Motaz Omarien
Among the wondrous tales that the mind cannot imagine, that no rational human being can conceive, that no dreamer in his sleep can foresee, is what I did. I went to the compulsory conscription after years of fleeing from it. From 2001 to 2011; after ten years, I decided to hand myself over to the conscription office.
This office was the one that gathered up the young conscripts and sent them to the compulsory service, the one we called, for short, the military. I went, and I will never forget that day I went; it was in the fourth month, or the tenth, or the eleventh. And that clerk wrote: "Since you came of your own accord and handed over your personal identity…"
— Of course, at that time we had no personal identity; only a temporary residence permit for Palestinian refugees.
I always insisted on this phrase: that it was temporary, and that it was for refugees, and that we were Palestinians, and that identity was nothing but a residence permit. This phrase, "a temporary residence permit for Palestinian refugees," expressed what I was raised on, and lived by, and gambled with, and lived in all its details: in its sweetness and its bitterness, in its madness and its absurdity, in its fruits and its rationality, in the sky it holds and the earth it sowed, and in everything within everything.
He said to me: "Take this booklet" — and it was a booklet for the compulsory conscription — "and take this identity of yours, and come back on this date." And he wrote it with his own hand.
No sooner had he finished writing it and handed it back to me than I went out. And I will never forget that stopping: I stood far from the building and said to myself: "Another life has been written for you."
I confess that at that moment the rapture of life took hold of me, and I loved the idea of appearing in a cinematic scene, even though there were no cameramen and no screenwriter. But in truth, the one who was writing was writing with my blood, and the one who was drawing the scenes was drawing them with my feelings, and the one who was expressing these details was expressing the hours of my life.
Yes, it was he, and I was that actor, proud — that killer and killed.
I went to kill myself, and I went to kill my soul, and I went to kill myself, but I came back with my soul and with myself, and I came back with my life, and I said: "A new life has been written for me, a new time has been written for me, something else wonderful has been written for me in this life."
After this moment I surpassed myself. Fleeing from a thing is of no use, but with the acceptance of time and the acceptance of life I had not yet learned it. And my story with Salwa still makes my soul and my heart bleed.