from Jaffa, from Acre, and other towns or isolated villages in Palestine. Haifa, O beloved city, we left thee with the fish that our fishermen had caught still thrashing about on the sands.
Jaffa, its denizens would counter, we fled thee O sad city of the north, with our Dabki song not yet finished. And those who came from Acre would say, Acre, we built thee unafraid of the roar of the sea.
I am eleven years old and my father and I are walking down the dirt tracks of our makeshift world in the refugee camp. The walls are covered with political slogans. One of these says, “May a million calamities befall the British, enemies of the Palestinian people.” I read that aloud to my father, deliberating over the words.
“May the Lord hear your prayer,” he responds earnestly.
“The Zionists are also the enemies of the Palestinian people.”
“That they are. May a million calamities befall them too.”
With such vehemence was I acquiring a past and a consciousness.
My father is in his traditional shirwal and headdress, clutching three liras and some change for the tram fare. We are heading to the marketplace downtown to buy food. The money, though so little, is precious. My brother had worked all day the day before at a construction site to earn it. Today maybe we can eat something other than the powdered milk, bread, and dates that the UNRWA rationed out.
I am carrying an empty wicker basket in one hand. I ask my father eagerly if we will be buying cake today.
“Why cake? Who do you think we are? We are not of the landed gentry, you know,” he reprimands me. Everything he utters nowadays, every phrase he formulates, seems to be infused with land. We are not of the landed. We are not of anything except Palestine. Palestine, which housed within it the passions of two hundred generations.
“When we return to our homeland, you shall have all the cake you want. Believe me, it won’t be long now. Just be patient.”
In the marketplace we mingle with the shoppers. It is hot and humid. My father haggles over prices, spending the whole morning, to make the three liras last. The flies buzz in the air. Peddlers shriek. The porters walking around with huge wicker baskets over their backs frantically solicit work. We have to walk all the way back to the refugee camp because we don’t have enough money left for the tram fare. In the heat, it is a long trip for my father. He and I alternate carrying the basket, now full of vegetables. Every five minutes or so, my father sits down, panting. I sit down with him along the Basta road. My father’s face pours with sweat, which glues some of his hair to his forehead.
“Soon we shall go back to our homeland, son,” he says to me suddenly. “We are not from this country. We are not even of it. God in his wisdom will know when to help the heroes of the Return regroup and help us fight for our rights.”
I ask him if his store in Haifa will still be there when we return. He smiles happily at the image, and says of course it will, like everything else.
“And our home will still be there. And the Makha el Sham Café near it, where Abu Murad used to play the oud and make it cry,” he adds.
I glance at him intently, studying his face, as if I am seeing my future in his past. To him everything is in either the mind of God or the heart of the poet.
Soon after that I took to the streets. This was no time, no place, to have a childhood. At home my father hung a picture of Nasser up on the wall, hammering a bent nail in with an ashtray. What else was there for him to do? At the dinner table everybody watched someone who reached for the sugar or the bread or the beans, ready to shout “Hey, leave some for the others.” I say that to my younger sister. There is so little of everything. More than one spoonful of sugar and everybody cried, “Hey, leave some for the others; we are not of the landed, you know.”
I was growing up very cynical in my early teens, cursing the world and its angels and gods, and the mumbling incoherencies of my father. And the whole world outside the camp, which was venting its hostilities and aggression on us.
The Egyptian president smiled benignly on our misery in the mudhouses of our refugee camps, promising my father salvation he never intended to deliver. My father trusted Nasser because he had nowhere else to turn. I tried to be understanding but found it difficult.
If I was later to become a revolutionary, it was simply because a revolutionary idiom and the tensions of revolutionary life raged around me in the streets as if they were part of the elements. The struggle between rich and poor? This was a concrete everyday reality we literally bumped into it as we walked the city streets and saw Arabs from Lebanon and elsewhere driving imported sports cars to the nightclubs of Beirut, where they could drink and gamble themselves silly while the masses of the city starved. Their preoccupation with Western gadgets had long since turned them into caricature Arabs. I only had to go to Hamra Street, as I did in my first year selling chewing gum, to see them sitting around in places called Uncle Sam, Queen’s, and The Horseshoe, speaking French or English to each other. To them, we were “tres sauvages, complétement sauvage!”
And the ruling elite in the Arab world? I could not reconcile their pious claims with what we Palestinians endured in their states. Before I reached an age to have acquired any recognizable political history, I could already tick off a whole catalog of fears, terrors, and mendacities that they had made a part of our lives.
“Why the hell do we need a picture of Nasser around here?” I ask my father flippantly.
“Watch your language,” my mother intones.
“Can we still trust Arab leaders?”
“Not Nasser? Nasser?” someone in the room asks incredulously.
“If God were an Arab leader, I would not trust him.”
“Atheist! Communist!” This one from my mother.
I start swearing vehemently and my mother starts her Koranic incantations. “I ask forgiveness from God Almighty, the Great. No power and no solution except from Him the Exalted, the Omniscient.”
My father, as if on cue, stands up and tells me to leave the room. As I do, my sister picks up where I left off.
“He is right, don’t you see, dad?” she is saying. “Can we trust anyone, except ourselves, to liberate our country?”
Jasmine. My kid sister. With her glasses and teenage pimples and jet-black hair. With her pamphlets and booklets on the “solidarity of the working classes” hidden in her school bag so our parents won’t see them. Her fear of the dark. Jasmine, who, like every other Palestinian kid, never had a childhood. As much a product of the violence in our history as I. Working as a servant in the Ajloun Mountains of Jordan at age 12.
We were learning rich metaphors from those who came before us with full memories of Palestine. And adding our own metaphors from exile. Our struggle for self-definition took on the freshness of a new beginning, resonant and self-assured, as theirs did when it started in the 1920s. And like everything that is newly born, our struggle carried elements within it from the past, all Palestine’s past.
As we grew up, we lived Palestine every day. We talked Palestine every day. For we had not, in fact, left it in 1948. We had simply taken it with us. Palestine was an indivisible part of my generation’s experience. Just as there was nothing in the Garden that Adam did not know, nothing that he could not isolate,
