‘Where I Write Now’: Maryam Al Khateeb

Where I Write Now

By Maryam Al Khateeb

Translated by Wiam El-Tamami

In the room where I sleep, I’ve created a portal to the sky    Every night, I prepare the moon, the stars   I arrange the branches of the olive tree around my window so I can sleep

This, my beloved window    I would sit in front of it to gaze at the composition of the sky    the moon    the olive branches as they slip into my room then run away

My window of magic   On a moonlit night I decided to put my pillow under the window    and sleep on the moon

I gazed at it   it gazed at me   My mother always found it strange, that I sleep this way

Across from the window   upside down   where a pillow should be I put my books, papers, pens, and sleep

This is the last image I have of my window before the sky stole its face     I trusted that my window would never turn the color of the sky to the color of missiles and blood    I woke up surrounded by hellfire, the olive branches wilting before my eyes     Everything changed

I leave my papers behind and run

Since that morning, I’ve been waiting for the sky every day

The windows have changed     Every morning I wake up in terror   Where am I?   Where is the sky?

The war machine reached my home in the first moments, and I left      My window was broken my room morphed into an abandoned place    eaten by dust    I left my pens behind    Now I write on the walls of houses along the road of my displacement       and I know that they will wilt, I mean, turn into rubble

After some time, I return to the room     I turn it into a place of displacement for a family with ten children     Their mother is afraid for them to sleep under the window

Every day I ask the oldest child for permission to come into my room     to wipe the dust off my pens    and take one

I take it and alone together we sit under the sky    on the roof of our half-destroyed home

I write to the sound of the drones and missiles    training my mind to imagine    testing its ability to deny everything it sees

I turn the missile-ridden sky into a home filled with stars and soft lights

I turn graves into chairs for those who have become tired of the road

and the airplane into an olive branch     slipping in and out of my room

I turn my mother’s voice warning me about the shrapnel flying around the roof of our home     dangerous for me     into the sound of her voice calling me to cook with her my favorite dish    the sumagiyya

I turn my pen into a magic wand     transforming all this devastation    into something else

Something that breathes life

I left the pen, the rooftop of our home, the window of my room, the ten children, the city

And now I’m in a city where everything is real and does not need my pen to transform it And now I’m afraid to sleep next to the window with pens under my head

Every day I wake to the sounds of the radio, my father heaving a sigh about the awful state of things, the frying pan in the kitchen as my mother prepares breakfast from the leftovers of war, my little sister conspiring to burn my pens so that we can eat bread, the noise of the airplanes, the screaming coming from our neighbors’ home under threat of bombardment, the smell of gunpowder, and a sky not blue but red

Every day I see only that I am a stranger here    even in death

Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb is a dentistry student, poet, oud player, translator, and community activist in the local community. She was a participant in the Hult Prize, an annual competition for ideas solving pressing social issues, such as food security, water access, energy, and education. She works as a writer and makes videos, producing content about Palestine.