Читать книгу Soul in Exile - Fawaz Turki - Страница 7

The objective conditions in our situation—which are themselves an externalization of our subjective condition—were changing us, transforming our picture of the world and ourselves at a dramatically accelerated pace.

At school, I am consumed by a paper I am writing about the Russian Revolution for my history class, trying to deal with why men and women struggle at such danger to themselves; why certain individuals readily offer their lives for a cause although this means they will not be around to enjoy the rewards of the ultimate victory. At home I am consumed trying to pacify my mother, who berates me and my sister for “endangering” our education. Our mission in life, she insists, is to become educated and liberate Palestine, not to change the Arab world. “Leave politics alone,” she shouts. “We are just Palestinians, for God’s sake.” She does not respond to our argument that Palestine and the Arab world cannot be seen in isolation from each other, and that our destiny as a people cannot be divorced from its relation to politics, and to political events in the rest of the world.

The argument that everything in politics is interconnected in an intricate web of relationships spanning the whole world had come to me from my friend Samir Salfiti, who worked as a peddler at the Corniche. I knew Salfiti from the camps and from Awlad Falasteeri. We often called him Abu Saksuki, Father of the Beard. More often we called him Brazil-Japan, an engaging name we gave him because he was always wont to begin an argument, in that systemic logic of his, by saying: “Hey listen brothers, if you want to know what’s happening in Brazil you have to know what’s happening in Japan”—what happens in one place is related to what happens everywhere else.

Unlike many of us, Brazil-Japan, or Bee-Jay, never made it through high school. He had to drop out when he was fifteen because his father died and there was no one to support the family. So he bought himself a cart and sold peanuts, kaak—a crispy bread—and roasted corn around the Corniche. We often went there, his old friends from the streets, to chat with him, talk politics, and, above all, recite poetry. Poetry is not the exclusive idiom of the educated elite among Palestinians. Rather, the opposite is true. Poetry to us is a currency of everyday exchange, a vital starting point to meaning. A child recites poetry. A politician quotes a line of poetry, to prove a point. A personal letter contains, always, at least one line of poetry. Moments of despair in everyday life, moments of joy, are celebrated or defined in poetry. There is so much poetry in the air, poetry from pre-Islamic times, poetry composed by countless poets at the height of Arab civilization, poetry during that civilization’s decline, modern poetry, obscure poetry. People define themselves and their environment in verse. Palestinians take all of this for granted—until they live elsewhere in the world.

The poet’s craft has so shaped, organized, reordered, and revitalized the tenor of our society’s life and mythology that it has become ingrained in our existential habits of spirit, our manners of ceremonial life. That is why Palestinians forget, outside their own milieu, how affected they seem, how rhetorical; and how hard it is for outsiders to understand that a people’s national anguish, or personal grief, can be best articulated in poetry—that poetry, in fact, is every Palestinian’s idiom.

At the Corniche, we would sit by Bee-Jay’s cart and recite poetry incessantly. We had memorized so much of it, even before we had gone to school, that we played a well-known game with it. One of us would recite a line, and the fellow next to him would be challenged to recite another beginning with the letter with which the previous one ended. We went on for a long while before someone got stuck.

Palestinian poetry, whether oral or written, is so rich, and poets so ubiquitous, that no aspect of Palestinian culture and no introspection of the Palestinian national psyche is irrelevant to it.

All the poetry that was then being composed, or at least that we were then committing to memory, would have been considered subversive by the Arab governments and their police. Our poets were forever exhorting the masses to struggle for freedom, for Palestine, for the Return. The struggle for freedom, whether against indigenous oppressors or foreign ones, the theme went, is a unified statement that needs no explanation. It is encompassed in forces that transcend us. Ordinary people should plunge into the tumultuous stream of history, so that articulate self-determination and political experience are not the prerogatives of princes and presidents and statesmen alone.

Despite its somber theme, the poetry we grew up with also had a kind of innocence to it, a roundedness, a celebration of the impulse to be free, a moral optimism, and an aboriginal reduction of history so that it became everybody’s concern.

The ideal of a poem whose meaning “remains hidden” is alien to us; not only because our language leans more, in its drift and form, to verse than to prose, but because it is in the craft of the poet, rather than of the theoretician or polemicist or analyst, that people seek a reflection of their mass sentiment. For centuries, in a development originating in the overlap of infinite social adaptations whose exact origins are beyond recall, our poets have appropriated the role of speaking the language of the people, of drawing on the universality of their struggle rather than on the particularity of a personal malaise.

The poet in Palestinian society, hence, has been a hero. The hero of the poet, however, has always been the fighter, the man or woman who dies in the struggle of the masses. The myth of the fighter, “the blood of our fallen patriots,” has always pressed to the core of our historical meaning.

God will free us, Palestinians used to say in the old days, at moments of crisis before our struggle began. Then soon after the turn of the century, the fighter became a sort of God himself, supplanting the real God here on earth, as His agent in the now, while He sat back to deal with issues of the hereafter.

Three successive generations of Palestinians, inside and outside Palestine, have immersed themselves in struggle, conducting their own dialogue with history. Our children have never had occasion, a respite, to adulate or emulate Davy Crocketts and Robin Hoods and football stars. Their heroes are the same as their elders’—individuals whose sacrifice for the cause of Palestine had already entered into legend, the kind of legend necessary to any society created, shaped, and organized to be responsive to situational and psychological needs such as ours.

The spell of martyred Palestinian fighters does not lie wholly in their willingness to give their lives for the people. To us, to those Palestinians who knew these fighters, lived alongside them in the villages in Palestine or with them as sons or brothers, and to those of us growing up in the refugee camps on their exploits, these fighters have signified an uninterrupted continuity in a tradition of struggle, a tradition of life, that stretched back to the turn of the century.

To us, the tradition of the mojahedeen of the 1920s (literally, those in holy struggle for the people), like the fedayeen of the 1960s (literally, those who sacrifice their lives for the people), means that every moment in our present establishes intimate links with our past, thus making our future not only tolerable to contemplate but a vital center in our historical experience. In this context, Palestinians do not have to throw furtive glances behind them; they are, rather, forced to proceed afresh every morning, leaving failed history behind.

The poet, then, simply appropriates the enormity of this collective sentiment, internalizes it, endows it with poetic form, and gives it back to the people, from whom it came. And of course the people respond.

So we, the children from Awlad Falasteen, strolled around the Corniche, or more often congregated around Bee-Jay’s cart, and recited poetry—poetry whose subtlety and richness were actually structured by, as much as it was now structuring, our own self-definitions.

Bee-Jay never felt insecure because he was possibly the only kid among us who was not going to school. He just took it for granted that since his father had died he would, as the eldest son, support the family. Luckily, his family was rather small by Palestinian standards, with only six of them around.

Still, the death of Bee-Jay’s father had come as a surprise to everybody, since he had seemed so healthy. So massive and strong. He had a thick mop of hair and keen, piercing eyes, in addition to an incredibly resonant voice, which he often used effectively to recite mawal and awf peasant songs.

Back in Palestine, Bee-Jay’s father, Abu Samir, had spent his life almost entirely on the land, with the land. He knew what was and what was not coherent with his world—which for him was the only world around—without knowing the history and the politics of Palestine. When people around him, at the refugee camp, discussed the Balfour Declaration or the White Paper or the role of Arab reaction in the nakbi of 1948 he was lost. But he had a cogently aboriginal sense of our historical life. Once, the men were arguing at one of the sidestreet cafés at the camp about how strong the Palestinians would have to be in order to defeat Zionism and return to their land. Abu Samir interjected: “Brothers, the answer is simple. Ask yourselves how many enemies we have and that is how strong we have to be. We have to have as much strength as the Zionists, the Arab governments, and America combined.”

Abu Samir would have no truck with the political banter and heated discussions around the camp’s cafés. Peasants have no business discussing intellectual issues. Is not everything they need clearly defined, with every question being its own answer, in the condition of the land, of the seasons, and in the way men and women, animals and trees, wind and sky, express themselves every day, how they were born and how they died, having lived out their life spans and then returned to the land whence they came?

Abu Samir, like the true Palestinian peasant he was, loved the land and his family and his village and his goats and even the cheese that his goats gave him. But while he had them all he never once, Bee-Jay told me, used the word love. He never once said to his wife that he “loved” her.

“I don’t believe that my father had ever kissed my mother,” Bee-Jay once explained to me, in talking about the concept of affection in the peasant milieu. “Only when we came to Lebanon did my father begin talking about how he loved, and missed, the land and our village and our way of life in Palestine. Only then did he begin to seem affectionate, loving, intimate, with my mother.”

Abu Samir’s own father, around the turn of the century, had worked in a camel caravan, transporting goods back and forth among Amman in Jordan, Sidon in Lebanon, and Acre in Palestine. He was bitten by his own camel and died a few months later.

He had carried all his family’s savings on him in a money belt, all in gold coins. With that, Abu Samir, then in his late teens, bought the land. Working the land in third world countries is not, as is often pictured, a bitter struggle for peasants who own their land. It is in fact a labor of love. When the harvest was in and sold, peasants like Abu Samir would buy their wives printed fabric to make dresses, slaughter a cow, and invite other families from the village for a feast so they could meet children of marriageable age and see which of them was gifted playing the yarghoul and dancing the dabki, who was strong and healthy to work the land and who, among the girls, had accumulated a good trousseau.

In 1955, a journalist from England, one of those wretched “area specialists,” complete with cameras and images of the Palestinians as the noble savage, came to the camp to conduct a series of interviews with the men around the cafés. She talks to them, through an UNRWA interpreter, as if they are children—in a slow, deliberate, patronizing manner.

“But why, why must you go back to Palestine?” she asks Abu Samir, thrusting her microphone close to his face. “Why Palestine specifically? There are many Arab countries you can be resettled in.”

She was too ignorant of our culture to know how profoundly insulting she was being. No one can make sport of a Palestinian peasant’s gods without eliciting a fierce response, yet Abu Samir simply straightens up stiffly in his chair and waits a while before he answers. He has learned over many years how to handle a goat or a mule possessed by a fit of obstinacy. You are gentle with it, suspending your fury a while, till it comes to its senses.

“Sister, let me tell you this,” he intones, his eyes almost closed as he puffs on his waterpipe. “The land is where our ancestors were born, died, and are now buried. We are from that land. The stuff of our bones and our soul comes from there. We and the soil are one. Every grain of my land carries the memories of all our ancestors within it. And every part of me carries the history of that land within it. The land of others does not know me. I am a stranger to it and it is a stranger to me. Ardi-aardi,” he concludes. My land is my nobility.

What an English journalist, coming from a culture that wants to “conquer space” and “tame nature,” did with that bit of peasant self-definition, no one can say.

When it rained and no people strolled up and down the Corniche, Bee-Jay left his cart at home and engaged in politics. Politics ruled his life, as it did, in one degree or another, the life of every Palestinian of my generation. He had been in and out of virtually every political party and movement found in Beirut at the time, and was as comfortable, in that man-child confidence we possessed in those days, dissecting secular Arab ideologies—Baathism, Nasserism, and Pan-Arabism—as he was holding forth on Marxism or John Lockean liberalism. In addition, he was a hardened street tough, the stereotypical “son of the camps” who was living a quintessentially political life.

Sometime in the early 1950s, he and his family left Beirut to live and work in Cairo, only to return in disillusionment after less than two years and reintegrate themselves into the camp. While in Cairo, Bee-Jay became involved in student politics and was detained a number of times. His most memorable arrest, ironically, was the result of a seemingly nonpolitical offense. He was working as a janitor at one of the hospitals in Cairo. One day he noticed two women in labor and recognized one of them as a Palestinian from the neighborhood where his family lived. She was in extreme pain and screaming furiously. So Bee-Jay went over to console her, presumably because her husband was not around. The doctor told him to get out.

“She is a Palestinian,” Bee-Jay responded shouting, “I’m responsible for her.”

The doctor scolded the woman for screaming, saying she should be quiet “like the Egyptian lady next to you, who is also in labor.”

Bee-Jay turned around and screamed at the doctor: “What the fuck do you know? Do you expect a woman giving birth to a guerrilla fighter to act the same as a woman giving birth to a bellydancer?”

He was dragged out and taken to a local police station, where he continued to play his defiant act—which kept him there for a few days instead of a few hours. While in jail he met a Palestinian boy in his early twenties whose story he never ceased narrating to us when he returned to Beirut. This boy, presumably from Gaza (which was then under Egyptian administration), had been picked up by the police for some unknown, undocumented offense having to do with being “associated with communists,” and tortured so brutally that he lost all his memory. He could not recall his own name, or anything about his background except that he was a Palestinian. When it was time for his release, the authorities discovered that he did not possess the thirty dollars to pay his fine. So they dumped him back in jail. He tried to commit suicide once by throwing himself onto the yard from the second floor. He just broke his legs and his collar bone.

When Bee-Jay got to jail, the boy was a mess. He had lost his glasses and could barely see, and was no longer in control of his motor responses or bowel movements. Bee-Jay took care of him the short while he was there and after his own release he immediately collected the thirty dollars for the boy’s freedom. When Bee-Jay and his parents left Cairo the boy was still under treatment, looked after by various Palestinian families in the neighborhood.

Back in Beirut, when Bee-Jay spoke of that boy, he always referred to him as el batal, the hero. But more than that, he always ended the story by saying: “We shall burn down their religions and their gods, destroy the house their ancestors built, and suck the blood of those who rule the Arab world.”

Around that time, Bee-Jay became a Baathist and often smuggled party literature into various West Bank towns, where it was, of course, banned. He usually took the last bus from Amman and arrived late at night in Nablus, where bookstores distributed the material surreptitiously. The Communists and Arab Nationalists did the same thing. In those days in the Arab world, literature that mattered had to be distributed through an underground.

One night Bee-Jay’s bus was stopped at one of the check-points where Bedouin soldiers routinely searched passengers and examined their identity cards. He was arrested, not because the soldiers discovered his contraband publications, but because he had given the soldiers a lot of back talk, as was his wont with authority.

He was held overnight but the soldiers never discovered that he was carrying “subversive literature,” he told us derisively, because they were “all illiterates.” And he would repeat rhetorically, over and over again, “Imagine the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Hashemite Kingdom. A country named after the name of the ruling family. Imagine! A country where labor unions and political parties are banned, where voting in elections—when elections are held—is confined to male property owners. Son of a whore king. Feudal pig.”

Bee-Jay was growing up violent. In demonstrations he would taunt the police. When arrested, he would be the one to throw the first blow. When called a two-bit-Palestinian, he would spit at the cops and holler obscenities at them.

I was witness to a fragment of this violence one day when Ibrahim Adel and I met him at the Corniche just as he was ready to close up shop.