Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood

Part 1, “A Letter to No One” is both a letter to the reader and to Ibtisam herself as she processes events that prompt her to consciously remember her traumatic childhood. By opening her memoir at a pivotal moment in her teenage life—the day she was detained by soldiers—Ibtisam establishes suspense and tension for the reader, drawing them into her daily life of fear and danger in Israeli-occupied Palestine. Ibtisam’s first-person narrative, with its lyrical prose and use of figurative language, quickly engages readers, establishing a sense of closeness, and allowing them to share Ibtisam’s intimate thoughts and feelings. In this section, Ibtisam introduces people and influences that shape her worldview and begins building themes of the power of language, loss, and the effects of war.

Ibtisam is a wordsmith: She reveals both her love of words and the importance of language in her life and, by extension, its importance to humankind, developing the theme Finding Refuge: The Healing Power of Words. The free verse poems that open and close Part 1 encapsulate Ibtisam’s feelings of fear and repression and her hope for freedom and home. These poems are rich with alliteration and assonance and add to the lyricism of her memoir. Ibtisam frequently uses similes and metaphors to create vivid sensory impressions for the reader. Writing that the Israeli military compound is “like a carcass of a giant animal that died a long time ago” (5) and comparing her fear to “a blizzard inside [me]” (4), help the reader visualize Ibtisam’s experiences and connect to her emotions.

Writing is a means for Ibtisam to connect to others in the world: It fosters communication and an exchange of ideas. Ibtisam’s pen pals are a lifeline to the world outside her repressed life in Palestine. She refers to her post office box as her own “country” and writing as a balm for her lack of freedom. Writing and communicating with others around the world gives Ibtisam a sense of independence. Writing also helps release Ibtisam’s emotions. She feels she cannot speak her feelings out loud despite wanting to let them “escape like birds” (5). Ibtisam communicates her feelings about and to her mother by writing poems in a journal she knows her mother reads. It becomes a medium “to say the things we cannot say out loud” (12). Writing, even in her mental journal, allows for honest, measured expression.

Outside her writing, Ibtisam reveals that she cannot fully express herself within her family or in her country. She compares her mother to a soldier, suggesting both are “enemies of freedom” and that she is “doubly occupied” (12). Her father attempts to control and protect her, but Ibtisam has outgrown his influence, partially because of her education.

Developing the theme of The Poison Inside: The Lasting Effects of War, Ibtisam follows her fearful mother’s advice to be invisible and ignorant of the volatile political situation and refuses to lift the “curtain” that conceals her childhood. She does not want to face the losses and trauma of her past. Ibtisam embraces forgetting. Ibtisam is deeply affected by the wartime violence and repression in her country, which manifest in a feeling that she has no home and “no place” in the world. She comments that Palestine is “broken.” Israeli snipers watch from rooftops, indifferent, and violently suppress Palestinian dissent. Ibtisam’s fear is ever present, “under [her] feet like a land mine” (3). Ibtisam ultimately decides Mother is wrong and that remembering her past will reconnect her to the home of her heart.

Education is vitally important to Ibtisam. She aspires to go to college. Although her father feels Ibtisam’s education has usurped his authority over her, even he does not truly want to criticize it. Ibtisam absorbs ideas from books and finds reading as empowering as writing. She refers to two books that her English pen pal and she have both read and admired: Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift and Emil and the Detectives (1929) by Erich Kästner. Gulliver’s voyages are social satire, illuminating the weaknesses of humanity, while Emil is a young student who tracks a thief through Berlin. Ibtisam relates to these characters because, like her, Gulliver is “not free,” and both characters “form fond friendships with strangers” (10). Her connection to these characters reveals Ibtisam’s desire to bridge gaps, communicate with others, and find commonality among strangers, which are all ways of working toward peace.

Ibtisam dedicates her memoir in part to the letter “Alef,” which she notes is the first letter of the “sister” languages, Arabic and Hebrew. Her observation suggests that the languages’ common roots reflect a deeper unity that should transcend political conflict. People, like the languages, have more in common than not.