Читать книгу Beyond Beauty - Ferial Youakim - Страница 7

I USED TO LIVE IN A small corner of the city of Beirut, in a refugee camp called Mar Elias. It was smallest of the refugee camps. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA) and other humanitarian organizations still rate it as the best of all the refugee camps in Lebanon.

My grandfather had left Haifa with the idea that he would return in a few weeks. He left behind two married daughters and their families. He had six children with him. My twelve-year-old father was one of them. My grandfather held my father’s hand when they both saw their home for the last time.

That was in 1948, and many more refugees would come into Lebanon that year. Palestinians refer to that year as the “the Catastrophe” or Nakba.

My grandfather carried his house keys in his pockets for the rest of his life. I have seen and read the deed to the house and property. My family had a home, but we had been locked out. We still have the keys. Grandfather and the children entered the refugee camp system and eventually settled in Mar Elias, which was exclusively a Christian Palestinian camp then.

Mar Elias was founded in 1952, and its very existence today, as is that of the other camps in Lebanon, proves that the situation was not momentary. Those of us in Mar Elias were the misplaced, the displaced, the castaways on what became a small island of poverty and despair. The affluent of Beirut surrounded us, as they lived and worked, moved about their lives, while we treaded water in place, stuck, maintaining hope amidst dust and deprivation.

Palestinian refugees, regardless of their religion or their camp, have no rights as citizens; they are stateless. I had travel papers once that stated that I was born in Lebanon, but I was not Lebanese. Palestinians are restricted from a variety of occupations. This list of prohibited jobs has grown smaller, but the figures still exist as denials in double digits. The pathway to higher education was blocked, either by policy or prohibitive costs. Self-determination in the camp was like a car without an ignition and the tires slashed.

The word “refugee” has the echo, to my ears, of “flee” in it, but a linguist friend of mine reminded me that the word originally meant “one who seeks shelter,” until the start of World War I, when the word came to mean “one fleeing home.” My family, just as so many others had at the time, had sought shelter in a storm, and the government and the people of Lebanon welcomed us. We had arrived believing that our stay would be only temporary; the Lebanese had thought the same, but history would prove otherwise. As I write this, a new wave of refugees is arriving, this time from Syria.

If I had my choice of words, I might choose “exile” over “refugee.” I carry within me the hope of many people for peaceful coexistence, of a people that wish to return to its ancestral land. I can visit the Holy Land, but I am denied entry into my grandfather’s house. I can see the door, but I cannot use the keys. The locks have been changed, the dead bolt thrown.

I write “Holy Land” and not “Palestine” because it is sacred soil. This is the land where God’s whisper is heard through the valleys, day or night, where prophets came forth to chasten the fold, where conquering nations forced their currency and customs on captives before they disappeared like another mirage in the desert. The Holy Land is the homeland to three Abrahamic religions, and to call it home is to have an identity, a relationship with God, with time and history.

Beirut, once the Paris of the Middle East, the Riviera of the Mediterranean, has been savaged and gutted by explosions. Buildings were left pockmarked by gunfire during decades of tension and civil war. I have heard the whistling of a missile overhead, the clatter of machine guns, and the thuds of bombs. There was no escape. Assassinations were common. Detonated explosives were the preferred method. People ran for cover from one part of Beirut to another. If I went east, I was reviled as a Palestinian; if I went to the western part of the city, I was insulted because I was Christian. The Green Line divided Muslim Beirut and Christian Beirut. All the while, the air was thick with smoke, full of poisonous hate for which there was no antidote. When I heard the sirens, I knew that somewhere, someone had been maimed or had died. Death does not discriminate. This was the Beirut I knew.

Should I call myself an Arab Christian or a Christian Arab? In both cases, this makes me both a contradiction of cultures and a minority, a person with a double identity in conflict. Ethnicity is, and should be, the spice of a person, but couple ethnicity, politics, and religion together, and the combination is as volatile as any of the Molotov cocktails hurled in riots. I speak Lebanese Arabic; it is my mother tongue, but I am no terrorist just because I am both an Arab and a Palestinian and a Christian.

Mar Elias is on an acre of land. A Greek Orthodox convent owns that land. The single most compelling problem in the camp is not space, but clean drinking water. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment, with four people to each room. I was the third of six children. My two brothers and three sisters and I slept on twos on a single mattress. A bath was a bucket of water trucked into the house, and the kitchen was a gas tank and a camping stove. We used to heat water for our showers and a used a tin can for a ladle.

Standing in the queue for food each day was one step forward for our sustenance and another step backward for our dignity. My grandmother supplemented our meals with leftovers from the cafeteria of the school where she worked as a cleaning lady. Electricity was sporadic; candles were more reliable. We used one of the two toilets for the entire camp.

UNWRA had set up a school for children inside a tent. Illness was rampant, and school was inconsistent when there was violence in Beirut. There was one health center in the camp. Cancer, diabetes, and hypertension are prevalent.

Mar Elias is a place of claustrophobic alleys too narrow for cars. Laundry is draped over makeshift lines or railings. The numerous scents of meals commingle in the air with music. The sides of buildings act as bulletin boards for community news and for news from abroad. There is no escaping the reminder that home is elsewhere. On various shades for a background, words are not graffiti but laments for the dead, love letters to a place left behind, to families and other loved ones whose memories are kept alive with handsome calligraphy in Arabic, as if those words were written on a postcard that never arrived.

What I remember most about Mar Elias are two distinctive sounds: the patter of rain falling on our tin roof, which I found comforting, and the church bells that invited us to worship on Sundays. When it rains in Lebanon, it rains during the winter months: December through March. The downpours benefit the ski resorts less than an hour’s drive from Beirut, but threaten our streets with floods and raw sewage; and for me, the odor of stagnant water and human waste competes with the sight of dust and the glitter of broken glass, the percussive sound of a blast, and the stench of cordite and garbage.

The greatest luxury my family had were some tiles that my father had laid down for my mother. My father was a manual laborer. He had taken all of us to one of the tile factories on a family trip. My father couldn’t afford the tiles, so he had us sort through the rejects, the broken and imperfect shards so that we could have something beautiful. I remember how he got on his hands and knees for my mother and for us children, remember how he concentrated intently as he pieced together a work of art for us. It may seem odd to walk across a work of art, but those tiles were our flying carpet and a reminder of his love for us. All these years later, I understand that love and beauty are inseparable.

All of this that I have described, all of this that I experienced would suggest that the first few pages of my existence were nightmares. Not so. Children are accepting; they are resilient, and they know no better until presented with an alternative. I was no different. My corner of the world, the one I knew until I was thirteen years old when I left the camp, was a loving place. Because we were a small camp, people knew each other as one big family. Love was not a refugee. Kindness needed no return visa. Not all the stones on the ground were rubble from violence.

Children played. I played. We were resourceful with what little we had, not knowing how little we had. My friends and I played with sticks; we played jacks, using apricot seeds and small stones. We had our imaginations and our adventures. We sang and we tumbled through the usual games of childhood. We roughhoused and ran wild in the lanes while men played their board games, drank their coffee, and debated politics loudly. Mothers called out to their children and looked after other children. Men stood up when women entered the room. We were courteous to our elders. We had manners because our parents instilled in us the values of respect and civility. Our clothes may not have been trendy, but they were clean and maintained.

My father worked hard, but he was no stranger to relaxation. He loved to meet with his male friends, drink the anise-scented drink called arak with them, and entertain them with melodic strains of music from his oud, a guitar-like instrument with its big rounded belly and short neck, its head tilted back as if it didn’t want to interrupt a conversation. Food was scarce, but there was always a meze platter of assorted vegetarian appetizers that would appear when friends gathered in fellowship. I look back at those days with gratitude, and I would not wish away one minute.