Biddu By Summer Awad

By The Rising Phoenix Review on June 28, 2024

Biddu

"Israel is imprisoning the villagers inside of a wall, and is grabbing their land. Biddu, and the ten villages around it, are allowed only one option – to sit quietly and watch as the fruit orchards that they have nourished from one generation to another, turn into the real-estate reserves of the Jerusalem corridor."
– Tanya Reinhart, The Road Map to Nowhere: Israel/Palestine since 2003

I am eating a fig
straight off the tree
outside the olive press.
Samar is crying
and smiling, Samar
who shares my name
in the other transliteration.
And now I am smiling
and crying, too, fig juice drying
sticky on my fingers, tears
drying salty on my face and neck.
The fig tastes perfect and wholesome.
We are crying about the hospitality
of a dispossessed people,
from whom everything
has been taken and how they still
give everything away.

This is because in my other hand,
I am holding a liter of olive oil,
freshly funneled into my plastic water
bottle, the liquid gold of this first October
press. We watched it happen, the inaugural
droplets, licked it from our fingers, anointed
one another, skin glowing in the setting sun,
adjourning a day spent plucking at ancient trees.
We gathered up shekels in hushed tones, guided
as we were by our culture of compensation.
Our host only scoffed, looking pained, and ordered
every last vessel on our bus be filled;
he was not having any of our money.

We are saying ashamed but grateful goodbyes
when Ata spots the fig tree. When we ask
his permission to pick, his reply reminds
us that a tree's gifts are not his to give.

Now I know why Daddy has always wistfully
and loudly remembered tiin, their abundance,
the way they ask nothing of you
but succulent enjoyment. It is not lost
on me that the name of this strangled village,
from where this oil flows like a blessing,
is Biddu – like the Arabic for he wants.

Click here to listen to an audio clip.

By Summer Awad

Biography:

Summer Awad calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an end to unconditional US support for Israel. Summer is a Palestinian-American poet, essayist, and playwright from Knoxville, Tennessee. She is a third-year MFA candidate in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. She received a 2023 LANDO Grant for migration and immigration writing from the de Groot Foundation. Her poems have most recently appeared in Adi Magazine and her nonfiction in J Journal.