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,
