the man is rescued the tanks and soldiers stay in the neighborhood. Soon more soldiers arrive. Hundreds of them. With their blond hair, freckled noses, and tattoos.
We hear them climbing up the stairs. My grandfather’s part of the house is on the second floor of a two-story building. We hear foreign voices. It is always foreign voices. Foreign people telling us what to do. They order us to open the door. They shout something about the authority invested in them by the King of England. That is how it was in those days—the King of England invested his people with authority to issue orders in Palestine. And in India. And Africa. And Kenya. And Hong Kong. Of course, no Englishman would ever have allowed us to send people over to England and invest in them the authority to push around English men, women, and children.
The soldiers rush into our house, six or seven of them. We are herded into one room. They ask my grandparents if they have guns around the house. We are standing, all of us, with our arms up. Only my mother looks funny, with her prayer beads over her head, muttering incantations to scare away the evil spirits. The soldiers open wardrobes, smash the dressing table, throw my grandmother’s sewing machine against the wall. They wreck the place. The two soldiers who are doing most of the ransacking are shouting abuse at the top of their voices. “Filthy wogs,” they keep repeating, “filthy wogs.” All this time I feel nonchalant. For I had seen that, and much more, done in the village. I had seen them grab people by the hair and drag them to the center of the square and kick them till they became unconscious. Often they took suspects with them who never returned. In the 1936-39 revolt, before I was born, the British hanged three men from our village. Three mojahedeen.
Though my father was never a mojahed, he transmitted their ethos to me. The mythology of the mojahedeen is an integral part of our oral history. Every Palestinian child who sits on his parents’ knees listens, entranced, to the tales of men who defied the hated British and later the Zionists. How bands of mojahedeen came to the village during the 1936-39 revolt, with guns and checkered headdress, and the women came out to the square and gave them flowers and bags of food and the children pointed at them. Suddenly a woman would stand close to them, put her hand over her mouth, clasping her lips with two fingers, and start ululating. The other women joined in and the square, the whole village, reverberated with the resonant sounds. The men in the village became reverential, their voices hushed, as they greeted the mojahedeen. “Ahlan Wa Sahlan, Ahlan Wa Sahlan fi el Abtal” (Welcome, Welcome to the brother heroes). And before leaving, the fighters were joined by some of the young men, who would leave the village fields to live in the hills with them.
My father never went away. He was a small shopkeeper. One day three British soldiers get off their jeep outside his shop and talk to him. They are drunk. One abuses my father because there are flies on the goods displayed in the open. How do you expect anyone to eat this shit with flies on it, he wants to know. Another takes his rifle and knocks over the bags of olives, cheese, oranges, whatever is nearest him, right on the ground and jumps on them, roaring with laughter. The third soldier grabs my father by the neck, throws his hatta off his head and slaps him across the chest. And my brother became a mojahed at the age of seventeen.
When we left Palestine the dawn was blowing around us like the rage of God. Our city had fallen and burnt on supine bodies. And the world applauded. But I did not hate. I could not hate at the age of eight. April is always a good time of the year where I was born. The sun shines and the smell of olives and oranges permeates the air. That April, in 1948, was my father’s last in Palestine.
The day before we left the city, we sat in the house off the highway and heard foreign voices shouting into loudspeakers, “Get your women and children out.” I hated those foreign voices. “Get everybody out. Get everything out.” This is going to be somebody else’s country now. “Get them out.” Around the streets, in the distance, there was intermittent gunfire. “Get your women and children out.” Flares and smoke and fireworks exploding in the heavens, above the houses, beyond the port, near Mount Carmel, around the center of town. Something was dying. Something was coming to an end for this generation of Palestinians. Get out.
The men and women who were defending Haifa were gone. They were alone. They were dead. They were dying. They were wounded. Then the people went. The radio was dead. Before it died someone issued Declaration 15 on the air. And what was Declaration 14? And 8? And 4? And infinity? There was no Declaration 16. The ether was choked with fire. And despair. And death. And ever since that time, people have wondered why I use double negatives around my house, unhindered by my walls lined with books; and why I use terms like nation and homeland and inalienable rights, unconcerned that I have become over the years the citizen of a community of beings much larger than Palestine.
In Beirut, however, at age thirteen, I could not explain my father’s death without looking for Declaration 16, and for a liberated zone I could go to, live free in. At that age I could not explain the tradition of refugeeism my father was transmitting to me as I listened to his mumblings about how soon—for surely it had to be soon—we would all return. All our agonies would be over. The cosmos would be restored to its preordained course.
In the first three years of our ghourba a frightening sense of my father’s refugeeism ruled Palestinian life in our refugee camp. Everything was slow-moving, quiet, dormant. The dogs, like the children, had bones showing under their skin and lay in the shade of the tents. In the hours after noon people were nowhere to be seen, except occasionally a woman walking up the dirt track to the water pump with her bucket. No one acknowledged our presence. Whether we were being ignored or forgotten no one could say. After a while, it ceased to matter. In the evening, the old men sat in the sidestreet café with its kerosene lamps talking furtively. Their words were at times impassioned. At times angry. They talked about Palestine. About the Return. Trustingly, hopefully, about UN debates. None of them doubted that their stay in Lebanon was temporary. Instead, they discussed the difficulties that the majority of Palestinians encountered making a living, getting a work permit, a residence permit, a permit to cross borders; they discussed which Arab leader stabbed us in the back more than the others. Which Arab state was good to the Palestinians and which was bad to them. Palestine would always be there as they left it. And it was also right there that night, around the kerosene lamps, transmuted to us in their images and recollections and passionate idiom, in the encapsulated world of the refugee camp that had already been home to me for three years.
I sit in the café next to my father and watch him and his friends drink their tea and suck on their waterpipes. I am eleven years old.
My father is talking to Abu Saleem, a newcomer to the camp. My father asks him where he comes from in Palestine.
“I come from Hawassa,” Abu Saleem replies.
My father recognizes the village near Haifa. “Hawassa, hey?” he asks quietly, elongating the name and dwelling on it as if it has some mystical, healing effect. “Hawassa is a pretty village.”
Such an exquisite verb that my father has just used, bristling with the stuff that makes people defy history and the heavens and the powers that be. For to both my father and Abu Saleem, Hawassa, along with all the intangible realities of the village, is something that will remain eternal and real in the essential repertoire of their consciousness. To them, Hawassa is and not was a pretty place. And Palestine is and not was their country.
To my parents’ generation the present was insanity. Not a natural continuum of what was. The only way they could relate to it was to transform it into an arrested past, governed by Palestinian images, rites, rituals, and dreams. That was the only way to impose harmony on their daily life, which terrorized them. They looked at themselves in the mirror of their past, for had they looked at the present the mirror would have been cracked. The image of their reality blurred.
A whole mosaic of folklore began to emerge that captured, and froze in the mind, the portrait of Palestine as our parents’ generation
