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

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Piety is not the characteristic for which the Barghoutis are best known, but most of the women of the family now wear the hijab, including two of the wives of my three brothers, as do some of their daughters. I condemn neither the wearing of hijab nor those who have decided to wear it. What I condemn is turning hijab into a registered trademark of faith and a litmus test of piety, righteousness, and good morals. Hijab is a form of dress and dress neither proves nor disproves anything. Niqab, though, is a criminal offence. Why? Because a woman wearing niqab, whose face cannot be seen, is the equivalent of a car moving through the streets without a number plate.

Later, Uncle ‘Ata suffers a brain hemorrhage and two days before his death, the doctors will decide that he is living his last hours. His son and daughter came from the Gulf, and find him lashed to life by a support apparatus of wires and tubes, unconscious in the final coma. I am taken aback to see his six daughters and his son’s wife bring a huge black Toshiba tape recorder into the intensive care unit and make repeated and laborious attempts to stuff its earpieces into his ears so that he can listen to a recording of verses from the Qur’an in the hope that this will cure him. The important thing, though, is that the doctors, nurses, and administrators of the Shmaysani Hospital in Amman don’t dare remove the Toshiba from the intensive care unit lest they be accused of being irreligious.

I say to the girls in a calm voice that almost choked me, “You’re right. Thanks to this Toshiba, my uncle will wake from his coma, leave the intensive care unit, and immediately play in the World Cup” (it was 2006).

One of them (Amal, the cheerful, laughing, easy-to-get-along-with, good-hearted one, who lives in the Gulf) answers me, “Please, Mourid. You don’t believe in these things but we do. Please please don’t interfere.”

I leave the room bemused.

Two days later Uncle ‘Ata will depart this life, everyone will move out of the hospital to see to the funeral arrangements, and the Barghouti Family League will open its doors to receive mourners.

My nieces went to university, traveled, worked as teachers, and mixed with society. What led them to make this shift in their lives, in unison, as a group, and all in the same direction?

In this age of satellite television, the book is no longer for many a source of knowledge. The satellite channels have been taken over by preachers, missionaries, and professional fatwa-makers, and television has become the locus of truth. This is not enough, however, to explain the phenomenon. What is certain is that this social upheaval has become general in all Arab countries. No less strange is what happened to Radwa in a hospital in Cairo.

She needed a very simple surgical procedure, the kind they call a ‘one-day operation.’ The doctor suggested that she do it at the private hospital with which he worked.

She was starting to come round from the anesthetic as she left the operating room.

The nurse was pushing her cart down the corridor toward the room. Close to the threshold, Radwa gave a small cough.

Suddenly, her face started to swell.

Tamim and I could see her face swelling in front of our eyes. The doctor had left, so we called him back. When he arrived, the swelling had increased so much that her eyelids were pressed shut and her face had turned into a smooth round ball twice its normal size, making Radwa a completely different person. It was terrifying because she was at risk of asphyxiation and her lips were pressed tightly together. The doctor noticed our fear and tried to reassure us and we had to appear reassured in front of her so as to lessen her fear. The doctor gave her the necessary medicine and the swelling ceased and then started gradually to subside. The traces were completely gone within a few days of our bringing her home.

This unexpected complication meant that we had to stay at the hospital for four days. That was enough for me to discover that we were in a mosque, not a hospital. I open the door to the room to look for a nurse to help in an emergency and find dozens praying in the corridor. Unable to go anywhere, I am forced to go back inside the room and wait for the prayer to end. After a day or two, I discover that the worshipers are not only of the hospital’s doctors and workers but include guards from the nearby buildings, shop owners, traffic policemen from the surrounding area, some bus drivers belonging to the German School close to the hospital, and visitors and family members of patients. They drop everything for the prayer, and next to them their shoes are gathered, along with all the muck of the streets and roads outside that has stuck to them. I wonder, do the people in this corridor do this in order to demonstrate their ‘faith’ to one another? Is that why they don’t pray in their own homes?

Given the situation, we should have been thinking exclusively about Radwa’s well-being but the hospital had been transformed into a mosque, its doors blocked by bodies and mats, making it difficult to reach help in an emergency. The impossibility of asking for any emergency medical or nursing assistance from the hospital staff added further to our fears and worries. I still recall this provocative and intrusive situation with great perplexity and anger at what has become of our society.

Pains of social desiccation and times of barely opened, or almost closed, eyelids – and there is no enemy of the living creature more dangerous than desiccation, be it desiccation of the body, of the mind, of an idea, of a tree, of desire. I am speaking of the accumulation of ‘historical pain’ in our country – a pain that chases away peace of mind, logic, responsibility, tranquility, imagination, truth … and poetry.

They say that constant pain acts as an incentive to writing but I don’t believe such nonsense. Pain sometimes acts as an impediment to writing. I consider myself a poet in decline, near the end of his run, and admire those who publish forty or fifty collections of verse on the grounds that their suffering is never-ending. Historical pain is a burden on the poem because its constant presence means that it’s chronic, and all that is chronic, from inflammation of lungs to inflammation of rhymes, is boring. Palestinian pain due to the Occupation and Arab pain due to dictatorship have reached a point that disables poetry. What they call ‘nationalist’ poetry generally depends on rhetoric and eloquence. Eloquence may shake history but it doesn’t protect geography.

Real pain doesn’t need our rhetoric. In my collection Mantiq alka’inat (The Logic of Beings), I wrote the following very short poem to affirm this, to myself above all:

Truth needs no eloquence.

After the death of the horseman,

the homebound horse

says everything

without saying anything.

We have been living with ‘chronic pain’ and ‘chronic resistance’ for more than a century. The poets of the world wrote resistance poetry for a year or two and then went back to the poetry of ordinary life. How many years must people resist and how many years must their poets write resistance poetry? The French Resistance lasted for no more than four or five years, after which Aragon, éluard, and the others returned to their experimentalism and the aesthetic playfulness that suited their temperaments. There aren’t many cases of a people resisting for a whole century, and from the time that the fingernails of the Zionist movement started rapping on our windows until now, when they have pulled our homeland down around our ears, we’ve seen everything a poet or prose writer can imagine, to the point of satiety and vexation – every kind of death, every kind of patience, every kind of trying, and every kind of leader (except for one who can deliver, for whom we are still waiting, though that wait too has brought us to the brink of boredom). We’ve seen both despair and hope so often that we no longer know exactly what either of them is. We’ve seen pessimism, we’ve seen optimism, we’ve seen pessoptimism, and we’ve seen a whole line of United States presidents, so what is there left for us to see?

We’ve seen the seller of colored beads, the seller of poisons, the seller of dreams, the seller of delusions, the one who sells his party and the one who sells himself; the coward who flees the field and the brave man from whom the field flees; the tender and the cruel, the honest man and the liar, the sage and the idiot. We’ve seen those who can distinguish fifty kinds of wine and those who wipe their noses on their sleeves, so what is left for us to see?

We’ve seen smart bombs and stupid bombs, cluster bombs and phosphorus bombs, fragmentation grenades, tanks, armored cars, bulldozers, secret agents, and silencers, so what is left for us see?

We’ve seen the detention camps of twenty Arab states, so what is left for us to see?

I haven’t written a poem for three years because I don’t want to put a helmet on my poem’s head. I don’t want to work as a war correspondent. I don’t want to work as a fireman. I don’t want to work as an ambulance. I don’t want my verse to get used to living in graves. In the poem “Midnight” is the following passage:

Here is Death,

wearing padlocks as pendants,

his well-trained hounds at his heels;

his eternal belt

stuffed full of addresses.

He gently lays you in his ebony trunk

with his dark clothes,

handkerchiefs, combs,

and huge toothbrush,

preparing you for a journey

to a place he knows and you do not.

Yet, with the ending of the rain,

you discover

Death has overlooked you!

In a fit of irresponsibility

he has left you to this life;

you realize it is others who have died.

They have gone

for reasons as obscure

as the sources of the winds,

or they have departed

shrouded in banners

where winds go to sleep.

And though you can’t recall the details

your extravagant joy

now mellowed,

comes back again to you.

Slowly and slyly,

it has kept its charms for you alone,

as if it were a bolt of lightning that,

after seven years’ fermenting in the skies,

descends to strike,

electrifying you

from head to toe

from left to right,

snatching away your scepter.

Though you sought to evade it,

It returns to strike you,

because,

but for the hundred aches and pains

nagging at your window,

like the beggars at the traffic lights,

you were born for joy.

Yes! We were created for joy. We were created to reduce pain and increase pleasure. Isn’t man’s struggle with nature and with tyrants and invaders a sign of that goal? Isn’t our enchantment with love, kindness, justice, harmony, and freedom another?

We had got used to facing whatever we had to, as though the world would never add further hardship to hardship.

But on one of those typical Cairo springs that are not without foreboding, or dust kicked up by the burning khamasin winds, something that had never occurred to any of us was to happen.

10. The Dawn Visitor

When I was deported from Egypt in 1977, I told myself that this would be the last slap in the face I’d take from that regime. I set about trying to reorganize our family life using whatever means were available to me in exile.

I learned to appear ‘strong’ though my fragility was plain to any intelligent eye.

To appear to have no need of others though my need for a prop increased as the years passed.

To appear ‘under control’ like a stove burning quietly.

I asked myself if I’d fallen victim to a schizophrenia that hid the truth about myself from me even before hiding it from the world around me.

Was I now the Mourid I knew or had another Mourid formed inside me, at whose features I did not care to look?

One thing I was sure of: I would have to endure.

I am not a piece of music and I am not a play contemplating men’s destinies on a darkened stage. I am a father, a husband, a man with a cause, a poet, a son, and an uncle. I’m an adult and I’m supposed to provide answers and not just questions. I got used to my expulsion from Egypt and made it old news. I walked the roads of the world turning that page and trying with all my might to forget it. Life, though, taught me that you have to be free in order to choose, or be confused, or decide, or demolish, or build, or forgive, or apologize, or accept, or refuse; likewise – and here’s the rub – you have to be free in order to forget.

The world didn’t let me be free so that I could forget.

When I imagined that I’d forgotten or that I’d learned to coexist with my forgetfulness, the Egyptian police took it upon themselves to remind me that this was a delusion.

Tamim left Cairo for Boston on 20 August 2001. Just twenty-one days later, on 11 September 2001, the Twin Towers were blown up. He was obliged to live in an atmosphere of persecution directed against Arabs and Muslims in the United States instead of experiencing its social, scientific, cultural, and literary environment. What helped him, however, was the political openness of Boston and of New England in general. It is a fact that must be acknowledged that he was not subjected to harassment during the entire period of his residence there and that it was, for him, a normal period, with a certain measure of tension that should not be exaggerated, during which he was able to pursue his studies, teach his students, and read for the comprehensive exam that would precede the research and writing phases of his dissertation.

He took the comprehensive exam, passed, and returned to Cairo to do his research. He would take his laptop in the mornings and go to the library of the American University in Cairo, located a few steps from our house in Shari‘ al-Falaki, and there he would spend most of his time, racing to obtain the greatest academic benefit in the shortest possible time.

This was early in 2003 and America’s around-the-clock preparations for the invasion of Iraq were speeding up.

It seemed certain that Bush would launch his attack on Iraq within two or three days.

Egyptian opposition activists had agreed via the Internet and cell phones to go to Tahrir Square in the heart of the capital at noon on whatever day the offensive started in order to demonstrate against the war.

The U.S. and British embassies are located not far from Tahrir Square, as is the American University.

At the American University, on the morning of Thursday, 20 March, a small number of students were trying to come up with a way to let the others know that the shelling of Baghdad had in fact begun during the early hours of the morning, so as to get them out to demonstrate without waiting for the agreed-upon time.

They decided to set off the fire alarm.

Students and teachers rushed out of their classrooms to see what was going on. News of the war spread. They set off spontaneously for Tahrir Square and occupied it before the government could put its fortifications in place. A little later, the Cairo University students and waves of local citizens poured in. The government had lost control of the situation.

The Egyptian government spends millions of pounds to protect this particular square and only very rarely in recent history have the students of Cairo University been able to get to it, because the security forces close the university’s gates on demonstrators and imprison them inside the campus, making it impossible for them to get out.

The government found that the square had fallen early, and to a threat from an unexpected direction. The students of the American University are mostly children of the ruling class or of the social elite that has the means to pay its fees, and in the estimation of the security apparatus nothing is to be feared from such people. The state went crazy.

Tamim returned from the demonstrations at night and said he expected to be arrested. He spent the night at another house and nothing untoward happened.

He returned the following day.

We became less cautious and he slept at home.

At dawn, five Egyptian security officials forced their way into our house.

Through the partly opened door, the figure of a man in civilian clothes could be seen.

“We want Tamim al-Barghouti and we want to search the house.”

“Who are you?”

“State Security.”

“Where’s your permit?”

“Open the door immediately.”

“I want to see the written permit. This is kidnapping.”

When the first man heard us insist on seeing the permit, he took a step to the right, bringing into our field of vision the man standing directly behind him – a soldier wearing gleaming black body armor that gave him the appearance of a two-meter-tall metal bar and who looked as though he were about to set off for the battle front. His index finger was on the trigger of his weapon. He said nothing. He jerked his body one step to the left and another of his colleagues appeared behind him – a huge leaden twin, who didn’t speak either and whose hand, like his companion’s, was ready for anything.

“There’s no reason to be alarmed. Just a couple of questions. We’ll bring him back to you in an hour or so.”

They’re inviting him for ‘a cup of coffee,’ I told myself.

No matter the differences in terms and methods from one Arab country to another, such people are always gracious when inviting their prey to be their guests and they will always be bringing them back in an hour or so at the most. Men and women have spent decades in the cells of the Arab regimes without ever finishing that damned cup of coffee.

We got the message.

The message of fear or, rather, of intimidation.

In dictatorships, local industry’s finest product – the best made, best packaged, hardest wearing, and most quickly delivered to the home – is fear.

Helpless, Radwa and I would watch them as they took Tamim down the building staircase, their guns pointed at his back.

Thuggish authority is the same, whether Arab or Israeli. Cruelty is cruelty and abuse abuse, whoever the perpetrator.

What hurts most is the lack of a clear legal mechanism for what follows the arrest.

They don’t tell you where they’ve taken him. His place of detention remains unknown to you – such places are many and they are scattered throughout Cairo. All you can do is look through your telephone list for the name of someone influential who may be able to direct you.

As to what happens to him there, it’s no different from what any foreign occupation would do to a citizen who had the miserable luck to fall into the hands of its security forces. Humiliation, slapping, torture with hot and cold water, being hung from the ceiling with your arms behind your head, electric shocks, and sleep deprivation. None of those things may actually be done to him, but fear that they will is used deliberately to bring about the desired effect.

The night before his arrest, we were with Edward Said and his wife Mariam at the house of our friend Huda Guindi in Zamalek. Edward was talking to Tamim about his dissertation, asking him about his professors at Boston University, and telling him what he knew about them.

The following morning, Edward and Mariam were on their way to a resort on the Red Sea coast for a holiday when Edward found out via a phone call from a friend what had happened. He phoned me in the utmost fury.

“What can I do? Tell me how I can help.”

“No one can do anything, Edward. Things will take their course.”

Tamim, who had been given his rights in Palestine, a country he didn’t know, would lose them in Egypt, the only country he knew.

He was born in Cairo to an Egyptian mother and educated at Egyptian schools, from the Happy Home kindergarten to al-Hurriya School, to Cairo University, to the American University in Cairo, where he obtained his master’s degree. On arresting him, along with hundreds of other students, the Egyptian security authorities would treat him as a foreigner and ‘advise’ him to leave the country, unlike the Egyptian students, who typically would spend a few weeks or months in the detention centers, after which they would be released. If a male Egyptian marries a woman from the furthest reaches of Eskimo Land, Egyptian law automatically grants her and her children Egyptian nationality. At the time, this same right was not granted to a female Egyptian who married a non-Egyptian.

Tamim was forced to leave Egypt.

What has stayed with me from this incident was my inability to protect my son.

In Marrakech, Morocco, I was to see with my own eyes the most painful example of a father who couldn’t protect his son. When I was invited to read poetry in a number of Moroccan cities, I was accompanied by Jamal al-Durra, father of the martyred boy Muhammad al-Durra. I arrived at my hotel in Marrakech on time but Jamal al-Durra didn’t come. He didn’t come for two days after that. The Egyptian authorities had prevented his brother, who was coming by land from Gaza to accompany him, from entering Egypt to catch the Moroccan plane, which left from Cairo. Jamal cannot move on his own because his right side is packed full of bullets, some of which surgeons managed to remove and some of which remain in place. After repeated telephone calls, the Egyptian authorities allowed him to travel alone and transported his brother from the border post in the Gaza Strip directly to Cairo Airport, to make sure he didn’t spend a single hour on Egyptian territory. To the Arab regimes, the Palestinian is simply a security file. He is dealt with by the interior ministries, not the foreign ministries, as though to give meaning to the secret motto embraced by the Arab States from the Atlantic to the Gulf: “We love Palestine and hate the Palestinians.” That said, the Rafah crossing point on the Gaza-Egypt border is the ugliest embodiment of the ruthlessness of Egyptian official policy and the cruelty with which the regime treats the ordinary Palestinian citizen.

The Arab States are now living the third phase of occupation.

In the first phase, the Arab citizen lived under foreign occupation.

In the second, he was occupied by his local rulers acting as proxies for the foreigners.

And now he’s living the phase of double occupation, which is simultaneously local and foreign.

What Jamal al-Durra told me of the criminal killing of his son Muhammad in his arms added nothing to the stupefaction I’d felt when watching the scene on satellite TV. However, the muscles of his face and the look in his eyes as he spoke of his inability to protect his young son will stay in my mind for a long time.

Jamal al-Durra added one thing that made the week I spent in his company in Morocco bearable. He told me that his wife was pregnant and that he would name the new baby Muhammad so that Israel would have to go on living with Muhammad al-Durra even after it had murdered him.

At the time, Jamal al-Durra seemed strong to me, but when his younger brother helped him to take off his shirt one morning while I waited in their room to go with them to a joint appointment, I saw that his right arm was attached to his shoulder by a thin remnant of skin. A sudden spasm of embarrassment passed over his face when he noticed that I’d seen. My embarrassment at myself will last for a long time.

It is a strange irony that of three prisons in which Egyptian security would hold Tamim during the three days of his imprisonment, one was al-Khalifa/Deportations, the same prison they put me in in 1977.

Tamim sleeps in my place in the same packed communal cell. He eats the wedge of processed cheese and the crust of stale bread that they gave me as nourishment for an entire day. He sleeps as I slept, on the cement floor without a bed, and maybe a murderer or smuggler or thief next to him voluntarily gives him a blanket as one of them once did me. He makes his shoes into a pillow beneath his head as I once did.

I, who am free today, feel exactly as though they are imprisoning me for a second time.

As though I had never left their first prison.

As though I were in a never-ending prison that refuses to acknowledge any final act.

As though the prison were my personal city. This time we will live in it and grow up in it together, my son and I.

I entered the seventh decade of my life having spent only a few days in prison, and those in an Arab country ruled by an Arab dictator, not in Israel. The idea of prison constantly intrigues me though. In the mind of the dictator, prison is abstraction, not detail; an idea, not actualities – an idea that requires no proof or evidence, a personal concept, like temperament or taste, that cannot be questioned. This prison is the source of his unshakable peace of mind. And because issuing an order to put people in prison is the one solution that doesn’t need much intelligence, prison is the dictator’s first, easiest, and surest solution. The dictator will not change his mind so long as he is on his throne. He will change it when he is somewhere else (in a different world, for example), not before. The dictator’s throne is his opinion. The dictator squats on his opinion like a hen sitting on her eggs. He and his opinion carry out all the rituals of his day together, bathing, doing their morning exercises, eating, working, playing, and fucking one another. He takes his opinion with him to sleep the way he does his dog. The dictator is faithful to his opinion and his opinion is faithful to him. He and his opinion wake up at the same instant (note the coincidence!); it never leaves his side through the hours of the day and it never leaves his side through the hours of his rule, which are the hours of his life. If the dictator falls sick, or goes on holiday, or is afflicted with senile dementia, he leaves his opinion in the keeping of loyal followers, such as policemen, advisors, editors-in-chief, ministers of information, and former leftists who have seen the light after hesitation and cauterization and being beaten unconscious and hung from the ceiling. It is preferred that there be, alongside these, poets, novelists, and critics who have fought long and with tremendous courage in defense of their inalienable right to possess a flexible spine that enables them to bow, with dazzling ease, before the chamberlain of the dictator’s palace. They have held strikes and sit-ins to be allowed to assume a position in his government, that same government that is known for its wholehearted dedication to the patronage of culture and the intelligentsia (just like that, with no expectation of reward!). The dictator has a sadistic love of obedience, rewarding the obedient by doubling his efforts to humiliate them, to the point that he uses them for his entertainment every time he sees them. The worst thing about a dictator, though, is his minor underlings.

When the time comes for Tamim’s deportation, the deportations officer will allow me to accompany him. Two members of the security forces, charged with guarding him up to the last moment, ride with us. Near the end of the long, crowded, choking road to Cairo Airport, the driver, ‘Abd al-‘Al, gives me a word of advice: “Don’t forget the tips, Mr. Mourid.”

“The tips?”

“Yes, sir. The tips.”

“For whom?”

“For them.”

“Are you joking? Tips for the men deporting my son, ‘Abd al‘Al?”

He whispers in my ear, “So that everything goes alright at the airport, sir. So they don’t complicate matters.”

“How much?”

“Whatever you think proper, sir.”

“Fifty pounds? A hundred pounds?’

“Keep going, sir.”

I pay the tips to the two men.

I am going to keep Tamim company on the plane to Amman. This time they allow Radwa to say goodbye to us, so she comes in another car with her friend Hasna Mekdashi.

The plane’s front wheels rise and we are airborne. I feel as though I too am being deported and expelled a second time. I relive the day of my expulsion from Egypt in 1977 as though it still hadn’t turned into the past. All the people in the airport’s halls – the hundreds packing its front hall to say goodbye to their departing relatives, the dozens standing at the counter where the tickets are checked and the baggage weighed, the parallel rows for the passport stamping windows, the customers in the café in front of the gates leading to the boarding areas – all these are not here at the airport to say goodbye, travel, drink coffee and tea, or mount the steps to the departing aircraft; they are here to gaze at the iron shackle that links my wrist to that of the policeman accompanying me, who drags me through the halls before the eyes of all like a heavy suitcase.

This fat old woman will think I’m a thief. That teenage girl will think I raped a girl her own age. This customs officer with the dyed hair will think I’m a currency smuggler who has fallen into their hands as a result of brilliant planning, or an international criminal that Interpol has finally succeeded in catching after years on the run, and that now I’m being taken off under guard to suffer my punishment. A traveler in a hurry who treads on my foot by mistake and doesn’t apologize will think I represent some kind of danger and that getting rid of me is a matter of urgency to him personally. It will never occur to them that I’m a poet whom authority, or the regime, is afraid of. So many of the country’s intelligentsia and its important writers let the country – and the people – down that authority isn’t afraid of them any more. People stopped reading poetry when poets deluded themselves into thinking that modernism meant gibberish. At the same time, they watched many literary icons colluding with the ruler. They did this in three ways: by desperately striving to obtain his approval; or, if that failed, by desperately striving to avoid his anger; or, if that failed, by quitting and migrating either to their inner worlds, which had been destroyed by melancholy, or to the world outside them, where they found themselves caught between the jaws of absence and of forgetfulness.

Certainly, everyone at the airport today will think I’m a criminal. No one will think I’m a poet who writes and rewrites a poem time after time until the poem is happy with its shape and I am happy too. I’m not a hero that I should feel pride, and I’m not a criminal that I should feel shame.