The Wonder Chronicles: 6
On Watermelon
Khaled Hourani, 2021, “The Colours of the Palestinian Flag” (courtesy the artist)
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Masturbation
Summer tastes of Egyptian watermelon: ready to make a mess of you with the wonder of sweetness.
Another wonder that my ancestors gave the world. Yes (of course) watermelon comes from Egypt (and Libya, Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya, but I’m Egyptian, so…)
And the world tasted its sweetness and created resistance, old and new.
A resistance sweet with freedom for enslaved people in the United States who planted the easy-to-grow fruit in designated plots of land on the plantations where they were forced to work, and sold it after the hours of that enforced labour.
For the audacity of benefiting from the literal fruits of their labour, for the audacity of continuing to exist, white supremacists have since then weaponized a symbol of self sufficiency into a racist stereotype.
"This air of freedom among those formerly enslaved further humiliated Southern whites," Howard University Afro American Studies lecturer Dr. Jo Von McCalester said. "The sheer audacity for Freed Africans to persevere in spite of their deplorable action, caused the concerted effort and sharp response of Southern whites to create a racist trope around the fruit and freed Africans."
Defiance and the audacity to exist, still, are–like watermelon–easy to grow.
After the 1967 war, when Israel seized control of and occupied Gaza and the West Bank (where locally grown watermelon is famously succulent) it banned the display of the Palestinian flag. Red, green, and black: watermelons have the same colours as that flag.
In 1980, when the Israeli army shut down an exhibition by artists Sliman Mansour, Nabil Anani and Issam Badr at 79 Gallery, because their art was deemed political and bore the Palestinian flag and its colours, Badr asked an Israeli officer “What if I just want to paint a watermelon?”
“Even if you paint a watermelon, it will be confiscated,” was the reply.
Defiance and the audacity to exist, still, are–like watermelon–easy to grow.
From leaving watermelon slices on windowsills, to carrying them through the streets, to slicing watermelons in half and waving them around (for which Israel arrested young men in Gaza during the Second Intifada): public displays of watermelon spelled defiance, during the flag ban and after its lifting.
Defiance and the audacity to exist, still, are–like watermelon–easy to grow.
As a reminder of their audacious existence, still, Palestinians in Jenin (where those locally grown watermelon are famously succulent) can tell the difference between their watermelon and watermelon grown in Israeli greenhouses; they eat their watermelon and use Israeli watermelons to throw at IDF tanks–stuffing, at one point, that fruit into the gun of a tank.
Stuffed with the sweetness of resistance.
The audacity to exist and defiance are–like watermelon–easy to grow.
Since the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, art and emoji of watermelon slices is used to evade social media censorship of pro-Palestinian content.
Go on: slice a watermelon and wave it in the air. And then taste the sweetness of wonder.
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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