My grandmother, Tayta Fadela Al Haj, was born in 1926, while my grandfather, Seedo Mohamad Abdul Mooti Mansour, arrived in this world in 1925. She was a young 22-year-old, and he was 23 when they were displaced from Saffuriyya, located a short distance from AI Nasirah (Nazareth). The year 1948 destroyed their village, besieged and
In bitter times stones cut your feet And the winds of change stood still. When all the voices and all the wars were scratched into your heart, And marked into your soul. I watched and waited for you. In the cruel and relentless call to arms The mothers and the children hid Crouched and beaten
I sit at my machine, the early morning news still ringing in my ears. An earnest voice acknowledges the land our fathers took. Now some attempts are made at reparations and apologies. That’s good, I think, long overdue. Then images of war, of starving children, a wasteland, fills the screen. I hear the cries of
These simple, rustic pieces of pottery have made the remarkable journey from Gaza to the UK and now to Sarnia, Canada! I am a Palestinian from Gaza and my wife is English, and we lived in Gaza from 1984 to 2000, after which we immigrated to Canada. My mother and father-in-law came regularly to visit
My name is Tareq Abu Shindi. I moved to Sarnia Canada in 2012 with my Canadian wife. I would like to share with Canadians my frustration and the injustice that happened to my family. I was born in Jordan to Palestinian parents who were forced to move and leave their homeland in 1948 in what’s
Where do the doves go when the bombs fall? Into the grit and grey of skies And swift to the mountains and the valley of tears. Where do the mothers and children hide When the screech of sirens burn bitter the night And nowhere now, not a single light of hope illuminates the Gaza sky.
When my father was seventy-four and I was no longer a girl that cowered, skirting the edge of the room, I asked him to travel back to his childhood, the landscape he’d banished for years. He became an Amish boy in suspenders, hitching the horse to the buggy, driving Delaware’s back country roads past the
Some women resist ruin for three thousand years. The wrecking ball smashes the front closet and hall but they just keep humming and dusting the knick-knacks. Lot’s wife disobeyed, turned and looked back at what was forbidden, now she’s afraid to risk any tears, four could dissolve a salt pillar. I watched a woman sell
