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Tasting the Sky: 

A Palestinian Childhood

by Ibtisam Barakat

Ibtisam Barakat

In the Historical Note in the beginning of the memoir, Ibtisam explains that, “A genuine solution must allow not only freedom and security for both Israelis and Palestinians but also room for both peoples to heal from having been victimized as well as heal from having victimized others.”

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On June 5, 1967, the six-day war started; Ibtisam was three-and-a-half years old. The Israeli warplanes began to target Palestinian homes. Her family turned off the lights in their beloved house, left and hid in the water trench. But after an array of bullets frightened Barakat’s mother, and after a group of Palestinians who were walking in exodus to Jordan traveled by and told how Israeli troops would soon be checking the houses and slaying anyone who remained, her family decided to leave. Barakat was then separated from her family in the rush and mass of people that marched to Jordan. With one foot bare and shoeless, Barakat kept walking with strangers, spending the night alone before finding her family the next morning.

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After being forced to leave Ramallah, Ibtisam stayed at a school in Jordan that was set up for refugee families. In the schoolhouse, she found a piece of chalk and this is where her mother first drew Alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. Barakat developed an instant fondness and sense of closeness to the letter she describes as looking like “a Popsicle, a dandelion, a sunflower, a streetlamp, or a man with a hat on his head, like [her] dad in winter.”

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In Alef, Ibtisam found a likeness of herself, saying that like her, Alef is a refugee who goes “from paper to paper.” During her reading in San Antonio, Barakat expressed the belief that we deepen our understanding by sharing stories. Her early love for language, inspired by her friendship with Alef, allowed Barakat to share the story of her Palestinian childhood.

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And as a young girl, Barakat kept a diary. The true one, she said, was in her mind. The other one she wrote for her mother, knowing her mother would read it. Of the journal Ibtisam said, “…[my mother and I] meet there to say the things we cannot say out loud.”

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As refugees, Barakat’s family spent two weeks in a shelter in Jordan, one month in Hamameh’s kitchen (a fellow refugee), one month in a classroom shelter, and two months in Marka before returning briefly to the house in Ramallah. But after finding bullets in the house, the family did not feel the same sense of safety. Even so, Ibtisam and her brothers’ fear of the Israeli soldiers who trained near their house in Ramallah turned into curiosity as the days passed. She and her brothers went closer to the soldiers, watched them jump from planes in training, searched their trenches after they had left for the day, climbed the barbed-wire fences, and dragged the target-practice cardboard people with bullet holes out to examine. The three children even pretended to be soldiers by imitating them.

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In her memoir, Barakat describes a very simple but loving and creative childhood; a childhood in which she sprouted like a flower, even under threats of violence, and fear during the occupation. Her brothers made kites from reed stalks, brown paper, dough, and torn cloth. Her mother poured soap bubbles on the one-room house in Marka for her and her brothers to slide around, in play. But life seemed to also have a simple delicacy. Her father planted spearmint, tomatoes, eggplants, zucchini, onions, and melons in the family gardens. And Barakat recalls the simple yet colorful things of the house: the brown sewing machine, the green bed, the red and yellow straw carpet, the honey-colored Formica® cupboard, and the sky blue thermos. Instead of a watch, Ibtisam’s mother determined time by the sun and the lengths of shadows. And when it was time for Ibtisam to attend school, her mother made her first school dress and sewed a school bag with a giraffe neck that extended from the top. The grandmothers, the older Palestinian women, wore long black dresses with hand-embroidered flowers that indicated the town each woman was from. Tradition persevered and family stayed strong in simplicity.

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Ibtisam expressed a special affinity to the animals that peppered her childhood during the occupation. But through each animal, she again had to let go of something she loved. In Al-Salt city, at the orphanage for women and children, Ibtisam found a baby goat she named Souma that she “embraced…with [her] whole heart.” When she, and her mother and brothers, moved from the orphanage, she had to leave Souma behind. She was saddened but understood when Un Muhammad explained that Souma would also be sad if forced to leave home. Ibtisam then expressed feeling troubled when the stray and starving dogs that entreated the camp refugees were shot because she realized that they, too, were merely seeking refuge. And later, she developed a child’s friendship with a baby goat, Zuraiq, pretending she was a teacher and Zuraiq was her pupil, though he only “ate the paper.”

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And it was during exile, Barakat explained, when she came to understand the word “imagine.” She realized she could see anything she wanted at any time.

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