Internationally renowned and award-winning Palestinian author and poet, Susan Abulhawa, opened the historic Palestine Writes Literature Festival in Philadelphia, Sept. 22-24, with this poem written in May 2022.

No matter what you ask

Because we are the people of the land.

Because we are the keepers of her stories

passed down to us from the olive trees

Because her rivers run through our bodies

  and our grandmothers embroidered her landscape

  on our skin since ten thousand years

Because we saddled her first horses

we sang her first ballads and

we harvested her wheat with love

no matter who held guns over us

Because our poetry watered her gardens

since before she was Canaan

Because we danced when she married the Mediterranean Sea

and we made her wedding cake a tray of

kanafe from Nablus

Because we were always there.

We are the Jews and the Christians and the Muslims

we lived converted between religions

settled from pilgrims left and returned

mixed with our conquerors

died by their swords and

    nourished her soil with our bodies.

But we never left.

But we never left.

But we never left.

When Henry VIII sent Anne Boleyn to the tower

we were in Palestine.

When Marie Antoinette was marched to the guillotine

we were in Palestine.

When Galileo gazed at the heavens

we were in Palestine.

When Columbus got lost, pillaged, and raped where he landed

we were in Palestine.

When Queen Nzinga ruled the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba

When Genghis Khan broke through China’s great wall

When the suffragettes marched

When all of your history

it was us who were there.

Not in Europe or Russia or Poland or

Brooklyn or Yemen or

Iran or Iraq

but in Palestine

continuously for millennia.

Because we created her dances

we terraced all her hills and

nestled our homes in her grooves,

Because we slept, ate, gave birth

married, loved, aged, and died in her arms

since time was fitted for a calendar.

Because now she’s under a foreigner’s boot

her curves decapitated by urban planners

her trees cut and burned by their hate

her body scarred and siphoned dry

her pomegranate owned and caged

her zatar buried in concrete and

her wild tumultuous history

    violently stuffed into a plastic box

      branded with a new name and an epic myth.

They’ve killed her birds,

taken our hummus and falafel hostage in a museum

they built over the graves of our ancestors.

But we know and

  only we can tell her native stories,

  sing her native songs and

  dance for her a promise from her children

determined to make their way back

to the embrace of her sun-kissed hills and

  her orange and olive groves

to revive her desiccated rivers

  that they might again roar with life

as they did when our family

  was whole on her banks.

We will

  always write our love letters to her

  always sing and paint and sew and

  cook her favorite foods

  and think and fight and cry and plant

  and harvest and celebrate for her

  our Palestine.

We lean on each other

  we count on our friends and

  repudiate to the normalizers of our oppression.

We persist.

We exist.

We are one nation

  one history

  one heritage

  one people

  determined and destined to go home.