Letters from Palestine by Pamela Olson

my first foray through
Jerusalem as we tried to catch a cab to Ramallah and then to our
hometown of Birzeit.
    I do remember, though, that as we made our
way to Birzeit, things became quieter, more subdued. City buildings
turned into olive groves, and street vendors turned into farmers
making their way home. Three hours later, we finally reached
Birzeit. Our entire trip took over twelve hours—subtract five for
the waiting, and it took about seven hours. Just as a comparison, I
can drive the 532 miles from New Orleans, Louisiana, where I attend
graduate school, to my parents’ house in Austin, Texas, in eight
hours. We found out later that it took my uncles over fourteen
hours to travel less than fifty miles.
    Needless to say, we were exhausted when our
third taxi finally stopped in Birzeit . I looked around for the
field of flowers, the little fairies flitting from tree to tree,
and the green emerald castle. Instead, I was greeted by the
decapitated head of a cow hanging by a hook through its nose,
swinging in front of a doorway we were to climb through to our
apartment. My meat usually came wrapped in clear plastic wrap with
that sanitary yellow Styrofoam plate underneath; it didn’t hang
from a hook. But as I peered inside the butcher’s shop, I noticed
something that didn’t happen much when you bought your prepackaged
meat (and I’m not talking about any kind of deadly disease). The
lady inside buying her meat put her purchase down on the counter
and started laughing as she took a cigarette from the butcher and
sat down with him for a cup of tea.
    Then once we made it past the cow head and
into the apartment building where we would be staying, I noticed
the stairs. No elevator. Only five flights of stairs. I had heard
the aunt we were staying with was old. No way she had to climb
these stairs to get home every day! I mentioned this little fact to
my dad. Maybe we were in the wrong place? He laughed and told me he
never really understood it either.
    I thought this was supposed to be some kind
of paradise. Instead, I’m greeted by five flights of stairs and cow
heads. But what happened next made me realize that paradise wasn’t
just about the field of flowers. In the next few days, I would be
overwhelmed by warmth and kindness and closeness, maybe even
sometimes too much for comfort. Our journey did end with an emerald
city of sorts. We were fed, stuffed actually, with delicious foods,
buffed and laced and given every sort of hospitality imaginable.
People my dad hadn’t seen in years and whom we’d never met treated
us like we’d lived there all our lives. Some homes didn’t have
running water, the city mostly smelled terrible and trash cans had
more trash around them than in them, but I couldn’t think of
paradise any other way.
     
    Lessons learned
     
    My parents made every effort to instill my
siblings and me with their culture. I appreciate their patience
with us as we learned to speak Arabic and tried to compromise
between being American and at the same time Arab. But because they
were my main source of information on my culture, all of my
“Arabness” had always been strongly attached to what they chose to
show me. For example, since I was a little girl, my dad had always
tried to quell my anger at not being allowed to go out with friends
or wear spaghetti strap shirts by using “our versus their” culture
techniques. This technique is described best as the “I trust you,
but I don’t trust them” technique, the “them” being my American
friends. “When you’re eighteen, you’ll understand. We’ll send you
to Birzeit by yourself, and you’ll see for yourself,” he would
close, reasoning that I didn’t understand where he was coming from
because he had been modifying our real culture and being easier on
me. Just wait till I was left alone in the society that had
indirectly bred me, without my parents as a buffer.
    It’s true that being Arab-American is
different in many ways than being