I can't cite the page, because (to be honest) I'm listening to this one on my summer travels; but Abulhawa suggests that the capacity for love--or maybe the quality of loving--is different in a people who have experienced so much loss, and so much dispossession, and so much violence. Because they have struggled so profoundly, and lost so much, and because they hunger for the good--out of that lived experience, out of that loss--they cultivate a kind of loving, a kind of devotion that is sometimes unavailable in a so-called "first world" context.
The young protagonist has spent years in the US, studying and preparing for a career here. When she returns one summer to Lebanon, to the refugee camps where her beloved brother still lives, she meets a Palestinian there--and immediately senses a raw, open, hunger in him, a hunger for authentic communion that meets hers in a way no American has been able to. She wonders whether it's the nature of their lives, and their hearts--to love out of a different ache, to connect around a vulnerable center, to need one another in different ways. And no American she's met could do that, could offer that, could meet her there. She doesn't go so far as to say that the Americans were lacking in some way, unable to love so deeply; but she hints that our acquisitive culture, our notions of security and accumulation, render us less equipped for deeper journeys of the spirit and heart. Challenging stuff.
And she doesn't go here, but I will. I can't help thinking about that beatitude: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be filled." Maybe Jesus was acknowledging and even celebrating what Abulhawa's Palestinian student is beginning to see: that there is a strange blessing, a spiritual opening, that comes with the frontline struggle for justice, the frontline vulnerability in the struggle for goodness and peace. When that struggle is the substance our your life, the pattern of your family's existence, you may (and it's not a simple blessing, right?) find your heart open to needs, opportunities, songs, touches that make for a kind of intimacy that is profoundly human and blessed. This is not the kind of hunger and thirst one can simply 'cook' up--as if you hear the sermon on this beatitude and you then go out Monday morning to "hunger and thirst for righteousness." Instead, it is born in occupation (as it is for these Palestinian families), and it is born in the community bearing the scars of white racism (as it is for our Black siblings in the USA)...and so on.
All of which is to say: Read this book. It's provocative and brilliantly written.
