Eastern music is the soundtrack of me, and dancing is the only nation I ever claimed, the only religion I comprehend. When I see women “belly dance” to music they do not understand, in clothes of a people they do not know—or worse, disdain—I feel they are colonizing me and all Arab women who are the keepers of our traditions and heritage.

My life began in a two-bedroom apartment in Hawalli, a Kuwait ghetto where Palestinian refugees settled after the Nakba. Although I grew up hearing stories of Palestine, I didn’t get the politics, nor did I care to learn. Even though our father took us there every year to “renew our papers,” Palestine remained the old country in my young mind, a distant place of my grandmother’s generation.

In fourth grade, Gameela, an Egyptian classmate, taunted me once with “Palestinians are stupid. That’s why the Jews stole your country.” I yanked her to the ground by her braids and beat her up good. The school suspended me, entrenching my reputation as a troublemaker. It was one of the few times Sitti Wasfiyeh said she was proud of me. No one in school dared cross me after that.

I never told anyone, until I met Bilal, that I beat up Gameela precisely to get suspended in advance of national school testing. I was barely literate. More than anything, I feared being outed as dumb. Up until then, I had gotten by in school by cheating on tests, through my superior memorization skills, and by fighting. But then my brother, Jehad, began tutoring me when he advanced enough to be almost in the same grade as me. He did it in secret and told me often that I was “really smart.” With his encouragement, I began to read poetry, and in time, I could recite some of the greatest and most erotic love stories in Arabic verse. It was through them that I found a command of the written word.

Mama kept a box of black-and-white photographs from her life in Haifa. Her family had been well-off, but European Jews stole everything when they conquered Palestine in 1948—right down to their furniture, books, and bank accounts. Her family became penniless overnight, then scattered to different corners of the world or died. She didn’t like to talk about it. “What’s the point of picking at scabs?” she’d say, except when I told her what Gameela had said. She called up Gameela’s mama and told her she’d better tie up her loose Egyptian tongue, or she’d cut it out of her face.

“Woman, you better put your hands on your head when you talk about Palestine, or I’ll put my shoe in your mouth,” she yelled into the receiver. It thrilled me to hear my mother berate Gameela’s mother, and I couldn’t stop giggling.

My paternal grandmother, Sitti Wasfiyeh, Hajjeh Um Nabil, lived with us. Unlike Mama, she’d never really left her village in Palestine. Just as I do now in the Cube, my grandmother roamed Ein el-Sultan in her mind. She bored us with tales of her childhood and about people we didn’t know. She was sure we would return someday.