The Desert's Silent Shadows

A song starts playing on a night as starry as only the desert sky can produce. I sit barefoot in the cooling sand, a hot cup of tea in my hands and a bitter wind playing with the veil covering my head.

- Paola Martani

My cotton clothes, too heavy for the burning daytime sun, would now be too light if it were not for the fire that rocks me, in this open space without end.

A wooden lute, the ud, stands imperiously erect as only the sultan of instruments could do; the stringed qanun follows, keeping time with the melody, brass and bronze, resting horizontally on the knees of a long-bearded man, dressed in white. He caresses it with picks that seem to have been affixed, as if by magic, to his fingertips. Percussion accompanies, and I lose myself in an almost ecstatic mood that floods into my bones.

I am in the Middle East. I sit among people with no identity, not one that matters in the least. They are ghosts with blood flowing in their veins, so strong and tough that they will neither surrender nor ever forget anything.

I look at these men sitting in a land that does not resemble their own, dressed in white as they did when they were still Bedouins. I look at them and see, in their wrinkles, the dunes of the desert they have left behind; I look at them and, in their eyes, I find memories still alive, eyes crystal clear, to the point of making me forget the real place that hosts my body and taking me to where they were, seventy years ago, in the Negev desert. The iftar for this day is over and, while in the middle of the night as we await sahur, before going to bed and preparing for a new fast, a deep voice begins to drown out the melody that was about to trance me; it narrates a call for peace that tears me from the dream and brings me back to a land that I love to the core.

Unadikum

Ashuddu ‘alaeyadikum

Waebussu’ l’arda

Tahteni’alikum

Waequluefdikum

Wauhdikumdeya ‘ayneyy

I call on you

I clasp your hands

I kiss the ground under your feet

And I say: I offer my life for yours