You, From Now On, Are Not Yourself

Heylloo All again ^.^
This is Mahmoud Darwish Latest work, It was written by the time Hamas & Fateh fought each other in Gaza, & Once again Darwish translated our feelings of sorrow mixed with anger into words that speak our hearts and minds while we stood there in the darkness numbly shocked.

Did we have to fall from a tremendous height so as to see our blood on our hands…to realize that we are no angels…as we thought?
Did we also have to expose our flaws before the world so that our truth would no longer stay virgin?
How much we lied when we said: we are the exception!
To believe oneself is worse than to lie to the other!
To be friendly with those who hate us and harsh on those who love us — that is the lowness of the arrogant and the arrogance of the low!
O past: Do not change us whenever we stepped away from you!
O future: do not ask us: who are you? And what do you want from me? Because we too, do not know.
O present! Bear with us a little because we are nothing but insufferable passersby.

The identity is: what we bequeath and not what we inherit. What we invent and not what we remember. The identity is the corruption of the mirror that we must break whenever we liked the image!

He masked himself and pulled up his courage and killed his mother…because she was the easiest of prey…and because a female soldier stopped him and exposed her bosoms to him saying: Does your mother have ones like these?

Had it not been for shame and darkness, I would have visited Gaza without knowing the way to the home of the new Abu Sufian* or the name of the new prophet!
Had Muhammad not been the last of the prophets, every gang would have had a prophet and every apostle had a militia!
June astonished us in its fortieth anniversary: if we do not find someone to defeat us again, we defeat ourselves with our hands so as not to forget!
No matter how long you look in my eyes, you will not find my gaze there. It was kidnapped by a scandal!
My heart is not mine and not for anyone. It became independent of me without turning into a stone.
Does the one chanting on the body of his victim-brother: "Allahu Akbar" know that he is an infidel since he sees God in his image: smaller than any perfectly created human.
The prisoner who seeks to inherit the prison hid the smile of victory from the camera, but he could not succeed in curbing the happiness that cascaded from his eyes.
Perhaps because the fast-paced script was stronger than the actor.
What is our need for Narcissus so long as we are Palestinians.
As long as we do not know the difference between the mosque and the university because they are derived from the same linguistic root, what is our need for a state so long as it and the day are facing one fate?

A large sign on the door of a nightclub: we welcome the Palestinians returning from the battle. Entry is free! And our wine does not intoxicate!
I cannot defend my right to work; a shoe shiner on the pavement.Because my customers have the right to consider me a shoe thief – a university professor told me!
"The stranger and I are against my cousin. My cousin and I are against my brother…and my sheik and I are against myself." This is the first lesson in the new national education in the dungeons of darkness.
Who enters paradise first? The one who died by the bullets of the enemy or the one who died by the bullets of the brother?
Some theologians say: Many an enemy of yours that your mother gave birth to!
The fundamentalists do not exasperate me because they are believers in their special way. But, their secular supporters do and their atheist supporters, too, who only believe in one religion: their images on television!
He asked me: does a hungry guard defend a house whose owner traveled to spend his summer vacation at the French or the Italian Riviera …no difference?
I said: he does not defend!
He asked me: do I + I = two?
I said: you and you are less than one!
I am not ashamed of my identity because it is still in the process of being written. But I am ashamed of parts of the Prolegomenon of Ibn Khaldoun.
You, from now on, are not yourself!

* Abu Sufian was the leader of Mecca when the Muslims took over; Meccans who entered his home were given sanctuary.

M.Darwish
Translated By : Dr. Mohammad Abu Zaid

Handala Al-Ghaseel

WHO IS HANDALA?

Well I'll never be as good as Naji Al-Ali to introduce Handala to you all, so I let myself this time, not for my own sake but for the sake of Palestine, to copy and paste what this famous cartoonist had to say about his immortal master piece Handala.

Visit http://www.handala.org/ for further information..

Naji Al-Ali wrote: "The child Handala is my signature, everyone asks me about him wherever I go. I gave birth to this child in the Gulf and I presented him to the people. His name is Handala and he has promised the people that he will remain true to himself. I drew him as a child who is not beautiful; his hair is like the hair of a hedgehog who uses his thorns as a weapon. Handala is not a fat, happy, relaxed, or pampered child. He is barefooted like the refugee camp children, and he is an icon that protects me from making mistakes. Even though he is rough, he smells of amber. His hands are clasped behind his back as a sign of rejection at a time when solutions are presented to us the American way. Handala was born ten years old, and he will always be ten years old. At that age, I left my homeland, and when he returns, Handala will still be ten, and then he will start growing up. The laws of nature do not apply to him. He is unique. Things will become normal again when the homeland returns. I presented him to the poor and named him Handala as a symbol of bitterness. At first, he was a Palestinian child, but his consciousness developed to have a national and then a global and human horizon. He is a simple yet tough child, and this is why people adopted him and felt that he represents their consciousness."

Introduction..^.^

Heylloo ♥__¶, I represent one of the many young voices of PALESTINE ^.^ .

For those who don’t know where Palestine is, “well LOOK IT UP…lol kidding ”.Palestine is a small country that sleeps on the Mediterranean’s east shores; it’s one of the few occupied countries in the world. It’s the same spot where Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. In Islam, Prophet Mohammad’s followers believe that he also visited Jerusalem/Palestine and then from its famous rock flew up to the sky and toured heaven and hell with angel Gabriel.

The struggle took its part in the holy land in 1948, when the state of Israel saw the first light to life. Ignoring the rights of the local inhabitants, “GREAT Britain” who ruled Palestine back then helped the Zionist movements take control of everything and slowly establish a state of their own after fleeing 711.000 thousand Palestinian to the near countries such as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, using the armed militates of course to kill, plant terror in the people’s, replace the inhabitants with new settlers.

The descendants of the first refugees are estimated to be 4.5 million now. The ones living Lebanon and Egypt have one-room apartments and no decent jobs, they suffer each day and fight to make it to the next day. The refugees in Jordan have better lives than the other refugees” can’t say they’re lucky though…eh”, they have decent houses and decent jobs, but that doesn’t erase the fact that they are still refugees, even with millions of dollars in their pockets, they still have lost their homeland, their real houses and olive trees and maybe their closest people to their heart.

I don’t know anything about politics and I don’t want to get myself involved in it by any chance, although I’m forced to watch the news everyday, the only reason that happens is because I want to know if the checkpoints are opened tomorrow so I can go to school.The separation wall is 10 minutes away from my house, now that it’s complete I can never visit my aunts in Jerusalem, I can never ever see the sea.

Yet more still to come, I hope we can help the world be a better place for the coming generation “ Ahh… I know I sound like my grandma >.> ” But it’s true..

Mahmoud Darwish:I have many memories, I was born as everyone is born, I have a mother a house with many windows, brothers, friends and a prison cell with a chilly window! I have a wave taken by the seagulls, a panorama of my own. I have a saturated meadow. In the deep of horizon of my word, I have a moon, a bird’s sustenance and an immortal olive tree. I have lived on the land long before swords turned men into prey. I belong to there. To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trail by blood. I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: Home