Exiles and Home

Exile is predicated on the existence of love for and a real bond with one's native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected, unwelcome loss. --Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993) "Give me a face for exile," he asked, looking at me as I tried to find refuge in my tears. "Exile has no face," I retorted. "It is sadness, a loss, a nostalgia that cannot be put in words. Exile can only acquire a face once it is overcome!" I have been away from home for over 20 years. But what is home in my case? An Arab woman born to a Palestinian father and an Italian mother, married to a German man and mother to an American daughter, I had traveled a long way. I asked my mother once whether "Hon casa?" (Is this home?). I was 2 years old then, and we had just arrived at my grandfather's house in Italy after a long journey from Jordan. I was just starting to talk, but could only do so by mixing the two languages I was born with: "Hon" is "here" in Arabic and "casa" is "home" in Italian. Ever since, I have lived in many houses. I carried many worlds, but kept looking for a home, the home. ORIGIN OF EXILE The story of exile started long before. My Palestinian grandmother, who lived in our household up until I was three, was exiled from her native town, Saffuria, north of Nazareth, when she was only 13 years old. She was then being wedded to a man 30 years older than her, and moved to the west Bank in 1926. She was exiled a second time when her town was eradicated by the Hagana (a jewish underground organization) in 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel. She never saw her siblings again, as they became refugees dispersed between Lebanon and Syria. She only reconnected with some of her nephews, who became Israeli Arabs, after 1967. That war reconnected the land, but reaffirmed the exile; her sons had to leave because of the Israeli occupation and many were forbidden from returning to their place of birth. My grandmother raised four boys and a girl whom she pushed out of the parochialism of village life by insisting that they become enlightened professionals. However, they were forced to be dispersed across the globe, and she suffered for not having them around her, especially in her ailing years. She spent the last years of her life traveling from one country to another to see them, rather than having them visit her and re-establish the home. It was her deepest sorrow that none of her boys witnessed her last breaths, told her farewell, in her, theirs, native land. Only her daughter stood by her. Yet, for my grandmother, daughters could never be as good, as validating, as boys. Sons, not daughters, gave my grandmother a sense of place, a prominence in the exiled community she came to live among; if her sons had remained she would have perhaps been able to cope better with her exile, been less sad, been comforted with a sense of power, of the status that could compensate, maybe, for the loss of home. Although only her daughter dealt with her daily, never really left her, catered for her needs, comforted her in her pain and sorrow, it was the sons my grandmother longed for. women might well be those who cater for the home; but men are the ones validating the sense of home, its contours and its content, if not its form. The exile from Palestine and from womanhood was two exiles that inhabited me, probably ever since I was born. I was in my mother's womb on June 6th, 1967, when the six day war erupted between Israel and its Arab neighbors. My father had wanted me to be a boy, all the more as he became a refugee himself. He was already known by his relatives and friends as Abou-el-Abid, the father of first son, not first daughter. Like many of his third world generation of the 1950s and 1960s, my father had recently returned from being a student in the west, to build his homeland. …