tears mix with my son’s as the three of us whisper love into each other’s ears.

And the Wall Came Down

Such boundaries are unnatural. And because they are unnatural, I have never related to them. Yes, I have long advocated Palestinian rights, but my own national identity was tangential to my passion, I advocated Palestinian rights because they are human rights that were being violated for the sake of man-made artificial boundaries and collective brainwashing into the “uniqueness” of a culture that only some humans acknowledge. But today, as I see the Palestinian people represent the finest in people power, I am proud to be Palestinian. I am proud to be part of a people that refuses to submit to unnatural limits on our most basic freedoms: the freedom to eat, to drink, to grow.

~en lucha