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
