![Me in my mom’s authentic Palestinian tatreez jacket Me in my mom’s authentic Palestinian tatreez jacket](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F556686a1-2ae5-4110-89bc-52befbaf8cf7_800x796.jpeg)
I found my watheeqa in Baba's things. Baba. Allah yirahmo, he even saved the transcripts of my school grades, a fax I sent him when I was abroad at university, and the cheques I gave him when he covered my rent after I got divorced. He never cashed them—thank God. It made me cry and laugh. He was so irritated I got divorced, but he loved me.
I thought I had lost my watheeqa forever, but there it was, almost 20 years later, in baba's cabinet next to the staircase, between his many files and papers — not just the one I lost, but all the old ones, too. It was like I had found a pot of gold. I feel rich in refugee documents. You have no idea. One day, I will go home.
I remember the days I used to travel with my refugee document like it was yesterday. It was such an odd-sized thing. Bigger than a regular passport but smaller than an A4 paper, with a hard brown cover. It stuck out like a sore thumb. Maybe it was designed that way on purpose — Identity, What is it? by Nada Chehade
Baba was the guy who knew where he came from and was proud. A Palestinian refugee of Lebanon, his father used to beat them when they went to the beach. He and his siblings would wrap their t-shirts on their heads to shade themselves from the sun on the way back from their sea adventures, but their dad usually noticed their tans and would hit them because he was worried they would drown. Refugees aren't supposed to leave camp to go to the beach, or swim.
Baba was obsessed with the beach—it was his religion. Every Friday, all the neighbors would go to the mosque, and my dad would go to the beach. This really embarrassed my mom. She, too, wanted to wave from the balcony as the neighborhood men took their kids to head to Friday prayers, but baba was taking my siblings and me to the beach. She couldn't flex in front of the ladies in her Quraan- group.
I went to the beach a few days after my dad's funeral. I realize now that I love the smell of the sea because it reminds me of him, especially when I was a kid. We would eat the best burgers and ice cream, drink grenadine, pick snails, and swim. Yes, Baba taught me how to swim in the very Arabic way. I also remember him teaching other kids.
When I moved to Canada for uni, we went to the pool once, and a friend wouldn't get into the water. I later realized that he was embarrassed that he couldn't swim. It dawned on me what it was like to grow up surrounded by white people instead of your own. It wasn't embarrassing to not know how to swim where I came from. Most people who grew up in refugee camps, especially women, didn't know how to swim. Most of my aunts couldn't swim, but they always wanted to dip their feet into the sea and scream and tumble on the shore if a wave crashed, and we'd always have to save them from their own screams and tumbles. As a kid, we would be like, for fuck's sake, can we teach you how to swim? But they didn't want to wear swimwear and attract anyone.
By the way, the first trick to swimming is understanding that you can float.
All four of my uncles worked to send my dad from the refugee camp to study at the University of Turkey in Istanbul. There, he shared a bed with another Palestinian refugee because they couldn't afford their own. Years later, they both ended up in the UAE. Whenever we randomly bumped into his old roommate, my dad would enthusiastically screech, "Baba, we slept head to foot, foot to head!"
Palestinian refugees of Lebanon are not allowed to work in most fields or own property, hence bound to the camp. Being stateless but working in the UAE meant that your resident visa depended on your employment, so getting deported was always a risk. When my dad grew some success, people suggested that he seek foreign citizenship to protect me and my siblings from continuing to be stateless. He was against it for a long time because he considered it a betrayal of Palestine.
"We are refugees, and we want to go home."
In 1948, all four of my grandparents left their villages in Palestine to bordering countries, assuming they would return in a week, but they never got to see their homes again. Jewish colonists ethnically cleansed them and burned their towns, committing massacre after massacre, dispossessing them of their lives, belongings, and freedom — what is known as the Nakba.
My dad worried that immigrating West meant that we would forgo our roots, "It's what the enemy wants" — and that we would normalize thousands of our cousins still stuck in the camps and the Zionist occupation, better known as the Nazi European settler project they call isreal. It's amazing that 76 years later, nothing has stopped our dream to go home, our right to return, and avenging our roots.
I remember the first time I visited Baba's camp. In Arabic, the refugee camp is called mokhayam, which means tents. They started as tents and, with time, evolved into mud houses with tin roofs. Baba loved the sound of rain hitting a hard surface because it reminded him of his childhood in the refugee camps when the rain hit the tin ceilings.
My grandfather continued to live in the mokhayam until the family bought him an apartment in Hart Hreik, a few blocks from it, in his old age. He was such an angry man—that's how I remember him. When he was young and in the camp, he was known as somewhat of a Peter Pan, stealing electricity from wealthy Lebanese to serve the needs of the refugees in Burj Al Barajneh because the government limited the number of hours they would get electricity, sometimes going for days without any.
Since October 7th, 2023, I have come to deeply understand him. He was a genocide survivor; the scenes of death never left him, nor his once dignified life that was reduced to begging for handouts and treated like vermin all over the world. A few months ago, my cousin sent me a map of our village Kwikat, Akka, detailed down to the olive and fig trees my grandfather spoke of. I found his house, his brother's house, their father's house, and even the houses of refugee families I know. We were a community, whole, not scattered in camps behind colonial walls. I'm sorry, jiddo, I see it now, what they did to you.
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I loved that my dad took us as kids annually to visit the Mokhayam after the ban on traveling to Lebanon was lifted post-Kuwait War. We would meet our cousins, his cousins, aunts, uncles, the whole shebang. It was another world from my cushy life growing up in the UAE. It's what made me who I am today. My existence is political.
My dad would turn a regular football match into politics and threaten to disown my siblings and me if we cheered for any of the colonizers. One time, my brother dared to cheer for England because it was trendy to get a David Beckham haircut, and my dad shunned him. He kept calling him “a traitor and a sellout, and you’re not my son!!” — The Afro-Palestinian community, by Nada Chehade
Some of my Palestinian friends, whom I used to consider lucky for having Lebanese or Jordanian passports, never stepped into a refugee camp. But I was the one who was lucky the whole time. Truly, it is an honor to be with my people, right inside the struggle, to never normalize dispossession, the Zionist occupation, to never yield to the enemy. Baba, Allah yirhamo, I thought I lost my watheeqa forever, but he saved it for me in his cabinet next to the staircase. I swear, one day, I will go home.
Till liberation my friends….
Fabulous, heart-touching and defiant with the spirit that no oppression can quell - you are a great example Nada - keep shining !
Yep, I'm crying buckets right now! So lovely, Nada. I think he knew you would find these artifacts and be comforted. I love you, my friend.