for lamis
on the 77th anniversary of the nakba, i remember the palestinian girl’s hand in mine.
Ten years ago I sat in a concrete apartment in the Jalazone refugee camp in the Occupied West Bank. Along with a psychologist from the Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Torture, I listened to a young man recount what had recently happened to him: the Israeli army arrested him in the middle of the night on fabricated charges, imprisoned him, beat him. Weeks after the incident, he was dealing with insomnia, bedwetting, nightmares of the event, trouble concentrating, and a pervasive terror that this would all happen again.
I wrote about this experience for Mondoweiss, discussing the patient’s relationship to ongoing trauma—more commonly known as CTSD, or Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder. In this environment of military occupation and invasion, poverty, political disenfranchisement, and overcrowding, where Israelis torment Palestinians as a form of recreation, this patient’s fears of a fresh arrest were horrifyingly warranted.
What I didn’t write about was the girl who sat by my side. She hadn’t been there from the start. Maybe forty-five minutes into the appointment—which often felt more like a long, informal conversation between family friends—we took a break from therapy-talk and discussed in a mixture of English and Arabic the family’s living situation. The patient’s father talked to me about the painted mural on his wall beside the front door, of a flower-laden balcony overlooking the sea. As I studied it, we heard a series of harsh bangs on the metal door that echoed through the room. Having just discussed the patient’s arrest, we were all on edge; arrests could happen again at any moment, and every hair on my arm stood up.
When the door opened, there stood not an Israeli soldier in fatigues and night-vision goggles, but a thin girl with a mischievous smile on her face. We all laughed in relief to see this child with more presence and sense of self than anyone else in the room. She wore a kuffiyeh over her pinstriped school uniform, and stomped inside, throwing her backpack to the floor. She greeted everyone, went into the kitchen for a snack. Within moments she plopped herself down beside me on the family’s one couch, gazing at me—one of two heretofore unknown Americans drinking tea in her living room. She still wore that devilish smirk; she was ready to mess with me if I revealed myself to be an idiot. But soon her eyes filled with great curiosity. We began a halting bilingual conversation; she was eager to practice her English, and wrote her name, Lamis (LAH-MEES) in my notepad in a mix of Latin and Arabic characters.
I tried to focus on the conversation between the adults, but it had shifted to the news. The patient’s family shared some general information about the camp to my fellow American visitor and served us more tea. I turned back to Lamis.
In Arabic I asked her how old she was. I knew I asked the question correctly—I had asked it of several other Palestinian children I’d met and been answered—but she did not seem to understand me. Finally she said she was “maybe six.” Then she slid her hand into mine.
This is where the long disclaimer about Americans abroad befriending local children goes; where I explain why I never took pictures of any of the kids I met unless they asked me to. I did not ever want to use children as props or accessories in the photos—à la Humanitarians of Tinder—I’d show upon my return. All I’ll say now is that I have long found it to be exploitative and icky, and it’s part of the reason I have no photos of Lamis today, or anything else from that visit to Jalazone.
So I did not photograph our hands. I stayed there for another hour or so while Lamis continued to tell me things about school, about where she was really from in Palestine—somewhere in the countryside outside of Ramallah, the closest major city. When she tried to get her brother, the patient, to talk about their ancestral homeland, he kindly brushed her off. This was not the first time she had begged him for stories about their origins, and he was chain-smoking and trying to focus on the psychologist’s words.
Lamis loved my notepad. She drew a picture of herself, of the Palestinian flag. We wrote words in Arabic and she told me again about her English classes. I strain at my memory to remember what else we talked about.
As the conversation died down and the tea glasses were taken away, Lamis asked, “Will you come back tomorrow?”
I had not expected this. I’d come here to learn about trauma in a Palestinian refugee camp, to ask questions, to listen to the experiences of young men who had been brutalized by an invading, colonizing army. How anguish was political, how recounting traumatic events in the right company could go beyond simple catharsis, locating the speaker in a legacy of suffering that ironically provided the necessary scaffolding to cope with pain. “Go home and tell your President Obama about this,” the patient’s mother ordered me, and I promised I would do my best.
Lamis, who had wrapped my hand in both of hers, who scooched closer and closer until she was almost in my lap, told me wordlessly that I had gotten into something much larger and more complicated than a report on mental health. The trust in her eyes was so profound I had trouble meeting her gaze. I did not deserve Lamis’s trust, yet here she was: straight-backed, confident, mischievous, and barnacled onto me. She asked me again and again and again if I was coming back. I could recognize this as something like a transference, that it had little to do with me personally and everything to do with Lamis’s circumstances in the refugee camp, but somehow that made it even more painful to leave her.
If Lamis’s math was correct, she’s about sixteen now—the same age as Ahed Mohammad Rida Mereb was when she was forced to shield an Israeli army vehicle with her body in Jenin in 2022, and the same age as Loujain Osama Abdulraouf Mosleh, shot and killed at home by an Israeli sniper in Kafr Dan last fall. Actually, Lamis’s age is irrelevant, because Palestinian girls and women are subjected to imprisonment, rape, torture, and killing at all ages.
Having not taken photos during my trip to Jalazone, I have long since forgotten Lamis’s face. Yet I can still feel the weight of her small, soft hand in mine. Naming her age brings me back to that gray room with the florid mural. The banging of the metal door. The impish grin.
Here are my foolish wishes for Lamis on her sixteenth birthday: that she is celebrating with balloons and cake. That she is still playing tricks on her family, stomping into the house like she owns it. That she’s still taking up space in a world designed to erase her. That she never has to watch another member of her family handcuffed and abducted in the night; that she still wears her kuffiyeh with pride.
I made the decision several years ago to not have children. In the time and space afforded to me by not rearing my own, I hope to meet more girls like Lamis.
