CPTnet
July 12, 2004

HEBRON REFLECTION: Queens of heaven

by Maia Williams

Memory is strange. It tells the story the way the eye takes in
information,one blink, one frame at a time.

Christy Bischoff and I watched from the edge of the sidewalk at the Beit
Romano checkpoint as six women dressed like the queens of heaven in blacks,
burgundies and pinks were stopped by two female soldiers. The eldest woman
in the group turned her back to the soldiers when they shouted to the women
to stand still.

I am constantly amazed at how women teach women to resist.

Twice a month, during the school year, I went to the University Graduates
Union and spoke English with a class of 14-year-old women who call
themselves the 'English Club.' The young women wore gray tunics, their
school uniform, and hijabs, as a symbol of their Muslim faith. They
teetered on the edge of understanding an authentic response to being young,
female, and educated. Being a teenager is never easy, especially when you
live on the outskirts of war.

One of the female soldiers at Beit Romano took the women's identification
cards and searched their handbags, and called one of the women to go into a
small gray metal freestanding room built at the checkpoint. The woman who
had turned her back to the soldiers called to Christy and me.

Maya Angelou writes that she knows why the caged bird sings.

I will never forget the color of the air, indigo and white, as two of the
young women in the English Club sang Umm Kulthum's classic Arabic songs.
Last year one of their teachers was a suicide bomber. They wailed melodies
through personal pain that too many young women know.

There are no outskirts to a war.
We walk towards the queens of heaven. The woman who called to us asked me
to go with the women into the metal room. Inside was a map of Hebron and a
small Torah. The room opened to the Beit Hadassah settlement. Yeshiva boys
stopped to stare as the women lifted up their dresses to their shoulders and
the female soldier ran her hands along their undergarments.

The last woman the soldiers searched was the woman who had turned her back
to the soldiers. She was robust with pregnancy and spoke to me, not to the
soldier, as the soldier told her to empty her handbag and lift her beaded
dress. Her mobile phone rang and she spoke to her son who was home alone.
The soldier ordered her to turn off the phone. She kept talking.

One of the young women in the English Club said, "Nobody wants to hear our
stories."

I don't know why the caged bird sings. I am just grateful that it does. It
wakes us from our walking slumber and constantly reminds us there aren't any
outskirts to a war and we are here on this earth to be called.