Читать книгу Soul in Exile - Fawaz Turki - Страница 6

In the panic, some children suddenly found no hands to hold. They ran up and down the coast road looking for their parents. Clusters of men and women, tired from the long trek, sat by the bushes to rest, staring into the horizon as if crazed by sorrow and incomprehension. A few miles before we reached the Lebanese border, a crowd of people gathered around a woman who lay by the wayside screaming with labor pains. No one knew that this was our last day in Palestine, that this chaos would leave a gap in our soul. And we, the children, did not know that the memory of it was later to haunt the inner history of our whole generation.

In our refugee camp in Beirut, my father complains that the Lord’s way has become wanton and absurd, but adds that every event in His creation has reason, meaning. If it had not meaning, then what has happened to us would not have happened. He could not explain the meaning of the events that led to our last day in Palestine. He just trusted that it was there, somewhere. The beginning of every act in His creation was simply the beginning of another.

Maybe he was right. No one can say. I just know that for my own generation of Palestinians our last day in Palestine was the first day that we began to define our Palestinian identity. Like the olive trees and the land and the stone houses and the sea and the dabki dances and the ululation at weddings. Everything was where it belonged. Everything coalesced into a coherent whole. It had never occurred to anyone to define it, or to endow it with any special attributes. Until we were severed from it.

I was just another eight-year-old child growing up in the refugee camps. All around me people talked about Palestine as if it were the center where all the impulses of their human identity intersected. And everybody was angry. Their anger tangled in the hair of the tents and the muddy lanes of the refugee camps. The men and women were angry because they had to count their years without the harvest. The children were angry because, as they began to acquire a past, moment by moment, touch by touch, encounter by encounter, they discovered that a sense of otherness governed their lives.

In exile, Palestinians lived in their little world and waited for a kind of deliverance. And soon our lives would intertwine with the lives of other people in the world. Then, in the overlapping of strange sorrows, it would be difficult to say whose mouth should turn angry.

In the early 1950s it was still unclear who was in exile, we or our homeland. The refugee camps we lived in were beginning to resemble the people who inhabited them.

In the winter it rained heavily. The dirt tracks of the Bourj el Barajneh camp turned to impassable mud. Families stayed in their tents or, the lucky ones, in their mud huts. After the torrents came the bitter frosts. The cold ate into our flesh. The whole camp was transformed into a swamp, with steam coming out of the belly of the earth and our mouths, and the walls of the mud houses.

The people were wrapped in rags given to them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. Rags originally “donated by the American people.” The girls walked around wearing baseball hats. Out of the sacks our UNRWA flour rations came in mothers cut underpants for their sons. I often walked around with my behind covered with a handshake and the proclamation that the contents were a “gift from the American people.”

Everybody shivered. All over the camp, the emaciated dogs died. Every day had a thousand and one wrinkles and a thousand and one knots. The men looked for employment, for food. They avoided the police, who were then implicating Palestinians in everything from inflation and communist plots to cold spells. And once every month they lined up, as if in a funeral procession, to receive their UNRWA rations of flour, powdered milk, and dates. The rations lasted a week. Then people ate words. The words led to orange groves in Jaffa, to olive trees in Tershiha, to cloudless summers in Haifa. And back again to Bourj el Barajneh.

In the summer it was fiercely hot. Big bowflies buzzed in the air. A sense of ennui, of resignation, ruled the camp, our lives. It was going to take a new generation to bring down the camp’s flag of surrender and raise a flag of rebellion in its place.

In the 1950s I lived in the streets of Beirut. There was nowhere else to go. I worked in the streets, played in the streets, grew up in the streets, virtually all the streets of the city. In those days, Beirut was owned by street people. They poured over them, day and night, in an intricate communion with a city crazed by its colonial past and class dichotomies. Street peddlers, lottery-ticket sellers, shoeshine boys, hustlers, pimps, black marketeers, as well as Palestinian children in oversized business jackets down to their knees, donated by UNRWA, selling chewing gum and trinkets. At the age of ten I sold chewing gum, trying to hide my Palestinian accent for fear of getting beaten up by Lebanese kids who called me “a two-bit Palestinian” and a coward who “sold his land to the Jews.” That is, till I learned to band with other Palestinian kids in the streets for protection, for union, for commonality.

We wandered the streets of Beirut together, peddling, shining shoes, hustling, stealing. And talking. We were all Palestinians and we all came from the camps. We spoke the same language, lived the same tensions. The geography of our souls intersected. We called ourselves Awlad Falasteen. A name that you choose for yourself, that you endow with your own symbolic constructs, has an indefinable exquisiteness. It unifies you, brings you close to yourself.

The streets of Beirut, as we worked and lived and played there, held a pain that gave us meaning. The image of children wandering around selling Chiclets chewing gum outside sidestreet cafes and restaurants and schools and office buildings has meaning. The aimlessness of street life has meaning. The sun was so hot it made the streets sing. The sounds came from everywhere, as they always do in the streets of third world cities. These ancient streets were so narrow and the houses were so close to each other on either side that people were constantly on their balconies, talking, shouting, shrieking at each other. The peddlers, with their carts, shouted the virtues of their goods to heaven. All of this overpowered us, demolished us, till we learned to assimilate it and make it a part of our consciousness. And when the streets breathed, the smell blew at us as if it had come past centuries, after circling the oceans and the deserts and the stars. And always the faces. The faces of people earnest with impatience or quiet resignation. In some streets it seemed as if there was not an inch of space to spare. Human beings were walking, living, working, riding their buses and trams, tending their shops, sitting in their cafés, as if shoulder to shoulder. Nobody knew for sure why they cried or mourned. They just did. And waited for a Messiah, a prophet, a revolutionary, a rebel, an ideologue to explain their subjective pain, and give it objective coherence.

In the midst of all of this, we Palestinian children tried to make a living. Going to school was still a dream, a precious thought, like first love.

Ibrahim Adel became my friend almost the first day we arrived in Beirut. His family’s tent was next to ours. We took to working the streets together. He shined shoes. Some of his customers called him Baldy. In fact, most Palestinian children were called Baldy in the streets. When our parents sent us to a barber (usually to one from Palestine who now made a living with a chair and a small table with the tools of his trade on it, propped up against a mud wall somewhere down the end of a dirt track in our refugee camp), we had all our hair shaved off. That way, because we needed a haircut only every three months or so, our fathers could save a lot of money. We often held that against our fathers. Ibrahim did not. He worshiped his father.

Abu Ibrahim^* was revered by everyone at the camp because he had been a guerrilla in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine and two of his brothers had fallen in battle. He was also a “people’s poet,” an activist who composed poetry orally and recited it to the masses, often political poetry about the land and struggle and freedom and life and death in the cause of Palestine. When people in the camp, sitting in the evening around the kerosene lamps in sidestreet cafés sipping their tea and smoking their waterpipes, came across a metaphysical question to which they were hard put for an answer, they murmured the common Palestinian phrase: “Surely the answer, brothers, lies only in the heart of the poet.” And if Abu Ibrahim happened to be there, they all turned silently to him. He would pull gently on his thick moustache, sheepishly looking down the bridge of his nose, and begin: “Brothers, as the Prophet Mohammed revealed … and the poet confirmed …”

Ibrahim would always be there, looking up at his father, hanging on his every word.

In the streets, Ibrahim never learned to hustle, to fend for himself. We called him Maktabi (the library) because he was always reading books and because we were awed by his ability to write the English alphabet. He did not know any English yet, but he could transliterate any word in Arabic into English letters. All of which was never an asset in the streets.

One day Ibrahim and I are downtown working a street together. He with his shoeshine gear slung over his shoulder and I with my supply of chewing gum. On formidably hot days like this one the heat takes your breath away. If you walk for more than a block, you feel you are about to choke, your lungs struggling for air. On such days we worked the cafés, where it was cool inside, and even cool outside because the waiters would splash buckets of water every now and again on the pavement in front of the tables. Ibrahim and I have not eaten. We are both anxious to make some money, enough money to buy a falafel—a vegetable patty—or better still a shawarmeh, a chopped meat sandwich.

Usually when there was no food around the house because the UNRWA rations were gone and we had to leave without breakfast, the kids from Awlad Falasteen could be seen around the Beirut port, picking up oranges, apples, tomatoes, and the like that had fallen from the vegetable and fruit crates being shipped to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Sometimes Ibrahim and I would go to the American University of Beirut campus, sneak into the architecture department, where students would have their lunch bags ready for them before they went on their regular outings to study city buildings, and simply walk off with four of five of the bags. We were never caught.

Today it is too hot to go anywhere. Ibrahim walks around the Mashrek Café, near the Corniche, desperately soliciting business. He looks even to me, so little, so trusting, so vulnerable, as he maneuvers his way around the tables offering to shine shoes.

When he stops by Abu Majid’s table, I know there is going to be trouble. Abu Majid is a neighborhood zaim—in the Lebanese tradition of the 1950s a huckster who lived, and earned his living, by the code of the bully. Like other neighborhood zaims, Abu Majid is known to have extensive holdings in business and politics—established politics being, in those days, as authentic a source of income as any other. His friends, like him, are thugs who prey on the poor and the helpless in the neighborhood.

In addition to this, Abu Majid hates Palestinians. Sitting at his table at the Mashrek Café surrounded by his friends, he is often heard mimicking our accent and talking, between giggles, about how he had just picked up his food rations at the UNRWA depot.

I stand in a corner of the café watching Ibrahim. The damp penetrating heat I feel is the heat of hatred. I hate this man and his friends. And his world. And ours. When a child hates, it is the voice of reason traveling home over lost roads, with the sound of blood rushing to the ears. One does not “learn” to hate. A child hates because it has been robbed of conditions of love. Standing in a corner of the Mashrek Café that day, I hate this man and his universe.

“Do you want your shoes shined, zaim?” Ibrahim asks Abu Majid.

“Well, son of the camps, son of Palestine! We love Palestinians here,” he says, turning to his friends with a knowing smile. “Right brothers?”

They all mumble their agreement. I know immediately that this repulsive creature, made inhuman by his calling as a zaim, is about to play a practical joke on Ibrahim, to humiliate him, because that is how people like Abu Majid and his friends derive their enjoyment.

“I will shine your shoes for a quarter of a lira,” Ibrahim says.

“I will give you half a lira,” the zaim replies, again looking knowingly at his cronies.

Ibrahim’s face lights up and he proceeds to put down his shoeshine pack.

“Before I give you the money, you have to do one thing.”

My friend looks up as if nothing unusual is about to happen. “Sure, what would you like done?”

“First, you have to kiss my foot.”

Ibrahim remains squatting behind his gear, staring at the man. The request has taken the will out of his muscles, his ability to respond.

Around the café, no one seems to notice. Busboys are running around with burning coals for the customers’ waterpipes. Waiters are shouting to other waiters to bring a new deck of cards to a table whose occupants, in turn, are shouting greetings to people sitting at other tables. Outside there are beggars and lottery-ticket sellers and vendors and veiled women. And children in rags, with no hands to hold theirs. And people haggling over prices of food and soap and rosewater and a respite from pain.

“You want me to kiss your foot?” asks Ibrahim incredulously.

“For that you get half a lira.”

I can see Ibrahim is getting flustered at the strange proposition. I cringe with mortification as I see my friend prepare to kiss the zaim’s foot, looking abjectly at the gathering. I am consumed by hate. I am hating Ibrahim with all my might because I know he is going to do it. I am furious at him. I am furious at everything around me.

“Kiss my foot, boy, kiss my foot, son of the camps,” the man is saying, almost shouting with delight. His companions are roaring with laughter and anticipation of the result of their practical joke.

Ibrahim squats there in front of the man and waits for the excitement and laughter to die down. And I am thinking of that day, about a year before we left Palestine, when my uncle had brought home a hand grenade and I was allowed to hold it for a moment. I remember feeling the cool of the metal on my skin, contemplating the web of lines on its surface and being fascinated by the magic it transmuted to me. The terror of knowing how such a small object could wreak devastation on an enemy. Now, as I stand in the café, I am holding the same grenade, shouting “die, die, die, you mob of two-bit Lebanese sons of whores. Die.” I am throwing the hand grenade into the crowd of people as they contentedly drink their glasses of tea and torment us. Because we have less than they do. Because we are hungry. Because we are Palestinians. But when it explodes, it explodes only in my head and my soul. It is only my sense of worth that explodes. My rage. At the whole world. At the whole community of civilized nations and peoples that send us blankets and figs and powdered milk. That give us a tent to live in. And a foot to kiss. No one dies in this explosion, no one is mutilated, except us, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, as we silently go about our business of growing up.

We Palestinians often picture ourselves as a proud people, a people hardened by adversity to the point where we would not compromise our meaning. Well in the 1950s we were, as children, hungry. And hunger has a meaning, a logic, all its own. Just as our metaphysical need to be free declares its own form of meaning, so does our physical need to eat. A human being, triggered uncontrollably to gratify either need, will do anything—and a child will more readily than an adult.

The man puts his foot forward and Ibrahim bends down to kiss it. Just as my friend is about an inch away, the man withdraws it. There is a sudden explosion of laughter. The zaim’s friends are slapping their knees and doubling up with joy. Ibrahim demands his half lira, and the zaim, in between roars of laughter, repeats: “But you did not kiss my foot, you did not kiss it.”

“I want my money,” Ibrahim is demanding, virtually in tears.

“You will get your half lira only after you have kissed my foot.”

The man puts his foot forward again. “Kiss it now. You’ll get your money.”

Again Ibrahim tries. And again the man pulls his foot away and his friends break up.

I go over to Ibrahim and drag him away. We walk out of the Mashrek Café and head to the Corniche, where we sit by the water.

Ibrahim, my friend. Ibrahim, whom we called “the library.” Ibrahim, whose full name translates to Abraham the Just. Ibrahim, who is like me, and other Palestinian children growing up in the streets, learning what living in exile means.

We sit by the water for a long while, not saying much.

“Sons of whores,” he suddenly shouts. “May the Lord destroy their homes.”

“And pour acid on their souls,” I add. “May they all die away from their homeland, in the ghourba, in the countries of others.”

“Hey, tell me,” Ibrahim asks with passion, “when do you think we shall return to Haifa?”

“I don’t know for sure. A year or two. Maybe three.”

“You think it’s going to be that long?”

So you are abused by time. And wizened by it. For every moment in your existence, as a Palestinian child, thrusts you beyond your fixed meaning, a meaning that is difficult to explain to others. Meaning, after all, is hardly neutral or reducible to a static definition divorced from its existential setting. The range of significance that we endow ourselves and our history with is irreducibly Palestinian, the product of infinite adaptations in our social system. And it is, in the common sense of the word, private.

How the fuck do I explain why I am angry at the West, at the rich and powerful in the Arab world? How do I explain why I am now a revolutionary, why the vision of the return to Palestine has been, all my life, indispensable to my feelings, as it was to the feelings of my parents’ generation and later became to the feelings of the generation of Palestinians that grew up after mine? How do I explain any of that without explaining the overlap of every event in my life and my history and my social system? And how do we go about repudiating the sense of otherness thrust upon us, without repeated spasms of despair, without muttering cruel prayers and drinking rain?

In the end you just return to the streets, which you have come to know so well and with which you have developed a subtle relationship of hate and love. In Beirut, as in other third world cities, the streets have a way about them, a magic to them, an intensity evocative of ancient energy and ancient memories that only the eye of hunger and love can see. There is a kind of order to everything, to the fusion of the odor of urine from the open latrines with the smell of uncollected garbage in alleys and on the pavements, with the political (always political) graffiti on the walls, with the sounds of pain from every direction, with the smell of spices, the intimacy of bodies, the notion of a humanity suckled on the same misery. And with the subtle absence of anonymity in the midst of it all. The streets do not tolerate anything anonymous. If you live there, everybody knows your name and your family and your nationality and your class background and your place in the hierarchy of power that the streets, in the wisdom of diversity-within-unity that they create about them, will give you. The peddler’s status is known vis-à-vis that of the shopkeeper. The lottery-ticket seller, the cardsharp, the black-marketeer, the pimp, the policeman, the local zaim, they all know where they stand in relation to one another. Who oppresses whom, who reveres whom, who robs whom, who lives off the labor of whom—all of this has been determined by historical forces in the streets, forces whose origins are buried by time or beyond individual recall. And if the streets do not decay it is because every available space is occupied, because everything has an intricate structure and an intricate function.

Westerners who live in their suburban outback will not mistake these streets for a happy place to live in. But those who have lived there, graduates of the higher education that city streets can confer on its denizens, often emerge as inspired men, as poets, as revolutionaries, as angels in armor. Few emerge as dead souls wounded by the crush.

And we, the children of the Palestinian diaspora, coming as we did in 1948, had to fight for our way there, acquiring an aboriginal sense of where we fit in the general scheme of the city—pending our return to Palestine, our homes and homeland. In the meantime, ours would remain a reality scorched by alienation. We were destined to wander the face of the earth, creating a ceremony of shadows that was to become our homeland in exile. And living in it, in the dark fullness of ourselves, we would end up affecting the world as forcefully as it had affected us. The only difference between us and others growing up in the world at the time is that we, unlike them, never had a childhood. In the end, people like us are a necessary component of change in history. Progress has never been made by contented people. In the midst of oppression, only the oppressed will abolish injustice. Only those who are defined as the footprint of a shadow emerge from the night with a dream. The dream soon sours, as all dreams do, and other outsiders, armed with the complex energy of their outsidedness, come forth to be agents in history, propelling it forward.

In Beirut, a year or two after we left Palestine, my father’s hair began to take the color of snow. I would not leave him alone. I repeatedly badgered him about my bicycle. He had bought it for me a short time before we left our country. I want to know what is going to happen to it. Will the Jewish kids, who had been coming to Palestine from Europe, take it? Is it safe? Is it? Will it still be there when we return? And he assured me, earnestly, faithfully, that since our house is locked and we have the key, everything, including the bicycle, will be there just as we had left it. But I was not satisfied. I leaned against him, in tears, pleading to be taken back to Haifa, just for the day, just for the short trip across the border, to pick up the bike. Why can’t we go? Why not? Why? Why?

Suddenly my father bursts into tears and begins to mumble: “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.”

Soon after his wish was granted.

How do I mourn my own father’s death? Had my father died of natural causes, of a recognized disease, of old age, or had he even died a violent death, I would have known how to mourn. But my father died of something else. He died from not being able to answer the question that he must have repeatedly asked all those years: Why had all of this happened to us?

In 1948, my father lived in Haifa. He was poor, like most Palestinians, and like most Palestinians he was also proud—that he lived in his city, had his own petty business, played backgammon with his friends in the sidestreet cafés of the city, and supported his family. After 1948, he found himself transplanted to a world of nonbeing in a refugee camp where his humanity and identity were reduced to a fragment. The move was so sudden, so inexplicable, that it took his breath away. The more he thought about it, the more the thought splintered his soul into pieces of raw wounds, of dizzy incomprehension. At the beginning of each month, he would line up at the food depot to pick up our food rations. His family lived on charity. Away from home. In the homeland of others. And they were alone. And destitute and hungry. He did not know why everything had crumbled around him. He could not deal with his sudden transformation from a proud, self-sufficient Palestinian Arab to a helpless nonentity belonging to a people being pushed off the pages of history books. Armed only with his traditional images, with his traditional system of logic, which had served him well to define the peasant society he had been a product of, he was unable to explain why he had been robbed of the right to live in his country. That is why my father’s hair, which had been jet black in Palestine, was turning the color of snow. He was shriveling up and his hope, like his voice, was losing its edge. He had no answers, and he just wanted to die.

Yet I know I should not be concerned. My father lived his history and responded to it, in life and in death, the best way he knew how. And I had mine. When I reflect on it, I find that I have grown up with death like I have grown up with my skin. Violence and death flourished within close proximity of every moment, every encounter in my life. Even as a child I was learning of the violence that history is capable of inflicting on the soul.

Violence in both its psychological and physical forms had always dominated my life. Yet in this period along with my memory of pain and devastation, I had an equally strong feeling of compassion, an affirmation of the possibility of human justice and freedom—denying violence a monopoly of the soul. Even as an eight-year-old boy, I had memories of what I had left behind. Of walking, resting, and walking along the coast road to the Lebanese border to seek refuge. A peasant woman giving birth on the wayside, emitting ghastly sounds. My mother fingering her prayer beads, pleading with the deities to let us through safely. Stragglers from Haifa, and Acre, and other coastal cities joining us along the way, all heading in the same direction. My mother tying her shawl in knots around her back and shoulders and putting my two-year-old sister there. When we pass the Zionist settlements, everybody walks straight on, looking straight ahead, as if this will protect us from being seen or shot at. What are these settlements? Who are the people who live in them? Why did they choose our country to come to? Who are these people? Who are they? Who are they?

The year before, in the village we lived in, I keep remembering… the house was blown up and the family in it ran out, the woman, her body burning, clutching a pillow as she ran. I hear a scream. In the room that night everybody is getting up. My eldest brother carries a gun and leaves in a hurry. The sound of gunfire is getting louder, closer, and the animals in the village are running loose, down the dirt tracks, behind the houses. The Committee for the Defense of Balad el Sheikh is giving instructions while the sky rains fire on our village. Maybe God in His heaven has gone mad. They are here again. It is still night in the room and my mother is reciting verses from the Koran. The Stern Gang is here again. There is a kind of frenzy in the Koranic words my mother recites. Her voice is drowned out by the sound of shooting and then I hear it again, so loud, so frantic, when there is a gap, a short silence, as the firing stops. They are here … who are these people? … They are taking our homeland.

We left the village and went down to Haifa to live with my grandparents and uncle. My grandfather worked at the Haifa port with the British Port Authority… and the underground. Every night he came home with guns that he would smuggle through the gates at the port and bring to my uncle. Guns he would steal from the offices where he worked. Guns he would buy from drunk British soldiers. Guns brought on friendly ships arriving from Beirut, Latakia, and Alexandria.

My uncle and brother would go off for days together. They were called mojahedeen in those days. In my own generation, two decades later, their counterparts were known as fedayeen. But everything was dying. There were only remnants—disorganized and alone—of the 1936-39 revolt.

Outside my grandfather’s house, along the main road, a group of mojahedeen are standing beside cement blocks. They are armed with machine guns and hand grenades. They take up their positions on the road to Mount Carmel only minutes before the ambush begins. My uncle is running back and forth issuing instructions. The convoy of trucks arrives. Six brown trucks covered with canvas and thick rope. One driver and a passenger in each. I am crouching by the window with my father’s arm around my waist. Everybody in the room is watching. All at once, machine-gun fire rakes the trucks. Hand grenades explode. The shooting is incessant for over a minute. Two of the trucks are on fire. I do not know where to look. Something is happening in all directions. To all the men. To all the trucks. I keep watching the truck nearest to the cement blocks. I see the driver with one hand on the steering wheel, the other clutching a pistol that he places on the outside, against the windshield. His co-driver, next to him, is dead, his body half out of the open door. The man now jumps out of his vehicle and takes cover behind some of the cement blocks. He crouches there with the pistol still in his hand.

When the British soldiers arrive in their tanks and army trucks, my uncle and his men hurry back to their homes with their weapons. There are bodies in the street. The trucks are burning. The smell of gun smoke fills the air. The man behind the cement blocks waves to the soldiers. I see him as he walks away with them. I wave to him, tentatively, innocently. I begin to endow him with a private history that I create for him. A private life that is embellished with time. His memory has lived with me ever since I left Palestine in 1948. Ever since our land was flattened by bombs, and political edicts denuded our history of its metaphor and its idiom.

After the man is rescued the tanks and soldiers stay in the neighborhood. Soon more soldiers arrive. Hundreds of them. With their blond hair, freckled noses, and tattoos.

We hear them climbing up the stairs. My grandfather’s part of the house is on the second floor of a two-story building. We hear foreign voices. It is always foreign voices. Foreign people telling us what to do. They order us to open the door. They shout something about the authority invested in them by the King of England. That is how it was in those days—the King of England invested his people with authority to issue orders in Palestine. And in India. And Africa. And Kenya. And Hong Kong. Of course, no Englishman would ever have allowed us to send people over to England and invest in them the authority to push around English men, women, and children.

The soldiers rush into our house, six or seven of them. We are herded into one room. They ask my grandparents if they have guns around the house. We are standing, all of us, with our arms up. Only my mother looks funny, with her prayer beads over her head, muttering incantations to scare away the evil spirits. The soldiers open wardrobes, smash the dressing table, throw my grandmother’s sewing machine against the wall. They wreck the place. The two soldiers who are doing most of the ransacking are shouting abuse at the top of their voices. “Filthy wogs,” they keep repeating, “filthy wogs.” All this time I feel nonchalant. For I had seen that, and much more, done in the village. I had seen them grab people by the hair and drag them to the center of the square and kick them till they became unconscious. Often they took suspects with them who never returned. In the 1936-39 revolt, before I was born, the British hanged three men from our village. Three mojahedeen.

Though my father was never a mojahed, he transmitted their ethos to me. The mythology of the mojahedeen is an integral part of our oral history. Every Palestinian child who sits on his parents’ knees listens, entranced, to the tales of men who defied the hated British and later the Zionists. How bands of mojahedeen came to the village during the 1936-39 revolt, with guns and checkered headdress, and the women came out to the square and gave them flowers and bags of food and the children pointed at them. Suddenly a woman would stand close to them, put her hand over her mouth, clasping her lips with two fingers, and start ululating. The other women joined in and the square, the whole village, reverberated with the resonant sounds. The men in the village became reverential, their voices hushed, as they greeted the mojahedeen. “Ahlan Wa Sahlan, Ahlan Wa Sahlan fi el Abtal” (Welcome, Welcome to the brother heroes). And before leaving, the fighters were joined by some of the young men, who would leave the village fields to live in the hills with them.

My father never went away. He was a small shopkeeper. One day three British soldiers get off their jeep outside his shop and talk to him. They are drunk. One abuses my father because there are flies on the goods displayed in the open. How do you expect anyone to eat this shit with flies on it, he wants to know. Another takes his rifle and knocks over the bags of olives, cheese, oranges, whatever is nearest him, right on the ground and jumps on them, roaring with laughter. The third soldier grabs my father by the neck, throws his hatta off his head and slaps him across the chest. And my brother became a mojahed at the age of seventeen.

When we left Palestine the dawn was blowing around us like the rage of God. Our city had fallen and burnt on supine bodies. And the world applauded. But I did not hate. I could not hate at the age of eight. April is always a good time of the year where I was born. The sun shines and the smell of olives and oranges permeates the air. That April, in 1948, was my father’s last in Palestine.

The day before we left the city, we sat in the house off the highway and heard foreign voices shouting into loudspeakers, “Get your women and children out.” I hated those foreign voices. “Get everybody out. Get everything out.” This is going to be somebody else’s country now. “Get them out.” Around the streets, in the distance, there was intermittent gunfire. “Get your women and children out.” Flares and smoke and fireworks exploding in the heavens, above the houses, beyond the port, near Mount Carmel, around the center of town. Something was dying. Something was coming to an end for this generation of Palestinians. Get out.

The men and women who were defending Haifa were gone. They were alone. They were dead. They were dying. They were wounded. Then the people went. The radio was dead. Before it died someone issued Declaration 15 on the air. And what was Declaration 14? And 8? And 4? And infinity? There was no Declaration 16. The ether was choked with fire. And despair. And death. And ever since that time, people have wondered why I use double negatives around my house, unhindered by my walls lined with books; and why I use terms like nation and homeland and inalienable rights, unconcerned that I have become over the years the citizen of a community of beings much larger than Palestine.

In Beirut, however, at age thirteen, I could not explain my father’s death without looking for Declaration 16, and for a liberated zone I could go to, live free in. At that age I could not explain the tradition of refugeeism my father was transmitting to me as I listened to his mumblings about how soon—for surely it had to be soon—we would all return. All our agonies would be over. The cosmos would be restored to its preordained course.

In the first three years of our ghourba a frightening sense of my father’s refugeeism ruled Palestinian life in our refugee camp. Everything was slow-moving, quiet, dormant. The dogs, like the children, had bones showing under their skin and lay in the shade of the tents. In the hours after noon people were nowhere to be seen, except occasionally a woman walking up the dirt track to the water pump with her bucket. No one acknowledged our presence. Whether we were being ignored or forgotten no one could say. After a while, it ceased to matter. In the evening, the old men sat in the sidestreet café with its kerosene lamps talking furtively. Their words were at times impassioned. At times angry. They talked about Palestine. About the Return. Trustingly, hopefully, about UN debates. None of them doubted that their stay in Lebanon was temporary. Instead, they discussed the difficulties that the majority of Palestinians encountered making a living, getting a work permit, a residence permit, a permit to cross borders; they discussed which Arab leader stabbed us in the back more than the others. Which Arab state was good to the Palestinians and which was bad to them. Palestine would always be there as they left it. And it was also right there that night, around the kerosene lamps, transmuted to us in their images and recollections and passionate idiom, in the encapsulated world of the refugee camp that had already been home to me for three years.

I sit in the café next to my father and watch him and his friends drink their tea and suck on their waterpipes. I am eleven years old.

My father is talking to Abu Saleem, a newcomer to the camp. My father asks him where he comes from in Palestine.

“I come from Hawassa,” Abu Saleem replies.

My father recognizes the village near Haifa. “Hawassa, hey?” he asks quietly, elongating the name and dwelling on it as if it has some mystical, healing effect. “Hawassa is a pretty village.”

Such an exquisite verb that my father has just used, bristling with the stuff that makes people defy history and the heavens and the powers that be. For to both my father and Abu Saleem, Hawassa, along with all the intangible realities of the village, is something that will remain eternal and real in the essential repertoire of their consciousness. To them, Hawassa is and not was a pretty place. And Palestine is and not was their country.

To my parents’ generation the present was insanity. Not a natural continuum of what was. The only way they could relate to it was to transform it into an arrested past, governed by Palestinian images, rites, rituals, and dreams. That was the only way to impose harmony on their daily life, which terrorized them. They looked at themselves in the mirror of their past, for had they looked at the present the mirror would have been cracked. The image of their reality blurred.

A whole mosaic of folklore began to emerge that captured, and froze in the mind, the portrait of Palestine as our parents’ generation had left it. The vernacular exploded spontaneously with the mass sentiments of those who came from Haifa, from Jaffa, from Acre, and other towns or isolated villages in Palestine. Haifa, O beloved city, we left thee with the fish that our fishermen had caught still thrashing about on the sands.

Jaffa, its denizens would counter, we fled thee O sad city of the north, with our Dabki song not yet finished. And those who came from Acre would say, Acre, we built thee unafraid of the roar of the sea.

I am eleven years old and my father and I are walking down the dirt tracks of our makeshift world in the refugee camp. The walls are covered with political slogans. One of these says, “May a million calamities befall the British, enemies of the Palestinian people.” I read that aloud to my father, deliberating over the words.

“May the Lord hear your prayer,” he responds earnestly.

“The Zionists are also the enemies of the Palestinian people.”

“That they are. May a million calamities befall them too.”

With such vehemence was I acquiring a past and a consciousness.

My father is in his traditional shirwal and headdress, clutching three liras and some change for the tram fare. We are heading to the marketplace downtown to buy food. The money, though so little, is precious. My brother had worked all day the day before at a construction site to earn it. Today maybe we can eat something other than the powdered milk, bread, and dates that the UNRWA rationed out.

I am carrying an empty wicker basket in one hand. I ask my father eagerly if we will be buying cake today.

“Why cake? Who do you think we are? We are not of the landed gentry, you know,” he reprimands me. Everything he utters nowadays, every phrase he formulates, seems to be infused with land. We are not of the landed. We are not of anything except Palestine. Palestine, which housed within it the passions of two hundred generations.

“When we return to our homeland, you shall have all the cake you want. Believe me, it won’t be long now. Just be patient.”

In the marketplace we mingle with the shoppers. It is hot and humid. My father haggles over prices, spending the whole morning, to make the three liras last. The flies buzz in the air. Peddlers shriek. The porters walking around with huge wicker baskets over their backs frantically solicit work. We have to walk all the way back to the refugee camp because we don’t have enough money left for the tram fare. In the heat, it is a long trip for my father. He and I alternate carrying the basket, now full of vegetables. Every five minutes or so, my father sits down, panting. I sit down with him along the Basta road. My father’s face pours with sweat, which glues some of his hair to his forehead.

“Soon we shall go back to our homeland, son,” he says to me suddenly. “We are not from this country. We are not even of it. God in his wisdom will know when to help the heroes of the Return regroup and help us fight for our rights.”

I ask him if his store in Haifa will still be there when we return. He smiles happily at the image, and says of course it will, like everything else.

“And our home will still be there. And the Makha el Sham Café near it, where Abu Murad used to play the oud and make it cry,” he adds.

I glance at him intently, studying his face, as if I am seeing my future in his past. To him everything is in either the mind of God or the heart of the poet.

Soon after that I took to the streets. This was no time, no place, to have a childhood. At home my father hung a picture of Nasser up on the wall, hammering a bent nail in with an ashtray. What else was there for him to do? At the dinner table everybody watched someone who reached for the sugar or the bread or the beans, ready to shout “Hey, leave some for the others.” I say that to my younger sister. There is so little of everything. More than one spoonful of sugar and everybody cried, “Hey, leave some for the others; we are not of the landed, you know.”

I was growing up very cynical in my early teens, cursing the world and its angels and gods, and the mumbling incoherencies of my father. And the whole world outside the camp, which was venting its hostilities and aggression on us.

The Egyptian president smiled benignly on our misery in the mudhouses of our refugee camps, promising my father salvation he never intended to deliver. My father trusted Nasser because he had nowhere else to turn. I tried to be understanding but found it difficult.

If I was later to become a revolutionary, it was simply because a revolutionary idiom and the tensions of revolutionary life raged around me in the streets as if they were part of the elements. The struggle between rich and poor? This was a concrete everyday reality we literally bumped into it as we walked the city streets and saw Arabs from Lebanon and elsewhere driving imported sports cars to the nightclubs of Beirut, where they could drink and gamble themselves silly while the masses of the city starved. Their preoccupation with Western gadgets had long since turned them into caricature Arabs. I only had to go to Hamra Street, as I did in my first year selling chewing gum, to see them sitting around in places called Uncle Sam, Queen’s, and The Horseshoe, speaking French or English to each other. To them, we were “tres sauvages, complétement sauvage!”

And the ruling elite in the Arab world? I could not reconcile their pious claims with what we Palestinians endured in their states. Before I reached an age to have acquired any recognizable political history, I could already tick off a whole catalog of fears, terrors, and mendacities that they had made a part of our lives.

“Why the hell do we need a picture of Nasser around here?” I ask my father flippantly.

“Watch your language,” my mother intones.

“Can we still trust Arab leaders?”

“Not Nasser? Nasser?” someone in the room asks incredulously.

“If God were an Arab leader, I would not trust him.”

“Atheist! Communist!” This one from my mother.

I start swearing vehemently and my mother starts her Koranic incantations. “I ask forgiveness from God Almighty, the Great. No power and no solution except from Him the Exalted, the Omniscient.”

My father, as if on cue, stands up and tells me to leave the room. As I do, my sister picks up where I left off.

“He is right, don’t you see, dad?” she is saying. “Can we trust anyone, except ourselves, to liberate our country?”

Jasmine. My kid sister. With her glasses and teenage pimples and jet-black hair. With her pamphlets and booklets on the “solidarity of the working classes” hidden in her school bag so our parents won’t see them. Her fear of the dark. Jasmine, who, like every other Palestinian kid, never had a childhood. As much a product of the violence in our history as I. Working as a servant in the Ajloun Mountains of Jordan at age 12.

We were learning rich metaphors from those who came before us with full memories of Palestine. And adding our own metaphors from exile. Our struggle for self-definition took on the freshness of a new beginning, resonant and self-assured, as theirs did when it started in the 1920s. And like everything that is newly born, our struggle carried elements within it from the past, all Palestine’s past.

As we grew up, we lived Palestine every day. We talked Palestine every day. For we had not, in fact, left it in 1948. We had simply taken it with us. Palestine was an indivisible part of my generation’s experience. Just as there was nothing in the Garden that Adam did not know, nothing that he could not isolate, identify, and interpret. It could not have been any other way. Our involvement was as much forced upon us as it was a genuine and spontaneous inward preoccupation of our soul. This became evident soon after we all began to go to school again.

The first school I went to in Beirut was not far from the camp. It was run as a business by a Lebanese from the neighborhood. The classrooms were crowded. And always cold and damp. The teachers, were semi-literate. But for me even this school was an exciting place to go to every day. For Ibrahim, with his craving for education, it was heaven on earth.

Every school day, for me, was an exotic experience. After years in the streets I was truly enchanted by the idea of a formal education, by school activities, by sports, by the concept of boy scouts. I joined the boy scouts. And I was totally consumed by the idea of a camping trip to Cyprus that the group was organizing. For three months I made preparations. I saved money. I peddled chewing gum again in the evenings. The anticipation of the trip gripped my senses. I told the people at the camp. I told the whole world. I was a fourteen-year-old boy, a boy scout, going on a camping trip to Cyprus. I was, at last, no different from the other children. The tension of this transformed me, ruled my life for three months.

Three days before we were to go on this trip, the Palestinian kids in the boy scout group were called into the principal’s office. Because we were Palestinians, he said, we were stateless. And because we were stateless, we had no travel documents. And because we had no travel documents, the principal adds with the gestures of a man who had just discovered the solution to a major problem in his life, we could not go to Cyprus. We should have informed him of our status before, he continued reprovingly, talking to us, as the rest of the world did, as if it were our fault that we were stateless.

The other kids went on their trip. And we returned to Palestine. I am from Haifa. Haifa, O beloved city, we left thee with the fish that our fisherman had caught still thrashing about on the sands. Haifa now means more to me than it did to my father. It is more graphic in my mind than in his. Its image more enriching, more engulfing as I grow up.

Still, there was nothing wrong with being a Palestinian. Or living at the camps. We went to school. We fought the boys outside the Bourj el Barajneh. We fought each other. Samira sat next to me in class and my arm brushed hers. During the Eid following the holy month of Ramadan, the UNRWA distributed clothes and shoes and baseball hats to the refugees. I am a refugee. I get an old pair of moccasins from America. That’s right, from America. I have painted slogans on the walls: Down with America.

For Palestinians, passion for politics and political activism began at a very early age. By the time we were halfway through high school, we were already veterans of a number of demonstrations, strikes, protest marches, and ideologies, as well as arrests, beatings, and worse.

For Ibrahim, politics was now more than a passion. It ruled his life. Every waking moment. Long before he graduated, he virtually controlled political activity at school. He became the one to decide when to go on strike, what demonstration to join, what petition to sign. He was becoming incredibly self-assured, haughty, aggressive, and extremist. It was he who organized Awlad Falasteen to uproot the UNRWA trees. The United Nations organization had been doing a lot of building, renovating, and construction around our camp. The trees, planted along the dirt tracks, were presumably put there to beautify the area. But around the sidestreet cafés, people were wondering about them, about the better shacks they were building.

A woman shouted to a gathering of Palestinians around the water pump, “O sisters, I swear to you by the blood of our fallen patriots that I will not hammer one nail in a wall while we are outside Palestine. We shall build only when we return to our land. There we shall build!”

The woman was Um Ali, who became famous in the movement in the 1970s because she lost all her six sons, her two daughters, and her husband in battles the Palestinians waged after 1967.

Are they going to deny us our right to return to our land, everybody was complaining, by making our stay here comfortable, acceptable, and hence permanent? “They” were the UNRWA officials, the American government, the Zionists, the British, the Arab states, and everybody else who lived outside the camps with their backs to us.

The trees looked so incongruous in the midst of our misery and destitution. So Awlad Falasteen attacked the trees, uprooted them, and burned them. We danced around the fire, singing lines of doggerel then common among Palestinians: Who am I/Who are ye?/I am the returnee/I am the returnee.

And always the police came to the camps. And always Captain Constantine was in a jeep, accompanied by three or four of his gendarmes. Nobody was afraid of us in those days.

He climbed up on a box, in the manner of a man about to pontificate, and waited for the people of the camp to come and listen to his abuse. If they did not, he sent his men to drag them out of their homes. He talked as if we were children.

“I don’t want to see any more Palestinians peddling in the streets without a permit,” he hollered with a hint of contempt in his voice. “I don’t want to see any more Palestinian sons of whores going across the border to Syria without a travel permit, or working ‘whether paid or unpaid’ without a permit.” If someone asked him a question he raised his voice contemptuously as he replied. He even slapped men across the face in front of their sons. “Uppity Palestinians,” he screamed, and went on to do the same thing at other camps.

At the café, a man complained, “The son of a whore doesn’t even wear a moustache.”

One day someone killed Constantine, with a dagger, as he was coming out of his house in the Mazra’a district. Immediately everybody began to speculate whether it was the Nasserites, or the Arab Nationalists, or the Communists, or the Baathists who did it. Shopkeepers gave out free candy to the children.

Then Squad 10, police who were the terror of both Palestinians and poor Lebanese, came to the camps. They arrested an eighteen-year-old boy called Hatem Arabi. He was never seen again.

Three middle-aged, very American-looking evangelical ladies come to our school to distribute toys. They are patting kids on the head and speaking deliberate, enunciated English to them when a boy of eleven or twelve walks up to one of the ladies, and ever so gently, pats her behind. “Your buttocks are so beautiful,” he says innocently.

The three evangelists want to know why the older pupils outside the school gate are making such a din. We are going to join yet another demonstration organized by the Arab Nationalist Movement in support of the Algerian struggle against French colonialism. Everybody is already shouting slogans. The girls are in the front, standing three abreast, holding Palestinian, Lebanese, and Algerian flags. The boys are arguing among themselves about which route to take to reach the Makassed school, where we will join its detachment of demonstrators.

“Tahya el thawra el Jazairia,” someone shouts. And we all shout back, Victory to the Algerian Revolution. “Fi el thawra tahreer Falasteen,” another shouts. And the slogan is repeated en masse. In struggle shall Palestine be liberated.

As we move on, dirty versions of political doggerel, old ones from previous demonstrations or new ones coined for the occasion, echo across the streets. The slogans condemn American imperialism, the British government, the French colonists in Algeria, Arab reactionaries, the “lackeys” of the West and Zionism in the Arab world, and virtually all established Arab leaders, with the Hashemites in Jordan and Iraq heading the list. When we get to the Makassed school, Ibrahim runs back and forth to confer with the leaders of its detachment of demonstrators. He is sweating profusely, with his shirt clinging to his small body.

“The sons of whores say we can’t go for a while,” he says loudly, contemptuously, “because the stupid Baathists are at it again with their rigid instructions to their followers. For God’s sake, these people are so dumb and irritating!”

He talks as if his whole life depends on the success of the event, gesticulating wildly, pleading with everybody to stay in place and not disperse.

We ultimately get moving and pick up more people on the way, heading to the American University of Beirut (AUB) to combine with its own students demonstrating there. From the AUB we are all going to march down to the Borj, the main square in the center of downtown Beirut, to the Lebanese Foreign Ministry.

On the way, the shopkeepers throw flowers and rosewater at us. Some shout slogans such as “Down with colonialism” and “God is with those who seek to be free.” Others, more religiously oriented, shout Koranic phrases. By the time we reach the Borj, our numbers have swelled immensely. We stand all bunched up together, surrounded by a large number of gendarmes. The demonstration today, unlike many others before and after it, is legal. The Algerian Revolution in the late 1950s, like the Palestinian Revolution in the late 1960s, was too popular for the government to ban.

Outside the Foreign Ministry building the various groups from different schools or different parties or different ages mingle together. Ibrahim and I hold the wooden poles supporting a banner that says “Western imperialists, colonists, and occupiers in our homeland—the Arab world shall become your graveyard.” Salim Solh, the prime minister of Lebanon, steps onto his third floor balcony to address the crowd. Ibrahim and I are directly below, standing near the steps leading into the lobby of the building. For about ten minutes Solh dwells on the sympathy that the Lebanese and other Arab peoples have for the Algerian struggle for independence. But then he says the Lebanese people have always sought friendship and cooperation with the French and the Lebanese government does not want to endanger this special relationship. Ibrahim begins muttering loudly under his breath. Then suddenly, as if he has gone mad, he screams “La, la, ya Solh, la solh ma’a el istimar?”—No, no, O Solh, no peace with colonialism. Ibrahim is punning on the name “Solh,” which in our language means “peace.” He keeps screaming the line over and over again, at the top of his voice. Full of uncontrolled fury, he lets go of his side of the banner to wave his fists at Solh. Then he climbs up on the steps and proceeds to give a counter-speech.

For God’s sake. Ibrahim Adel. The sixteen-year-old boy with whom I grew up at the camps. Who has a lyrical name like Abraham the Just and a nickname like “the library.” Who shined shoes around the Corniche with me. Ibrahim, the boy with the shaved head who had tried to kiss a zaim’s foot not so long ago, is now giving a counter-speech to the one that the foreign minister of Lebanon is giving to a crowd of ten thousand demonstrators.

What is happening to us, the first generation of Palestinians growing up in exile? It is as if we are growing up challenged to talk about and deal with more than we knew. Each question we ask to which we find no answer becomes a blow, merciless and brutal.

Ibrahim is, of course, picked up by the police and taken into custody. In those days, when you were arrested the police did not bother to file charges, release you on bail, or enable you to inform your next of kin. Very simply, you were beaten senseless, made to sit in a cell for a day or two, a week or two, a month or two, or when necessary, a year or two. Till the emergence of the Palestinian Revolution in 1967, it was illegal for Palestinians to engage in any kind of political activity. In Lebanon, Palestinians were considered aliens.

When we went to visit Ibrahim at the police station the day after his arrest, laden with bread, black olives, and yogurt, he seemed in incredibly good humor, despite his swollen face and bruises. He even joked with us about what the police had threatened.

“To deport me,” he said mock-seriously, “if they caught me in a demonstration again.”

“Deport you,” we all asked in unison. “Where? Where could they deport you?”

“That’s the joke, don’t you see?”

Ibrahim was soon released because Abu Ibrahim (like everybody else) knew someone, who knew someone, who knew someone in the Lebanese Parliament who, for a bribe, did favors for the families of prisoners. Under the then existing system, someone who could come up with the appropriate amount of money could literally get away with murder.

In Palestinian society, when someone is released from jail for a political offense, everybody in the neighborhood, and even outlying neighborhoods, visits to offer “congratulations.” The visitors may be total strangers, but they come, sit down, drink tea, talk Palestine, and offer their congratulations. If male, the ex-prisoner wears his headgear in a special way, tilting his hatta at an angle to indicate rakish defiance of the authorities and to declare to his friends that he had not been crushed. He is, in other words, proclaiming publicly his willingness to go back to jail if need be. If the victim died under torture, or has been killed in battle, then his family buries him attired as a bridegroom, arisse el watan, married to the nation. Again, congratulations, not condolences, are offered by the visitors.

These are old, traditional arrangements that Palestinians (in struggle for well over a century) had established sometime beyond anybody’s recall; arrangements that, for various reasons, still appeal to their internal psychic economy.

So Ibrahim basks in the “congratulations” that people from Bourj el Barajneh camp come to his home to offer.

Abu Ibrahim, however, is enraged at his son, not because of his political activism but because he is “endangering his education.” “How are you going to live without an education?” Abu Ibrahim is shouting at his son. “You keep forgetting that you’re a Palestinian. A Palestinian. You’re worth nothing without an education. No one will give you a job without an education. Do you want to grow up to be a shoeshiner? And tell me. How will you support us when your mother and I are old? You’re a Palestinian. Can’t you wait till we go back to our homeland? Do you want to struggle in the lands of others? May the Lord damn them and damn the lands of others? May the Lord damn them and damn their lands and their corrupt governments and police. May the rainbow never appear in their skies. May the Lord pour acid on their songs and fire on the tongues of their poets. Wait till we return to Palestine. Your education is more important than politics.”

In Palestinian society, you do not talk back to your father. Ibrahim listened, and said nothing. In exile, however, our fathers have become too debilitated, too drained, by the effort they have made, all these years, to transmute the ethos of Palestine to us. In their old age, they have become conservative, cautious, terrorized by the exigencies of life and the imminence of death in exile.