Waiting to Return to Salamah

MY GRANDFATHER passed away in 1989. Before he died he spent every evening fixated on the TV screen. This was his ritual for as long as I knew him. He wasn’t watching anything but the evening news. He was hoping that he would someday hear, before he retired for the night, important news he’d been waiting for since 1945. He was hoping that the day might come when he would return to Salamah, the village near Jaffa from which he was expelled along with his wife and three sons (one of them my father) in 1945, and which Israel completely destroyed on April 30, 1945.

Sadly, my grandfather died while patiently waiting to hear the news that never came. For almost half a century he never gave up hope that someday somebody would return to Salamah to claim his house and his orange orchards—where every day he would ride his trusty white Arabian horse “Sa’adah alrajah” (good hope). Tragically, he died knowing that his orchards, and indeed his entire village, have long been wiped off the face of the earth. In its place a modern Israeli suburb has sprung up. Yet, he never let go of his beloved Salamah and the bliss and euphoria the name Salamah gave him.

The Nakba underestimates the sorrows of millions of Palestinian refugees who are scattered around the world. It seems that every falling raindrop will touch a Palestinian refugee. The Nakba is a continuum where every generation hands over to the next its sorrows and its dreams of returning home some day. My father (now 68 years old) never speaks of Salamah anymore. He was displaced from it when he was young, and he seems to store away its memories and the pain of his family’s plight and anguish that it unleashes. During his childhood he lived in tents on U.N. handouts. They simply didn’t have money, and didn’t know what it was for years. Finally the family settled in the West Bank city of Nablus.

But that is not the end of a compulsory journey that started in 1945. In 1965, he decided to try his luck in Kuwait, where he lived and worked as a public schoolteacher for almost 30 years. He was expelled, for the second time in his life, from Kuwait in the aftermath of the Gulf War of 1990. It seems that the curse of the Nakba is true. I remember looking at my dad’s face after we left Kuwait and it seemed to tell me: once a refugee, always a refugee. Today, my dad lives in our home in Nablus.

For my part, my refugee spirit put me on the road and took me on my own journey, a more pleasant one nevertheless. Now I live in the United States and have children of my own. But the Nakba stays with me. It never left. It is true that I perhaps will never return to Salamah, and my children will never know what Salamah is. But I knew my grandfather and father, in whom Salamah never left or vanished. So I dream, just like my grandfather did, that someday he can be reburied in Salamah, perhaps near the road where he once rode his horse. That dream will never die and I am sure I will be passing it to my children.

By Basel Saleh, Ph.D., Radford University, Radford, VA.