West Bank Journal: Last Day in Palestine

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

WEST BANK, April 9 -- In Palestine I often think of those advent calendars, the ones with little windows that you open to reveal whole, small worlds. A doorway presents a blank face to the world, but open it and another reality is revealed. Take a hand, open and door, and be drawn ever deeper into hidden, secret worlds.

After the last day of the women's training, we go home with Arish to her village of Sarda, open the door in the blank cement wall that faces the street, and enter a walled garden, with mint and fava beans, fig trees and grape vines, sages and roses lining the paths. In front of the house is a wide porch, and on the sides and back are courtyards. Arish brings us inside, to sit and drink tea and admire a perfect model of the Al Aqsa Mosque made by her brother, the engineer. Arish is young, in her early twenties, not yet married, an artist and writer. She shows us her drawings of her nieces and her mother. She has a round, bronze face and half-moon eyes that crinkle up as she smiles.

Then the women beckon us out back, and we crowd onto a low bench in a small, cement-block outbuilding. In one corner is a sunken oven, heaped with coals and ashes from burning olive pumice, what's left after the oil is pressed. Arish's mother presides, patting out flat slabs of dough, and Arish removes the lid which has a long, vertical handle so they can lay them in the pit, replace the cover, and heap the ashes on. After just a few moments, the bread is done. Wide sheets of flat bread dripping with olive oil, with flat leaves of zata sandwiched in, and thin pasties of crisp, sweet bread basted with honey.

They fill our hands with it, and we eat as tea is poured. It's a warm, intimate women's space, heated by the oven, like a sauna or a sweat lodge, and we laugh and smile and eat. I have seen clay models of this oven in sculptures thousands of years old. Generations of women have patted the dough, baked the bread, gathered at these hearths to gossip and laugh -- a warm and womblike female space in a male world. I feel so safe, so welcomed, that I'm lulled into being happy, a feeling I just can't shake as the afternoon goes on. In spite of the harsh realities we've been discussing in the training, the techniques for self protection when facing tear gas, sound bombs, rubber bullets, beatings, the ominous approach of the wall that will shatter the fabric of these villages, the overwhelming oppressive realities of the occupation, something strong and sweet as this honey bread survives. For a little while longer.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print