Amto remembers Hussein, Aljibbayn 1983

Kamelya Omayma Youssef

                      ^{Peace will come when the Arabs will love
                      their children more than they hate us. 
                                      —Golda Meir, 
                                       served as prime minister of the
                                               colonial entity in Palestine from 
                                       1969–1974 
       
                  There will never be peace 
                 with people who don’t want peace. 
                                        —Baba}

When the martyr died in my arms,

I pleaded in the name of the prophet,

in the name of Mariam and their Messiah,

let me go, let me go.

They came and wanted to abduct the young man,

accusing him of smuggling guns.

I stood in the commander’s way.

He hit me and threw me

to the ground.

They came to get our boy.

They tried to put him in the car.

They couldn’t.

They couldn’t put him in the car.

They couldn’t.

I was there.

I was screaming for the boy’s relatives to come.

They tried to take a boy, the son of my uncle,

the son of my land, away.

Me, I don’t accept. I don’t accept.

The balad gathered.

All the villages came together.

Everyone. The big, the small, the well, the ill,

the one holding a child on her hip.

The betrayers were armed and they had their cars

but the people were not afraid.

I am giving you the abridged version.

They had beat the boy until he leaned against the wall

immobile.

The commander got a gun from the car, they call it an M16.

The boy against the wall, they stabbed him with the bayonet,

and sprayed bullets at the feet of

the people, the women, the children, the men.

They got in the car and tried to leave but

all of our people had rocks in their hands.

The boys of our village blocked the road with their cars.

Where there was not a car, the people put boulders.

The men who killed our boy ran on their feet

to the village next to us.

The next day they sent their commanding officer, an Israeli,

to investigate the killing.

We all stood in protest by the wall where the boy was killed.

We were occupied. They occupied us.

Because I was there, because I held the dying boy in my arms,

the commanding officer came to speak to me.

I grabbed him, the Israeli, by the collar

and pulled him close

and said:

From here, you leave.

We are not hiding anyone here.

From here, you leave. Leave.

We’ll sell the baby to buy ourselves guns

and you will leave from here.

He said:

You are crazy. You are crazy. Crazy. Crazy.

You know he doesn’t know how to speak Arabic well.

Everyone pleaded that I let him go.

Praise the god of your god, ya bint Abu Ali,

it was Qassem Akil Abu Nazih who said that.

I did not do this because I want people to praise me.

I have inside me a need to tell the truth.

Why did our son have to die?

We had a funeral.

We buried our dead.

Above were their jets.

We were occupied.

The funeral was a funeral and it was a protest.

When they came to take the boy and then killed him,

and they ran away on their feet

to the next village,

our boys set their car on fire.

It burned.

They waited a month to exact their return.

I was pregnant at the time.

The martyr’s name was Hussein.

Tell them his name. Hussein Abedelhassan Akil

from the village of Jibbayn. His mother is Badriye.

Everyone there knows.

They kidnapped three boys

and put them in prison. Your uncle among them.

And what about Salim?

Over there, oh soul of mine, he arrived at the door of Ansar

to free the prisoners,

the airplane shot him and his companion.

God wrote for them martyrdom.

They took me to prison too.

I was in the field with two other women riding two donkeys.

The roads were blocked. We passed through the field instead.

On the way back, we saw a skull on the road.

Another boy’s skull, a bag, right there on the road.

Just yesterday, yesterday, I saw a video.

A tank rolled over where was Hussein’s grave.

All the houses are now gone.

I wish I’d saved him.

I wish.

I held him in my hands, my niece.

Had he run north, he would have escaped.

They came back and my boy had been born.

I named him Hussein.

They returned with airstrikes

on seven of our houses.

My son is calling me, habibti. I have to go.

You know, Moses crossed the water, habibti,

and the pharaoh’s army       haha        did not.

Copyright © 2025 by Kamelya Omayma Youssef. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 28, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“Sentences escape me these days; all words in this poem are my aunt’s. Baba calls this story Intifadat Aljibbayn. Our tiny village in the Galilee. In resistance. ‘Bottomless well of love,’ Baba says. Generations in our names. Realest place I’ve ever barely known. Balcony facing horizon. Jido’s notebooks, hand-carved busts of ancestors, a hundred kinds of figs, two graveyards, pomegranate trees, olive groves, tobacco bales. The remains of my great-great-great’s house, stones arranged into arches. All demolished by Israeli Offense Forces. All the martyrs. I considered removing the epigraph; Hala and Lara said, ‘Keep it. Show them.’ ‘Land is land,’ Zaina wrote. Free Palestine.”  
—Kamelya Omayma Youssef

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