I remember the scent of jasmine oil. Being propped up on my father’s shoulder and a keffiyeh being placed around my head. I remember a crowd smiling up at me and the men singing “Falasteen Arabiya, Falasteen Arabiya.” It was in Norman, Okla., and I was 5 or 6 years old. Somewhere in my grandfather’s video catalogs in Lebanon, the footage still exists.
There can be no claim that at such early childhood I grasped what was happening, what lay beneath the crooning, what sharp sentiment overwhelmed these men as they clapped around me repeating; “Falasteen, falasteen.” But that particular memory never left me, and I find that I hold on to it with a kind of stubbornness. It is an obduracy that characterizes many Palestinians living in the diaspora, as though they are clinging to every inch of land lost to our families, land that many of us have yet to revisit.