One morning in late April, a group of us sat on their second-story porch in our pajamas, looking out over overgrown lawns. Nour’s house, at some point during those years, had become my Detroit home away from home. The sun spilled streams of golden light along the rooftops of my new city On that last day, I watched the bus roll away before walking to my car. By the time we’d return to Chicago later that same evening, it would be dark as when we’d left. On those long rides between Chicago and Detroit, friendships and alliances had blossomed and imploded and continually transformed, but still we all boarded that bus together in an ever-changing game of musical chairs set to the tune of Palestinian wedding songs, the crinkle of plastic water bottles, and popping potato chip bags. I remembered how we’d clamor up the tall rubber-coated steps in the mosque parking lot before the sun, resting our heads against the cool windows as we careened down I-94, that artery that connects our twin cities flitting by outside the window. That day, after the speeches and the cameras left us in a daze, I stood and watched everyone board the bus I had taken so many times. In their quest for the perfect woman-centered Palestinian liberation project, these men had left countless women strewn along in their wake, women who were, ultimately, sent far, far away. The four-year campaign to keep Rasmea Odeh, the then 70-year-old Palestinian community organizer, from being deported due to her activism, had become a crowning feminist jewel in the political careers of the men at the helm of the effort. Men I knew to be violent spoke self-righteously of women’s liberation. That last day, the chanting crowd on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse looked to me as much a circus as the inside of the judge’s marble chambers. They became a kind of great communal prayer, as if repeating them would speak into existence some semblance of justice. We weren’t prepared for everything to fall apart. In those days, we pulled hope out of one-another’s throats, too terrified to discuss any alternative ending to the story that was unfurling around us. I had marched vigilantly in that line for so many years, had chanted until my voice grew hoarse, in bitter cold and unrelenting rain, days when thousands of tiny droplets formed shimmering wet halos around our heads and we called out, “I believe that we will win.” Jumping up and down, fingertips pressed into one-another’s shoulders, we were fish thrashing forward in an enormous, yet unseen net. A voice in my ear whispered: “Rasmea didn’t write this.” I came to the unwilling realization that she had been silent long before the judge ordered her to stop speaking.Īfterwards, the picket line circled up and down Lafayette in that reliable oval, single-file, well-spaced. I expected a moving, personal account, but her speech read more like a slogan-laden Wikipedia article on the Palestinian struggle. As she spoke, tears swelled in the back of my throat. Before he handed down her deportation order, Judge Drain told Rasmea to read her final statement. We filtered in as always, the clatter of keys and belts in plastic bins echoing through the great stone hall as gloved guards felt us up. The final time we filed up the Detroit courthouse steps, I had already moved there.
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