Samia Costandi holds a PhD from McGill Faculty of Education, Montreal, Canada; her areas of research (and teaching) are: philosophy of education, feminist epistemology and pedagogy (identity, narrative inquiry, auto-biography, and autoethnography) multicultural education, mythology, culture, and values in education. Her BA in Philosophy from Beirut University College sent her on a quest that was not completed until she procured her Masters and doctorate from McGill Faculty of Education in Montreal, Canada to which she emigrated in 1988. Prior to that she had taught for five years in Beirut at her alumni (BUC) under the excruciating circumstances of civil war while simultaneously completing a diploma in Education with a focus on Teaching English as a Second Language. Teaching under the threat of bombing and shelling moulded her into the kind of teacher she is. Besides raising her two sons in Montreal, she completed a Master of Arts degree in Philosophy of Education in 1994 with distinction while concurrently teaching courses in philosophy of education and multicultural education at the Faculty of Education at McGill. Samia volunteered in NGOs that worked on eliminating human rights injustices and abuse against women and children for years in Montreal and was honored with the Helen Prize for Women in 1999 for merging her academic work with her community work. Dr. Costandi began teaching at McGill Faculty of Education as an appointed lecturer in 1991 and continued until 2002. She has also taught at diverse colleges in Montreal. The focus of her doctoral dissertation was on narrative as a tool for the construction of knowledge and values in education; in it she explored her own teaching, research, and activism in the context of her own complex circumstances: Between the Arab Middle East and the West:The Life and Work of a Palestinian Canadian teacher through Narrative Inquiry.

Memory transports me to a day in the summer of 1978 when a building crumbled, when I was asked to leave Beirut with my nine-month old son to Athens for a break from the madness that was the civil war, when the savage images of my neighbors, two hundred fifty some of them, being butchered were imprinted on my memory indelibly! Depressed, defeated and imploding, I watched those families wither away under the rubble on television, before they flattened it all, before they buried the jasmine, before they counted the departed.  Between the crumbling of that building and the crumbling of our Palestinian houses in Gaza as bulldozers clench their teeth to devour the young and the innocent are three full decades.  Yet the memory is fresh and the images are ironically pristine. Clear as the spring water the robbers continue to steal, clear as the morning sun drying the lost harvest.

The Eternal Recurrence of the Same: Is that what Nietzsche called it? And how not to resist staring at a point in the wall, never wavering, challenging the mundane concept of time?  The images haunt me, haunt us. Three thousand something bodies strewn like scorched wildflowers all over the camp: Shatilla, September, 1982: the Palestinian Stalingrad except that people fought with their muscles and bones, their teeth and their hair.  Their transfixed stares watch us as we the Arabs sink into more political debauchery and fail to condemn the butchers.

Palestinian memory can sometimes be short, especially when it is constrained by political necessity, real politick, is that what our government calls it?  Let us be pragmatic!  The Palestinian street romances the stones and the rocks, the olive trees and the old trees.  Palestinian blood quenches the thirst of our yearning land. The colloquial dialect refuses transformation on the American red carpet into a dialect of Israeli necessity!  The younger generations continue to be more passionate about their land, excavating the memories, documenting the daily massacres, refusing the rhetoric of defeat and humiliation, resurrecting the olive trees, one hundred thousand of them that have been plucked by those clenched teeth – again, the civilized world sees no need for olive trees. As it sees no need for the Brazilian rain forest...  As it sees no need to liberate thousands of female children in bondage to sex slavery in South East Asia....  It is all part of the same paradigm: the paradigm of colonization, de-humanization and defeat.

The Israeli democracy needs to erect highways that sever villages in two: the un-touchables and the unreachables. Those who yearn and those who thirst; those who die and those who die watching!  Those who subsist and those who starve. The mothers and the fathers, the children and the parents, the maternal cousins and the paternal cousins.  Oh but for the wisdom of Solomon.  The real mother is crying out loud: Take the baby but do not sever it in half.  Let me die but do not feed my body to the vultures.  Let me die but give me a decent burial. Take my house but do not remove me from it, for it is better for me to die inside it than die inside me, than to be a refugee four times on my own land.

The drums are beating.  They beat louder than ever.  At this point they are suffocating my thoughts, destroying my eardrum, bashing my neurons, kneading my cerebral grey matter.  I am everywhere and nowhere. I live in the empty shells that weapons eject while factories churn millions more death machines to enable the masters to erect villas in Los Angeles and New York.  And London and Paris.  And many more capitals and cities.  I live within my enforced Diaspora in the morgue where the wails of mothers shatter the walls.  Nightmares overwhelm me of chemicals infecting the seashore and contaminating the lungs of children.  I jump from my sleep sweating about the phosphorus and napalm bombs. Yes, the “Napalm” bombs that Israelis used and continue to use in Lebanon and in Palestine: the napalm that dances on the skin of the young and helpless.  The appetite of the dominant powers is all-pervading, it is as huge as the insensitivity that pervades affluent cultures.  And they wonder from whence comes this debauchery?  From affluence and ignorance, from the desensitized souls and the deadened hearts. From the deafening of human conscience, the loss of humane values and compassion.  

There is nothing more painful than slow death when time is being kept by the invading gatekeeper.  A few days ago, five hundred people were killed in Iraq, five hundred in one fell swoop.  I feel so small and diminished when I hear news about the toll of death around me. I feel guilty that I am alive. I feel estranged from my own capacities. And when the death machine stops churning bodies in Iraq, in one decade or two, in one century or two (?), what will the Iraqis find left behind after the vultures, all the vultures, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern, have left? They will be searching for their identities in the cemeteries, in the mass graves, in the destroyed museums where the American Abrams and the British Challengers stood passively aside as a once proud culture and civilization was being robbed and ravaged of its history.

Woe is me. Woe are we here in the Middle East, in the Arab World, in the World at large.  We have not yet begun to realize the minutest details about the consequences of the actions of the powerful and the dominant, for if we did, we would be going out into the streets on masse, in millions, in tens of millions.  The fabric of human society is being shredded slowly but surely around our globe.  We do not understand how quickly the heart-beats of this globe are waning away.  Multinationals and multi-technologies erect virtual realities around us everywhere, virtual realities that delude us.  We have such a false sense of safety, such a fake sense of security.  What giant is going to wake us up from this horror of horrors, this terror of terrors called the perpetual war machine of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism?  What kind of humongous superhuman effort will it take to do something substantial enough to stop this melt-down of cultures, human lives, ecology, and global life in general?

I miss Birzeit, my mother’s village in the West Bank…I miss my childhood, I miss climbing my favorite fig tree and picking the honey-dipped fruit.  I miss my secluded moments perched up on my tree watching the sunset and articulating my first words of poetry.  I miss playing with my cousins who have now become fathers and mothers like me all over the world, in multiple continents.  When did we grow up? Where have the years gone? Why did we not spend some time together sharing anecdotes, cups of tea, and jokes about rearing children?  We stand dispersed, frozen in time, ashamed of the loss of innocence, ashamed of our unrelenting yearnings for a homeland that is so vividly portrayed in our memories.

I miss Beirut as I visit it today, now, as I come to spend a short vacation with my parents. As I write this piece. I am walking the streets and shedding a tear at every corner. The huge uncut trees and wild dandelions know me well.  I yearn for the bliss we experienced as children where within a one-square kilometer our cousins, my brothers and I merrily jumped from mom’s house to my aunt’s house.  I miss the innocence of my green beloved Lebanon and the way its sea kissed its mountains; I miss its songs and its mythology before it became the backyard of Israeli weapon experimentation.  Before its young died as they resisted the vicious twelve-hour bombardment in 1982.  Before the multiple massacres, before the massacres of Qana in 1996 and in 2006. Before the Israelis erected the prisons in the South.  Before they tortured the young men and women who loved the land and loved freedom. Before the 33 day war last summer where venom spewed from Israeli jet fighters, venom the like of which one has never seen in this day and age.  I miss Lebanon before it became the pawn of Arab and international political fights, before it became the junkie of the Middle East.

I need permission to visit my grandfather's house in Birzeit.  I need permission to take my children, my grown children to see their grandmother’s house where my grandfather, the mayor of Birzeit, conducted the affairs of the village.  I speak to my sons about their grandmother's and grandfather's childhoods more than I speak of my own.  It is as if mine was an ephemeral childhood, full of love, but shifting in terms of place and time, in terms of the legitimacy of it all – it felt transitory, we were simply waiting in Lebanon, in Beirut, to all go back. My father refused to buy land in Lebanon, "What heresy?" he would say to my aunt when she suggested it.  We will go back to our own lands eventually.  We are all in transition here, just give us a little more time, it is going to be resolved, and the negotiations seem to be taking off!

And what of my father’s birthplace, Jaffa?  That has become the unmentionable topic in Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.  Palestine proper, the 1948 Palestinian lands that were systematically and meticulously ethnically cleansed: 531 cities and villages, 800,000 Palestinians – power to Ilan Pape for documenting all that beyond the shadow of a doubt (2006).  From the mouths of perpetrators.

As a child, I wavered and hesitated before divulging that I was Palestinian. I was ashamed of our refugee status.  Then came the Palestinian revolution and I was filled with pride: I began to announce it to the world at large in a strong and loud voice: in 1969 at Hyde Park, and later at the Institute for Palestine Studies, and later on in Canada as a Canadian activist for human rights, for the rights of Palestinians and Lebanese and all oppressed groups.  Later, I became more nuanced and sophisticated; I began to choose my battles, to couch the facts and feelings in academic and “appropriate” language.

The reality is that I cannot and will not fight this anymore: whether I am a citizen of Canada, a citizen of the world, an educator, a writer, a feminist, an activist, whatever, wherever and whoever I am: As I grow older I yearn more for my childhood, for my beautiful, colorful, happy moments in time and place, in an un-occupied Birzeit, in a peaceful Beirut, with my maternal and paternal cousins, with my brothers, with my parents, uncles and aunts. I will never cease yearning…I will feed my shameless nostalgic, passionate and powerful yearning…I will never cease dreaming of my homeland, and when my children fulfill my wish and carry me there in a casket, my soul will dance as my body embraces the earth and the wildflowers.

And millions of others share that with me, for another generation, and another, and another…