As a Child I Knew Nothing About War

Explaining the Language of Homeland

Choose your vocabulary with great precision
— Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

1. There is a difference between leave and flee.
2. There is a child leaving home is not the same
   as there is child fleeing home.
3. In this language, there is a box of sorrow
   is more appropriate than there’s a box of books
   carried by those fleeing their homelands.
4. There is a wound opening in this language
   that hangs in the mouths of the dispossessed.
5. There is a child in the dark small room of a boat,
   a child learning for the first time the meaning
   of not belonging to a place called home.
6. There is a torch of loss, the one whose 
   light is too frail to see the road ahead of those
   who crave the tenderness of home. 
7. There is a country burning. It’s my country burning.
8. It’s my country saying its last prayers.
9. It’s my country speaking the language
   of the dispossessed, my country inventing
   new words to mask the grief of fleeing home.
10. In this language, there are no words for joy.
11. For safety. For the musk of olive trees in the air.
12. There are no words to teach the children 
                how to love home, how to think home. 
13. There is no home in this language. 
14. There is a knife slicing the fabric of this language,
    a bullet wound tended by those who speak this language.
15. There are no words for a sanctuary in this language.

As a Child, I Knew Nothing About War

I spent years learning how to pronounce 
the sacred letters of Arabic at the Madrasah. 
How to begin with Bismillah each time 
I set out to dream. How to face the Qiblah, 
knowing that my Lord listens to my supplications 
in the quietude of the masjid. I attended school 
where my tongue was shaped into English.
I listened to the radio every day with my father. 
On the radio, there was no announcement 
of a bomb blast. No gunshots rent the air. 
After school hours, we picked flowers in the fields
and chased grasshoppers till nightfall. 
On rainy days, our mothers made hot pap
for us to exit the cold. We wore sweaters 
and slept in the safety of the beds. 
We were children untethered to fear. 
We woke up each day to the sky
crowded with birds. The birds traversed 
the sky of homeland and returned to the trees
at dusk. They sung of bliss. They picked 
leaves of grass in the fields to build their nests.
None of them was shot. None of them died. 
There was no smoke of bombs shrouding 
the sky. There were no dead bodies 
on farmland. No one died at birth. 
The women were alive. They carried 
their babies on their backs on their way 
to the farm. No one fled home.
No one died of bullet wounds. 
No one lived in a refugee camp. 
Our fathers returned home alive. 
They returned without losses in their hearts. 
No one stayed awake to watch if the sky 
would be occupied by bullets in the midnight. 
There was no unrest. There was no riot.
There was peace unbroken by war.