despair

From the moment I entered this world, my parents knew I was a delicate rose. I was the first flower they planted on their own, and although their parents didn’t teach them to garden, they did their best to gently tend to the growing thickets of the rose bush they so thoughtfully sowed. As I grew throughout the changing season, I did my best to weather the storms that constantly plundered through the garden.

There’s a word in Arabic, ghurbah, that one dictionary defines as “a feeling of longing for one’s native land, of being a stranger.” I think that feeling approximates what it is to live a diasporic being, but we diasporic bodies have no homeland. Mine is the history of the Jews, my ancestors who, through exile and diaspora, learned to live with uncertainty and placelessness. Not like my friends among the Kamëntsá, whose ethnonym supposedly means “people of this place with our own thought and language.