Borders Crossing Bodies
In "How to Cross a Border"

A woman defies the physical barriers separating her body from her destination. In  A Gaze" generations of struggle forego childhood. At refugee camps children swing hope running, smiling, simply being children at checkpoints and bulldozed homes, at toxic rivers and telephone poles.

I walk amidst them, with camera in hand children run around and through me. I am Palestinian American. I am them; I am not. I too understand and inhabit the conflicted location of home and the West.  Why aren t you covered, asks a 4 year old girl; it won t be long before I am told that  smoking is a sin in Islam, by a 9 year old boy standing next to me. I grin at his comment witnessing the birth of fundamentalism amidst colonization.

A mother waits at a checkpoint in Jericho, in her waiting she coddles an infant, motherhood an act of defiance in the midst of colonization. She too traverses the imprecated path of tradition and resistance while garbed in the traditional veil. She negotiates her space between the harem and the streets, between the physical and the traditional barriers, between the threat of insanity confinement and the threat of a soldier s bullet; waiting to cross.

At a time when the Road Map is being redefined by walls, barriers, and destruction, the human body and mind is altered to adapt to the various borders crossing through it.

Dana Erekat
Architect, Photographer