Читать книгу Soul in Exile - Fawaz Turki - Страница 5

Most people, not least of all Arabs, consider the capital cities of the Maghreb countries of North Africa to be steeped in French culture. That may be true of Tunis and Rabat. Not so Algiers. Here people have thoroughly scrubbed all the grime of the colonial past off their national body. Streets, squares, parks, marketplaces, and other city landmarks are named after heroes of the war of independence. People read El Mojahed, not he Monde. Road signs are in Arabic. Cafés have terraces, as in Paris, but they are filled with a generation of young Algerians who have grown up with little recollection of the Pieds Noirs nightmare. This is a blue-collar city, not without its share of drabness. But its inhabitants, unlike those of other cities in North Africa and the rest of the Arab world, are not so helpless economically that they have to import their matches, their soap, and their pencils.

Algerians forever remind you, and each other, how costly it was for them to gain their independence. True, this independence has not produced economic miracles. Life here is still lived close to the bone. It does not allow, as in Western society, or monied society in some Arab countries, for afternoons of brie and beaujolais nouveau, for annual vacations by the seashore and shopping sprees at department stores. Thousands of Algerians still emigrate each year to Western Europe in search of a place as “guest workers.”

In the Middle East, however, Algerians are seen as the Germans of the Arab world, hard working and persistent, though at times stolid and humorless, respected for their accomplishments in national reconstruction. Respected, but not, unfortunately, emulated.

At the Algiers airport, the clean and spacious VIP lounge is located in a separate building. Its officials speak in soft, polite tones. Attendants attired in national dress serve coffee.

The main terminal, however, resembles all main terminals in the Arab world, crowded with passengers and their relatives and veiled women and children and peddlers and lottery-ticket sellers and taxi drivers and pickpockets and porters and policemen. And soldiers everywhere with submachine guns. You choke in the heat. You are overpowered by the pungent smells and the dust. And you wonder if you are going to be arrested or questioned or delayed. You worry about that even if you are a citizen of Algeria. But if you are a Palestinian, you worry more. You know that you have no recourse to justice. You have no state, no embassy, no institution of any kind to protect you in a moment of crisis. That’s how it has always been for Palestinians; but you don’t mind or care.

You have worn your sense of otherness all these years as a consciousness more intimately enfolding than your own skin. Statelessness is your only state, and you have long since developed an aboriginal sense of how to live there. You have grown up thinking that only in hell is there likely to be a halcyon statehood without the implosive stresses of national struggle. Perhaps a state is only a fantasy in the crazed dreams of your people, devised to contain the terrors of their history.

No matter though. The five thousand Palestinians who have been arriving in Algiers around the first week of February 1983 know they need not worry. They are received at the VIP lounge. As celebrities. As revolutionaries. They are, after all, arbiters of the destiny of the Palestinian people and are in the Algerian capital to attend the sixteenth session of the Palestine National Council (PNC), their parliament-in-exile. Among them are the 355 council members, all manner of council officials and functionaries, observers, journalists, and activists, as well as foreign dignitaries and solidarity group representatives.

I too stand there clutching my passport. There is something formidably, unendurably pitiful about the way a person, stateless all his life, clutches a passport once he gets one. I look at all the other Palestinians around me, coming from a bewildering multiplicity of countries, and experience a kind of emotional vertigo. We have all grown up and lived not only in diverse locales in the Arab world, but also in Western and Eastern Europe, in North and South America, in Africa and the Far East. Yet we have managed to keep our communal sense of national reference bounding and rebounding among us, like jugglers’ weights, from year to year, from place to place, from generation to generation, so that we now understand each other, as if through a common trick of feeling.

As I sit in the lounge, memories of more flamboyant times cross my mind. A mere eight months before, what had taken a whole generation to build had been at its magical height. There was not a Palestinian alive then on whose life the Movement, the Revolution, the Resistance (as it was alternately called) had not etched a deeper national sensibility and inner excitement. There was not a Palestinian alive between the battle of Karameh in 1968 and the siege of Beirut in 1982 who was not radically transformed at the core. Our society had experienced a dynamic awakening at its vital centers of query and apprehension. Our national folk troop had found in music and dance a liberating function of culture and was recreating dabki dances and the use of our musical instruments, the yarghoul and the oud. The Palestine Film Institute was projecting lucid imagery on the screen and showing how a society, once held inert by its sense of refugeeism, could, through national struggle, impose coherence on the botched landscape of its everyday reality. The Palestine Research Center had amassed the world’s largest library on Palestinian history, along with a large number of artifacts, artworks, and old manuscripts dealing with our culture. A whole institute employing hundreds was established to resurrect the ancient art of embroidery. Our poetry, fiction, belles lettres, science, and system of education were enriched at their core of meaning.

A new tense, a tense of reality brought to a higher pitch of subtlety, was being added to the grammar of our cultural life, flourishing even under the occupation. To elude the censorship and restrictions while remaining responsive to the native sensibility, our writers were compelled to sharpen and restructure their metaphors and allusions, their use of image and style.

For two decades our Movement continued to release intense energies of spirit, and exploit possibilities of perception that would otherwise have remained fallow. We were growing up to see ourselves as inseparable from the national struggle, or separable from it only by abstraction. Our struggle for statehood, for freedom, for self-definition was, in effect, our window on life. We knew that if the Palestinian Revolution lost any of this energy, every Palestinian would, in a vital and central way, become less Palestinian.

This process of renewal seemed active wherever we chose to pitch our metaphorical tents, not only in Lebanon, but elsewhere.

Then, a walk through the Arab University district, where the Movement’s offices and institutions were located, quickly proved—to a native son who had grown up in the streets of Beirut—that beyond the outward circumstance of anarchy lay a greater reality of revolutionary dreams. And the streets teemed with Iranian revolutionaries out to topple the Shah, Turkish leftists training to form a native underground, Egyptian Communists organizing to overthrow Sadat, Sudanese poets hiding from Numeiri’s repressive regime, Nicaraguan Sandinistas out to liberate their society from Somoza, Arab Marxists who believed that armed struggle was the only instrument of liberation in the Arab world, Tunisian intellectuals coming to grips with their inability to write a coherent theory of the “Arab nation,” plus European Trotskyists, U.S. pacifists, English ideologues, East German labor unionists—they were all there, not to mention all manner of Arab-American hucksters who had a readymade formula to “turn American public opinion” in our favor in return for this amount of money, or to put out a publication or open a “lobbying office” for that amount.

Though at times shrill and naive, our political values and the subversive energy of our outsidedness as a nation-in-exile had thrown their shadow across the entire Arab world, the third world, the Islamic world, and the socialist world.

Here in Algiers today, however, no one knows that our objective reality, along with these same political values, has already turned on its hinges.

To these Palestinians, and others like them around the world who follow the ten-day proceedings from afar, this is just another Palestine National Council session. A very important one to be sure, since it has been called to reassemble our political ethos and redefine our tactical direction in the wake of war, but nevertheless just another gathering of our parliament-in-exile. With a long catalog of ruin stretching behind us, all the way from the dismemberment of our homeland in 1948 to the siege of Beirut just eight months before, and with death sweeping over our history with such cruel frequency, we have thought that the 1982 war was just another firestorm, from which we will emerge intact, even purified. None suspect that each one of us (for in national struggle history is Everyman’s affair) is destined to suffer, however uniquely, some part of the tragedy and dislocation that followed the siege of Beirut. None suspect that the fall of movements, or causes, from grace could be accompanied by a festive mood such as the one characterizing this sixteenth session of the PNC. None suspect that the arrow of revolt we had shot twenty years before has started its downward flight. And none understand that, whether we like it or not, whether under duress or in agreement, we will have to hand over the leadership of this national struggle—a struggle that has become so ingrained in our daily lives—to another generation of Palestinians.

No. Made haughty by our grief over Sabra/Shatila and arrogant by our ritual of resistance in Beirut, we remain unchanged, unyielding, unmoved in our repose of illusion. A generation of Palestinians that, in its impudence, expected, as we have become accustomed to expecting, that the Arab world, and maybe the world beyond, owes us a living. And support. And respect. And here we are, five thousand of us, to reenact our private anguish on a public stage, unaware that the last authority of reason in everything we had built and struggled for is shattered. We strut about as if we still occupy center stage in the international arena as heroes of a national struggle supported by a consensus of humanity at all its international forums.

At the airport, I sit in the VIP lounge—for where else would men and women who had conducted daily transactions with history sit?—and clutch my Australian passport as other Palestinians arriving on the plane with me clutch their equally hollow travel documents. The man sitting next to me is Mahmoud Darwish, one of our national poets and a friend of many years. He confides that surely there will be trouble soon with the Algerians, a confrontation of sorts with some Palestinian or other. This is an airport, for God’s sake, isn’t it? Where have Palestinians been more wounded at the core than at airports, refused entry, detained, expelled, questioned, humiliated, and so on, because of their travel documents, their national identity, and their revolutionary reputation? I respond that this has happened more often at airports in the Arab world than in the Western world. For this and other reasons, I add, we have become elitists, looking down our noses on Arabs in general, not just on their governments.

Indeed, Palestinians have traditionally considered themselves the most outstanding theoreticians, ideologues, novelists, belle lettrists, bankers, and engineers in the Arab world. They have believed that they were chosen, if not by God, certainly by history, to be the vanguard of the Arab renaissance and to fall into the garb and glove left to them by the Vietnamese after their victory in 1975. Somehow Palestinians have believed all these myths and tried to lay them on people everywhere. And though they have not, after two decades of struggle, liberated any part of the homeland, they have carried within them no germ of preordained failure. It is the world that has failed, not them.

For ten days and nights, we wander around attending General Assembly sessions and various closed-door meetings in the spacious halls of the Palais de Nations by the shore of the Mediterranean. All the well-known heavies of the Revolution are here, striding around the hallways, talking animatedly, gesticulating, and giving speeches, trying to find an idiom of struggle, a political paradigm, to correspond to the new realities of our times. None of them betrays a hint of unease, uncertainty, about our condition. Perhaps it is a statement about us as a people and a nation in struggle that they do not.

Instead there is an incredible flow of energy, even pride. It is, after all, a major accomplishment for the Palestinians not only to be holding a parliamentary session so soon after the devastating events of the 1982 war, but to be holding a parliamentary session at all. For a nation severed from its native ground, with its people fragmented around the world or living under occupation, with its movement, cadres, and leaders constantly hunted down by enemies from within and without the Arab world, to have its own parliament and convene it yearly is no mean accomplishment.

Moreover, to establish the Palestine National Council, a forum for democratic discourse that adopts resolutions then acted upon by the Movement’s executive branch, in a part of the world where institutions of this kind are seen as a threat, is no less than heroic.

And the people who have made it all happen are right here, having converged on Algiers from diverse locales around the Middle East.

In my nihilistic mood today, I see intimations of doom everywhere. Are these men capable, still capable, of comprehending, indeed mastering, the workings of our historical destiny? Whom does one blame—our leaders, ourselves, history, God—for allowing the enemy to chase our fedayeen to the four corners of the Arab world and for allowing the women and children they left behind to be chased to their mass graves in Sabra and Shatila? Whom does one blame for allowing the numbing image to enter our consciousness of the evening sun casting vacant shadows on the fly-covered bodies of our men, women, and children as they lay slaughtered like sheep in the muddy lanes of our refugee camps?

I observe that I am not completely alone in my gloom. The calamitous nature of our condition today, and the swift descent of our movement from center stage, is written on the faces of a great many of our leaders.

But not on Yasser Arafat’s. What is it about this man? Why is it that he does not at least appear to grow old in years, slow in gait, pessimistic in mood? What makes him able to emerge from each upheaval in our national life with renewed vigor, to rebuild, to start all over again? Why have Palestinians rallied around him all these years, these long arduous years, although he has not brought them anything for their labor and sacrifice?

Unlike other Palestinian leaders, whose pronouncements on our condition have always somehow retained a feel of conscious acquisition, Arafat has an intuitive, aboriginal grasp of the Palestinian psyche. His métier as a revolutionary derives from a sense of tenancy, an ability to work from within, the national heart. He operates from a popular, historically based center in Palestinian life. He is in organic accord with the Palestinian people’s idiom, culture, and aspirations, as well as their elitism, prejudices, and chauvinism, at any moment of immediacy in their struggle. His political logic is not charged with Mao’s stylistic genius or Lenin’s interpretive audacity or Castro’s universal currents of meaning; it is, however, a folksy, literal, political logic nearer the source of Palestinian life than that of any other Palestinian leader. When Arafat speaks, Palestinians hear words close to their own. He strikes a chord in their collective soul, not only with his words, but with his style. He is the essential Palestinian Everyman, living a more authentically Palestinian lifestyle than any of them—no family, no home, no passport, no country, no property, consumed by Palestine and nothing else. That is why Palestinians, or at least most, engagingly call him Abu Ammar (the Building Father), el Khityar (the Old Man), el Kaed el A’am (Commander-in-Chief), and, at times, el Waled (Dad). And that is why the overwhelming majority of Palestinians have chosen Fatah, the movement that Arafat and half a dozen of his fellow revolutionaries created, as the expression of their mass sentiment. Fatah is an ensemble of their sensibility, no less than that. Unfortunately, it is also no more than that. For Fatah is impermeable to another flow of meaning. It is, at this point, an essentially nationalist movement—a reflection of the people it leads.

I spot Dina Ta’amari standing with a group of men. Dina was King Hussein’s first wife. She is a woman with an outstanding history as an Arab patriot. In the late 1950s, for example, she had used her yacht to transport arms to the Algerian revolutionaries, who were then in struggle against the French to gain independence. Her involvement in civic and nationalist causes has not ebbed since. Now she is married to Salah Ta’amari, the military commander of the Palestinian forces in southern Lebanon. A dashing, intellectual, and handsome guerrilla from a poor, refugee-camp background, Salah became the model of the Palestinian protagonist in John Le Carré’s novel The Little Drummer Girl. Le Carré had been a friend of the Palestinian leader for years and had stayed at his house in Sidon on a number of occasions.

During the invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, Salah was injured and later captured by the Israeli army and placed in Ansar, a sort of concentration camp that then held about fifteen thousand Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners. Dina’s preoccupation these last eight months has been to publicize the atrocious conditions the prisoners lived under and to petition international organizations to demand their release.

I go over to shake hands.

“What’s the news from Salah?”

“No news,” she responds, sighing to indicate her sense of hopelessness. “What makes it worse is that the prisoners think we don’t care about them. They think we’ve forgotten them.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Well, they have no access to news from the outside world. Every now and again they see a Red Cross official or two and that’s about it,” she says wearily.

I tell her that sooner or later we’ll find a way to get them out of that hellhole.

“I hope so. Have you seen the exhibition of posters about Ansar that we put up?”

I tell her that I have, and was impressed by it.

Hundreds of people mill around the corridors and the lounge. It is early evening. In three hours, the PNC, the ultimate legislative authority of the Palestinian Movement, will meet again to elect a new executive committee for its executive branch, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

There are old people and young people, people in traditional dress and others in jeans. People who have been in the struggle since 1965, or were in it during the 1936-39 revolt inside Palestine, and some who have grown up not knowing anything else. And the foreign guests. Slavic faces, Germanic faces, Anglo-Saxon faces, African faces, Oriental faces, Indian faces, Latin faces. Outside the Palais de Nations, three Algerian destroyers patrol the coast.

I join some friends in the lounge. Among them are May Sayegh, president of the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW), and her husband, Abu Hatem, a PLO official.

May is reminiscing about an incident in the old days, in the early 1970s, when she and two other women from the union went to the Tel Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp to “educate Palestinian women politically, about their role in society.”

“I mean,” May laughs self-deprecatingly, “here we were, a bunch of bourgeois Palestinian women, graduates of the American University of Beirut, and we meet this middle-aged woman, with that typically haughty look on her face that most women of the camps have, hanging her laundry on a line outside her ramshackle hut, with its tin roof held down by rocks and pieces of wood and branches and what have you. We tell her we’ve come from the GUPW to teach her—we actually said teach—about the politics of the Revolution. Well this lady says, ‘Listen khaltes, my loved ones, I want to tell you this. If these sheets of tin,’ she says and hits the wall of the hut with her fist, ‘did not teach me, all these years, what the politics of my life and revolution is all about, then you’re not going to.’ “

“Yes,” says Abu Hatem, “You can’t underestimate our people’s intuitive view of the world. This man I knew in Bourj el Barajneh kept telling me, every time I saw him after an Israeli bombing raid, ‘Don’t worry, it’s all vitamins for our nation.’”

We continue talking. We reminisce about Majed Abu Sharar, a mutual friend who had been killed three years before, about the Takhikhas, the fighters and civilians who were shooting in the air when the fedayeen evacuated Beirut; about Black September in 1970, our first major confrontation with an Arab army; about the battle for Sidon in 1976 against the Syrian army, when a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) hit a Syrian tank and sent it flying up to the roof of a two-story building, where it stayed right through the summer of 1982. We talk about who is living where now, since the evacuation. And in the end we talk, as if sensing that we needed relief from the excruciating subject we had been addressing ourselves to for over an hour, about May’s hometown, Gaza.

“Brothers,” says May mock-seriously, “in Gaza we eat hot peppers for breakfast.”

We all laugh.

“And don’t tell me you fellows from Haifa,” she continues, pointing to her husband, “eat anything resembling hot peppers, even for dinner.”

“You are the crown of my head,” Abu Hatem responds.

At this point another friend joins us, a man in his late twenties whom I know only be his nom de guerre, Ben Bella. My acquaintance with him was superficial, but the others know him very well. Ben Bella, an expert in karate, had spent many years in Japan, where he acquired a reputation as a champion who would not “retreat” in combat. When he returned to Lebanon, he worked in the South under Salah Ta’amari as an instructor for the Palestinian youth movement, the ashbal. The ashbal—literally, the cubs—aged anything from nine to fifteen saw themselves, and were seen by Palestinian society, as an elite group who excelled not only in sports, but in combat. Karate was their major sport, according to Ben Bella. Though “violent,” he tells us, it teaches practitioners to be “calm.” The ashbal weapon was the RPG, known in the Soviet Union, where it is manufactured, as “the weapon of the brave.” The ashbal were expected to fight “like ten fedayeen.” “Every grenade in an RPG costs 34 liras, and you only have six, so don’t waste them,” they were told. “Don’t hit your target”—usually a tank—“until it gets close to you, and then immediately move away.”

Indeed, the Israelis dubbed them “the RPG kids” in the 1982 war for the devastating number of hits they scored with their grenades and the agility with which they moved. In every battle the Palestinians waged, all the way from the battle of Karameh in 1968 to the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1976, from the Israeli invasion of 1978 to the one that came four years later, the ashbal played a major role.

At Karameh, by literally throwing themselves at Israeli tanks with their explosives strapped to their waists, the ashbal may have turned the tide of battle. In June 1982, at the Rashidiyyeh refugee camp in the South of Lebanon, Ben Bella tells us, a group of thirteen ashbal kept firing at the attackers, “meanwhile running around like frogs,” till they ran out of ammunition. Then they marched out with military salutes, to surrender to the enemy.

Ben Bella also tells us about the last days in Sidon, around the end of June; how Salah Ta’amari decided to stay rather than leave the ashbal behind and join the battle in Beirut.

“They all fought until they had no more ammunition,” he says with finality.

Not more than twenty feet away, Salah’s wife, Dina, is busy hanging drawings done by Ansar prisoners, smuggled out recently, on the walls of a room set aside for their exhibition.

The conversation turns to internal politics. Abu Hatem, bitter because he was prevented from giving Fatah’s presentation on the Lebanon Zone because of his “radical” views, complains that the PNC’s major contribution in this session was to coin a new word for the Arabic lexicon—la’am, a contraction of the words la (no) and na’am (yes). All the resolutions that mattered, including the one on the Reagan Proposals, were couched in innocuous, ambiguous terms. In effect, this exposed the helpless, eviscerated spirit of our Movement.

Ben Bella takes exception, and submits that this is all part of the “tactics” of our postwar policy.

“Isn’t it interesting,” I say, “that most of the declarations dealing with our history have emanated from foreign capitals and were proposed by foreigners? Look at the Peel Commission, the Rogers Peace Plan, the Geneva Conference, the Camp David Accords, the Fez Plan, the Reagan Proposals, and so on.”

“The first session of the PNC, which gave birth to the PLO, was held in Jerusalem,” Ben Bella reminds me. “That is significant, isn’t it?”

I admit that it is; but I don’t add that it is equally significant that we are here in Algiers and not in Jerusalem. What is the point of getting into these arguments now? Isn’t it enough that I’ve discussed that issue a million times in the past, in the early hours of the morning, with diverse Palestinian friends, all the way from Sydney to Paris, from Washington to San Francisco?