Gaza's Bougainvilleas

I felt an instant and deep connection to Nesrine Malik.

Writing for the UK newspaper The Guardian,  she asked her readers:  What does it mean to erase a people, a nation, culture, identity?   She wrote about Gaza’s libraries, museums,  hospitals, mosques and churches, apartment dwellings, cemeteries, and boulevards --- all of them now a massive rubble.  The sturdy bougainvillea trees along Gaza’s coastline where Palestinians went for shade,  an open space to breathe from being squeezed in, are all gone. Bombarded, bulldozed, erased.  Near constant bombardment of the Gaza Strip for the past two months may wipe Gaza off the map.

My mother’s 20-year-old house instantly came to mind. Especially her bougainvillea trees that crept sideways and upward over two decades. Twirled around the terrace outside my brother’s room.  Covered the chicken wire fence at the land boundary where the lot behind her house remains empty. The thousand purple leaves and petals that fell into the pool whenever the winds blew during the monsoon. 

For over twenty years, visiting her house was always a comforting experience. I assumed the wrought iron gates would always open even with rust slowly creeping around the heavy handles. The acacia tree fronting her house will continue to sink its roots and thicken its branches, to shelter the third-floor balcony and camouflage the dangling electrical wires.    

Whenever six siblings reunited from our scattered locations across the globe, it was at my mother’s dining table, a square twelve-seater glass-top table where everyone faced each other equidistantly.  We sat, snacked, traded stories and corny jokes for over two decades. Gathered our relatives for a lengthy meal, discussed and dissected family matters, laughed and argued, suggested take-out menus, hoisted our laptops, and shared extension plugs.  Texted each other across the table. Marveled at each other’s unfolding lives.  Four generations of our extended family have partaken in numerous meals at this dining table. 

Over two decades, our hairlines receded, waistlines expanded, cheeks turned to jowls. We bowed gently to Time and Age. We’ve witnessed the arrival of a new generation of nieces and nephews, their children, our grandchildren, my mother’s great-grandchildren. Bonds formed, deepened, never broken, even with time and distance. 

But not in Gaza. No longer. The Omari mosque, originally a fifth-century Byzantine Church, all 44,000 sq. ft. of heritage and history, was destroyed. So was a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery and the Rafah Museum which once housed Gaza’s cultural pride.  More than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, wrote Chloe Veltman for the National Public Radio (NPR).    

But more was destroyed than just the physical landscape of Gaza, asserted Nesrine Malik.  The “architecture of belonging” --- those shared spaces for creating art and poetry, for story-telling and joke-swapping, where memories are formed, stored, and shared, are now facing imminent extinction. The libraries,  the repositories of histories and stories, are like shredded pages of a book.  Journalists, novelists, artists alike ---- those who preserved the Palestinian experience through their imagination and creativity, have been killed.  Gaza is facing a “memory gap.” 

For who are we without memories?   Whether happy or sad, monumental, or mundane, memories are the connective tissue that links our past to the present and the future.  They are threads that are woven into the tapestry of our lives from where we can discern patterns, some more colorful and richer in texture, others thin, grey, and bland.  Altogether, memories are the ingredients of ongoing life plots with their curious twists and turns. Memories provide us with some coherence especially during moments of stress and darkness, when life throws curved balls, or when we are tilted off-kilter.

Ahmed Masoud, a British-Palestinian writer from Gaza, can no longer visit his father’s grave.  The Israeli tanks destroyed it, along with a hundred other graves.  Even the dead have been permanently erased.  Masoud can no longer visit him or talk to him.

Whereas I faithfully visit my father whose remains lie in a porcelain jar, quietly ensconced in a glass-encased crypt at the church of St. James in the same gated community where my mother continues to live.  Upon arriving in Manila, the church was always my first stop. 

I talk to my father as though we were conversing over a languorous breakfast.  I speak to him of my favorite flavor-of-the-year complaints and challenges --- all of them small and inconsequential. I hear him laugh at me. “Cool it, just roll with the punches” he would say as he heartily dispensed his counsel from the realm of infinity where he now resides. And then I would kiss my palm and press it to the thick tinted glass that separates us, always fervently wishing to kiss his hand instead, out of respect, reverence, and affection.  Whenever I reach my mother’s home some five kilometers away, I know this ritual will be repeated with every visit. 

I know too that my aunt-in-law’s grave somewhere in a kibbutz in northern Israel would still be there.  So are my in-laws whose kibbutz and moshav have been spared Gaza’s rockets.  On visits to my Jewish in-laws, we would linger over coffee breaks in Tel Aviv.  Drive to the Bay of Haifa to sample Greek deserts at a coastal cafe. Visit our colleagues at Hebrew University, enjoy a hummus snack and a lamb kebab at the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem. Israel would remain a relatively intact country, standing tall and upright, not flattened nor erased.

I’m too well aware that the comparison between my mother’s flourishing trees and Gaza’s eradicated boulevards is a flimsy one, a bit of a long conceptual stretch even. But I write in defense of empathy for the Palestinians who are faced with the imminent destruction of their homeland, their identity, and their memories.  What will be left to bind the survivors together, Nesrine Malik asked.

My mother faces imminent death at 101 years old. Hers has been a long and bountiful life. Not only did her gardens and her magnificent home withstand the ravages of wind and storm that regularly visit Manila. She also endured a three-year-long pandemic and escaped unscathed. She was spared COVID-19, even as the virus made the rounds among her six children. 

But her impending death leaves me with the question about her home. Not bombarded or bulldozed like dwellings in Gaza, but likely to disappear into the realities of a diasporic family. What then shall we call home when my mother joins my father in a porcelain jar at the crypt of the church of St. James?