Where are you Walid? Waiting for the bus to Ramallah

The memoirs of the released prisoner and former member of the Knesset, Basil Ghattas, which were titled (Prison Papers, from the Knesset Corridors to the Israeli Prisons), which he wrote during the two years he spent in prisons, revealed the decay and fading of the sense of humor and humor among the prisoners with the passage of time, and the absence of smiles from their faces, with the exception of the prisoner Walid Daqqa. Who maintained, despite the passage of 37 years in prison, his cheerful spirit, and every time he went out to the clinic or to the hospital to receive treatment for cancer that afflicted him, and someone asked him: Where are you going, Walid? He replied, "Waiting for the bus to Ramallah."

Walid Daqqa kept vomiting from prison until he broke his fangs that wanted to undermine him, devour him, and turn him into oblivion. He faced prison and its horrific conditions by preserving his mind, soul, and will until he defeated this prison and became free, a symbol and a cultural value present in every home and school.

Where are you Walid? Waiting for the bus to Ramallah, I packed all my belongings, my notebooks and my scribbles, my many letters, my clothes, my medicines and my serial numbers, ready to return in the transformed language from a chain to a horizon that can make the impossible not impossible, for language in prison is hope and song, an ax that destroys the wall and the system of control. It expands the patch of freedom so that the sun that I haven't seen in a long time greets me. If we only fought with dreams, the nightmare of the night would not last once.

I prepared everything, the house, the lane and the road I will take, the trees I planted and grew up, the color of roses on the balconies of memory, I greeted my family, my neighbors, my school and my first steps, returning from prison carrying a stone from my heart and a song, these are my memories that do not need new historians to discover me alive Or dead, or petrified in a military archive or library, I do not need someone to reproduce me as a great skeleton without a voice and a tongue. Salt, absence, cancer and forgetfulness did not kill me. I am on the bus to Ramallah.
Do not be surprised, I am on the way to Ramallah. I circumvented prison, death, and doctors dressed as a jailer. My voice was jumping from cell to cell. The voice is a living being with resonance, life, and rhetoric. It makes sense in the epic of dignity and pride. My voice is freedom, and it is enough that it leaks. From the cracks of the door, the executioners hear it. My voice has a hand, a pen, a semen, a message and a book. My voice guides me to the dates of meeting my country, because the homeland is not a building of stone or an account number.

The Zionist occupation state has closed all entrances to Ramallah, erected barriers and barricades. Walid Daqqa is coming in his stories that built all the demolished and looted regions in time and space. The borders of his homeland are his true existence. He returns to imagination, smell, emotion and synonyms, and with breathless steps, he returns to his wife, Sana, and his child. The beautiful Milad, his shadow embracing the light of the accelerating time, making him the whole time present, present, and the pulses igniting in his chest. Walid returns to curse the emptiness, the howling of steel, and the cold trance that suffocates the bodies of prisoners.

Where are you Walid? Waiting for the bus to Ramallah, the prisoner's freedom is the rhythm of running through empty streets, the rhythm of people rising from the silence and dust, the rhythm of the wind as it trains you to fly over the coast and Carmel for all your wings and senses.

Walid Daqqa is late, everyone is waiting for him, this bus stops for a long time at every prison, a pile of handcuffs and batons carried by the Nahshon men responsible for transporting prisoners, distributing them to all prisons, hospitals, cemeteries and cold refrigerators, moving from the Negev to Ramla, it is the journey of hell in the closed busta Which takes more than ten hours, but you, Walid, are on the outskirts of Ramallah. Twenty checkpoints or twenty settlements are fine. A wall wraps around a wall so that your body becomes another street that cuts land, bulldozes a place, minces meat and kills a tree. That's okay, the city. It appears in front of you, even if it seems small from between the grilles. This wall was not in your old memories. It's okay. Rearrange the pictures. The smell of burnt tires at the entrance to Beit El. Children throwing stones. It's okay. Sana is waiting for you, so open the window if you can to see your dream as a star on Her shimmering bosom, look good you see her, drops the ambiguous puns and masks.

In installments, they wanted to kill you, one at a time, and you do not know which station the bus will stop at, in your village, Baqa al-Gharbiya, or in Ramallah, in a frozen refrigerator or in a cemetery? You only know what your flowing river says in your self and your depths. The body is absent a lot, but the word is not absent. This is your religion and your faith, a branch in the earth and a root in the sky. Between death and life are my two birth children. Praise be to God, for they were completely filled with love in this world and the hereafter.

I am waiting for the bus to go to Ramallah. I bring to you people the notebooks of love and resistance, the secret of the spectrum, the secret of the oil, and the secret of the sword. The triple secrets of the coming generations. I met them in the interrogation rooms and in the demonstration, in the lesson class. Our offspring, who are extended in history, culture, knowledge and identity, are returning to you, not through bridges or permits as tourists without citizenship, returning to my beloved and my country. My blood never left the earth even after you cut me into two halves: half in prison, and half at home, the first and the second jostling and not dividing. physically, consciously and imaginatively.

In the military court, they accused me of smuggling mobile devices. I immediately confessed and hit the table. I told them: I want to talk to Sana and my daughter Milad. This is my human, legal and social right guaranteed by all the charters of the world. I am not a ghost to see her from behind a glass. I want to dictate to my wife the name of our next son. And my fourth story, letter by letter, whisper by whisper, before they raided my prison room and broke my fingers and pens. It is enough for me to write about tomorrow so that I can reach tomorrow shortly, and it is enough for me to write about water to quench my thirst in this desert.

I am on the bus to Ramallah. The doctors have completed all the necessary examinations. They carried me tied to a cylinder and an oxygen tube. They removed from my lungs the seventh direction from which I breathe. They confiscated my pens and words and put a device over my mouth. They completed all their work and took me to the bus and hung over my head for an hour to die. They refused to leave my friends in the Ramla hospital clinic, Khaled Al-Shawish, Mansour Muqada, Nahed Al-Aqraa and Moatasem Raddad. They refused to take with me parts of their amputated bodies or their hot cough.

Where are you Walid? Wait for the bus to Ramallah, do not believe that the bus will go to Barzlai Hospital or Ramla Clinic, the bus is on its way to Ramallah, and there I will lay a wreath at the tomb of the martyr Yasser Arafat, and visit the family of the martyr Nasser Abu Hamid, I will visit the house of Nael Al-Barghouti and convey greetings to my family Marwan Al-Barghouti and Ahmed Saadat, I will visit the family of the blind prisoner Alaa Al-Bazian in Jerusalem, and tell him that I am not blind, but rather we are a choir of blind people. I will sit near the lions in Al-Manara Square in Ramallah, shaking hands with all friends and loved ones. The bus will take me to Nablus, the lions' den, and to Jenin and the house of Sheikh Khader Adnan. I write on the walls of the camps: The camp is a history of nostalgia from uprooting to existence. Thanks to the Jenin camp, which breaks the dull light from the lost margin into a dense presence like a clash. From sidewalk to sidewalk, I saw a human flag crossing the line between here and there.

I have arrived in Ramallah now, I have broken the parallel circular time in prison, my heart has not dried up as they thought, nor the ink, I said that the Palestinian realist defeats the Zionist superstition, and that the spiritual and mental time of the prisoners defeats the time of Zionist falsehood and their sinful crimes, the tank chasing the Jerusalemite boys in Sheikh Jarrah and Bab Al-Amoud only haunts ideas, Palestinian flags, murals, our deep history, and the sacred meaning of steadfastness and prayer.

Yes, I arrived in Ramallah, the jailer did not arrest me, and the capos did not incriminate me. I fought internally and externally until the wall of the prison broke down on myself and I became free. I got off the iron bus. I greeted the West Bank and Nazareth. I still know the distances and directions and I do not get lost in it. Geography, demography, and paved or bumpy roads. I still memorize the names of the sites in Arabic and Canaanite. I found a solution between the dialectic of the relationship between the cultural, political, nationality, and identity, when mixed with the color of the sacrificial keffiyeh.