For Hanan, sitting in the sparsely furnished house where she was born five days before the war, each birthday is overshadowed by mourning the "naksa," or setback, of 1967, which followed the "nakba," disaster, of 1948 when her family fled its farm in what is now Israel as the Jewish state fought its way into being.
"I've never taken any pleasure in my birthday," she says, clad in black, as she tends to her invalid mother and seven children in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Ramallah.
Making the point, she displays her identity card showing her "official birthday" as June 5, 1967 -- the day of the naksa, a day that ever since, she says, has been marked far more by protest and demonstrations than by any personal celebration.
Notice, first it appears in quotation marks but the second time, it already becomes a proper English word.
Funny, though. In Hebrew slang, the word "nachs" (pronounced as if with a guttural 'x') - נעכס - means "crummy", "lousy" or "bummer".
=============
A friend commented to me:
I think it's from the Italian-Afro-American slang: "I no aksa questions" – or in short: "naksa". The statement is a clear statement that the person accepts reality and has given up on asking any questions.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment