Intergenerational dreams
It was 2021 and I was reading Khaled Hosseini’s novels
for the first time: A Thousand Splendid Suns and The Kite
Runner. I now consider them two of my favorite novels, but I’ll never be
able to read them again. Stories that painful should be experienced only once. I
was reading those novels when I had my first dream about the homeland. I wasn’t
sad about it, just scared and very confused because I’d never dreamed about
Palestine or Palestinians before. I was a little girl again with my mom and
baby sister. We were in Dahye, a neighborhood in Beirut where many Palestinian
refugees settled after the Nakba. Everyone in the dream was fleeing, but they
were running aimlessly—into each other and in all directions—like glitched NPCs
in a videogame. Israeli soldiers were there, carrying long guns and policing
Palestinians around. It was black as night, no stars nor moon. There was a one
bright light shining from above, harsh and artificial like a stage light. Armbands
from the Nazi Regime were in the dream, but we weren’t the ones wearing them.
The Israelis were. It was interesting and ironic. The band was yellow, though,
and the Star of David was green. The colors were odd and ugly.
The second dream I had was only three days after the
first one. I was in middle school again. My whole class was on a school trip abroad.
After our plane landed in Occupied Palestine, me and my classmates lined up at
the border checkpoint. We were in my old school uniform and everything. Then
the Israeli occupier at the border took our passports and said they were gone
forever. We all panicked and all the kids cried, because we couldn’t travel
back home without our passports. All my classmates looked to me for help. I, a
child, had to argue with an Occupier in my dream about how only my
passport should be confiscated because I’m the only student with Palestinian
blood. My classmates were Egyptians, Australians, Europeans and Emiratis, but they
all felt as doomed as I did. The Israeli occupier explained that anyone who
steps foot in Palestine becomes a Palestinian. We didn’t get our passports
back. My classmates vanished from the dream and I saw a new scene.
I was alone, walking the streets of Occupied Palestine,
passing through a small and poor bazaar, finding shops destroyed, glass windows
broken, and the Zionist flag graffitied on the walls. Electric cable lines dropped
down to the street from the poles above. The roads were black with trash and
dirt. Poverty was everywhere. Children walked barefoot with deadened skin and long
clumped hair. These were my distant people and it was horrible.
The next scene was me going “home”, which was Dubai at
the time. The airport was fancy and white, clean and advanced. All the signs
and maps were in the Occupiers’ language. Everyone was speaking it, even the foreign
tourists standing in front of me at the ticket booth. They came to visit a
stolen land. I had to look the Occupier at the ticket booth in the face while
he smiled at me and spoke with his foreign tongue. I was seething and crying,
seeing nothing but a thief, a killer, a killer.
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