It’s Not a Big Deal
But it is to me.
A silly quiz, a random quiz on Facebook… A picture personality test, choose a photo that you think describes love… A photo that represents your favorite meal… A photo that represents success. But this quiz, it’s not tailored for Palestinians… Choose a photo that represents freedom… An image of beautiful horses running through the wild, a photo of a fresh graduate looking ahead at the roads diverged, awaiting the sound of his stamping feet to choose the path that will determine his future… Or is freedom the image of money, or is it the image of a rock climber hanging of a cliff… I want to choose all of those and yet I cannot but choose one, because that is my fate. My fate is to be uprooted from my land, my fate is to be a refugee, my fate is to be without an identity card, my fate, is to live between borders, not allowed to proceed into another nationality, not allowed to go back to mine, not allowed to move forward, not allowed to travel. My choice, and I never really had a choice… was to choose the image of a passport.
It’s the things that you take for granted, that mean the most to the doomed. Shelter for the homeless. Food for the hungry. Passports for the refugees.
Duried replied:
A Passport can never give someone an identity if they have no feeling of belonging nor can a lack of it strip a person who belongs and has his routes planted in his/her land. There are millions of dispersed Palestinians all over the world that belong to Palestine. They might have never lived there, been there for a visit or even seen it from afar. But their routes are there, their blood is their just like the olive tree that go back thousands of years.
Palestine can never be lost by injustice and human right violation, it can only be lost should we decide to let it go.
November 25, 2007 at 12:37 pm. Permalink.
izzi replied:
You paint a beautiful metaphorical picture of what the word Freedom means, and it’s something I would be ready to say myself. Freedom is inside our heads, freedom is our minds, and freedom can only truly exist within us. Nelson Mandela said that even though he was in jail, has mind was free. But, what I was trying to reflect here was freedom in the tangible realistic sense, that is, daily life, a refugee is not free to travel, he cannot move at all. The two of us, we can apply for a Visa, and go anywhere, but the Palestinians without an American, Canadian, Jordanian or any other passport… Well, freedom pretty much lies in a passport to them, a passport that represents a nationality, a mark of your existence in this day and age, if you do not exist, what rights do you have.
November 25, 2007 at 1:02 pm. Permalink.