So You Were Born in a Dream

When I think trees, you think desert.

I do not think about trees at all.

When do the trees stop?

In Gaza, the trees stop at “the desert’s ebb and flow,” where green is the measure of cultivated expansion, yellow the “crawl[ing] back” of [End Page 226] “the bare surface of the earth.” When I write Negev, you say, you must use Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Naqab. Ten years ago, cloth hung from the few trees left on site, traces of the Bedouin “clinging on to the threshold of the desert” (Weizman, Conflict 64).

I tell my friend Javier I was born in the desert. I tell him how I ran from my mother once, and ran only so little before I reached al-Ain’s border with Oman, with nothing but an aisle of dirt separating it from my aunt’s back garden. It turns out that as I was running on the dirt, I was running along the threshold of the border(s). I returned there all my life without ever knowing the house was at the end of the country. It turns out that if you run without reaching the end of the hour and reach, instead, the end of the country, it can feel like reaching the end of a world.