Enter Apartheid
Between cacti
and boulders, the car trudges
through the bypass roads,
carrying university students
through the refugee camps’ narrow alleys,
its residents assembled
on both sides of the street,
bougainvillea branches
framing each house.
Above small shops, signs declare
the villages’ names
like protest banners: Jaffa butcher shop.
Bisan pharmacy.
Al-Quds supermarket.
Our universities can be found
in cities that don’t appear
on street signs; we reach them
through lanes that don’t exist on maps.
In the minibus en route to Abu Deis,
the driver is always lost in thought.
The wheels speed down the asphalt,
the surrounding mountains as white
as peeled almonds.
With a student on every seat,
the minibus is a portable classroom.
In the mirror: the driver’s eyes.
Between the mountains:
the settlements.
In the barrenness, a bulldozer
paves angular roads, right out
of the settlement’s mouth.
We cross from one checkpoint
to another, traversing streets
that glimmer like ivory.
As the wall follows us,
surrounds us, the poem
is in my head.
The silence in the car
is the same silence
that fills theaters
when the protagonist dies—
the same quiet
that surrounds mass graves.
Cars pour out of the settlement to our side
and turn onto rectilinear streets
leading to Jerusalem,
Haifa, or Jaffa.
The driver comes
and goes every day
on the frontier
between a people with weapons
and a people with minibuses
stuffed with students.
And when the street is free of cars,
the driver speeds away.
For a moment
we feel like we’re flying—
the wheels rising
above all this debris.
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Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet and playwright who has published poetry books, a novel, two plays, and a children’s poetry book. An English-language translation of Enter World (Almutawassit Publishing House) will be published by Graywolf Press this year. She teaches at Birzeit University.
Brian McPartlon attended the School of Visual Arts in New York. Exhibitions include Pie Projects in Santa Fe and the International Art Museum of America in San Francisco. Press includes LandEscape Art Review, Magazine 43, Dream Noir, Arkana, and Pasatiempo.
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