On the many Arabic words for love

THIS BOOK IS 30% OFF FOR A REASON. PLEASE GIVE IT TO A TEACHER, A PARENT, A BELOVED CHILD. DISCOUNT APPLIED IN PROCESSING: promo code UHIBBOUKUM 

Weeks ago, I placed orders for beautiful children's books to fill our shop and your homes with colour and build warm connections between you and the kids in your lives. I was so excited to choose Eleven Words for Love, a celebration of the way the Arabic language distinguishes between many forms of love, written by Palestinian-Egyptian author Randa Abdel-Fattah.

It arrived today, though it's not officially published for another week. Maxine Beneba Clarke's utterly gorgeous illustrations glow with the saturated colours of desert skies and flowers and lemon trees, and a refugee family's treasures as they carry their memories of all these loves to their next stopping place. I unpacked it and excitedly started to flip through.

I had not cried about Palestine until today.

I couldn't stop. I made a mess of this keyboard and the UPS guy asked if I was okay. All the distance, all the helplessness, all the rage/grief has come crashing in with this one lovely book and I just could not any more.

I cherish the uniqueness and dignity and resilience of Jewish culture in its resurgence from the Shoah and the many brutalities that drove its diaspora. I also, deeply and firmly, cherish the uniqueness and dignity and resilience of Palestinian culture in the face of the Nakba that has shadowed the Arab collective awareness since before I was born. The willingness of any individual or group to inflict that on another will only ever baffle and enrage me. 

I can't fix the last 75 years or change the path of a nation-state, but I can share with you this little celebration of the resilience and beauty of the Palestinian people. I think it needs to be seen. I invite you to appreciate a small part of why Palestinian culture is precious and worthy of care, and more broadly why a singular experience of the world is worth preserving. So. Eleven Words goes on sale so that as many people as possible can welcome this Palestinian view of love into their lives. Please enter UHIBBOUKUM at checkout. It's Arabic for 'I love you all.'

For my Lebanese dad and every great-uncle and cousin whose lives have been blown apart in land wars in the Levant; for Ziad, dad's Palestinian best man, the wild-hearted charter pilot, who went home and disappeared there; for every Palestinian I have ever known who can't go home, or who has less and less home to go to, and tries to build what is precious about home wherever they land; for every queer Arab who walks fine lines trying to cherish a culture that often doesn't give space to queerness but has so many words for love, this small thing, simple when other things are complicated. Uhibboukum, habeybi.

--Nena Raoudahtel-Balah