Before I start with my own reflections on my first day "back" in the Middle East, I'd like to share this poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish:
I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body ianto a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....
There is a line in the book "Steppenwolf" that says that the only guide we have in life is the sense of our own homesickness. I consider this one of my great truths. For really, I only know I'm on the "right path" when that path is leading me home. But what is home? That is the question that I've been struggling with ever since I landed at Ben Gurion airport yesterday. It dogged me as we ploughed our way through Jerusalem's OldCity today, taking in the Muslim, Christian and Jewish quarters. I lived in Israel for nearly five years, but I never considered it home. And yet, and yet...it has never left me. It has influenced my studies, my career choice, even my poetry. I cried when I first saw the Tel Aviv shoreline from the plane window. Why?
Before I try to answer this question for myself, though, I'd like to relay some of the sights we toured today, because I think they might hint at some possible solutions.
Our first stop, after a brief interlude on MountScopus looking out over the entire city, was the Mount of Olives, specifically the Garden of Gesthemene and the Franciscan Basilica of the Agony, also known as the Church of All Nations (called this because it was built from funds donated by 12 countries). Here I felt the sanctity of the holy place overwhelming the flashbulbs of tourists (including, I'm sorry to say, myself). A group of Asian pilgrims was visibly moved, older women kneeling, they cheeks wet with tears. Here these Christians came from the other side of the world, from a land completely foreign from the desert citadel they were now roaming, and yet clearly their spirits felt comfort and peace. Where else does one find this absolute peace, this sense of belonging, than at home? I’m not talking about your childhood home, which you may or may not associate with the previous sentiments, but whatever place you feel most secure, most understood. The tears of these Asian pilgrims was a sign, both of closeness and of relief. How wonderful it is to finally encounter a place or a person to whom you needn’t explain yourself, for whom your mere existence is explanation enough. This is one face of “home.”
This same face was visible as we continued on to the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. I was sad, as I know most of the group was, that we were unable to enter the mosques due to heightened security (apparently only Muslims can enter now). Still, after the most intensely enclosed atmosphere of the Basilica, walking around these structures in the bright light and fresh air was strangely intimate. I felt I was conversing with the architecture, the white Jerusalem stone, the twisted cypress. It was easier to find sanctity outdoors actually – a sensation I felt most intensely while pressing a prayer into a crack of the Wailing Wall (later on our tour).
Another face of “home” I encountered on the second leg of our trek, through the OldCity’s maze of bazaars, walking the Via Delarosa, or Way of Sorrow, following what tradition says are the Fourteen Stations of the Cross. I can give the best sense of this face of home by describing its incarnation in the form of two tiny little boys, dressed in identical orange t-shirts, arms around each other’s shoulder, having an intense conversation the way old men do about “important concerns.” The entire group parted way for these two old souls, who marched by us intensely involved in some pressing matter of their seven-year-old lives. Everyone smiled and laughed, for the image was so sweetly comical. But these boys embodied the sense of home pervading the bazaar – family, loyalty, affection, pride. Each religious and ethnic quarter is a country unto itself, in many ways.
I know there is more to this concept of home I am searching for. But I didn’t find it in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where the whole place was permeated with what seemed like ritual tourism. It was so frenzied, so confusing and fraught with its dozens of warring Christian sects that the sanctity was marred somehow. Or at least diminished. In contrast, at the Wailing Wall, despite the crowds and the glaring heat, the ancient significance was more than of historic interest. The Wall was a living reminder – stuck full of the most precious scraps of our prayers and pleas – of the meaning of Israel for the Jews. As the last standing portion of the second Temple of Solomon, destroyed by the Romans, the Wall represents the millennia of Jewish exile – and the promise, now fulfilled, of return. How can we take that away from a people that have been so utterly demolished and are now so astonishingly rebuilt? Yet how can this exiled people in turn exile another people, perpetuating the cycle of homelessness and loss? Jews and Palestinians have this one thing, this yearning for home, in common. Neither can be denied, yet how they find home together?
Questions posed over a summer spent in Israel/Palestine. Some photography too, all original. My own attempt to come to terms with an age-old land and its seemingly perpetual conflicts.
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