Palestine, My Left

By Alia Yunis

What is left does not equal what is right.
My body born where the ocean touches the Jersey Shore is not symmetrical.
In my right hand, I have the dexterity to readjust the whole world with my pen, to rearrange objects deftly and swiftly, to erase the board and invent a new lesson with the brightest magic marker.
My right hand. Where I am strong, confident, entitled.
Where I am American.

My left hand is where I am Palestinian, my West Bank when I face Mecca.
Forty centuries of heritage so much weaker than my two generations of American righteousness.
Disconnected, awkward, powerless.
But only to those looking at it from my right.
My left hand. Which does not wave hello, nor will it say good-bye.

Here in America, it was my left hand that stopped my right hand from shaking when I tried to be athletic in school and was still the last one picked.
My left hand that clenched my right hand, absorbing its sweat, when I interviewed for what I thought was the greatest job ever.
Later, it was this hand that massaged the right one when it developed carpel tunnel syndrome at the keyboard of this greatest job.
That cradled and rubbed my right, giving it comfort when something I mistook for love slipped away one night.
The hand that first caressed the cheek of my true love.
The hand whose veins run to my heart.

I adore my right, with all the red, white, and blue blood that flows through it.
With its successes and joys.
The right that has time to play tennis, that controls the remote on my big screen TV as I lay on the couch thinking what to have for dinner.
This is after all my right.
While others on CNN, people of my left, wonder if there will be food or peace today.

With just my right hand, I have eaten a whole pot of grapeleaves.
The ones my mother’s mother’s mother taught her to make in Jerusalem five decades ago.
To make one grapeleaf, my mother showed me in America, I must roll it and seal it with both hands.
Tightly.
Or it will break apart.

My right, most visible to the world.
Yet, it is nothing without my left.
My left, with its intricate map of birthmarks.

To be Palestinian is to always reach for your right.
So it can one day soothe the other hand’s involuntary twitch.
For the unforgotten left behind.

If you cut off my right hand, I will become dependent,
If you cut off my left, I will be without history.
Without rightness.

My hands did not come into this world as two separate but equal parts,
Nor were they created equal.
Yet neither can be left alone.
Neither so right.

What is left does not equal what is right.
…And yet what is left is sometimes what is right.