If I had known that top leadership positions, council memberships, and memberships in institutions and independent bodies would sometimes be contested by those who get ahead through connections or nepotism, while true thinkers and experts remain on the sidelines, as the last cultural cafe in Jabal Amman quietly closes its doors. If I had known that the official end of every project or dream would be declared over the ruins of real effort, and that the spotlight would fall on those who dance on the wound not on those who try to heal it.
If I had known that the map would be reduced to a "filter" on Snapchat that erases its details, forgetting thousands of important stories, and that the queue waiting for basic rights or a job opportunity would extend indefinitely, leaving the true meanings forgotten.
If I had known that the tears of an "influencer" would translate to digital donations while the tears of a martyr's mother remain currency without a market, and that a lute player's fingers would sell more pictures on Instagram than his music is heard.
If I had known that a YouTuber's testimony in a live stream would cancel out a Ph.D. in literature, and that data chaff would feed generations hungry for truth but poison them with a complex illusion, and that the "son of the neighborhood" would be invited to global youth conferences while the son of a great thinker waits for the chance to live decently or pursue his dream.
If I had known that a spritz of perfume named "Gaza" would be sold in Dubai, while the real gas smell suffocates children's lungs underneath, and that a thumbs-up would end a strike's mark, and that a rap song about revolution would enter the Billboard charts while Mahmoud Darwish's poems disappear from the curriculum.
If I had known that a security guard would understand the meaning of the homeland more than a politician delivering an official speech, and that a sports commentator's salary would bury a national theater group, and that a phone ringtone would be downloaded a billion times while the book "Here and Now" is forgotten, and that a picture of an Egyptian Koshari dish would suffice over reading an entire book about the history of Egypt.
If I had known all this... with what heart would I have started?
But I was born. Born from the womb of this land doubled in love, Jordan, where stones learn to be rosy to survive the harshness of time. Born from a memory unlike anyone else’s: in my right hand the stone and the chalk of the Palestinian child who writes his name on his house before it falls, and in my left hand, the soil of Petra preserving the secret of resilience for thousands of years.
I am the letter that decided to be a homeland when it became just a sign in registers and complexities; a voice that talks about the genuine word, about resilience, about identity, without pointing out any offence to the land I live in. I am the voice that knows defeat may be a path, but silence about it is the real defeat.
My heart is not an iron prison for dreams, but a "literary border checkpoint" that stops each newcomer of the age's lies to ask: Where is your human passport? Where is your seal proving that you did not come to steal the soul of the place?
And I begin. I begin because the ending they sell to me under the title: "Alternative Homeland" is the trick of the century. My ending will be written on a wall in a camp, perhaps in Gaza, or on a university student’s notebook at Yarmouk University, or in a love letter from a cafe in Jabal Amman.
My ending will be resistant to oblivion. I will make my letter an indelible ID card, and my word a passport that needs no visa. I will make existing a "trend" that does not fade because it will not be a fashion, but a permanent memory like the beautiful scar on the face of history.
I am from here. From the country that refuses to be a global hotel for deals, but insists on being a home for stories yet to be completed. I say to the world: Come here, not to see shooting locations, but to see how a time of injustice is encapsulated in the eyes of a Palestinian in Wahdat Camp, and how a time of dignity is summarized in the smile of a Bedouin in Wadi Rum.
We, the people of this place who know the end of the movie from its first scene, decide to stay in the hall. Not to watch the disaster, but to change the scenario with our own hands. We start because we are the only ones who still know that "homeland" is not sold, but passed down like the poem memorized by heart, even if they burn all the books.
They have turned the homeland into a geographic application that is opened and closed, and memory into a rented storage cloud. But I have turned my existence into an open journey, every page a challenge to the pre-packaged ending, and every line a declaration that the real beginning starts when they say: "Everything is over".
So be it.
Here I am: Emad Dawood.
Son of the earth that teaches you to carry beauty and sorrow in your hands, and to walk.
From here… I begin.
