The following poem is an excerpt from the concluding chapter of Golda Slept Here (2015) by Suad Amiry, in which she traces the lives of individual members of Palestinian families and, through them, the histories of both Palestine and the émigré Palestinian community in other countries of the Middle East.

The Never-Ending Chapter

My country: As close to me as my prison

Mahmoud Darwish

Would You Ever Let Go of Me?
Would you ever let go of me
For a lifetime
For a year
A month
An hour
A minute
Even a second?
No
If ever
If ever we get an apology
If ever we get compensation for our losses
It would not be about a lost country
It would not be about a lost field
Or an orange grove
Or a lost home
No
It would not be about the hundreds of bulldozed villages
Or the scattering of a whole nation
The shattering of a whole society
It would not be about losing a livelihood
A stolen piano, a Persian carpet or a first baby photo-album
And it would not be about someone’s personal library
An abandoned Arab horse, or a Cypriot donkey
Not a Persian cat not even Shasa, the monkey that my mother gave me a few years before the war
No
And it would not be the blossoming almond trees and the red flowering pomegranates that were not picked tenderly in the spring of 1948 nor the following summer
And it would not be about firing at the farmers who returned to harvest the fields they had left behind
Nor would it be about the many deserted budding roses
Or a bride’s wardrobe and many cherished wedding gifts
Or a child or an old woman who was forgotten, left behind in the chaos
No
It would not be about concealing a crime or falsifying history
It would not be about blaming the victim
It would be about dehumanization and stereotyping
It would not be about making new “wandering Jews” out of us
It would be about revising roles and images
No
If at all
It will only be about an obsession
Yes, an obsession
My dreams are all about you
And my nightmares are all because of you
My happiness is related to you
And my sadness comes from you
My expectations are all concerning you
And my disappointments pile up beside you
Yes
And if I run away, I run away from you
And if I come back, I come back to you
If I love someone, it is because of what they think of you
And if I hate someone, it is because of what they say about you
Yes
And it is because of you:
Nothing in my life is normal
Nothing in my life is neutral
Nothing is mundane
Or even insignificant
And how very exhausting it is
How I desire one ordinary day when you do not haunt me
How I long for a pleasant evening where you are not invited
How I yearn to forget you
How I wish for amnesia or a stroke that
Will neatly remove every trace of you:
Thoughts, memories, emotions
Gone forever
I heard them moan for you before I was born
And I heard them moan for you after I was born and ever after
Their bedtime stories are about you
And their daydreaming is also about you
I’ve seen them cry, laugh, praise and curse
You, you and only YOU
I had to learn everything about you
I had to imagine you from across a border
Miss you
Love you
Defend you
Cry for you
Write about you
Talk about you
And, in imperative form, love you
And how very exhausting it is
Above all I have to keep my sanity with all the brutality around you
Every hour every minute and every second
If ever I do come to terms with what has happened to you
I must banish that part of my brain
That cherishes reason, logic and justice
Palestine
Will you ever set us free?