male, the ex-prisoner wears his headgear in a special way, tilting his hatta at an angle to indicate rakish defiance of the authorities and to declare to his friends that he had not been crushed. He is, in other words, proclaiming publicly his willingness to go back to jail if need be. If the victim died under torture, or has been killed in battle, then his family buries him attired as a bridegroom, arisse el watan, married to the nation. Again, congratulations, not condolences, are offered by the visitors.
These are old, traditional arrangements that Palestinians (in struggle for well over a century) had established sometime beyond anybody’s recall; arrangements that, for various reasons, still appeal to their internal psychic economy.
So Ibrahim basks in the “congratulations” that people from Bourj el Barajneh camp come to his home to offer.
Abu Ibrahim, however, is enraged at his son, not because of his political activism but because he is “endangering his education.” “How are you going to live without an education?” Abu Ibrahim is shouting at his son. “You keep forgetting that you’re a Palestinian. A Palestinian. You’re worth nothing without an education. No one will give you a job without an education. Do you want to grow up to be a shoeshiner? And tell me. How will you support us when your mother and I are old? You’re a Palestinian. Can’t you wait till we go back to our homeland? Do you want to struggle in the lands of others? May the Lord damn them and damn the lands of others? May the Lord damn them and damn their lands and their corrupt governments and police. May the rainbow never appear in their skies. May the Lord pour acid on their songs and fire on the tongues of their poets. Wait till we return to Palestine. Your education is more important than politics.”
In Palestinian society, you do not talk back to your father. Ibrahim listened, and said nothing. In exile, however, our fathers have become too debilitated, too drained, by the effort they have made, all these years, to transmute the ethos of Palestine to us. In their old age, they have become conservative, cautious, terrorized by the exigencies of life and the imminence of death in exile.
2
The objective conditions in our situation—which are themselves an externalization of our subjective condition—were changing us, transforming our picture of the world and ourselves at a dramatically accelerated pace.
At school, I am consumed by a paper I am writing about the Russian Revolution for my history class, trying to deal with why men and women struggle at such danger to themselves; why certain individuals readily offer their lives for a cause although this means they will not be around to enjoy the rewards of the ultimate victory. At home I am consumed trying to pacify my mother, who berates me and my sister for “endangering” our education. Our mission in life, she insists, is to become educated and liberate Palestine, not to change the Arab world. “Leave politics alone,” she shouts. “We are just Palestinians, for God’s sake.” She does not respond to our argument that Palestine and the Arab world cannot be seen in isolation from each other, and that our destiny as a people cannot be divorced from its relation to politics, and to political events in the rest of the world.
The argument that everything in politics is interconnected in an intricate web of relationships spanning the whole world had come to me from my friend Samir Salfiti, who worked as a peddler at the Corniche. I knew Salfiti from the camps and from Awlad Falasteeri. We often called him Abu Saksuki, Father of the Beard. More often we called him Brazil-Japan, an engaging name we gave him because he was always wont to begin an argument, in that systemic logic of his, by saying: “Hey listen brothers, if you want to know what’s happening in Brazil you have to know what’s happening in Japan”—what happens in one place is related to what happens everywhere else.
Unlike many of us, Brazil-Japan, or Bee-Jay, never made it through high school. He had to drop out when he was fifteen because his father died and there was no one to support the family. So he bought himself a cart and sold peanuts, kaak—a crispy bread—and roasted corn around the Corniche. We often went there, his old friends from the streets, to chat with him, talk politics, and, above all, recite poetry. Poetry is not the exclusive idiom of the educated elite among Palestinians. Rather, the opposite is true. Poetry to us is a currency of everyday exchange, a vital starting point to meaning. A child recites poetry. A politician quotes a line of poetry, to prove a point. A personal letter contains, always, at least one line of poetry. Moments of despair in everyday life, moments of joy, are celebrated or defined in poetry. There is so much poetry in the air, poetry from pre-Islamic times, poetry composed by countless poets at the height of Arab civilization, poetry during that civilization’s decline, modern poetry, obscure poetry. People define themselves and their environment in verse. Palestinians take all of this for granted—until they live elsewhere in the world.
The poet’s craft has so shaped, organized, reordered, and revitalized the tenor of our society’s life and mythology that it has become ingrained in our existential habits of spirit, our manners of ceremonial life. That is why Palestinians forget, outside their own milieu, how affected they seem, how rhetorical; and how hard it is for outsiders to understand that a people’s national anguish, or personal grief, can be best articulated in poetry—that poetry, in fact, is every Palestinian’s idiom.
At the Corniche, we would sit by Bee-Jay’s cart and recite poetry incessantly. We had memorized so much of it, even before we had gone to school, that we played a well-known game with it. One of us would recite a line, and the fellow next to him would be challenged to recite another beginning with the letter with which the previous one ended. We went on for a long while before someone got stuck.
Palestinian poetry, whether oral or written, is so rich, and poets so ubiquitous, that no aspect of Palestinian culture and no introspection of the Palestinian national psyche is irrelevant to it.
All the poetry that was then being composed, or at least that we were then committing to memory, would have been considered subversive by the Arab governments and their police. Our poets were forever exhorting the masses to struggle for freedom, for Palestine, for the Return. The struggle for freedom, whether against indigenous oppressors or foreign ones, the theme went, is a unified statement that needs no explanation. It is encompassed in forces that transcend us. Ordinary people should plunge into the tumultuous stream of history, so that articulate self-determination and political experience are not the prerogatives of princes and presidents and statesmen alone.
Despite its somber theme, the poetry we grew up with also had a kind of innocence to it, a roundedness, a celebration of the impulse to be free, a moral optimism, and an aboriginal reduction of history so that it became everybody’s concern.
The ideal of a poem whose meaning “remains hidden” is alien to us; not only because our language leans more, in its drift and form, to verse than to prose, but because it is in the craft of the poet, rather than of the theoretician or polemicist or analyst, that people seek a reflection of their mass sentiment. For centuries, in a development originating in the overlap of infinite social adaptations whose exact origins are beyond recall, our poets have appropriated the role of speaking the language of the people, of drawing on the universality of their struggle rather than on the particularity of a personal malaise.
The poet in Palestinian society, hence, has been a hero. The hero of the poet, however, has always been the fighter, the man or woman who dies in the struggle of the masses. The myth of the fighter, “the blood of our fallen patriots,” has always pressed to the core of our historical meaning.
God will free us, Palestinians used to say in the old days, at moments of crisis before our struggle began. Then soon after the turn of the century, the fighter became a sort of God himself, supplanting the real God here on earth, as His agent in the now, while He sat back to deal with issues of the hereafter.
Three successive generations of Palestinians, inside and outside Palestine, have immersed themselves in struggle, conducting their own dialogue with history. Our children have never had occasion, a respite, to adulate or emulate Davy Crocketts and Robin Hoods and football stars. Their heroes are the same as their elders’—individuals whose sacrifice for the cause of Palestine had already entered into legend, the kind of legend necessary to any society created, shaped, and organized