In the Words of Another...

There are many people in this world who can say things far better than I, and I am going to take advantage of that fact. Following is a poem (still in its rough form) written by one of our students (Alissa Walter) from this past semester. The poem is about Maynar, a Palestinian girl we met in Jerusalem who Alissa and another student later visited at her home.

“This is a brave man,”
she wrote beneath a photograph.
This is a scrapbook of her people.
She wants me to see.
The photograph was clipped from a newspaper,
clinging wrinkled to the page with yellow glue.
There is a man in a red coat, with deep pockets and a drawstring hood.
He is climbing on an Israeli tank. I cannot read the caption.
She turns the page to a cut out of a young woman’s face.
She has a delicate nose and a square jaw. Her hair is wrapped in black cloth.
“This woman made an explosion,”
she explains, a euphemism for a suicide bomber.
She quickly turns the page, but I see
in purple ink and large letters
written beneath this page
“May I have the courage to one day do as she did.”
She tells me that she is not supposed to hate, that hatred is not a part of Islam.
But what if Israelis kill one of her friends? She cannot rest until all the Jews are sent away.
I nod, like I understand what causes someone to daydream about violence,
but I have never been to a funeral before.

Maynar wants to be a journalist. She collects photographs and articles,
clips them out and pastes them on her wall, on her mirror, in her scrapbook,
until her room is covered in curvy black lines I cannot read.
From her back porch, we can see the west bank. A concrete wall snakes across the hills
like a river that’s lost its way.
A red-roofed Israeli settlement towers over the landscape, clinging to the top of a hill. The sun sets behind the cluster of these white houses. There are roses in her yard. There is a fountain and a swimming pool in the front.
Maynar wants to be a journalist. She wears brown bead earrings and wears a light purple head scarf when we walk through the old city of Jerusalem. She bought me a Christmas bracelet with green wreaths and a santa claus because I am a Christian. We bring fanta and dessert for her family.
Her mother serves us chicken and rice,
and her brothers play soccer despite the cool, autumn air.
Maynar wants her family to finish her scrapbook in case she doesn’t see her people establish their own state in her life time.
I didn’t ask, but I wonder if she expects to live to have her own family, or if she meant her parents.
She wants to be a journalist and an English major, so she can tell western audiences what has happened to her neighbors.
There was an incursion last week in Beit Hanoun. A family melted into each other’s arms as tankshells and fireballs ripped apart the autumn night air.
Her mother tells us that we must go to Gaza and the West Bank to see this for ourselves, but we cannot go. Gaza has been closed for 8 months, and no one has been paid. To feel courageous, they make small rockets and fire at the sheep grazing in freedom outside their walls.
Up north, I see black pockmarks in the ground where shells had been fired from Lebanon.
I attend the funeral mass of an Arab Christian, an accidental victim of the rockets recently exchanged with Hezbollah. Rockets are indifferently arrogant, choosing their victims by mistake, falling as they please, turning bodies and olive trees into twisted shards of shrapnel. It’s hard to blame a blind executioner.
I looked at the photographs of this man’s life—an awkward middle-aged man, he was a mechanic and wore ugly suits. He did not die as a hero or a martyr, but by an innocent miscalculation of time and place. Still, Christians, Muslims, and Jews come to burn incense and offer ironic prayers for peace over his body. I wonder which God will listen.
I walked a paved nature trail in the Golan Heights, where signs point to where the waterfalls and the land mines are. The waterfall is beautiful, feeding into the Jordan river, which pools into the sea of Galilee.
On the highway, I remember that no one but Jesus ever went to Samaria, either. Things have not changed so much.
Maynar helps us to the minibus and gives us directions. She wants us to call, in case we don’t make it back safely. I watched her wave goodbye, in her sweater and her purple scarf, as we were driven back to the stone gates of the old city.
I think of Jesus’ prayer If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace--but now it is hidden from your eyes.
How hopeful ambition and destructive courage can be bound up in the same person, I don’t know.
I keep my Christmas bracelet near my bed, and think of Maynar
as I stare up at my dark ceiling, sleepless.

-Alissa Walter

In Jerusalem we also talked to Philip Rizk, an Egyptian-German Wheaton College grad. who is currently working in Gaza under the auspices of the Anglican church. He too can express things far better than I, and he is in the middle of it all: www.tabulagaza.blogspot.com