Текст книги "I Was Born There, I Was Born Here"

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

In spite of the difficulty of what I try to do, I love to write poems using the softest possible voice, even while they preserve the roughness of the history that fills poets’ bodies, their rooms, and their memories, which are sharp as Swiss knives. The heroic tone in the tyrant’s voice has helped me rid myself of poetic heroics. The fierce Italian has saved my poetry from fierceness.

In the red Alhambra, I finish the poems that are born here in my white office, and what is born in the Alhambra or at the Upside Down café in front of the park I finish in Amman and Cairo.

I cannot calculate how much I’ve written with my eraser, for I have torn up much and regretted much. How happy I’ve been at my eraser’s cruelty! Doesn’t deleting give as much pleasure as writing? What does writing get its value from if not from what we have deliberately erased … so that it stands out more clearly?

The tree that bears a thousand buds resolutely and without hesitation abandons many of its fruits and allows them to fall dead next to its trunk so that it may take better care of the rest.

Trees fascinate me not just for their beauty but because I see in them also a symbol of resistance without bluster or bragging. It fascinates me too that the unarmed tree knows that everything that is permanent is temporary.

Come and see:

Their nakedness shudders silently beneath the whip of the wind.

Birds dare not visit them on their silent war front, nor bees.

One clever branch tells another:

“Slow down!

This is no time for greening, hot head.”

The branch nods to its friend, with an obedience

As complete as the surrounding emptiness.

The trees look like bombed out villages abandoned by their inhabitants

Who have taken with them their colors, their breezes, and their shadows

And left them surrounded by roaring hardships.

No one is left to share their moans beneath the blows of the thunder

And the electric torture sessions of the lightning.

Come and see:

And because many do not look at a field that is clothed in nothing,

Because the great do not disclose their mysteries, Because the trees, like us, are fighting an alliance of the snows of the north,

The fog of the gods,

And the lack of a helping hand,

And because all probabilities are open,

Come now. Come and see:

Teach your heart to trust their silence,

Which resembles ours.

Come and see:

The trees, which, like us, looked dead or almost so,

Were fighting all the time!

And on a known day,

At the one and only appointed time

And because nothing is ashamed when its time is come,

The clever branch says:

Now! Now, companions,

Now, enduring, patient branches,

Now

Let us proclaim our spring.

The kingdom of leaves

Opens its doors to the birds, to the bees,

And we humans prepare the baskets.

And on a known day,

The stage hand raises the curtain:

The basket of fruits at the center of the homely scene

Blazes

Like victory.

The Alhambra was the second place in which I’d lived on my own after my time alone in Budapest. I had a year ahead of me to perfect my solitude once more. It wouldn’t take much training. I have enough experience of solitude to open an institute.

The list of friends grew longer by the day, as did the list of relatives with whom I renewed acquaintance after my long absence in distant countries. But definitely I was in love with the new-old place. Long walks among the trees and on the hills, and getting to know the gardens of the houses with their lemon, orange, mandarin, and loquat trees, was a pleasure surpassed only by that of stealing one or two figs cut from the branches close to the street, and the sensation of the smell of jasmine that rose from the walls and spread to the four corners of the earth, filling my whole body and my chest.

It made me happy.

And, excited by that vital mixture, the writing squirmed inside me as though kicking me with its feet. Even though I didn’t know its name and sex, it was a life coming from the future and wanting to emerge into the present.

I had constructed my own Upside Down café for my writing here just as I had constructed my own Zsolnay Café in Budapest. Here, in the Alhambra, I used Fayrouz and Pavarotti; at the Upside Down, there was Umm Kulthoum. At the Zsolnay, there was Mme. Gabriella, the seventy-year old pianist, who would greet me with Beethoven’s Für Elise as soon as I entered. I’d send her, via the waiter, a glass of Rémy Martin in acknowledgement and she’d put it on the edge of the piano, where the cognac would remain unshaken no matter how loud the music at the crests of the crescendo. She would thank me with a nod and a calm smile and move on to Rachmaninov, Chopin, and the rest of her daily program. I’d sit down and the waiter would set before me a pen, blank sheets of paper, and a cup of coffee with a piece of the café’s special chocolate on the saucer, leaving it up to me to order anything else I might want after that. I would write, erase, rip, and keep only a little, but I’d return carrying a draft that I could work on through the night.

Summer arrived. Tamim came to Ramallah to spend a few days with me before joining Radwa in Amman, where she would arrive with the start of the university vacation. This time he came on his own. And this time too he got in easily.

I went with him to all the places I had formerly known in Ramallah and al-Bireh, and to new ones too.

Some of his poems had been published in the newspaper al-Ayyam and when he visited the House of Poetry, they offered to publish his first collection of verse in Palestinian dialect. He handed over to them his collection Mijana, and was both scared and happy.

Unexpectedly, I received some good news.

9. Things One Would Never Think Of

Anis came to me and said he’d been given the task of organizing a conference of Palestinian expatriates in Ramallah and that my brother Majid was among those invited. Incredulously, I said to Anis, “But he doesn’t have a Palestinian identity card, so how will the Israelis allow him in?”

“We’re going to get week-long visitors’ permits for all the invitees.”

“They’ve agreed to that?”

“They’ve agreed.”

“When’s the conference?”

“Next week.”

Majid came from Doha to Amman. There our mother decided to come with him, to see me, Ramallah, and Deir Ghassanah.

On the promised day, I asked Tamim to go to Amman to accompany his grandmother and uncle on the journey. I took him as far as Jericho and he went on to Amman. Then the three of them returned together and the Alhambra was brought to life.

Majid, who hadn’t seen Ramallah since he’d gone there clandestinely on foot after the occupation in 1967, was in seventh heaven.

I had to make a great effort to prevent my mother from getting engrossed in straightening up the apartment and making improvements.

Nothing about my rented apartment pleased her. The kitchen was “the size of a needle’s eye,” of course. The living room set was “commercial furniture” and the arrangement of the chairs was “wrong – this way’s better.” She asked me to buy new kitchen equipment and what not. When she learned that I ate in restaurants, she said pityingly, “Restaurant food will make you sick, you poor thing. What could be better than home cooking?”

“You’re my guest. I’m the one who’s going to cook and do the washing up and clean the house. Okay?”

“It won’t do, my son.”

“It will and that’s it.”

She smiled like one who doesn’t want to hear.

Majid was only nine months old when the Nakba occurred in 1948 (even my youngest brother is nine months older than the State of Israel). We were living in the city of Lydda, where my father worked, and there Majid was born in 1947, his birth bringing the number of brothers to three – Mounif, the eldest, who was born in Jericho, then me, who was born in Deir Ghassanah, then Majid. The attacks on Lydda by armed Zionists struck terror into the hearts of its inhabitants, not to mention the news that reached them of the killings and forced migration to which the other Palestinian cities, towns, and villages up and down the coast had been subjected. Reports of the hundreds of thousands who had fled by boat to Gaza or on foot to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan came in quick succession. My father decided to take us back with him to our house in Deir Ghassanah. Traveling the mountain roads was extremely unsafe but it was the only way. They returned with us and the baby Majid, who was still in swaddling bands; whenever he wanted to be fed, we would pause under a tree so that my mother could give him a few gulps from her breast, waiting minutes that seemed longer than they really were because of our fear of ambushes, shelling, and the other surprises of the road.

I’ve never in my life seen a hyena, a wolf, or a jackal, but terror at the thought that they might appear on the road as we fled from Lydda to Deir Ghassanah brought them to life before my eyes. I’ve seen scorpions and vipers but never feared them as much as I did those creatures of my imagination. A child’s facts are his fears, not objective facts. On that journey, I became aware that I was involved in something beyond my power as a child to understand. In fact, now, at the moment of writing, I discover that I can’t remember its details.

Later, the Palestinians would develop a collective memory as precise as any individual’s, as though whatever had touched one of them had touched them all. I asked my mother and she tells me that the passing of a bus or a car was a temporary lifebelt. We would get on without asking where it was heading and it didn’t matter if it carried us one kilometer or took us to a village we didn’t know. What mattered was that it take us away, or even that we should have the chance to sit for a while. I urge my mother to remember. Memory refuses to come to her aid but the phrase ‘they betrayed us’ repeats itself an amazing number of times in the course of her few sentences. From her sporadic words, I piece together the atmosphere of that sad exodus. Anxiety over what people had left behind and anxiety over what lay ahead. A world vanishing and another forming in its place beyond the control of the displaced. Everything that was known making way for everything that was unknown. Self-respect taking a back seat to necessity. Only necessity.

A father, a mother carrying a baby, and two small boys – Mounif, aged seven, and me, aged four. We walked inside fear itself toward the village that we thought of as our solution. At the time, we didn’t know we were merely a tiny detail in a scene from the Nakba that befell the entire Palestinian people.

Thereafter Palestinian migrations would diversify, stretching from the coast to the mountains, from Palestine to abroad, and from one country to another, bringing the wandering in the wilderness full circle. The worst of these migrations was that of our fathers to the Gulf states, where money was plentiful. Some (I do not say all) of these produced the youth of that lost generation that received an upbringing based on affluence and a day-by-day and year-after-year fading of the memory of Palestine. Some of this generation have become used to taking and are no longer able to give. They behave as though their prosperity in the Gulf states is a natural thing that will last forever. They enter universities not by virtue of their superior academic performance and high scores but by virtue of their family’s money. The student insists from first year onward on having a car and doesn’t care who pays for it or covers its running costs so long as it isn’t him. His clothes are flashy and all are the world’s top brands. He spends half his time watching American TV series and going with his friends to parties, for a reason or for none. He has never in his life taken part in a demonstration to protest against anything and makes fun of anyone who has or who shows interest in any public issue. A generation that may poison the lives of its families in defense of its personal freedom but doesn’t know what to do with that freedom or why exactly it wants it. The employment of millions of Palestinians in the Gulf may constitute another way in which the Arab system funds the Occupation and covers its costs with Arab money. The opening of the Gulf’s doors was a boon to the Palestinians in the short term, in the years of refuge and migration that followed the Nakba, but in the long term it has certainly been less beneficial. Let me pause here and confess that I’m not completely sure of what I’m saying. The subject hasn’t been studied yet with sufficient care. The Gulf provided many with a psychological and economic security umbrella without which it’s impossible to imagine that people could have survived in the aftermath of the Nakba. Certain Palestinian organizations and parties were born or developed in the countries of the Gulf. Their assistance to the villages and their generous financial donations in aid of their relatives in Palestine had a role in reinforcing their continued presence on the land and in withstanding the pressures of the Occupation.

Later, at the time of the Six Day War, Mounif will be working in Doha, I will be a student in Cairo, Majid will be at the University of Jordan, and ‘Alaa will be with my father and mother and attending primary school in Ramallah.

Majid decides to infiltrate on foot into Ramallah. He actually carries out his plan but is obliged to return to his studies a few days later. Since that visit, he hasn’t seen the city. The family ties that link us are totally at odds with our geographical dispersal around the world. We can no longer tell which of us is the one who cares most about these ties but we all recognize that everyone needs everyone else and that no one is happy with his forced separation from the others, whatever the reason – study, work, or the Occupation.

I’ll never forget something that ‘Alaa, whose job as an engineer forced him to live for many years in Qatar, once said. We were all grown up and had been dispersed among many countries. In his summer vacation, which isn’t more than one month a year, ‘Alaa returns to Amman and lives in bliss at being back among the family again. Once, when the time came for him to return to his job and I went with him to the airport to say goodbye, he surprised me by saying, “I’ve started to hate love.”

He said a great deal about the constant anxiety he felt over his mother when he is there and about his having to be separated from everyone to earn a crust of bread and educate his children and unburdened himself to me at length, but I remain amazed at the poetry sleeping in his amazing expression, “I’ve started to hate love.”

Majid is a poet faithful to poetry but not desperate to publish his work in books. He issued his first verse collection after fifty years or a little less of continuous writing and erasing and is now preparing his second for publication. Ghassan, who introduced me to the electronic paradise through his skill at everything to do with computers, has built websites for Radwa, Tamim, and me and taught me how to edit mine – a true test of his patience and perseverance. The internet has rescued Majid particularly from his reluctance to write and publish and he has started doing so electronically and spending long hours in front of the computer, as though to make up for lost time. ‘Alaa has taught himself to play the oud and started to write poems and songs that he sets to music himself.

Once Majid was done with the expatriates’ conference, we all went together to Deir Ghassanah so that he could see it after his long absence.

My uncle’s wife gave us the best possible reception. Our first lunch had to be musakhan, of course. The strange thing is that Marwan al-Barghouti phoned me too, by coincidence, and wanted to meet me. I suggested that he join us at Dar Ra‘d, which he did, once again over Umm Talal’s musakhan. This time I discovered that his family and my uncle’s wife’s family were related, though I failed to grasp exactly how, even after a long explanation.

As we left Dar Ra‘d for the Alhambra, I was surprised to hear my mother make the following announcement: “I have decided to restore and modernize your uncle ‘Ata’s house and I shall build a new house for you all in the courtyard of Dar Ra‘d. Mourid and Tamim now have identity cards and God willing the others will be able to claim the family reunion permit, so Dar Ra‘d won’t be big enough for everyone. Also, I’ve decided to buy al-Zawiya.’”

“What’s al-Zawiya?”

“It’s a house that’s fallen down and no one lives in, but my mother and I lived there for a while long ago, when I was a child, and I want it.”

‘Omar Dhib, to whom the lodge had come by inheritance, decided to give it to my mother as a present. She actually registered it in her name at the Palestinian Lands Department and felt that she had rescued her memory and her memories. A few weeks later, she returned bringing a construction plan for the new house that was to be built in the courtyard of Dar Ra‘d.

“Who drew the plan, Mother?”

“I drew it.”

She spread out a piece of paper that she took from her handbag and there was a plan of the house, down to the smallest detail.

I brought the municipal engineer, who studied the plan, authorized it with minor modifications, and signed it, and she obtained the necessary permissions from the municipality.

She took up residence in my uncle’s house, where she started by adding a balcony and a spacious kitchen, which she asked me to photograph after the restoration to show my uncle and his family in Amman. My uncle will never be able to go to Deir Ghassanah but he wanted to redo his house in case one of his sons, daughters, or grandchildren should return to live there one day. Next she came to an agreement with the building workers, who started to dig the foundations for the new house, and its pillars started to rise. I would visit her every Friday and find her sometimes issuing instructions to the workers, at others making them lunch, and at all times offering them tea as they worked.

The sight brought me very mixed feelings since, to construct a new house in the courtyard of Dar Ra‘d, my mother had to have the workers uproot the last two orange trees there. No power could turn my mother aside from the house-building project.

“You mean to say the poet of Deir Ghassanah shouldn’t have a house there?”

She falls silent for a moment, waiting for my reaction, so I say nothing. She proceeds with her argument.

“You mean to say when your brothers come back they should stay in the village as guests? And your son and his children don’t need a house in their own village?”

I’d look at the land after the disappearance of the orange trees, one inner voice blaming my mother, another arguing for an understanding of her insistence that we should have a house of our own in Deir Ghassanah. I recalled the great khudari fig tree that I’d been so quick to blame my uncle’s wife for cutting down years ago, though later I’d come to understand her decision. Today here I was, watching as our new house drove the greenery from Dar Ra‘d. My uncle’s wife had expanded her portion of the house so that for many years now it hasn’t had a real garden. She’d thought that those who had left would never come back, and now we were back. What my mother had done seemed to symbolize how tied in with pain this return was. Had I, who had been shaken to the core on my first return by the uprooting of the great fig tree, now colluded with my mother in the uprooting of the orange trees? Why was my difference with her a whisper and a hint and not a battle? Should I have stood up to her project with all my might? I hadn’t done so. Should I blame myself or my mother or a set of circumstances none of us would have suffered had not the hand of history turned the lives of every individual, family, and household in Palestine upside down? Wasn’t it possible for us to be overcome by joy without that joy being overcome by sadness?

Were we obliged to choose between the tree that lifts the spirits and the roof that shelters?

Was that how things were – the beautiful or the necessary? The tree or the roof?

Is it freedom or disobedience to differ openly with your mother?

How often have I said that life resists simplification? Here it was, resisting again, for the thousandth time. I admired my mother’s determination and her capacity for taking decisions and her initiative and I was upset at the disappearance of the two orange trees. Soon, though, this ambiguity ceased to be important.

The new building was finished in seven months. She slaughtered a sheep in celebration. She decided to call it ‘Lightning and Ra‘d,’ after the name Ra‘d, which means ‘thunder.’ She put a little furniture in it, gave me copies of the keys, and returned to Amman, intending to come back to furnish it and get it ready to be lived in. Then I could move there on a permanent basis, for I, being the only one of my brothers who had obtained the Palestinian identity card, was the only one who had the right to go to Deir Ghassanah.

Her plans would have succeeded, but for a small development that has prevented her from seeing the house to this day. Sharon took power in Israel after his visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Intifada erupted; he imposed a siege on the Bank and Gaza and on Arafat’s headquarters and closed the roads. The Israeli army set up the Surda checkpoint, cutting the road between Ramallah and thirty villages to the north, among them Deir Ghassanah. When, years later, things got a bit easier, my mother could no longer walk or travel because of the pains in her bones. She is obliged to stick to her seat next to the window in the Shmaysani house during the day, close to the heater, and to go to bed no later than nine. Because the default situation is closure and checkpoints and the exceptions are unreliable, the journey to the bridge and the uncertainties of the road have become unthinkable for her. The destiny of Umm Mounif’s small new house is now tied to the ending of (at the least) the Middle East Crisis, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the War on Terror. At the least!

I think that one day I must clad its walls in old stone that looks like the stone of Dar Ra‘d, so that I don’t go on being sad at the eyesore of the cement. I inform my mother of my intention and she welcomes it straightaway.

But what of the nightmare of the foundation, its thievery, and its Namiqs?

It was clear from the first week that I was fighting a losing battle. I had to honor my contract for a full year. I got into lots of fights. Many people acted as mediators. It slowly dawned on me that each mediation was aimed, fundamentally and invariably, at guaranteeing the continuation of ‘Namiqery.’

I got the message loud and clear early on.

All that remained was for me not to let my world be corrupted by that world.

I escaped into Greek myth. I read volumes, as though doing research, though I had no desire to do research; I just wanted to escape into a world other than the one I’d got caught up in. I started a long ode to Zeus and a poem called ‘Hera.’

When I returned to Ramallah following my furious resignation, the bridge was packed, so it was night by the time I arrived. I went up to the Alhambra, turned the key in the lock, and entered. I pressed the light switch and before I could put my small suitcase on the floor, noticed something that pained me: most of the leaves of the Thai bush that I’d bought had fallen onto the red carpeting, making a perfect circle of dead leaves around the huge pot. I got the vacuum cleaner and cleaned the whole house but decided to leave the circle of dry leaves as it was. I don’t know why I decided to leave it like that. My friends found the sight strange at first but got used to it. Dry leaves are time proclaiming its pre-eminence, death proclaiming its talent for victory. From one angle, I accepted it completely and from another I was playing the game of a realist who makes chivalrous acknowledgment of his opponent’s strength. I am not alone in this room, then. Life isn’t the only thing that lives here. Its opposite, its partner and murderer, known as death, shares its quarters, not as an honored guest but as a silent roommate whose presence is so quiet as to make him almost invisible. No one is aware of him, but these leaves that have turned completely dry point to his presence, which is something he neither intended nor is aware of.

I sat down next to the circle of dry leaves and wrote without pause until I had finished a poem that I called Ghurfa mu’aqqata (A Temporary Room).

Later, after many drafts and exclusions, I found that, without planning it, I had a collection of verse ready to be published.

The poems would set upon me like a highway bandit as I walked the roads of the world.

This is how the collection al-Nas fi laylihim (People at Night) was born, as well as more than half the collection Zahr al-rumman (The Pomegranate Flowers), which I published immediately after that.

As soon as ‘The Pomegranate Flowers’ appeared, I began writing Muntasaf al-layl (Midnight), a single book-length poem on which I spent more than two years.

Three collections one after the other. Then I stopped completely.

I stopped like someone returning from a marathon or who raises his hand in the dentist’s chair as a signal that he can’t put up with the sound of the drill any longer.

Was it the poetry that exhausted me or the pressures that made me write?

Or did I now need an overdue dose of laziness?

The amazing thing is that to be a poet you need two contradictory things – a great amount of vitality and a great amount of idleness. It’s always easy to find the vitality because it’s essential to staying alive. Any chance for idleness vanished with the invasion of Iraq.

History teaches us that political lies are a preface to war but the lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq exceeded all imagination and provoked millions of human beings on every continent. History has taught us that collusion among interested parties is widespread but the invasion of Iraq witnessed the collusion of governments at odds with their peoples and indifferent to the protests of millions of them, despite their high-flown talk of democracy. The invasion of Iraq upset the details of my daily life as much as the Occupation. American arrogance was now directed against every one of us and the era of universal apartheid between the strong and the weak began.

The worst thing about wars is that they reduce the enemy to a single characteristic. The country ceases to be history, language, architecture, theater, gardens, and legends; a heritage of love stories, philosophy, and science; shared ancestral dreams and uncountable varieties of human striving along the roads of the universe. Instead, every country becomes a mere label, blot, field of battle. This is what war has done to the names Palestine, Vietnam, Lebanon, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. These are no longer multifaceted countries and their names are mentioned in news bulletins not as such but as ‘fields’—fields from which the numbers of the dead and wounded are garnered daily like the output of a canned goods factory. The whole of history is now ‘today’ and today has become a reduction of every ‘yesterday’ that has passed over the face of this earth, a reduction of all history. As though al-Mutanabbi had never walked the markets of al-Kufa hugging himself with joy at a nation that would be singing his verses for a thousand years. As though the Abbasids had never built their libraries on the banks of the Tigris and Abu Nuwas never maintained his pinnacle of shamelessness and flagrant sexual indulgence through to the pinnacle of day after first exhausting the night with poetry and lovely depravities that spared neither male nor female. As though al-Hallaj had never been crucified defending what he had seen with the eye of the imagination and the eye of the mind. As though Hammurabi had never written his code on tablets of burnt clay before Coca-Cola and McDonald’s had been transformed into a religion for all mankind, while Gilgamesh, who achieved immortality by not finding the plant of immortality on the steppes of his everlasting legend, is treated as though he were not of the land of Iraq. Bush and Rumsfeld reduced all this to the word ‘enemy.’

Not one rational Arab believed for an instant that the Ba‘th Party was synonymous with Iraq and not one believed that Osama bin Laden was synonymous with Islam. However, war wants to summarize and abridge, not because the U.S. cannot understand but because it doesn’t want to understand. A Brazilian journalist once asked me, “To what do you attribute the West’s ‘misunderstanding’ of Islam?”

My answer was, “If a ‘misunderstanding’ serves the interests of certain people and helps them realize their goals, those people will decide to misunderstand. In such cases, the misunderstanding isn’t an accident that can be corrected through knowledge, dialogue, or better information. It’s a deliberate choice.”

When the politicians of the West decide that Islam is a religion based on violence and murder, they adopt the definition used by Islam’s own extremists. While claiming to fight it, the politicians of the West generalize the extremist definition. They encourage the naïve to believe the extremists’ theories. Today, in our own countries, numerous groups of Muslims also practice a deliberate ‘misunder-standing’ of Islam. Ignorance of the truth, or the intentional ignoring or polluting of it, is not only a characteristic of the oppressor. The oppressed may also be ignorant, may they not? At a mourning ceremony, the women may be taken aback to find a strange woman, with no connection to the deceased and unknown to his family and relatives, bursting into the house without permission and launching into her ‘lesson in religion’ to the weeping and mourning women, describing the torments of the grave as though she’d been there like some news agency correspondent, seen every detail with her own eyes, and returned to tell the tale with an ‘accuracy’ that instills terror in the souls of her listeners. Hundreds of satellite TV stations have appointed themselves spokespersons for Islam, handing over hours of their transmission time to jurisprudents of the small screen and charlatans with fatwas that no rational person accepts so that they can proclaim their contempt for medicine, science, history, geography, and all the arts, from music, dance, song, and cinema to the theater. The governments that claim to be waging war on such persons in reality compete with them in an attempt to prove that they are no less pious or faithful.