My grandfather’s picture rests in an emerald frame, hung on a wall in my house in Amman, Jordan. His eyes are a solemn hazel and his expression is longing and thoughtful. His hair flows like waves in a chaotic ocean, the same style and color as mine and my mother’s. The wrinkles that set in the corner of his eyes manifest years of happiness, coinciding with the same smile that is seen in every picture we have of him. Toothless, but not any less happy.
His bushy eyebrows that my siblings and I have inherited are messy and unkempt on purpose. The Cossack hat placed on his head accompanies a brownish mink coat. The hat is now placed in my mother’s closet and is worn whenever the weather drops below ten degrees Celsius. Mama and Khalto’s (aunt) love for fashion was ignited by his, and he appreciated clothes more than my Teta (grandmother) ever could or would choose to. He brought them pearls and silk kimonos from Japan and fur scarves and coats from Russia, a country he frequented. I see him in my mother when Baba (father) makes her laugh. I have never met him; she is close enough.
He was a revolutionary and political poet. Growing up in the heart of Palestine, Gaza, he had no other choice but to fight. What do you do when the very ground that you walk upon crumbles each time you take a step? When what you see outside your window becomes no longer recognizable? The buildings you played in, the streets you walked on, and the stores you visited are all gone and have turned to dust. The wind has buried them in the sea. The friendly faces you consistently saw crossing the street, selling you your vegetables, are gone and turned into everlasting memories that you hope will never fade away. To replace them are strangers that you hope you will never get to know—just another person to mourn.
He was tortured and detained more times than I can count on both of my hands. His four brothers and sister had also shared cells alongside him. This was not uncommon; my Palestinian friends’ grandparents shared a similar history. I have friends who go clubbing every weekend in New York City, London, and Paris. Who eat expensive dinners and ride in expensive cars being driven by chauffeurs while wearing expensive clothes. I wonder if that is what they fought for. What would they think of us if they saw us now? They were refugees who left Palestine with nothing and created their wealth in a country that was not their own. Building a life that masked and placed a veil over what they have been through and what they have seen, granting their grandchildren the privilege of naivety. Something they could never afford.
His voice was deep and coarse from the cigarettes. I have watched the videos of his intensified, passionate speeches, poetry readings, and interviews. But I have never fallen asleep to the sweet and lulling sound of him telling me stories. His words live on in bookshelves and libraries, in the hearts and minds of those who looked to him as their shining glimmer of hope. When I’m in an Uber in Amman and the driver sees my last name, they ask if I am related to Muin Bseiso. Once I tell them that I am his granddaughter, they begin to recite his poems from memory—and I am filled with guilt and shame because I can’t. So, I read his memoirs and try to memorize his poems in a language that is supposed to be my first. I grew up in American schools, so I need my father to translate words I should understand.
My father used to tell me that my grandfather lived in his own head. I would imagine him sitting on the seashore near the clear blue water as the Beirut sea distilled and splashed like mist on his dark olive skin and his sun kissed cheeks. He would stare into the distance in the mornings on their balcony at their summer house and the calm he was never able to experience at home was enough to entertain him for hours, and his mind was never not active. I wake up sometimes and record my most profound dreams in a small notebook that lays underneath my mattress, and the book is filled with one liners that I may never use, but I imagine I get the tendency to write them down from him.
When I am sitting in the car while being driven around Amman, I become so painfully aware of the safety that then begins to suffocate me. I have not witnessed true turmoil and the only wars I have seen were when I was much too young to remember and too far away to see clearly. I have grown up to the sounds of fireworks and never once believed thunder to be falling bombs and yet a small inkling of my being is fearful when I see my dog run to find cover underneath a bed when it strikes. My father once told me when I was one and a couple of months old, we had to be evacuated from Gaza. He told me when we first got to Amman I pushed his father into the house when the thunder struck and shook my bones and it worries me that I knew to take cover but not how to walk without falling over and that I couldn’t even find the words to name the sound. I called it “boom boom” instead of bomb.
When I want to know more about him, I read the words that shot fists into the air. Once, when the Israeli soldiers opened fire on the demonstrators, a man flung himself in front of my grandfather. The man died in his arms. I imagine the man’s family being told the news as his blood-soaked clothes and body lay cold on the street. His wife standing catatonic above his lifelessness and their daughter’s cries filling the sordid alleyways with shrieks so deafening they fill you with unrelenting terror. Her brother, who was much younger, instinctively wants to take away their suffering; he runs to him with a towel in hand and tries desperately to clean off the blood in order to reach and uncover the bullet, which has made its way so deeply into his skin that it is now part of his insides.
As my grandfather returns home that night it is a terrifying and paralyzing thought to endure that not only has he seen it all before, he has lived it, and will continue to for the remainder of his life. It will take every stifled breath, and forceful chant from broken lungs, and pencils hidden in crevices in jail cells with poems written on smuggled paper to tell the story of those who live within the sky-high cinderblock walls of the prison state.