Novelist Rachel Kushner spent a weekend in the Shuafat Refugee Camp in East Jerusalem, where she felt both safe and obscene. Recounting her time there in her first journalistic piece "We Are Orphans Here", Kushner, a privileged outsider, vividly describes the camp through stark contrasts—life and death, peace and chaos, hope and despair—captivating and resonating with the reader.
Kushner begins her story with a rich depiction of the surroundings. Some of the kids who were following her "looked like cool kids the world over." The high-rise apartments she passed by were so close to each other that "if a fire should happen ... there would be no way to put it out." Garbage was everywhere, often burned, emitting flames and "a smell you get used to." Her descriptive language allows the reader to be immersed in the camp as she goes. See it, smell it, and feel it.
Kushner deepens the story by drawing contrasts from what she saw while walking around Shuafat with the community organizer, Baha, a hope for the "orphans". Among the muddy roads and garbage piles, white is the favorite color. While burning the garbage near the separation wall is "symbolic", dealing drugs along the wall is not. The toxic drug is called "Mr. Nice Guy", but it's popular among children. In the mall, "bulldozed twice by Israeli authorities", there's a toy store called "Happy Child" and a travel agency called "Hope." She talked with Baha's wife about music lessons for kids' development, yet all she could hear was gunfire.
Kushner is a master of using numbers both to create tragic atmospheres and narrative twists. "Mr. Nice Guy," she writes, "is popular with kids as young as eight." "Empty packets of it" were found at the parking lot where "six thousand children" were picked up and commuted daily to the one-and-only public school outside the camp. She also writes that Baha is optimistic about their eighty-person emergency team, but it unexpectedly breaks your heart when you learn that fifteen days after Kushner left the camp, he was murdered. She continues with even more numbers: an unknown person shot at him "ten times … seven bullets hit him."
Her use of imagery and her somber tone carry the reader through her many emotional ups and downs. When she was describing her wanting to give earrings to a child without ears, she writes, "I felt obscene. I sat and smiled as if my oversize (sic) teeth could beam a protective fiction over this child, blind us both to the truth … that her life was going to be difficult." She gives readers a specific type of heartbreak that they can relate to in no time.
Rachel Kushner ends the story with a newborn baby. After Baha's death. Just like the life and death she experienced, the safety and obscenity she felt. Just like they say "we are orphans here" when they are not; there is hope there, but perhaps, only hope.