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
