Umm Hatem
“I have a lot of dreams. Sometimes I see myself playing by the fig trees, other times I see my aunt feeding me butter.
“Once I saw her making bread by the oven. I told this dream to Fathi to get his interpretation.”
Umm Hatem was talking to us while washing her husband’s clothes in a laundry tub. Her husband was sitting in front of us, ridiculing his wife’s story with a sly grin. A slim young man, Umm Hatem’s husband is a soldier in the Liberation Army living here for his job. His wife had come to visit him from a suburb of Damascus, and although I don’t know why, she didn’t remember anything from Palestine except the tomato seeds.
“I stole one of the loaves my aunt was baking and dipped it in a tub of olive oil—it was amazing.” Olive oil comes up in all of the stories we hear. “Once when I was asleep I saw a plane coming. It was just like the day our house there was hit. In the dream the plane crashed into the window, hitting the wardrobe and breaking all the glass. I started screaming, ‘Auntie! Auntie! The house collapsed on us.’ She said to me, ‘What can I do about that? God will recompense.’ And that day in Damascus, I dreamed that a plane came and shelled us, and the bombing threw me from the bed. I really was thrown from the bed that day, along with the radio that was next to me. Boom! I fell off the bed, and the radio broke. The radio broke for real, not in the dream. God, I’m really afraid of planes. I always dream about them. We were attacked once, in Palestine. I was carrying a plate of food that I was about to serve.”
She overflows with vitality, narrating without us asking questions. Fathi, however, was waiting impatiently for her to stop. “Once in a dream my mother came and brought me a handkerchief. ‘Why, mother, did you bring me a handkerchief? I haven’t seen you in twenty years.’ She said to me, ‘I don’t know. I wanted to give you this handkerchief.’ I took it from her. In the morning, I asked my aunt about it. She said, ‘You’ll have a boy because a gift from the dead is a blessing.’ Sure enough I later became pregnant with a boy, but then he died.
“My father is kind. Sometimes I dream about him. Once, he came and said to me, ‘Go apply for a passport for me. I don’t like living with your aunt.’” He lives in Iraq. “I said to him, ‘Come live with me.’ He said, ‘I’d like to, but your siblings won’t let me.’ He is suffering with my aunt in Baghdad. I said to him, ‘Baba, I can’t apply for a passport for you. You have to do that at the embassy there and then come.’
“Once in a dream I saw a bulldozer creeping up to me, one of the big ones, a scary thing. The street was narrow. If I tried to go here, it would crush me. If I tried to go there, it would crush me. The street was high and narrow, like the streets of Nabatiyeh and so on. I was clinging to the edge of the street, hanging there. I said to myself, ‘If my hand slips I’ll fall, and it’s a long way down. If I climb up, the bulldozer will crush me.’ I awoke from this dream, shaking for almost an hour, and I was very thirsty.”
Umm Yousef
“I stay home all day—cooking, washing clothes, feeding the kids.”
She is a thin woman who seems to be all skin and bones. She was moving around animatedly while she spoke, putting out food for her young son who had just arrived. When a bell sound rang, she’d said, “Ahmad will come now. That’s the sound signaling the lunch break at SAMED.” She was breastfeeding a child in front of us and calming another against her chest. She’d say something to us, then ask if we wanted ashtrays for our cigarettes, coffee too. She said, “Have lunch with us. Please. We haven’t been hospitable enough to you,” then, “eat, please, or time will run out. Don’t be shy. There are no strangers here.
“I’ve been here since my daughter was born. Where is Suad?” She looked around searchingly. “Suad, dear, come over here a while. God, I haven’t seen a movie in a very long time!” She broke into a smile that took her back to a hidden youth, and a strange beauty emerged from the corners of her eyes. “But I saw Palestine. Praise be to God! I saw it twice. How beautiful it is—like a dream, a movie! I went first to the West Bank, then to the lands seized in 1948. I went to Nahariya, Tiberias, Ramla, Acre, and Haifa.10 But the Jews, those bastards, didn’t allow me to enjoy myself. Some people spoilt it. They sent for me and started interrogating me about my husband. He’s not involved in anything. He works at the syndicate.”11 I don’t know why she told us this about her husband; it was as if she were talking to an interrogator. Something in her eyes suggested that she was leading us on. “My son was with me. Every few days, they took him for interrogation. Maybe they wanted to make us talk because they were asking about this person or that. I’d tell them, ‘I don’t know anyone.’”
When SAMED’s bell rang announcing the end of lunch break, her young son hurried back to work, and we accompanied him.
In the afternoon, I visited a Palestinian writer. I told him about the film, hoping he could help with introductions to Palestinian families or people I could live with and really get to know. I’d tired of talking to storekeepers or people we’d met by chance. But he showed no noticeable enthusiasm for the project. He said, “I thought the film would be an attempt to study the effect of the Revolution on the sociological aspects of the Palestinian camps, with respect to changing values and ideologies. Haven’t you read Frantz Fanon’s book about society and the sociology of revolution?12 You have to read it. Anyway, I’ll try to help you. There is a nice woman who works at the Women’s Union. I’ll call her, and she’ll lead you to families and homes in the camps.”
One of the young men sitting with us turned to him and said, “Abu-l-Haytham, how about taking him to Saint Simon and letting him see what’s there.” He said it as if he wanted to show me hell. This depressed me. People always say, “Come look at this,” “you have to film these things,” “come and see what’s happening over there.” No wonder cinema has been caught up in presenting and framing tragedy and trauma when people come to you with such things, their souls full of anguish and grief.
I didn’t show any enthusiasm at his offer. At first, I interpreted this as the kind of thing usually suggested by eager young people whose understanding of cinema is linked to their hostility to propaganda films and those films put out by certain organizations or national film industries. The young man himself caught my attention more than the name ‘Saint Simon.’ He had been silent throughout the whole meeting; then he spoke haltingly, slightly confused. He was shy and mysterious. What also caught my attention were his clothes: the loose beige pants that had become the uniform of the intellectual newly arrived in the city and the brown shoes with raised heels and a broad toe that curled upward. The writer turned to him and said, “Good idea. Let them tell him about Maslakh and Karantina.” Then he turned back to me and said, “Brother Ghazi is one of the youths of Jordan and he lives here in Saint Simon. He is a progressive young man. Arrange everything with him. Besides, he’s interested in literature and fiction. You can talk and sleep at his place. It’s no problem.” I was tempted by the idea of spending the night with the people and waking up early to see the camp. I thought I was going to a real Palestinian camp.
So this is Saint Simon? No, it’s Saint Michel. Saint Simon is there, behind the wall. We crossed through a hole in the middle of the wall. Ghazi said, “I live here in this chalet.” It was not a camp. It was a beach on the seashore where displaced Lebanese and Palestinians had taken refuge.
The weather was hot, suffocating and humid. The sky was blue, as was the sea. There was an air of vague, anxious tranquility, heavy and sluggish, so disorienting that you’re not sure what it is you’re feeling as you cross the muddy white sand. You struggle with a number of apprehensions, seeing how several subtle