Soul in Exile. Fawaz Turki

Egyptian administration), had been picked up by the police for some unknown, undocumented offense having to do with being “associated with communists,” and tortured so brutally that he lost all his memory. He could not recall his own name, or anything about his background except that he was a Palestinian. When it was time for his release, the authorities discovered that he did not possess the thirty dollars to pay his fine. So they dumped him back in jail. He tried to commit suicide once by throwing himself onto the yard from the second floor. He just broke his legs and his collar bone.

      When Bee-Jay got to jail, the boy was a mess. He had lost his glasses and could barely see, and was no longer in control of his motor responses or bowel movements. Bee-Jay took care of him the short while he was there and after his own release he immediately collected the thirty dollars for the boy’s freedom. When Bee-Jay and his parents left Cairo the boy was still under treatment, looked after by various Palestinian families in the neighborhood.

      Back in Beirut, when Bee-Jay spoke of that boy, he always referred to him as el batal, the hero. But more than that, he always ended the story by saying: “We shall burn down their religions and their gods, destroy the house their ancestors built, and suck the blood of those who rule the Arab world.”

      Around that time, Bee-Jay became a Baathist and often smuggled party literature into various West Bank towns, where it was, of course, banned. He usually took the last bus from Amman and arrived late at night in Nablus, where bookstores distributed the material surreptitiously. The Communists and Arab Nationalists did the same thing. In those days in the Arab world, literature that mattered had to be distributed through an underground.

      One night Bee-Jay’s bus was stopped at one of the check-points where Bedouin soldiers routinely searched passengers and examined their identity cards. He was arrested, not because the soldiers discovered his contraband publications, but because he had given the soldiers a lot of back talk, as was his wont with authority.

      He was held overnight but the soldiers never discovered that he was carrying “subversive literature,” he told us derisively, because they were “all illiterates.” And he would repeat rhetorically, over and over again, “Imagine the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Hashemite Kingdom. A country named after the name of the ruling family. Imagine! A country where labor unions and political parties are banned, where voting in elections—when elections are held—is confined to male property owners. Son of a whore king. Feudal pig.”

      Bee-Jay was growing up violent. In demonstrations he would taunt the police. When arrested, he would be the one to throw the first blow. When called a two-bit-Palestinian, he would spit at the cops and holler obscenities at them.

      I was witness to a fragment of this violence one day when Ibrahim Adel and I met him at the Corniche just as he was ready to close up shop.