Patricia Smith: Tuesday
Posted on | November 4, 2008 | No Comments
Wore the gold silk blouse, but that’s not the news. The news is that the books didn’t arrive at 10 am, they arrived in Jerusalem at 4 pm, and needed to be off-loaded, with 100 copies rushed through checkpoints (can one rush through a checkpoint?) to Ramallah. The boxes were brought in the exact minute the event started, at 5 pm. (Of course, this left 2900 other copies back in East Jerusalem to get to the storage area.)
Now we are at the reality of WOW!! The book is real, it has substance, presence, heft, weight, and tears come to people’s faces when they see it, touch it, open it, read it.
I cannot convey how touching it was to see the Palestinian women of the book together, with families, with friends, with media. We laughed, we hugged. I signed books, and signed books, and then we hugged more.
There were about 100 people there, including Ministers, the Brigadier General of security, the Palestinian television station (filming), heads of education departments, and the woman in the book who is illiterate and signed her authorization form with her thumbprint.
People were so happy, so grateful, and finding ways to get the book into their world. We all worked so hard, the key team of four, the designers, the women interviewed, and a dozen translators. And now we hold the book in our hands and it feels powerful!
