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

Автор книги: Mourid Barghouti

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

During these moments, I’m a person without feeling.

As though I were dreaming that I’m dreaming.

As though I weren’t here, weren’t with them, weren’t with anyone, weren’t coming from anywhere, weren’t going anywhere. As though it were someone else they were taking away.

This was my state exactly as I fumed and almost exploded, though appearing before all those people as calm as an ironed shirt in a drawer full of clothes.

This was my state exactly as I wished I were a Greek god so that I could kick the blank walls of the airport with a sacred rope sandal and leave its high ceiling resting on nothing but the pillars of my curses.

On that day, when the past had still to become the past, the policeman took me up the stairs and all the way to my seat on the plane. Only there did he undo the shackles that linked my wrist to his, and leave.

I know what the others passengers thought as I came through the door of the plane in shackles. I know why the flight attendant switched the smile in which she’d been trained for so many months for a fearful look of suspicion and then averted her face. I know why, when she put the meal down in front of me, she did so as though she were a faceless prison guard thrusting a loaf at the prisoner through the aperture in his cell door. I know that people find it the more comfortable option to respect you if they see that someone else respects you and to despise you if they see that someone else despises you. But shouldn’t a person make up his own mind? Shouldn’t he examine the reasons to respect or despise you? I tell myself sometimes, especially when things are a little mixed up, that the brain is the laziest of the body’s members and its dullest.

Alone, between sky and earth, I think of Radwa.

Radwa would pay for the policies of Sadat and his successor Mubarak in the coin of her own private life. She would experience the expulsion of her husband and dedicate her time to caring for her son without the presence of his father for seventeen years, except for short and intermittent periods. When she was obliged to undergo a life-threatening operation, she would be alone with Tamim, who was not yet three years old, while I was in Budapest and forbidden to put my mind at rest about her and be by her side. My mother flew to Cairo the moment she heard of the disease and that lightened the burden for me a little. Once more I had failed to be where I ought to be.

I fail to love, or show tenderness, or support, or help, or to look after, or be of use to those whom I love.

I had left Budapest for Doha to visit Mounif, Majid, and ‘Alaa. While there, I got a telephone call from Radwa informing me that she had to have a major operation that couldn’t wait.

What can the banished do to defeat a state, when their bodies are singled out as the target of its army, its police, its prisons, its borders, its stamps, and its ‘sovereignty’? Whenever anyone tried to intercede with a senior Egyptian official to allow me to visit or to have my name removed from the blacklist at the airport, he was told, “It’s a matter of sovereignty.” Long live sovereignty!

If one could voluntarily decide to go mad, I would have decided to go mad.

It occurred to me that the lucky Arab is the one who wakes up one morning and finds that he’s gone mad. That way it’s all over.

I haven’t gone mad.

Or has a thread of madness accompanied me till now, without my being aware of it?

I returned from Doha to Budapest stricken with silence. I turned the key in the door, sat down on the chair to rest for a few minutes before opening my suitcase, and woke up the next day still fully dressed. I went to work and found I couldn’t stand the voices of my colleagues. Every time one of them opened his mouth, I wanted him to shut up. I asked for permission to leave.

That mood didn’t last for more than a day.

I didn’t realize at the time how much ground I had covered in terms of educating myself in getting used to things being disordered, in getting used to the fact that things were by their very nature disordered. The process had begun slowly and with difficulty in June 1967 and continued to firm up by degrees as I underwent all the other unpleasant personal shocks which, with time, had ceased to shock me, by which I mean that I became too dulled to collapse or grumble at my pains. I’d tell my friends jokingly, “Don’t worry, guys. I’m not going to feel bad every time I’m supposed to. I’m not going to get sick every little while. I’m going to drop dead without warning.”

The operation was successful but to this day Radwa’s health remains generally delicate and this makes her susceptible to pains that she has learned to bear with a dazzling courage I’m incapable of learning from. If I catch so much as a passing runny nose I get into a panic and fill the world with my complaining and whining, and if my temperature goes up one degree I’m a dead man for sure (a business that deserves to be mocked and is apparently a bane of the male – but who among us can claim to have rid himself completely of the weaknesses of male nature that have come down to us through the generations?).

Did I say I’d fill the world with my complaining at every passing runny nose? Didn’t I say in the paragraph before that I didn’t feel bad or complain? Am I contradicting myself here? Yes! I’m contradicting myself and it amazes me that people are terrified of exposing their contradictions, flying off the handle in dismay at such an ‘ugly’ charge and defending themselves as vehemently as if their honor had been attacked. It doesn’t scare me when someone yells in my face during a discussion, “But you’re contradicting yourself, Mr. Mourid!” I reply “Of course I’m contradicting myself. You’re right. That is indeed a contradiction.” Sometimes I apologize for my contradictions and sometimes I don’t. Humans are full of contradictions however much they deny it. Each of us holds within him contradictory voices to each of which he listens at different times, thus making his inconsistency clear for all to see. Nor do those who yell at me “You’re wrong, Mr. Mourid” scare me. Of course I will sometimes be wrong. What’s so strange about that? Am I so stupid as to always be right?

Radwa will suffer for years from an irritable colon and in Budapest she contracted acute pleural effusion, which is life-threatening. An aged Hungarian doctor, experienced and gentle, gives her treatment and she recovers once more. With her illness and her permanently delicate health, she seems to me to be made of glass that may break at the lightest touch and this terrifies me. Nevertheless, she confronts the challenges in her life with the hardness of a diamond. Throughout Tamim’s childhood, she organized her university, political, social, and cultural calendars so as never to leave the house after seven in the evening. I was well aware that she was under threat not only of possible harm at a time when the two of them were alone but even of being arrested for her political stands. This was what she feared most, and it was impossible for her to predict how best to deal with the consequences should that happen. Phone calls weren’t easy at that time. Letters sent by mail took a month or a little less (e-mail, chat rooms, and Messenger would have been something out of science fiction). In the slightly more distant past, when Radwa went to Amherst in the United States in 1973 to obtain a doctoral degree, we had to wait more than a month before we could set up our first telephone call.

Our (recent) phone calls between Amman and Cairo continued with the aim of ensuring Tamim’s return to Egypt. Meanwhile he occupied my spacious white office that looks out over the garden in Amman and sat down to write his famous poem “They Asked Me, Do You Love Egypt? I Said, I Don’t Know.” The intensity of the campaigns of support for Tamim in Egypt, the Arab world, and the rest of the world amazed me. His professors at Boston University sent letters expressing their dismay to the Egyptian government and a number of Arab writers had already done the same. In Egypt, solidarity with him extended to far wider circles. Thirty-four days after he was deported, we received confirmation from Radwa that the efforts had succeeded and that Tamim could return to Egypt, which he did.

How many journeys and how many returns, I ask you, Time? We seem to sink and bob back up with boring regularity. As though the dry land were waves that roll us over every time we take a step.

11. An Ending Leading to the Beginning?

On my last visit but one to Ramallah, I found my friends swapping stories of an incident at the luxurious Darna restaurant. When I asked my friend Ziyad about it he invited me to dinner there so that I could hear the details from its owner. The latter hugged me and said to Ziyad, “Leave him to me for a while.” He took me upstairs, where he asked the waiter to bring him the photos. The waiter did so and my friend started showing them to me one by one. In all of them, the tables, chairs, plates, drawings, and glass of the elegant restaurant were smashed and bullet holes were visible in its columns, walls, ceiling, stairs, door, and floor. He told me the story in detail: “A number of armed fighters belonging to Fatah had become so fed up and angry at the widely known corruption of the Authority’s men that they decided to launch an armed attack on the Authority’s headquarters to express their fury. Of course, at the gate to the president’s headquarters at al-Muqata‘a, they came up against their comrades-in-arms of the duty guard, who were no less angry than the attackers but told them, ‘You won’t find the ones you’re looking for here. Go look for them in the most luxurious hotels and restaurants, where they spend each evening.’”

The angry Fatah men turned around with their weapons and made the Darna restaurant their starting point.

They burst into the restaurant through the main door and started shooting at random.

They didn’t intend to kill but to use the bullets as a final scream of protest. They intended to proclaim their fury at the leadership, the exhaustion of their patience, and their despair at all the promises of reform that had gone unrealized down the years. The customers hid themselves under the tables, of course. I saw a photo of one of them reaching up with his hand to the top of the table from underneath in spite of all the bullets so that he could grope for his glass, in which there was still a little beer, and I laughed.

Corruption is reaching a crisis point. The violence of the Occupation is increasing. Fatah is falling apart. Hamas is rising. This proves that the abyss can widen to take two victims at one time when both lose their minds.

The Authority has decided to sit on its throne waiting for the Israeli tank to smile.

The tank doesn’t smile.

The Arab rulers behave as though their countries are in a dilemma that can be resolved only by making concessions to their enemy and thus defusing the danger he represents. It never occurs to them that it is the Zionist project that is in crisis and that today it is caught in a real dilemma, which it doesn’t know how to get out of.

The Palestinian people, on whose disappearance it based all its calculations, haven’t disappeared and are still here, in its singular hell known as ‘the Occupied Homeland.’ In addition, Israel hasn’t won a clear victory in any of its confrontations with the Arabs since 1967. Despite this, the Arab leaders have yet to lose their fear of victory. Indeed, they rejected victory when they clearly achieved it in 2006 in southern Lebanon and claimed defeat, so attached were they to the latter. The ‘peace process,’ on whose pillow they have been sleeping so long, has exploded under all their heads. It’s just not working, chaps! The absurd peace process has killed more Arabs than all of Israel’s wars together. More dangerously than all this, though, it has seduced the Arab leaders into highjacking the meaning of the Palestinian cause itself and transforming it from one of national liberation into an NGO, and from a program of resistance into one of assistance, ignoring in so doing something every citizen knows, which is that the only form of resistance the Israelis will allow the Palestinians is the presentation of bunches of flowers to the soldiers of the Occupation. However, there aren’t enough flowers in Palestine for an army that keeps up its good work with such energy and constant appetite. During the long siege that the government of Israel has imposed on Gaza, tons of Gazan flowers prepared for export to Europe have become free food for sheep and goats, which munch on them with relish on Valentine’s Day. The Israeli army conducts its maneuvers against our bodies, and with live ammunition. Every time, it ‘keeps trying what’s already been tried’ and doesn’t calm down and doesn’t relax and doesn’t solve its security problem. Israel has tried every kind of military assault against the Palestinians. The United States and the governments of Europe have tried every door except the one door that would lead to a real chance of a solution, which is the door of justice.

Palestinian official impotence, however, isn’t our last word. Here is a people that has never ceased to be extraordinarily creative in coming up with ways to go on living. What is new is that it is now clear that the Namiqs will never liberate the land and that the Palestinians must do something to reclaim their cause, which has been highjacked by political corruption. They must repossess the moral significance of resistance, cling to its legitimacy, and rid it of the bane of constant improvisation, chaos, and ugliness. The oppressed wins only if he is essentially more beautiful than his oppressor.

How much time has been lost?

The Palestinian cause is starting over again from the beginning. Wasn’t the beginning that a land was occupied and has to be reclaimed? And that a people was expelled from its land and has to return? Is the end that we have come to today anything other than that beginning?

Glossary

the Green Line: the demarcation lines set out in the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its neighbors (Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) after the 1948 Arab – Israeli War. The Green Line is also used to mark the line between Israel and the territories captured in the Six Day War, including the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights. The name alludes to the green ink used to draw these lines on the maps during the armistice talks.

Hanthala: a cartoon character (named after colocynth, a bitter-tasting plant) created by Naji al-‘Ali; a Palestinian Everyman.

kanafeh: a dessert made of vermicelli-like pastry filled with soft cheese and drenched with syrup.

khamasin: the period of approximately fifty days in spring in Egypt during which oppressively hot dust-laden winds often blow.

kufiya: a square of cloth folded and worn over or wrapped around the head by Palestinian men.

the Muqata‘a: the administrative center of the Palestine National

Authority, in Ramallah. It and its occupants, including President Yasser Arafat, were besieged by Israeli armed forces from March to May 2002.

musakhan: a Palestinian dish of chicken, bedded in onions, basted in olive oil, smothered with sumac, and oven-roasted on flat bread.

the Nakba: ‘the Catastrophe,’ referring to the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland and the establishment in it of the State of Israel in 1948.

rababa: a folk instrument consisting of a sound box, long neck, and strings, played with a bow.

sandawitshat: sandwiches (a term taken from English and widely used).

shata‘ir: sandwiches (a term coined by the Arabic Language Academy to replace sandawitshat).

The Suspended Odes: seven poems by the greatest poets of pre-Islamic Arabia, which were engraved on plates of gold and suspended in the Kaaba at Mecca before the coming of Islam. They remain among the most highly regarded works of Arabic literature.

A Note on the Author

Mourid Barghouti was born in 1944 near Ramallah. He has published thirteen books of poetry in Arabic including a Collected Works (1997) and received the Palestine Award for Poetry in 2000. His memoir I Saw Ramallah was published in English in Cairo in 2000 and by Bloomsbury in 2004. A selection of his poetry, Midnight and Other Poems, was published in English in 2008. He lives in Cairo with his wife, the novelist and critic Radwa Ashour.

A Note on the Translator

Humphrey Davies has translated many Arabic books by a wide range of authors including Bahaa Taher, Khaled Al-Berry, Muhammad Mustagab, Yusuf al-Shirbini, Gamal al-Ghitani and Ahmed Alaydi. His translation of Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun was awarded the Banipal Prize, and that of Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building was voted Best Translation of 2007 by the Society of Authors.