Loubna Qutami, Jaffa, San Francisco

When I return to my homeland, Jaffa will welcome me with open arms. Her women will greet me with big hearts and warm smiles for one of their daughters, who has been lost in exile,has finally found her way home and is in her rightful place. When I return to Palestine, I will return with a sea of those whose hearts, minds and bodies have missed what they may have never even known in the physical sense. Our return will be the most salient form of resistance we could have ever deployed and yet when we meet those Palestinians who resided on our lands through all these years, we know deep in our hearts that staying put was their most radical form of resistance.

When I return to Palestine, the re-unification of a people who have endured dispossession, defeatism, corruption, and decades of colonialism will tell the world that justice always prevails. This re-unification will tell the world that suffrage, ethnic cleansing, and torture only fuels the bondage between us Palestinians with each other and our land.

When I return I will go back to my grandparents home, clean it, furnish it, and decorate it as my grandfather would have remembered. I will pick oranges from the orange groves and prepare a fresh cup of juice and a Palestinian breakfast of lebene, Zaatar, Zeitoon, and fresh made bread for my grandfather. I will carefully place two hand carved wooden chairs at the breakfast table facing each other and welcome him back home. Yet he will say nothing, because my grandfather….he died in exile with a broken heart. And in this moment, I will be reminded that even upon my return….justice and liberation is not over.

When I return to Palestine, I will know I am not returning to the “Paradise” once lost that fuels my journey. I will immerse myself in the re-construction of a broken country and a fragmented people, and I will fight for all of our minds, bodies, and consciousness to be freed of the decades of Zionism and colonialism that has raped our lands, and stripped our people of power, dignity and self-worth. I will fight all systems and forms of oppression perpetuated within our societies because revolution can and never will be over.

When I return to Palestine, I may be able to forgive, but never able to forget because my grandfathers dispossession can’t be rectified. I will remember 1948 and remember 1967 and 1972 and 1982 and 1987 and 1994 and 1995 because I AM my grandfathers return from exile.