When we left Palestine the dawn was blowing around us like the rage of God. Our city had fallen and burnt on supine bodies. And the world applauded. But I did not hate. I could not hate at the age of eight. April is always a good time of the year where I was born. The sun shines and the smell of olives and oranges permeates the air. That April, in 1948, was my father’s last in Palestine.
The day before we left the city, we sat in the house off the highway and heard foreign voices shouting into loudspeakers, “Get your women and children out.” I hated those foreign voices. “Get everybody out. Get everything out.” This is going to be somebody else’s country now. “Get them out.” Around the streets, in the distance, there was intermittent gunfire. “Get your women and children out.” Flares and smoke and fireworks exploding in the heavens, above the houses, beyond the port, near Mount Carmel, around the center of town. Something was dying. Something was coming to an end for this generation of Palestinians. Get out.
The men and women who were defending Haifa were gone. They were alone. They were dead. They were dying. They were wounded. Then the people went. The radio was dead. Before it died someone issued Declaration 15 on the air. And what was Declaration 14? And 8? And 4? And infinity? There was no Declaration 16. The ether was choked with fire. And despair. And death. And ever since that time, people have wondered why I use double negatives around my house, unhindered by my walls lined with books; and why I use terms like nation and homeland and inalienable rights, unconcerned that I have become over the years the citizen of a community of beings much larger than Palestine.
In Beirut, however, at age thirteen, I could not explain my father’s death without looking for Declaration 16, and for a liberated zone I could go to, live free in. At that age I could not explain the tradition of refugeeism my father was transmitting to me as I listened to his mumblings about how soon—for surely it had to be soon—we would all return. All our agonies would be over. The cosmos would be restored to its preordained course.
In the first three years of our ghourba a frightening sense of my father’s refugeeism ruled Palestinian life in our refugee camp. Everything was slow-moving, quiet, dormant. The dogs, like the children, had bones showing under their skin and lay in the shade of the tents. In the hours after noon people were nowhere to be seen, except occasionally a woman walking up the dirt track to the water pump with her bucket. No one acknowledged our presence. Whether we were being ignored or forgotten no one could say. After a while, it ceased to matter. In the evening, the old men sat in the sidestreet café with its kerosene lamps talking furtively. Their words were at times impassioned. At times angry. They talked about Palestine. About the Return. Trustingly, hopefully, about UN debates. None of them doubted that their stay in Lebanon was temporary. Instead, they discussed the difficulties that the majority of Palestinians encountered making a living, getting a work permit, a residence permit, a permit to cross borders; they discussed which Arab leader stabbed us in the back more than the others. Which Arab state was good to the Palestinians and which was bad to them. Palestine would always be there as they left it. And it was also right there that night, around the kerosene lamps, transmuted to us in their images and recollections and passionate idiom, in the encapsulated world of the refugee camp that had already been home to me for three years.
I sit in the café next to my father and watch him and his friends drink their tea and suck on their waterpipes. I am eleven years old.
My father is talking to Abu Saleem, a newcomer to the camp. My father asks him where he comes from in Palestine.
“I come from Hawassa,” Abu Saleem replies.
My father recognizes the village near Haifa. “Hawassa, hey?” he asks quietly, elongating the name and dwelling on it as if it has some mystical, healing effect. “Hawassa is a pretty village.”
Such an exquisite verb that my father has just used, bristling with the stuff that makes people defy history and the heavens and the powers that be. For to both my father and Abu Saleem, Hawassa, along with all the intangible realities of the village, is something that will remain eternal and real in the essential repertoire of their consciousness. To them, Hawassa is and not was a pretty place. And Palestine is and not was their country.
To my parents’ generation the present was insanity. Not a natural continuum of what was. The only way they could relate to it was to transform it into an arrested past, governed by Palestinian images, rites, rituals, and dreams. That was the only way to impose harmony on their daily life, which terrorized them. They looked at themselves in the mirror of their past, for had they looked at the present the mirror would have been cracked. The image of their reality blurred.
A whole mosaic of folklore began to emerge that captured, and froze in the mind, the portrait of Palestine as our parents’ generation had left it. The vernacular exploded spontaneously with the mass sentiments of those who came from Haifa, from Jaffa, from Acre, and other towns or isolated villages in Palestine. Haifa, O beloved city, we left thee with the fish that our fishermen had caught still thrashing about on the sands.
Jaffa, its denizens would counter, we fled thee O sad city of the north, with our Dabki song not yet finished. And those who came from Acre would say, Acre, we built thee unafraid of the roar of the sea.
I am eleven years old and my father and I are walking down the dirt tracks of our makeshift world in the refugee camp. The walls are covered with political slogans. One of these says, “May a million calamities befall the British, enemies of the Palestinian people.” I read that aloud to my father, deliberating over the words.
“May the Lord hear your prayer,” he responds earnestly.
“The Zionists are also the enemies of the Palestinian people.”
“That they are. May a million calamities befall them too.”
With such vehemence was I acquiring a past and a consciousness.
My father is in his traditional shirwal and headdress, clutching three liras and some change for the tram fare. We are heading to the marketplace downtown to buy food. The money, though so little, is precious. My brother had worked all day the day before at a construction site to earn it. Today maybe we can eat something other than the powdered milk, bread, and dates that the UNRWA rationed out.
I am carrying an empty wicker basket in one hand. I ask my father eagerly if we will be buying cake today.
“Why cake? Who do you think we are? We are not of the landed gentry, you know,” he reprimands me. Everything he utters nowadays, every phrase he formulates, seems to be infused with land. We are not of the landed. We are not of anything except Palestine. Palestine, which housed within it the passions of two hundred generations.
“When we return to our homeland, you shall have all the cake you want. Believe me, it won’t be long now. Just be patient.”
In the marketplace we mingle with the shoppers. It is hot and humid. My father haggles over prices, spending the whole morning, to make the three liras last. The flies buzz in the air. Peddlers shriek. The porters walking around with huge wicker baskets over their backs frantically solicit work. We have to walk all the way back to the refugee camp because we don’t have enough money left for the tram fare. In the heat, it is a long trip for my father. He and I alternate carrying the basket, now full of vegetables. Every five minutes or so, my father sits down, panting. I sit down with him along the Basta road. My father’s face pours with sweat, which glues some of his hair to his forehead.
“Soon we shall go back to our homeland, son,” he says to me suddenly. “We are not from this country. We are not even of it. God in his wisdom will know when to help the heroes of the Return regroup and help us fight for our rights.”
I ask him if his store in Haifa will still be there when we return. He smiles happily at the image, and says of course it will, like everything else.
“And our home will still be there. And the Makha el Sham Café near it, where Abu Murad used to play the oud and make it cry,” he adds.
I