and peoples that send us blankets and figs and powdered milk. That give us a tent to live in. And a foot to kiss. No one dies in this explosion, no one is mutilated, except us, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, as we silently go about our business of growing up.
We Palestinians often picture ourselves as a proud people, a people hardened by adversity to the point where we would not compromise our meaning. Well in the 1950s we were, as children, hungry. And hunger has a meaning, a logic, all its own. Just as our metaphysical need to be free declares its own form of meaning, so does our physical need to eat. A human being, triggered uncontrollably to gratify either need, will do anything—and a child will more readily than an adult.
The man puts his foot forward and Ibrahim bends down to kiss it. Just as my friend is about an inch away, the man withdraws it. There is a sudden explosion of laughter. The zaim’s friends are slapping their knees and doubling up with joy. Ibrahim demands his half lira, and the zaim, in between roars of laughter, repeats: “But you did not kiss my foot, you did not kiss it.”
“I want my money,” Ibrahim is demanding, virtually in tears.
“You will get your half lira only after you have kissed my foot.”
The man puts his foot forward again. “Kiss it now. You’ll get your money.”
Again Ibrahim tries. And again the man pulls his foot away and his friends break up.
I go over to Ibrahim and drag him away. We walk out of the Mashrek Café and head to the Corniche, where we sit by the water.
Ibrahim, my friend. Ibrahim, whom we called “the library.” Ibrahim, whose full name translates to Abraham the Just. Ibrahim, who is like me, and other Palestinian children growing up in the streets, learning what living in exile means.
We sit by the water for a long while, not saying much.
“Sons of whores,” he suddenly shouts. “May the Lord destroy their homes.”
“And pour acid on their souls,” I add. “May they all die away from their homeland, in the ghourba, in the countries of others.”
“Hey, tell me,” Ibrahim asks with passion, “when do you think we shall return to Haifa?”
“I don’t know for sure. A year or two. Maybe three.”
“You think it’s going to be that long?”
So you are abused by time. And wizened by it. For every moment in your existence, as a Palestinian child, thrusts you beyond your fixed meaning, a meaning that is difficult to explain to others. Meaning, after all, is hardly neutral or reducible to a static definition divorced from its existential setting. The range of significance that we endow ourselves and our history with is irreducibly Palestinian, the product of infinite adaptations in our social system. And it is, in the common sense of the word, private.
How the fuck do I explain why I am angry at the West, at the rich and powerful in the Arab world? How do I explain why I am now a revolutionary, why the vision of the return to Palestine has been, all my life, indispensable to my feelings, as it was to the feelings of my parents’ generation and later became to the feelings of the generation of Palestinians that grew up after mine? How do I explain any of that without explaining the overlap of every event in my life and my history and my social system? And how do we go about repudiating the sense of otherness thrust upon us, without repeated spasms of despair, without muttering cruel prayers and drinking rain?
In the end you just return to the streets, which you have come to know so well and with which you have developed a subtle relationship of hate and love. In Beirut, as in other third world cities, the streets have a way about them, a magic to them, an intensity evocative of ancient energy and ancient memories that only the eye of hunger and love can see. There is a kind of order to everything, to the fusion of the odor of urine from the open latrines with the smell of uncollected garbage in alleys and on the pavements, with the political (always political) graffiti on the walls, with the sounds of pain from every direction, with the smell of spices, the intimacy of bodies, the notion of a humanity suckled on the same misery. And with the subtle absence of anonymity in the midst of it all. The streets do not tolerate anything anonymous. If you live there, everybody knows your name and your family and your nationality and your class background and your place in the hierarchy of power that the streets, in the wisdom of diversity-within-unity that they create about them, will give you. The peddler’s status is known vis-à-vis that of the shopkeeper. The lottery-ticket seller, the cardsharp, the black-marketeer, the pimp, the policeman, the local zaim, they all know where they stand in relation to one another. Who oppresses whom, who reveres whom, who robs whom, who lives off the labor of whom—all of this has been determined by historical forces in the streets, forces whose origins are buried by time or beyond individual recall. And if the streets do not decay it is because every available space is occupied, because everything has an intricate structure and an intricate function.
Westerners who live in their suburban outback will not mistake these streets for a happy place to live in. But those who have lived there, graduates of the higher education that city streets can confer on its denizens, often emerge as inspired men, as poets, as revolutionaries, as angels in armor. Few emerge as dead souls wounded by the crush.
And we, the children of the Palestinian diaspora, coming as we did in 1948, had to fight for our way there, acquiring an aboriginal sense of where we fit in the general scheme of the city—pending our return to Palestine, our homes and homeland. In the meantime, ours would remain a reality scorched by alienation. We were destined to wander the face of the earth, creating a ceremony of shadows that was to become our homeland in exile. And living in it, in the dark fullness of ourselves, we would end up affecting the world as forcefully as it had affected us. The only difference between us and others growing up in the world at the time is that we, unlike them, never had a childhood. In the end, people like us are a necessary component of change in history. Progress has never been made by contented people. In the midst of oppression, only the oppressed will abolish injustice. Only those who are defined as the footprint of a shadow emerge from the night with a dream. The dream soon sours, as all dreams do, and other outsiders, armed with the complex energy of their outsidedness, come forth to be agents in history, propelling it forward.
In Beirut, a year or two after we left Palestine, my father’s hair began to take the color of snow. I would not leave him alone. I repeatedly badgered him about my bicycle. He had bought it for me a short time before we left our country. I want to know what is going to happen to it. Will the Jewish kids, who had been coming to Palestine from Europe, take it? Is it safe? Is it? Will it still be there when we return? And he assured me, earnestly, faithfully, that since our house is locked and we have the key, everything, including the bicycle, will be there just as we had left it. But I was not satisfied. I leaned against him, in tears, pleading to be taken back to Haifa, just for the day, just for the short trip across the border, to pick up the bike. Why can’t we go? Why not? Why? Why?
Suddenly my father bursts into tears and begins to mumble: “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.”
Soon after his wish was granted.
How do I mourn my own father’s death? Had my father died of natural causes, of a recognized disease, of old age, or had he even died a violent death, I would have known how to mourn. But my father died of something else. He died from not being able to answer the question that he must have repeatedly asked all those years: Why had all of this happened to us?
In 1948, my father lived in Haifa. He was poor, like most Palestinians, and like most Palestinians he was also proud—that he lived in his city, had his own petty business, played backgammon with his friends in the sidestreet cafés of the city, and supported his family. After 1948, he found himself transplanted to a world of nonbeing in a refugee camp where his humanity and identity were reduced to a fragment. The move was so sudden, so inexplicable, that it took his breath away. The more he thought about it, the more the thought splintered his soul into pieces of raw wounds, of dizzy incomprehension. At the beginning of each month, he would line up at the food depot to pick up our food rations. His family lived on charity. Away from home. In the homeland of others.