Palestinian Woman | Acrylic on canvas | 2024
To be a Palestinian mother,
you must learn some simple things:
how to hold your wounded child until he sheds
his last drop of blood;
crafting words to turn a child into a man
when the soldiers wake him for arrest;
how to prepare a filling meal for ten
when bakeries, malls, and restaurants are bombed;
how to tell delightful stories through long nights of shelling;
explaining to a three-year-old, the absence
of the martyred father and detained sister;
erecting colorful tents from cushion covers;
finding innovative ways to clean blood;
rejoicing that they arrested the child but didn’t kill him;
how to dig graves and build graveyards;
how to walk by a tank with your five children
and cross the path to exile with three suitcases and seven souls.
You have to be a cat
a crocodile
a plane
a protective shield
the roof of a tent
the stars when the power is out
a poem when even tears dry
you must be everything—the water and the rock.
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat
Author
Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (b. Lebanon, 1980) is a Palestinian novelist, poet, and children’s book author. She edited The Book of Ramallah, an anthology of short stories published by Comma Press in 2021. An English translation of her poetry appeared from Milkweed Editions under the title You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Translator
Ibrahim Fawzy is a two-time graduate of the British Center for Literary Translation (BCLT) Summer School. He was awarded a mentorship with the National Center for Writing, UK (2022/2023) as a part of their Emerging Literary Translators Program. He was a recipient of Culture Resource’s Wijhat grant. Ibrahim won a 2023 PEN Presents award for his translation of Kuwaiti author Khalid Al Nasrallah’s The White Line of Night. He is a 2024 Peter K. Jansen Memorial Travel Fellow with the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). He received a 2024 Global Africa Translation Fellowship. Ibrahim is currently pursuing his MFA at Boston University.
Artist
Fahad Mohammed Shihab was born in Gaza, Palestine, in 2004. He is currently based in Cairo, Egypt, where he is studying medicine at Al-Azhar University. Since he was young, he has loved coloring and drawing. When he was nine, he joined the Qattan Cultural Center in Al-Rassam Club in Gaza. Shihab’s work has won awards at art competitions in the Czech Republic and has been featured in multiple exhibitions. See more of his art on Instagram.
