“Jiddo, I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand, habibti?”
“You’re reading me a book that’s about a place that’s not on a map but you told me you’ve been there. How is that possible?”
We were sitting on a sofa reading books: I, her Jiddo, or grandfather, read books to my granddaughter which usually ranged from “Madeline” and “Eloise” to “Babar” and “She-Ra, Princess of Power.”
The book we were reading this afternoon was a little different: “A Map for Falasteen,” the story of a young girl in America named after a country that no one outside of her family can find on a map.
“Jiddo, I don’t understand.”
I sympathize: We’ve (finally, thankfully) entered an era where postcolonial studies are being represented in stories for children, especially stories written and illustrated by creators who live in and know those places; stories written for those whose families may belong to diasporic communities targeted and displaced, often ethnically cleansed, by colonial and authoritarian powers.
Contextualizing it all is difficult: “Jiddo, I don’t understand.”
There are far too many families like Falasteen’s, all non-fictional, all living in many communities around the world, all struggling to try to help their children understand.
“A Map for Falasteen” helps.
The book came to my attention when I read news accounts about the Watertown, Massachusetts, public library wanting the book removed from its list of summer reading for second graders.
Despite both local and national pressure, the trustees stood firm with its librarians and resisted pressure to remove the books from their summer reading lists, with some suggesting the books were antisemitic or incited fear-mongering.
Frankly, I think there should be fear. Fear that after nearly 80 years of trying to erase the Palestinian story, fear that after nearly 20 years of siege-warfare and genocide against Gaza, fear that the truth of what has occurred in Palestine in our lifetime, is being acknowledged and challenged.
I was not surprised at the negative responses directed toward the book. Any attempt in America to humanize and contextualize Palestinian history, culture and diasporic experience is most always aggressively opposed by pro-Zionist interests who deny the legitimacy of the Palestinian experience.
The dehumanization of Palestinians is particularly essential to settler-colonialism. Palestinians must be reduced into something other than human so that their elimination becomes justifiable. The oppressor requires its subjects to be perceived as “human animals” so that waging famine and genocide upon them appears to be the only solution.
That said, I was very surprised the debate was taking place in Watertown.
I love Watertown, where the first significant wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries of Armenian immigrants safely settled.
Watertown’s Armenian population swelled following the Turkish Genocide between 1915 and 1917 when many survivors sought refuge in the United States, especially in Watertown.
I shop in Watertown often. I buy packages of spicy, garlicky Lamejun from Massis Bakery and freeze them at home. I also shop at Sevan Bakery and Eastern Lamejun Bakers and come home with Armenian and Middle Eastern goodies I can’t find elsewhere.
Occasionally, if I am with friends, I suggest we visit the Armenian Museum of America which holds perhaps the largest collection of cultural artifacts outside Armenia.
Knowing Watertown as I do, I could not have imagined that harbored within such a center of diasporic experience would be residents who would want to delegitimize the Palestinian experience.
I should have known better. Palestine is in a category of its own.
At Falasteen’s American school, when her teacher shows the class a world map and asks them, “Can each of you tell us where your family is from?” she wonders, “Why isn’t Palestine on the map?”
Her teacher responds: “I think there is no such place.”
Returning home after school she repeats her question to her grandpa, grandma and mother: “Why isn’t Palestine on the map?”
Each answers her from within their personal memories and experience, sharing nostalgia for a land dear to Falasteen and her family’s hearts, reinforcing a belief that there is a right to return to their historic homeland.
Beyond Falasteen’s challenge, let us understand that Palestinian voices will prevail because of our refusal to accept that some stories cannot be told, that some deaths cannot be mourned, that some truths cannot be spoken.
We will speak for them all.
Understand that those who remain breathing will speak the truth for those who died — that is what we are all called upon to do.
The most important message — to my grandchildren, to you, my readers, and to all who believe in justice — is that even when we are forced away from our home, we always carry our homeland within us.
We carry and sustain our homelands in spite of the attempts of AIPAC’s local lackeys; Sen. Maggie Hassan and Representatives Chris Pappas and Maggie Goodlander continue to deny Palestine its rightful place on Falasteen’s map.
As she goes to bed at day’s end, Falasteen asks her mother one last time, “Mama, why isn’t Palestine on the map?”
“There are places, hayati, you don’t need a map to find,” she says. “Sometimes people live in countries … Sometimes countries live in people …”
Palestine lives.
Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. He can be followed at robertazzitheother.substack.com.