as if I am seeing my future in his past. To him everything is in either the mind of God or the heart of the poet.
Soon after that I took to the streets. This was no time, no place, to have a childhood. At home my father hung a picture of Nasser up on the wall, hammering a bent nail in with an ashtray. What else was there for him to do? At the dinner table everybody watched someone who reached for the sugar or the bread or the beans, ready to shout “Hey, leave some for the others.” I say that to my younger sister. There is so little of everything. More than one spoonful of sugar and everybody cried, “Hey, leave some for the others; we are not of the landed, you know.”
I was growing up very cynical in my early teens, cursing the world and its angels and gods, and the mumbling incoherencies of my father. And the whole world outside the camp, which was venting its hostilities and aggression on us.
The Egyptian president smiled benignly on our misery in the mudhouses of our refugee camps, promising my father salvation he never intended to deliver. My father trusted Nasser because he had nowhere else to turn. I tried to be understanding but found it difficult.
If I was later to become a revolutionary, it was simply because a revolutionary idiom and the tensions of revolutionary life raged around me in the streets as if they were part of the elements. The struggle between rich and poor? This was a concrete everyday reality we literally bumped into it as we walked the city streets and saw Arabs from Lebanon and elsewhere driving imported sports cars to the nightclubs of Beirut, where they could drink and gamble themselves silly while the masses of the city starved. Their preoccupation with Western gadgets had long since turned them into caricature Arabs. I only had to go to Hamra Street, as I did in my first year selling chewing gum, to see them sitting around in places called Uncle Sam, Queen’s, and The Horseshoe, speaking French or English to each other. To them, we were “tres sauvages, complétement sauvage!”
And the ruling elite in the Arab world? I could not reconcile their pious claims with what we Palestinians endured in their states. Before I reached an age to have acquired any recognizable political history, I could already tick off a whole catalog of fears, terrors, and mendacities that they had made a part of our lives.
“Why the hell do we need a picture of Nasser around here?” I ask my father flippantly.
“Watch your language,” my mother intones.
“Can we still trust Arab leaders?”
“Not Nasser? Nasser?” someone in the room asks incredulously.
“If God were an Arab leader, I would not trust him.”
“Atheist! Communist!” This one from my mother.
I start swearing vehemently and my mother starts her Koranic incantations. “I ask forgiveness from God Almighty, the Great. No power and no solution except from Him the Exalted, the Omniscient.”
My father, as if on cue, stands up and tells me to leave the room. As I do, my sister picks up where I left off.
“He is right, don’t you see, dad?” she is saying. “Can we trust anyone, except ourselves, to liberate our country?”
Jasmine. My kid sister. With her glasses and teenage pimples and jet-black hair. With her pamphlets and booklets on the “solidarity of the working classes” hidden in her school bag so our parents won’t see them. Her fear of the dark. Jasmine, who, like every other Palestinian kid, never had a childhood. As much a product of the violence in our history as I. Working as a servant in the Ajloun Mountains of Jordan at age 12.
We were learning rich metaphors from those who came before us with full memories of Palestine. And adding our own metaphors from exile. Our struggle for self-definition took on the freshness of a new beginning, resonant and self-assured, as theirs did when it started in the 1920s. And like everything that is newly born, our struggle carried elements within it from the past, all Palestine’s past.
As we grew up, we lived Palestine every day. We talked Palestine every day. For we had not, in fact, left it in 1948. We had simply taken it with us. Palestine was an indivisible part of my generation’s experience. Just as there was nothing in the Garden that Adam did not know, nothing that he could not isolate, identify, and interpret. It could not have been any other way. Our involvement was as much forced upon us as it was a genuine and spontaneous inward preoccupation of our soul. This became evident soon after we all began to go to school again.
The first school I went to in Beirut was not far from the camp. It was run as a business by a Lebanese from the neighborhood. The classrooms were crowded. And always cold and damp. The teachers, were semi-literate. But for me even this school was an exciting place to go to every day. For Ibrahim, with his craving for education, it was heaven on earth.
Every school day, for me, was an exotic experience. After years in the streets I was truly enchanted by the idea of a formal education, by school activities, by sports, by the concept of boy scouts. I joined the boy scouts. And I was totally consumed by the idea of a camping trip to Cyprus that the group was organizing. For three months I made preparations. I saved money. I peddled chewing gum again in the evenings. The anticipation of the trip gripped my senses. I told the people at the camp. I told the whole world. I was a fourteen-year-old boy, a boy scout, going on a camping trip to Cyprus. I was, at last, no different from the other children. The tension of this transformed me, ruled my life for three months.
Three days before we were to go on this trip, the Palestinian kids in the boy scout group were called into the principal’s office. Because we were Palestinians, he said, we were stateless. And because we were stateless, we had no travel documents. And because we had no travel documents, the principal adds with the gestures of a man who had just discovered the solution to a major problem in his life, we could not go to Cyprus. We should have informed him of our status before, he continued reprovingly, talking to us, as the rest of the world did, as if it were our fault that we were stateless.
The other kids went on their trip. And we returned to Palestine. I am from Haifa. Haifa, O beloved city, we left thee with the fish that our fisherman had caught still thrashing about on the sands. Haifa now means more to me than it did to my father. It is more graphic in my mind than in his. Its image more enriching, more engulfing as I grow up.
Still, there was nothing wrong with being a Palestinian. Or living at the camps. We went to school. We fought the boys outside the Bourj el Barajneh. We fought each other. Samira sat next to me in class and my arm brushed hers. During the Eid following the holy month of Ramadan, the UNRWA distributed clothes and shoes and baseball hats to the refugees. I am a refugee. I get an old pair of moccasins from America. That’s right, from America. I have painted slogans on the walls: Down with America.
For Palestinians, passion for politics and political activism began at a very early age. By the time we were halfway through high school, we were already veterans of a number of demonstrations, strikes, protest marches, and ideologies, as well as arrests, beatings, and worse.
For Ibrahim, politics was now more than a passion. It ruled his life. Every waking moment. Long before he graduated, he virtually controlled political activity at school. He became the one to decide when to go on strike, what demonstration to join, what petition to sign. He was becoming incredibly self-assured, haughty, aggressive, and extremist. It was he who organized Awlad Falasteen to uproot the UNRWA trees. The United Nations organization had been doing a lot of building, renovating, and construction around our camp. The trees, planted along the dirt tracks, were presumably put there to beautify the area. But around the sidestreet cafés, people were wondering about them, about the better shacks they were building.
A woman shouted to a gathering of Palestinians around the water pump, “O sisters, I swear to you by the blood of our fallen patriots that I will not hammer one nail in a wall while we are outside Palestine. We shall build only when we return to our land. There we shall build!”
The woman was Um Ali, who became famous in the movement in the 1970s because she lost all her six sons, her two daughters, and her husband in battles the Palestinians waged after 1967.
Are they going to deny us our right to return to our