| Many of the shebab (youth) had a hard time remembering my name, so I told them to just call me Fatima. The next day, everyone was calling me Fatima, even guys who weren’t around the day before, so I told them, “No, that was yesterday, today my name is Khadija”. On the third day, the shebab surrounded me first thing in the morning, begging to know if my name was still Khadija or if it was something else today. I told them that today, they could choose my name. After a few were voiced, Wujdan stepped in to mediate the discussion, apparently the shebab were suggesting names that were “not beautiful”. In the end, the name we could all agree upon was Bisan. And so on Friday, I was Bisan.*
*Six thousand Arabs were expelled from the city of Bisan in 1948. Many were loaded onto trucks and taken across the Syrian and Jordanian borders. Today, no Palestinian residents of Bisan remain.
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