INTERSECTION IN RAMALLAH, WEST BANK
RIYAM KAFRI ABU LABAN
Chemistry professor, blogger, 36
Born in Amman, Jordan
Interviewed in Ramallah, West Bank
Riyam Kafri Abu Laban was born in Amman, Jordan. Her father was one of thousands of Palestinians not allowed to return to their homes after the Six-Day War of 1967—marking a second wave of Palestinian refugees after the massive displacement of 1948. Riyam’s parents waited for the opportunity to return to the West Bank instead of leaving to pursue lucrative jobs elsewhere. They finally returned to the West Bank in 1980, after years of legal wrangling. On returning to Palestine, they settled near Ramallah.
We interview Riyam in her spacious kitchen in Ramallah. As she talks, she stirs pots, washes dishes, and checks the oven, effortlessly putting together a dinner for six as she tells her life story. We learn that this kind of multi-tasking is normal for her. She is the mother of twins, teaches organic chemistry at Al-Quds University, and she helps to run the university’s liberal arts program (designed in conjunction with Bard College). She also writes a blog with a fellow professor, and her posts are sharply observed explorations of daily life in Palestine.
Writing is Riyam’s passion, but she came to it later in her career. She received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and had the opportunity to live a comfortable life in the United States. She chose instead to return to Palestine where she started teaching, and she found her voice as a writer in describing life as a resident of the West Bank. She writes that Palestine is “like a distant land that inhabits the warmest chambers of one’s heart, so close yet so unattainable.”1
A DESIRE TO LIVE JUST LIKE ANY OTHER TEENAGER IN THE WORLD
When the war broke out in 1967, my father was an electrical engineering Ph.D. student in Germany. After the war, Israel gave ID cards to Palestinians. The cards were required for them to remain in Palestine, but since my father was abroad at the time they were distributed, he wasn’t able to get one. My mom, who hadn’t yet met my father, was in the West Bank at the time and was able to get an ID card. A little after the war, my dad moved to Jordan. Later, he met my mother while she was traveling through Jordan to visit a relative. My parents were married in November 1977, and then they started working immediately to return to Palestine. At first they thought that since my dad was marrying someone with an ID card, it would be easier for him to apply for one as well. But the Israeli government said that they needed to have a child to prove that the marriage was real. They got pregnant really quickly—and I was born nine months later, in Amman, Jordan, in October 1978.2
After I was born, my parents continued their pursuit of an ID card for my father. This time, the Israeli authorities told my mom that she needed to have a boy, because a girl didn’t count. Who knows what their reasoning was. My mom had to make the choice to get pregnant as soon as possible again, so that she could try to have a boy and reapply for an ID for my father.
An opportunity came up for my father to help build a new university out of a technical college that was located in Abu Dis.3 So we moved to Palestine in 1979, even though we didn’t have an ID for my father yet. We didn’t stay long. The faculty named the new university Al-Quds.4 Al-Quds is the Arabic name for the city of Jerusalem, and the name drew a lot of attention from the Israeli authorities, who assumed the founders were implying that the city belonged to the Palestinians. Some professors were arrested, and my dad was sent back to Jordan.
The next year, my mother was pregnant with my brother Muhanned, and we tried again to live in the West Bank. My father had found teaching work. This time, we settled near Ramallah.5 Finally, my father was able to obtain an ID card not long after my brother was born. Then after he got his ID card, he helped found the engineering school at Birzeit University.6 My mother was a teacher, and later a principal, but she took some time off after the birth of Muhanned and later my sister Duna.
I grew up in a politically active family. I also grew up with parents who thought that their children had to leave a mark on society. We were raised to think that we had to live with a sense of purpose. And the main purpose, the underlying goal, was always to serve Palestine in one way or another.
I was sheltered from some of the problems many Palestinians have, but I can’t say I grew up completely sheltered, because I was educated about the Israeli occupation. You know, I grew up during the beginning of the First Intifada, so the entire atmosphere was different.7 Everyone, from teenagers to adults, was more aware of Palestine, of the political situation, of the prisoners and arrests.8 Demonstrations took place right outside our home, since we lived in a central area of Al-Bireh, just outside Ramallah.9 One of my earliest clear memories is from the start of the Intifada. I was eight years old, and I spoke to a BBC reporter. I told him, “We’re not just throwing rocks, we want our freedom!”
The demonstrations during the First Intifada brought the neighborhood together. At that time, women would knit navy-blue V-neck shirts that they could send to prisoners. So that’s how I learned knitting. The prison would only accept that color, and it had to be V-neck, and it had to be plain—we couldn’t even use any stitches but the most basic ones. And my mom was part of a women’s group that would go into refugee camps to visit prisoners’ families, and they would also collect these knitted shirts and send them to prisons.
I don’t remember much about my first couple of years at school. Actually, the Israeli military shut down most schools in the area during the First Intifada. Schools might operate for only a few hours a week. So we did distance learning. I was enrolled at the Friends School, and I’d go once every two weeks to drop off my assignments and pick up new ones.10 The first day of the year, we’d go to pick up our books, get our first assignments, and then immediately go home to start working on them. We were really responsible for our own education. Kids from all around would come to our home, and my mother would teach them. Finally, when I was around twelve, the school reopened. But even then it was only open for half days.
Around the time I became a teenager, the Intifada took on a different emotional quality for me. I wasn’t just knitting sweaters anymore—I was watching my friends get arrested. I remember the powerful desire to live just like any other teenager around the world, to spend my time listening to music and not having to care about politics. It was suffocating. I say this with a lot of humility, because I didn’t even see what it was like to live in a refugee camp. So if I was suffocating in the middle of a city, with a home that had all the amenities that anyone could ask for, I can’t imagine what it was like for anyone in the refugee camps.
And then I saw this complete switch, with Oslo, around 1993.11 Things started to open up more. We could get to places we couldn’t get to before, including Jerusalem, and Haifa, and Jaffa.12 By the time I graduated from high school in ’96, even the topics of conversation with my friends were completely different—more the day-to-day concerns with living and work. We didn’t need to talk about fighting just to live and struggling just to exist. I could think about things like the New Kids on the Block, pop music. But even as a teen, I never trusted the Oslo Accords. We had peace, but it felt like an illusion, a hologram.
I WAS IN LOVE WITH THE CONCEPT OF A ROAD TRIP
I lived in Ramallah until I was seventeen. Then I graduated from the Friends School, and I received a full-tuition scholarship to Earlham College in the States.13 The Friends School had an arrangement where they’d send one or two graduating students to Earlham on full scholarship every year. I’d applied to a few other liberal arts colleges in the States, but I really wanted to get into Earlham, and when I got the scholarship, my family discussed it. It was a little bit of a conflict. It was very tough for my dad, particularly. My mother is a very realistic woman, and she felt like her children leaving home was inevitable. But I think for my father it was harder. He viewed the United States as a country that helped Israel. It was a matter of principle that his daughter shouldn’t leave this country to study in the U.S. Coming to terms with that was a huge adjustment.
In the end, we decided that I’d go with the idea to become a physician, and that I would return to Palestine after my education. My parents announced, “We’ll allow you, our first daughter, to go to the United States on your own, only under the following terms—you will not return with a bachelor’s in biology or chemistry, because you could always do that at Birzeit, and you will try to get into medical school.” I would finish my education, and then I would come back and work here in Palestine.
All I knew about Earlham was that it was a small school, that I wouldn’t have more than thirty or forty students in my classes, which was true. Except for introductory classes, I think most of my classes were like that. I think at seventeen you don’t know what to expect out of college, and I soon learned that the school was extremely challenging. I worked really hard. But the social life was far better than I expected. The kindness of people on campus made me feel really cared for in a small setting. And Earlham was very pro-Palestinian. As a Quaker institution, they were very interested in educating Palestinians—they’d been accepting Palestinian students since 1948.
I took biology in the first year, under the assumption that I’d be a pre-med student. But I was broken by the anatomy and physiology course. I just couldn’t do it—the smell, the formaldehyde. I worked so hard, and I could barely break a C in the course.
And in the meantime, I was taking organic chemistry, and I was practically sleeping through the course and I was getting an A, you know? And that’s when things kind of shifted. I had a great organic chemistry professor, Thomas Ruttledge, who’s still my friend and colleague, and I decided to become a chemist. And I thought, “Well, I’ll get a Ph.D. instead of an M.D.” And I wanted to work in the pharmaceutical industry. That part really enticed me—the idea of creating things.
By the end of my undergrad experience, I felt very much at home at Earlham, and I do think those were the best four years of my entire time in the United States. You know, the one thing that fascinated me the most living in the United States was the ability to drive anywhere. I was in love with the concept of a road trip. I learned driving just to be able to drive out for endless hours, because it was mind-boggling to me that I could cross state lines and be in Tennessee for a couple of hours, and on the same day drive back to Indiana, no problem! That was new to me, and I loved traveling, even after starting my Ph.D. program.
I did my Ph.D. in medicinal organic chemistry at the University of Tennessee, and I focused on computer-based drug design and discovery. I learned to design compounds by modeling enzymes on a computer, which was a very cutting edge approach to medicinal chemistry at the time. I worked with a team that researched anti-HIV compounds and anti-cancer agents.
I briefly considered staying in the U.S. When you’re in graduate school and doing research, all you see as important is the science that you’re doing. And you don’t have a concept or understanding of what life really is, right? Because for a scientist, life exists within the walls of the lab, and the library, and on your computer. And so for a while I really thought that I should stay for a post-doc there. But my parents weren’t willing to live through another year of not having their children around. They were really adamant that we should all finish and return as soon as we were done.
Also, I started my Ph.D. program at Tennessee right before September 11, 2001. I remember the day of the attacks, I had to teach a class. As I walked into the classroom, I heard some students whispering about me, “She’s Palestinian, they’re responsible for this.” I couldn’t keep silent. I told the whole class that it couldn’t have been the Palestinians, and that there was no way I would condone such an act. I told them I came from a violent place, but that all I wanted was for things to be easier for my younger brother and sister. I ended up crying, and a colleague came to the classroom and took over the class for me.
Later I experienced real hostility, even from some faculty, who’d ask me questions like, “Why are Muslims like this?” I knew then I couldn’t stay in the U.S. I couldn’t go through life explaining myself to others. It sounds strange, but I thought then that if I had children, I’d rather they grow up with the problems of occupation and know who they were than to keep having to explain themselves and their identities to everyone else in their community.
There is a lot that I still love about the U.S. and the South—I still make sweet potato pie every November, around Thanksgiving. But since September 11, I’ve known there is no way I could be happy living my entire life in the States.
So an opportunity arose in Ramallah at a pharmaceutical company called Pharmacare, and it sounded interesting enough. Also, I thought, If I’m willing to try living in the United States and adjust to its cultural values—the way it works, its social structure, everything—then why not give this chance to Palestine itself?
So after my Ph.D. program I returned to Palestine in January 2007, and I began researching the antioxidant activity of Palestinian plants with Pharmacare. It was part of a project where we were looking for anti-cancer compounds in traditional Palestinian medicinal plants. I worked with herbalists throughout the West Bank. We started the lab from scratch. Up until that point, all pharmaceutical companies in the West Bank were generic drug producers. Our work was the first to invest in innovative research in the region.
THERE’S A RHYTHM IN PALESTINE THAT REALLY GETS UNDER YOUR SKIN
Palestine had changed quite a lot since I had left. I had been away for the entire Second Intifada. I had never seen the wall.14 That was my first impression of what had changed. I had seen pictures, but to see it cut through terrain I remembered well—honestly, to this day I haven’t resolved the feeling I had when I saw it. Passing into the West Bank through Qalandiya, I saw incredible poverty—Qalandiya looks like all the misery of the West Bank, including overcrowding.15 Then driving into Ramallah, I was amazed to see how things had grown. There were new tall buildings, signs that people were doing okay. The city was jazzy, sort of dressed up. Coming back home, it was as though that illusion of peace, the hologram, had shrunk to a bubble just around my hometown.
Still, being back in Ramallah was a challenge in some ways. Once you go to graduate school abroad, it’s an entirely different experience living in Palestine. Believe it or not, the culture shock was easier to get over going to Earlham from Palestine than the culture shock that I faced coming back after almost eleven years of being away.
I can’t exactly pinpoint what the reasons are for the difficulty. I think one of them is that I spent eleven years on my own, in a country that’s fairly free and accepts anything and everything. And I learned to think for myself, learned to accept people for what they are and who they are, and not judge them for what they think or what they look like or what they believe. And I came back to a country that’s fairly systematic. There’s a specific, almost rigid, structure in society here that you have to fit into.
I came back here to Palestine, and I had social obligations and family obligations, and I was no longer able to read in my free time. Even the way I dressed had to change. So it was very difficult at the beginning.
But even in those early days back, I felt like Ramallah had a way of making me feel comfortable. And it’s not just the city—it’s the people. There’s a rhythm in Palestine. Every country has its own rhythm, but there’s a rhythm in Palestine that really gets under your skin, even with all the difficulty of travel, with all the difficulty of being stuck on the road in traffic. There’s something that just gets under your skin, and it’s very difficult to leave, once you start to get settled in here. I also finally found old friends, and a lot of my friends were going through the same difficulties. They’d been gone for a while, they were educated outside, whether in France or England or the U.S., and had returned. So we had something in common, and a common language, and that’s kind of what’s got me slowly coming back into living here.
