HABIBI YAMMA
In the video, the breathless mother is face to face with her son in his dark blue press gear. With all telecommunications severed for fourteen days, he’d been gathering reports on the besieged hospital. They who bomb hospitals and inherit the earth, who fear defeat by social media posts, were done murdering this one. [Editor’s note: This hospital’s cause of death could not be independently verified.] The Palestinian mother says to her son, Habibi Yamma. She holds his hands, turning them over, she’s an anatomist turned fortune teller, circling his waist, running her fingers around his hips—and he lets her. As if she is the tailor of his soul. As if she had seen his death in a recurring nightmare for two weeks, and in it, his hands were crushed, his love handles blown. She’s refusing to accept his wholesome appearance is real. The massacre is over, and it is the hour of the crow. The bulldozers are done with the earth: corpulent, corpuscular, corpsy, corpacetic. The killers fertilizing our memory with our ghosts and laughing: that their memory is immune to our ghosts. Her son has a full head of grey hair. She is wearing a headscarf. She kisses him, and he lets her. He turns one cheek then the other. A Jesus in him. A Jochebed in her. A Hagar. And Fatima is in her, that’s her name. Fatima or Zaynab. Bespectacled, he removes his glasses, gestures at taking off his vest as proof that he’s hiding neither scratch nor wound. “Why did you come, Mother? You didn’t have to come.” He says it tenderly, emitting a calm, a decoy of the horror inside them. She says, “My heart wouldn’t let me, Yamma.” In a second, I am filled with panic over the wickedness that may hunt down one of them to spite the other. The video’s gone viral. In a second, my tears bring my mother’s prayers to my knees. Her visions of safety and ruin, their history in her gasping heart. All her life, all of mine. In Rafah, in 1956, she’s seven, standing at her front door and shouting the names of abducted young men spared their execution—as they reappear on foot, one by one, into the neighbourhood, their mothers unable to ululate their joy next to less fortunate mothers. And me, some two decades later, a third grader, swallowed by his mother’s exhausting grief towering over the precipice, a portent for the rest of my days: No, Yamma, the school bus did not crash. Yes, the field trip was a blast. Habibti Yamma, I lived. Habibi Yaba, I’m alive. I drank from the only well in the only garden of the only heart I have. The well had been fed for years by tears of every type. And all around me are half-strangers. Half-stranger, will you let me give you back your sight? Or do you still think your heart is all yours—that it isn’t like my mother’s country?
(Fady Joudah)