To us, the tradition of the mojahedeen of the 1920s (literally, those in holy struggle for the people), like the fedayeen of the 1960s (literally, those who sacrifice their lives for the people), means that every moment in our present establishes intimate links with our past, thus making our future not only tolerable to contemplate but a vital center in our historical experience. In this context, Palestinians do not have to throw furtive glances behind them; they are, rather, forced to proceed afresh every morning, leaving failed history behind.
The poet, then, simply appropriates the enormity of this collective sentiment, internalizes it, endows it with poetic form, and gives it back to the people, from whom it came. And of course the people respond.
So we, the children from Awlad Falasteen, strolled around the Corniche, or more often congregated around Bee-Jay’s cart, and recited poetry—poetry whose subtlety and richness were actually structured by, as much as it was now structuring, our own self-definitions.
Bee-Jay never felt insecure because he was possibly the only kid among us who was not going to school. He just took it for granted that since his father had died he would, as the eldest son, support the family. Luckily, his family was rather small by Palestinian standards, with only six of them around.
Still, the death of Bee-Jay’s father had come as a surprise to everybody, since he had seemed so healthy. So massive and strong. He had a thick mop of hair and keen, piercing eyes, in addition to an incredibly resonant voice, which he often used effectively to recite mawal and awf peasant songs.
Back in Palestine, Bee-Jay’s father, Abu Samir, had spent his life almost entirely on the land, with the land. He knew what was and what was not coherent with his world—which for him was the only world around—without knowing the history and the politics of Palestine. When people around him, at the refugee camp, discussed the Balfour Declaration or the White Paper or the role of Arab reaction in the nakbi of 1948 he was lost. But he had a cogently aboriginal sense of our historical life. Once, the men were arguing at one of the sidestreet cafés at the camp about how strong the Palestinians would have to be in order to defeat Zionism and return to their land. Abu Samir interjected: “Brothers, the answer is simple. Ask yourselves how many enemies we have and that is how strong we have to be. We have to have as much strength as the Zionists, the Arab governments, and America combined.”
Abu Samir would have no truck with the political banter and heated discussions around the camp’s cafés. Peasants have no business discussing intellectual issues. Is not everything they need clearly defined, with every question being its own answer, in the condition of the land, of the seasons, and in the way men and women, animals and trees, wind and sky, express themselves every day, how they were born and how they died, having lived out their life spans and then returned to the land whence they came?
Abu Samir, like the true Palestinian peasant he was, loved the land and his family and his village and his goats and even the cheese that his goats gave him. But while he had them all he never once, Bee-Jay told me, used the word love. He never once said to his wife that he “loved” her.
“I don’t believe that my father had ever kissed my mother,” Bee-Jay once explained to me, in talking about the concept of affection in the peasant milieu. “Only when we came to Lebanon did my father begin talking about how he loved, and missed, the land and our village and our way of life in Palestine. Only then did he begin to seem affectionate, loving, intimate, with my mother.”
Abu Samir’s own father, around the turn of the century, had worked in a camel caravan, transporting goods back and forth among Amman in Jordan, Sidon in Lebanon, and Acre in Palestine. He was bitten by his own camel and died a few months later.
He had carried all his family’s savings on him in a money belt, all in gold coins. With that, Abu Samir, then in his late teens, bought the land. Working the land in third world countries is not, as is often pictured, a bitter struggle for peasants who own their land. It is in fact a labor of love. When the harvest was in and sold, peasants like Abu Samir would buy their wives printed fabric to make dresses, slaughter a cow, and invite other families from the village for a feast so they could meet children of marriageable age and see which of them was gifted playing the yarghoul and dancing the dabki, who was strong and healthy to work the land and who, among the girls, had accumulated a good trousseau.
In 1955, a journalist from England, one of those wretched “area specialists,” complete with cameras and images of the Palestinians as the noble savage, came to the camp to conduct a series of interviews with the men around the cafés. She talks to them, through an UNRWA interpreter, as if they are children—in a slow, deliberate, patronizing manner.
“But why, why must you go back to Palestine?” she asks Abu Samir, thrusting her microphone close to his face. “Why Palestine specifically? There are many Arab countries you can be resettled in.”
She was too ignorant of our culture to know how profoundly insulting she was being. No one can make sport of a Palestinian peasant’s gods without eliciting a fierce response, yet Abu Samir simply straightens up stiffly in his chair and waits a while before he answers. He has learned over many years how to handle a goat or a mule possessed by a fit of obstinacy. You are gentle with it, suspending your fury a while, till it comes to its senses.
“Sister, let me tell you this,” he intones, his eyes almost closed as he puffs on his waterpipe. “The land is where our ancestors were born, died, and are now buried. We are from that land. The stuff of our bones and our soul comes from there. We and the soil are one. Every grain of my land carries the memories of all our ancestors within it. And every part of me carries the history of that land within it. The land of others does not know me. I am a stranger to it and it is a stranger to me. Ardi-aardi,” he concludes. My land is my nobility.
What an English journalist, coming from a culture that wants to “conquer space” and “tame nature,” did with that bit of peasant self-definition, no one can say.
When it rained and no people strolled up and down the Corniche, Bee-Jay left his cart at home and engaged in politics. Politics ruled his life, as it did, in one degree or another, the life of every Palestinian of my generation. He had been in and out of virtually every political party and movement found in Beirut at the time, and was as comfortable, in that man-child confidence we possessed in those days, dissecting secular Arab ideologies—Baathism, Nasserism, and Pan-Arabism—as he was holding forth on Marxism or John Lockean liberalism. In addition, he was a hardened street tough, the stereotypical “son of the camps” who was living a quintessentially political life.
Sometime in the early 1950s, he and his family left Beirut to live and work in Cairo, only to return in disillusionment after less than two years and reintegrate themselves into the camp. While in Cairo, Bee-Jay became involved in student politics and was detained a number of times. His most memorable arrest, ironically, was the result of a seemingly nonpolitical offense. He was working as a janitor at one of the hospitals in Cairo. One day he noticed two women in labor and recognized one of them as a Palestinian from the neighborhood where his family lived. She was in extreme pain and screaming furiously. So Bee-Jay went over to console her, presumably because her husband was not around. The doctor told him to get out.
“She is a Palestinian,” Bee-Jay responded shouting, “I’m responsible for her.”
The doctor scolded the woman for screaming, saying she should be quiet “like the Egyptian lady next to you, who is also in labor.”
Bee-Jay turned around and screamed at the doctor: “What the fuck do you know? Do you expect a woman giving birth to a guerrilla fighter to act the same as a woman giving birth to a bellydancer?”
He was dragged out and