scheme of the city—pending our return to Palestine, our homes and homeland. In the meantime, ours would remain a reality scorched by alienation. We were destined to wander the face of the earth, creating a ceremony of shadows that was to become our homeland in exile. And living in it, in the dark fullness of ourselves, we would end up affecting the world as forcefully as it had affected us. The only difference between us and others growing up in the world at the time is that we, unlike them, never had a childhood. In the end, people like us are a necessary component of change in history. Progress has never been made by contented people. In the midst of oppression, only the oppressed will abolish injustice. Only those who are defined as the footprint of a shadow emerge from the night with a dream. The dream soon sours, as all dreams do, and other outsiders, armed with the complex energy of their outsidedness, come forth to be agents in history, propelling it forward.
In Beirut, a year or two after we left Palestine, my father’s hair began to take the color of snow. I would not leave him alone. I repeatedly badgered him about my bicycle. He had bought it for me a short time before we left our country. I want to know what is going to happen to it. Will the Jewish kids, who had been coming to Palestine from Europe, take it? Is it safe? Is it? Will it still be there when we return? And he assured me, earnestly, faithfully, that since our house is locked and we have the key, everything, including the bicycle, will be there just as we had left it. But I was not satisfied. I leaned against him, in tears, pleading to be taken back to Haifa, just for the day, just for the short trip across the border, to pick up the bike. Why can’t we go? Why not? Why? Why?
Suddenly my father bursts into tears and begins to mumble: “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.”
Soon after his wish was granted.
How do I mourn my own father’s death? Had my father died of natural causes, of a recognized disease, of old age, or had he even died a violent death, I would have known how to mourn. But my father died of something else. He died from not being able to answer the question that he must have repeatedly asked all those years: Why had all of this happened to us?
In 1948, my father lived in Haifa. He was poor, like most Palestinians, and like most Palestinians he was also proud—that he lived in his city, had his own petty business, played backgammon with his friends in the sidestreet cafés of the city, and supported his family. After 1948, he found himself transplanted to a world of nonbeing in a refugee camp where his humanity and identity were reduced to a fragment. The move was so sudden, so inexplicable, that it took his breath away. The more he thought about it, the more the thought splintered his soul into pieces of raw wounds, of dizzy incomprehension. At the beginning of each month, he would line up at the food depot to pick up our food rations. His family lived on charity. Away from home. In the homeland of others. And they were alone. And destitute and hungry. He did not know why everything had crumbled around him. He could not deal with his sudden transformation from a proud, self-sufficient Palestinian Arab to a helpless nonentity belonging to a people being pushed off the pages of history books. Armed only with his traditional images, with his traditional system of logic, which had served him well to define the peasant society he had been a product of, he was unable to explain why he had been robbed of the right to live in his country. That is why my father’s hair, which had been jet black in Palestine, was turning the color of snow. He was shriveling up and his hope, like his voice, was losing its edge. He had no answers, and he just wanted to die.
Yet I know I should not be concerned. My father lived his history and responded to it, in life and in death, the best way he knew how. And I had mine. When I reflect on it, I find that I have grown up with death like I have grown up with my skin. Violence and death flourished within close proximity of every moment, every encounter in my life. Even as a child I was learning of the violence that history is capable of inflicting on the soul.
Violence in both its psychological and physical forms had always dominated my life. Yet in this period along with my memory of pain and devastation, I had an equally strong feeling of compassion, an affirmation of the possibility of human justice and freedom—denying violence a monopoly of the soul. Even as an eight-year-old boy, I had memories of what I had left behind. Of walking, resting, and walking along the coast road to the Lebanese border to seek refuge. A peasant woman giving birth on the wayside, emitting ghastly sounds. My mother fingering her prayer beads, pleading with the deities to let us through safely. Stragglers from Haifa, and Acre, and other coastal cities joining us along the way, all heading in the same direction. My mother tying her shawl in knots around her back and shoulders and putting my two-year-old sister there. When we pass the Zionist settlements, everybody walks straight on, looking straight ahead, as if this will protect us from being seen or shot at. What are these settlements? Who are the people who live in them? Why did they choose our country to come to? Who are these people? Who are they? Who are they?
The year before, in the village we lived in, I keep remembering… the house was blown up and the family in it ran out, the woman, her body burning, clutching a pillow as she ran. I hear a scream. In the room that night everybody is getting up. My eldest brother carries a gun and leaves in a hurry. The sound of gunfire is getting louder, closer, and the animals in the village are running loose, down the dirt tracks, behind the houses. The Committee for the Defense of Balad el Sheikh is giving instructions while the sky rains fire on our village. Maybe God in His heaven has gone mad. They are here again. It is still night in the room and my mother is reciting verses from the Koran. The Stern Gang is here again. There is a kind of frenzy in the Koranic words my mother recites. Her voice is drowned out by the sound of shooting and then I hear it again, so loud, so frantic, when there is a gap, a short silence, as the firing stops. They are here … who are these people? … They are taking our homeland.
We left the village and went down to Haifa to live with my grandparents and uncle. My grandfather worked at the Haifa port with the British Port Authority… and the underground. Every night he came home with guns that he would smuggle through the gates at the port and bring to my uncle. Guns he would steal from the offices where he worked. Guns he would buy from drunk British soldiers. Guns brought on friendly ships arriving from Beirut, Latakia, and Alexandria.
My uncle and brother would go off for days together. They were called mojahedeen in those days. In my own generation, two decades later, their counterparts were known as fedayeen. But everything was dying. There were only remnants—disorganized and alone—of the 1936-39 revolt.
Outside my grandfather’s house, along the main road, a group of mojahedeen are standing beside cement blocks. They are armed with machine guns and hand grenades. They take up their positions on the road to Mount Carmel only minutes before the ambush begins. My uncle is running back and forth issuing instructions. The convoy of trucks arrives. Six brown trucks covered with canvas and thick rope. One driver and a passenger in each. I am crouching by the window with my father’s arm around my waist. Everybody in the room is watching. All at once, machine-gun fire rakes the trucks. Hand grenades explode. The shooting is incessant for over a minute. Two of the trucks are on fire. I do not know where to look. Something is happening in all directions. To all the men. To all the trucks. I keep watching the truck nearest to the cement blocks. I see the driver with one hand on the steering wheel, the other clutching a pistol that he places on the outside, against the windshield. His co-driver, next to him, is dead, his body half out of the open door. The man now jumps out of his vehicle and takes cover behind some of the cement blocks. He crouches there with the pistol still in his hand.
When the British soldiers arrive in their tanks and army trucks, my uncle and his men hurry back to their homes with their weapons. There are bodies in the street. The trucks are burning. The smell of gun smoke fills the air. The man behind the cement blocks waves to the soldiers. I see him as he walks away with them. I wave to him, tentatively, innocently. I begin to endow him with a private history that I create for him. A private life that is embellished with time. His memory has lived with me ever since I left Palestine in 1948. Ever since our land was flattened by bombs, and political edicts denuded our history of its metaphor and its idiom.
