Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood

Birds represent freedom and joy. Ibtisam uses bird imagery to reveal her desire to “fly away” and escape the wartime constraints and fears that keep her spirit grounded. Ibtisam initially compares herself on the bus to a caged bird who longs to be free and later wishes she could express aloud her inner emotions and let them “escape like birds” (5). Birds symbolically soar in the sky, unencumbered, unlike humans who suffer daily trials and troubles. When Ibtisam returns home with her family after staying in the orphanage, Ibtisam feels a sense of freedom and feels that she is where she belongs, in the home she loves. There, she feels both happy and free, like, she imagines, a bird “tasting the sky” (92). Ibtisam longs to be as free as the birds and finally finds that freedom in telling her story; She becomes “Like a bird flinging / Its freedom songs / Across the sky” as she “sings” her memoir (169). Writing about her past helps free her from memories that haunted her.

Ibtisam’s post office box holds and conceals her “freedom”—the letters that she receives from pen pals connecting her to the world outside Ramallah. The PO box represents Ibtisam’s independence. It is her private box, her secret, that only she holds the key to. It is the “only place in the world that belongs to [her]” (8). Her PO box allows her to communicate with people of all ages around the world, forming friendships through writing and learning about other cultures. She writes that her hand “when deep inside it, reaches out to anyone on the other side of the world who wants to be my friend” (9). Ibtisam also likens her memory to a post office box she opens to find pieces of her childhood. Opening the post office box of memory is key to rediscovering and feeling at home with herself. Ibtisam concludes that “The window into the past frames the new road before me like a postcard. I want to send it to all of my faraway pen pals” (169). Both Ibtisam’s physical post office box and the box of her memory open to avenues of freedom and autonomy.

Father teaches Ibtisam to make qantara: sculptures out of flat stones that look like people. He builds one to show his love for Ibtisam, and that is a memory she recalls when she is separated from him and home at the refugee shelter. The qantara represent love and home to Ibtisam. She builds Father a qantara before going to the orphanage “to remind him that [she] loved him each time he saw it” (80). The qantara show the family’s connection to their home and to each other. Before the family leaves home for what Ibtisam worries may be forever, she builds a qantara of seven stones, one for each family member, near the door of their empty house representing their love and unity and Ibtisam’s connection to what she believes is her one true home.

Because three-and-a-half-year-old Ibtisam cannot tie her shoe, she gets left behind by her family when the war begins. Shoes come to represent the insecurity caused by war and the fear of abandonment, both of which reflect the memoir’s theme of The Loss of Childhood Innocence. Ibtisam changes the story of Cinderella because it reminds her too much of the terrifying night she fled and lost her shoe; Ibtisam mentally empowers Cinderella with a magic wand to prevent the same feelings of trauma she experienced. Following the injury to her foot, Ibtisam gets a new pair of boots, and Basel and Muhammad show their love for her by teaching her to lace them up, something Ibtisam practices until she can do it perfectly because Ibtisam fears being left behind again. When she is four, she races to put on her shoes when the soldiers march to their practice field, showing her fear and her loss of childhood innocence: At four years old, she is prepared for war to start again. Even years later, when warplanes fly over their home, Ibtisam makes sure she has her shoes on and watches over her younger siblings so they are not left behind. The memory of being lost and abandoned leaves a lasting emotional scar.