Drifting

Boys here (shebab) always ask me about drifting; do you like speed? How fast have you gone in a car? Have you ever drifted? Drifting, as in, I don't even know how to describe it... driving fast and slamming on the breaks so your car moves as your tires are still struggling to stop.



I say no, no, this scares me. They say Aww, c'mon, and show me some scars- probably from something innocent like a dog bite or falling off their bike. But they claim the scars are from car accidents,never with details on how exactly they happened.

Once I was sitting on the balcony of a restaurant off Rafidia Street with two Palestinian friends, smoking shisha and eating ice cream- I could hear tires squealing somewhere below on the street. I looked down and saw one of the old, beaten up Fiat's that crowd the streets of Nablus zooming around the empty side streets below us. It would drive up the street, accelerating as fast as it could, then slam on the brakes, jolting the wheel so it the car "drifted" even just a minuscule amount. Then it would begin back down the street the same way and repeat the action. From so high above the car looked tiny and desperate, like it was searching for a way out of the street but couldn't find one.

What is drifting? Acceleration, then speed, abrupt deceleration, a strange and halting attempt to shift direction as the car attempts to stop. It seems stuck, ineffective, dangerous. Where does the impulse for such an implosive movement come from? Maybe it's simple: from any young boy's impulse for speed and danger, from popular movies, like *The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift*. Or maybe its some symptom of the feeling of isolation here in Palestine, isolation from the world that mostly ignores the situation here. From the physical entrapment of the occupation that doesn't allow free travel, barely allows access to Al Quds (Jerusalem).

Nablus is quiet and calm now, so it's easy to forget that in the near past it was subject to years of attacks, curfews, isolation from checkpoints. The the Old City, which I experience as a busy and beautiful market, was not that long ago systematically bombed and demolished. Not long ago, a trip to a nearby village would require passing through some fifteen checkpoints, endless waiting, being berated by soldiers. In 2002, a curfew imposed on the city lasted for 104 days- what comes from this experience of imprisonment? This isn't the Nablus I know but this is the Nablus that the shebab grew up in. What come from such an extreme lack of control?

Drifting isn't just recklessly driving- I mean sure, it's reckless and dangerous, but it's something more too. It's searching for a unique feeling, something akin to moving while standing still. Changing directions while the forces of deceleration work against you. Starting again, reckless speed, an abrupt and forced stop that you struggle against. Starting again.

But again, maybe I'm reading too much into it- maybe it's just boys wanting to drive fast.

Tiny pieces

I've been eating these chocolate eggs with toys inside, like Kinder but I buy the off-brand eggs that are only one shekel ($0.25). I like the toys in these better than the ones in Kinder, which seem somehow more ~advanced~, but they lack a certain quality. Something like honesty. They're trying too hard, like many things here do. I like the things that are forgetting to try, just getting by, working hard while they do it. These little toys in the off-brand eggs are working very hard to work, because somehow the small pieces never quite fit together. But once you force them into place, you have a small piece of tired success, nostalgia and fine-tuned pride, all in one small plastic toy.

These are things I see in Palestine everywhere. Like Ramallah: Ramallah is fun, but it's trying too hard to be something it isn't, something that's Western and works. There's always a discord there, like in the Kinder toys, because everyone knows there's something wrong here, so why are we pretending? I love Nablus because it doesn't try to be anything it's not; everything in Nablus is on the surface, easy to see. They work hard here and they seem tired, too tired to pretend to be anything other than proud and tired Palestinians.

I feel the same discord in the stares. Stares from the men here try so hard to achieve something beyond just looking. They ask you to look back, which you don't, because if you look back you're inviting something you don't want. The stares are trying so hard to be something that the men are not- something that reminds me of the worst parts of home. They are stares that make me want to be something I'm not. They make me want to be modest, more modest than I'm already striving to be in this place. They make me ashamed of my hair, because why should my hair attract these stares unless its something blasphemous.

If the men's stares make it all fall apart, the stares of the Palestinian women put it all back together. The women stare too, but in a completely different way. The stares of the women are the ones that I like, that make me feel whole instead of unsure. They stare only at times when they have to, and they stare with purpose, as if they're really trying to figure something out when they look at you. They make me question the stare I give back, because I know it doesn't compare in depth, in substance, but I'm getting better at returning them with confidence. There eyes have that same honesty and pride, the feeling that they know something is not quite working, but they have knowledge to force it into some quasi-working order.

I think the women are the ones who save Palestine from complete chaos. They are handed a world that is being town apart every day by the occupation, and they struggle to make sense of it. They save Palestine because if you can't do what they do, you're just stuck with a lot of tiny pieces that don't quite fit together.