"They wear their astonishment."

6 June 2009

The sunlight pushed through the slit in my left eye, and I rolled onto my side on the bare mattress. The bleating and tinkling of a goat herd pushing through the brush on the terraced hillside below my window tricked me into thinking that I was back in my homestay from SIT Fall 2008; there, in Dahiat al-Rasheed, goats or sheep wandering through the scrubby valley had awakened me most mornings. I sat up and pushed off the blanket, which surprisingly was necessary in this cooler mountainous region 900 meters above sea level. I was in Omar’s house in Ramallah, and it was late afternoon.

Maybe it’s the heat that makes the night-life here so vibrant. Our hosts regularly awakened mid-afternoon and stayed up until 4am, and I soon found myself in this reverse schedule, one night on a rooftop of an old evangelical boys school in Ramallah with a motley crew watching the distant lights of Tel Aviv twinkle on the horizon. The rooftop had the air of an expatriate gathering, despite the Palestinian majority, as most of the Palestinians present had spent much of their lives abroad: Omar and his brother were born in England and lived in the States; Sara, our Palestinian-British host spending her gap year in Ramallah, was English through and through; I’m fairly certain there was a quiet Jewish kid on the fringe. Muslim, Christian, Jew, agnostic, devout, skeptical, optimistic, discouraged – here was a real interfaith dialogue, a roundtable, a panel:
“But you Americans,” Sara was saying in her English drawl, “are such imperialists!”
“And who do you think we learned it from?” Wes contested.
“But what do you think about Obama’s speech in Cairo?” Sharook, puffing on the hookah, leaned in and asked. She had this sophisticated way of brushing her loose curls of rich, dark hair away from her heavily made-up face, her metallic jewelry glinting in the darkness. She continued, saying, “Obama said something about America breaking away from an empire…”
“It’s just words…” began another Palestinian.
“But to have him, to have an American president acknowledge the record in the Middle East, now that’s promising,” began Sharif. Nidal took the hookah from Sharook, shaking his head. Wes, Faye and I had watched Obama’s speech at Rami’s house in Jerusalem, and I suspect Nidal had felt ambivalent about Obama’s allusions to the “clash of cultures” – especially the conflation of Arab and Muslim. As Palestinian Christians, Nidal and Rami shook their heads and clicked their tongues at phrases like “the Muslim world”.
“The best part was when he said our women wear the ‘haajib’, and the people in the audience were like what did he say?” said Sharif, laughing.
“The haajib?” asked Wes. “You mean the hijab, the veil, right?”
“Yeah, haajib means ‘astonishment’, so rather than saying that the women cover themselves with the veil, Obama said women cover themselves with astonishment!”
“Yeah, but when he said as-salemu alaykum at the beginning, that was pretty intense,” Faye contested. “He got that right!”

The rooftop discussion went back and forth like this, until the lights twinkling toward Tel Aviv quieted themselves and the pink ribbon of dawn unfurled across the horizon.
(From a rooftop in Ramallah, Tel Aviv in the distance)