Dissident Voice

May 19, 2003

In the unbearable sorrow of a history buried alive, the year 1948 in Palestine broke away from time, scattered into exile and ceased to reckon with the marching count of days, months and years, but instead became an infinite mist of one moment in history, speckled in the heart of sprawling progress, waiting for the justice that would deliver its arrested heart to beat once more and join the registers of years and nations moving along. Its twelve months rearranged themselves and swirled aimlessly in the last tick of the clock, unable to pass the narrow boundaries of time and space imposed by its heartbreak, which became a dominion onto itself. Thus, although I was born in 1957, like everyone born in the refugee camp, I really arrived in the haze of that endless 1948, that timeless year, captured in the grip of paralyzing injustice, unable to break free without redemption, even if it wanted. The old folks of Ein Hod would die refugees in the camp, bequeathing to their heirs the large iron keys to the ancestral homes, the crumbling land registers issued by the Ottomans, the deeds from the British, their memories of the landscape, and the dauntless will not leave the spirit of forty generations of ancestry trapped beneath the subversion of thieves in the present.

…………My father, Darweesh and other men were ordered to dig a mass grave for the remains of 30 people who had been burned alive. They were able to identify all but two of the bodies, and father wrote their names on the sleeve of his dishdashe as he hollowed the earth.

Stunned, their ragged nerves fumbling in the shit of conquest and their children crying, my family could do nothing but be led by the hand of fate and do as they were told. They gathered their valuables, as they were ordered to do, and assembled by the town’s gate. Uncle Darweesh was the last of them to arrive with his pregnant wife, who was also his cousin. He walked with a defeated stoop, pulling behind him his heartbroken steed, Fatooma. The delight of my uncle’s heart, Fatooma’s lifelong companion, Ganoosh, the horse that accidentally broke Dalia’s ankle, had been killed in the fighting and it took much persuasion to pull Fatooma away from the massive unburied carcass of her mate.

At the gate, soldiers whipped their batons, herding the terrified masses like cattle through the narrow exit. A cart, weighed down with the belongings of five related families, wobbled toward the gate and an old lady, hunched by age, struggled along side, using the rim of the cart for balance. A man lifted the old lady and carried her on his back. Soldiers fired their guns and it began to rain bullets. Mama held Ishmael to her chest, Baba carried Yousef with one arm and a sack of hastily packed belongings in the other, grandfather Yehya toted a basket of food flung over his shoulder, and without water, my family stumbled into the hills beneath a parched sky.

On the edge of Ein Hod, by the town’s eastern water well, expectant soldiers stopped the fleeing souls and ordered them to empty their valuables into a blanket spread on the ground. Stupefied, people obeyed. Along with hundreds of women, my mother dropped all the golden jewelry that had weighed her down at her wedding celebration, into that blanket before the coveting glass eyes of a soldier whom she had served lamb and rice and yogurt and figs from the kindness of her fear three days before. Uncle Darweesh stripped Fatooma of the belongings saddled on her back and laid their contents on the blanket, and when he walked on, the soldier stopped him, ordering him to leave the horse too. Already defeated and stripped of pride and anger, my uncle begged the soldier to spare him his steed with the same urgency that a father would beg to keep his child. With an impatient and callous perturbation, the soldier shot Fatooma, then put a bullet through my uncle’s chest. His wife shrieked and cried by her bleeding husband as people gathered to carry him a distance away where someone produced a jar of honey for wound care and bandaged him with strips of his own clothes. The bullet would lodge in his spine, condemning Darweesh to a motionless life, plagued until his death by unsightly bedsores and tormented by the burden of his wife’s cheerless fate of being a young widow whose husband lived only from the chest up.

Separated from my father, my mother pressed on in the throngs. In an instant, six-month-old Ishmael clung to her chest. In the next instant, he was gone. It was a kind of infinitesimal point of time that arrived with a flash, which my mother would revisit in her mind, over and over for many years, searching for some clue, some hint of what might have happened to her son, perhaps a hidden face she might have overlooked in her memories. Even after she became lost in a chasm of eclipsed reality, she would search the panicked crowd in her mind for Ishmael.

Realizing that her baby had fallen, some people tried to help her find the child. But gunshots rang and Mama was shoved along, until she met up with my father in the crowd around my injured uncle Darweesh. She was hysterical, questioning people and uncovering babies with the hope of revealing a boy with a fresh wound circled around his right eye. She searched with muffled sobs at her cheeks and an alert frenzy at her brow, even though grandfather Yehya tried to reassure her that surely someone had picked up the child, and it was only a matter of time before they would be reunited.

Grief-stricken, my mother cried herself to sleep that night. Little Yousef, not comprehending the hell that befell the whole village sat in grandfather Yehya’s arms, both of them dazed and teary. My father shuffled restlessly between his wounded brother Darweesh, his inconsolable wife, his terrified son, and bewildered father, until he succumbed to exhaustion and slept on the unforgiving ground, using stones for pillows among merciless mosquitoes.

They awoke early to the sound of gunfire and a bullet missed a man standing in prayer and hit the donkey behind him instead. Soldiers were under orders to move the Arabs further east. By mid afternoon, dehydrated and spent, people staggered and fell. Some lay dead or dying in the heat. Pregnant women miscarried. Small babies starved. My father and mother came upon an infant. It was a boy of three months, suckling at the breast of his dead mother. Instinctively, my mother took the child to her own bosom and my father wrapped the woman in cloth because they could not bury her. After saying a prayer over her body, they left her by a tree and trudged on.

Mercifully, untimely clouds closed in the sky and showered them with rain, which people collected every way they could. Some stood wide mouthed in the open. They let their clothes soak then twisted the water into concave stones. It saved them from parched death the next day, going up and down rocky hills, with cactus grabbing and scraping at their ankles and legs. But the baby Mama rescued would not take from her milk, nor would he drink water, as if he possessed the lucid faculties to discern the subterfuge and would not be hoodwinked into taking another mother. He became feverish and died unobtrusively, without a wince, in the chest harness she had fashioned to carry him. When Mama discovered his lifeless body, she fainted.

Finally, the exiled wanders came upon a main road, where an Iraqi infantry took the infirm and disabled, including Mama, in the bed of a truck to the nearest town—Jenin. More trucks came and took people to Ramallah and some even kept going as far as Amman, Jordan. But my father, Yousef, and my grandfather caught up with mother and remained in Jenin for the next three years in a tent camp, set up by international donors. The UN condemned Israel’s “systematic” destruction of those villages, found 130 bodies there and demanded that Israel not only allow the return of those made homeless by the barbarity, but also to restore their homes, destroyed in the attack.

While my family waited for that return, their tent took root and turned into clay, then into the concrete shacks separated by muddy alleyways snaking up and down in no discernable pattern.

So it was, that 800 years since its founding by the two brothers from Nazareth, Ein Hod was cleared of its Palestinian children. My grandfather Yehya tried to calculate the number of generation who had lived and died in that village and he came up with 40. It was a task made simple by the way Arabs name their children to tell the story of their genealogy, inheriting five or six names from the child’s direct lineage and in the proper order. Thus Yehya tallied forty generations worth of living that was stolen from my family. Forty generations worth of childbirth and funerals; weddings and parties; song and dance; prayer and family. Forty generations of children, scraped knees, fevers and play; Of sin and charity; of love affairs and heartbreaks; of buildings and homes; cooking and eating; of chatting; of passing the time; plowing and planting; toiling and idling; of friendships and animosities; of arguments and agreements; of cultivating; inventing; trial and error; of wealth and poverty, drought and rain. Forty generations with all their imprinted memories, secrets and scandals; their letters; their dreams and treasures. Forty generations of tradition; of love and hate; betrayal and loyalty; of punishment and reward. All of it carried away in the backwaters of the bigoted notions of entitlement of another people, who would eventually settle in the vacancy and proclaim it all, all what was left of forty generations of Palestinians in the way of architecture, orchards, wells, flowers and charm, all of it as the Jewish history of foreigners arriving from Europe, Russia, the United States, Ethiopia and other corners of the globe!

Grandfather Yehya aged tremendously in the jumbled months of the same year that kept repeating themselves until one morning in 1953, when he realized that his miserable tent in Jenin had turned into clay. The symbolic permanence of the shelter was too much for his heart to bear that he would have rather lasted in the cloth accommodation which, with its leaky top and muddy floor, affirmed the notion of a transitory stay “until the return.” In the years of waiting in the tent city, he would awake at the Adan and idle, with the music of his nye, between rationed meals and five daily prayers. Yousef would recall fondly that time with Yehya when the two of them were inseparable. But in over sixty years of life, Yehya had become accustomed the daily activities of agrarian self-sufficiency. The aimlessness and inactivity of captive dispossession warped his mood and bent his posture. The string of broken promises and UN Resolutions that were not worth the paper on which they set demands of return, wore at his spirit and made taciturn, and he shuffled about with qualities of a man defeated by the wait and by the quiet nag of his hands wanting things to do.

Something in the clay of his new shelter, the way it solidified perhaps, stirred him to expel the dreary resignation that had come to permeate his temperament. One early summer morning in 1953, he asked my mother to wash his clothes and make the whites as bright as she could. He sat on a rock outdoors in his long white underpants and a white undershirt, with a razor in one hand and a piece of broken mirror in the other, and he shaved. He waxed his mustache into two perfect upward-turning curls. One garment at a time, he dressed himself in vintage dignity, putting on his best dishdashe, a jacket that was too hot for the weather, and a red checkered kafiyeh held on his head with a twisted black egal.

Realizing what my grandfather was up to, Haj Salem begged him to find prudence. But Yehya would not hear it. When father tried to stop him, grandfather Yehya silenced him with the soft words of an Arab patriarch’s unquestionable authority, and he walked as he had before, with purpose and pride and with a cane, up the sloping alleway, to the edge of the camp, past its boundaries, outside the limit that 1948 could not cross, beyond the border of what became Israel, the terrain he knew better than the lines on his hands, until he finally arrived at his destination.

Sixteen days later, grandfather Yehya returned ragged and dirty with a disheveled beard, and a radiant spirit that seemed to leap from a reborn bounty of happiness. The kafiyeh that he had worn on his head when he left now hauled a bundle flung over his shoulder as he walked with a merry hunch under its weight. “His eyes savored of sweet cheer as he unloaded his stash,” Baba told me.

Yeyha had made his way back to Ein Hod, undetected by soldiers. “That terrain is in my blood,” He proclaimed, “I know every tree and every bird. The soldiers do not.” For days he roamed his fields, greeting his carob and fig trees with the excitement of a man reuniting with his family. He slept contentedly in their shade, as he had done at siesta after lunch all his life. The old water well, where the soldier with the glass eyes had shot Darweesh and Fatooma and taken all the valuables in a blanket, was still there and Yehya devised a makeshift stone bucket tied to vines of Areej to fetch water. He went to his wife’s grave, where the white streaked red roses had come back despite the destruction, he said a prayer for Basima’s soul and, as he would swear, spoke to her apparition.

Almost thirty years later, and with the same corner curled mustache as his grandfather, my brother Yousef would recall the pocked yellow moss across Yehya’s teeth on the day he came back from his sixteen days in the paradise of realized nostalgia. He had left the camp with stubborn solemnity and his most dignified clothes and returned looking like a jolly beggar with mucky teeth and as much fruit and olives as he could carry in his kafiyeh, his pockets and hands. In spite of his vagabond appearance, he came invested with euphoria and the people lifted him to grand heights of esteem befitting the only man among them who had outwitted a ruthless military and did what five great nations could not effectuate. He returned. However brief and uncertain the return may have been, he did it.

Yehya’s audacity was an injection of life into the refugees who had become spongy with the weary promises of the United Nations, and lethargic with the humiliation of that year without end. For Yousef, who was only nine years old at the time, it was the seed that planted itself in the lava of his memories of the terrible eviction, and it would germinate at his core a character of defiance and a revelation that it was up to Palestinians, no matter how violated and destitute, to take reign of their own destiny to reclaim what was rightfully theirs. In the happiest days of his life, some thirty years after Yehya made his daring journey home, when I felt closer to my brother than I had in all my life, Yousef would recall the splendid sight of our grandfather unleashing a bundle of figs, lemons, grapes, carob and olives still on their branches.

Inspired and energized by Yehya’s rebellion, the patriarchs and matriarchs in the camp kept a festive vigil on the night my grandfather came back from his return. They divvied the sweet goods and ate them with ceremonial savor, letting the olives roll in a dance with their tongues before taking the sacrament. Those fruits, of forty generations of toil, went down like the elixir of their essence; like silky little kisses of heaven; and like a waft of Palestine’s centuries. They ate, laughed, wept, danced and sang the sad and happy ballads of old in reminiscing revelry, lacing their memories to Yehya’s description of the new state of affairs. The homes on the east and west wings of the village were still abandoned and the jars of pickles and jams, which must have been there since they left five years before, could still be found in pantries and Yehya helped himself. “I figure, better I eat them than leave them to the Jews moving in.” Yes, Yes. And there were clothes too. Some toys here and there. The village mosque, in the very center of the town, was turned into “a brothel,” he told them and the women muttered curses and the men shook their heads in disgust. And oh yes, Hajie Magida, God rest her soul, who had been known by everyone for her obsessive antipathy for ants, her house was populated with a formidable army of the little critters. “If she could only see that!” and they all laughed. “God rest her soul,” yes. “God rest her soul.” No one was using the olive press, except to hang caricature pictures in beautiful frames. And the big oak that grew out of nowhere in the late 1800’s, was still there. “Well, of course its there.” All the olives were still there too, but they were in need of caring “from people who knew how to take care of them” and Yehya didn’t think those people knew a damn thing about olives because they were “foreigners with no attachment to the land because if they did have an attachment to the land then the land would compel in them a love for the olives,” and “damn these people, why did we have to move out here, we would have let them move in with us and we’d have given them some olives from our harvest,” and everyone sighed and the women muttered curses and the men shook their heads in disgust and they ate olives with meticulous relish. Then Yehya pulled out his nye and began to play the sounds of time and women swayed and sang sad ballads and someone shouted “None of that! play us Dal’Ouna!” And he did, and the spirited tempo lifted their arthritic bones onto their feet and they danced a clumsy dabke around the bonfire to their songs and the nye and someone improvised a tabla, adding percussion. Yousef, the only child who had the privilege of their company until then and who had been struggling to remain awake, was suddenly energized by the unfolding festivities and, decades later, he would recall toothless smiles, laughs that shook tired old bodies, giggles that sounded like they should have come from mischievous children instead of grandparents, and the curling smoke of honey apple tobacco from the hookas and Baba’s pipe. The air filled with carousing sounds and people were drunk on a moment of life from the fruits of trees that had continued in time and penetrated the impenetrable cloud of 1948. Others joined in the spontaneous party that went into the night. Some women came out in their plebian finest and children, ecstatic at the prospect of a late night vigil, gathered around Yousef and had their own satellite celebration by the shadowy glow of the fire. Technically, I was there too, as Mama was in the eighth months of her pregnancy with me.

In the days that followed, the cheery spontaneity of that evening fizzled to the laborious business of patience and the restless odd work of temporary life. But for Yehya it was an intolerable anticlimax. So, two weeks later and once more, he asked Mama, whose belly was ready to explode with my mass, to make his whites sparkle. He shaved and dressed himself with the same quiet ritual as he had done weeks before. But this time, he performed the rites of the forbidden return with the deliberate strokes of experience. Yousef sat by his side in the sunshine, watching the slow motions of the razor along our grandfather’s jaw line. My brother would later recall the dirty white foam in the rinse cup, the sun reflecting off the metal of the blade, the spots on Yehya’s hands and the dirt beneath his nails, and he would commit to memory the precision with which Yehya trimmed his salty black mustache and waxed its tips to perfect curve and symmetry.

No one knew exactly when Yehya died and by the time the UN was able to secure the return of his corpse from the Israeli authorities, I was already born. Everyone in the camp agreed that Yehya knew that when he set foot again outside the boundaries of that eternal 1948, he would be gone forever. Haj Salem was sure that Yehya “went back to die where he was supposed to die,” and when people spoke of his passing, they said he died from the malady of a defiant broken heart.

The actual cause of death was a gunshot wound. Ein Hod was being settled by Jewish artists from France and had been gaining a reputation as a secluded paradise. Yehya had been spotted on the first trip by one of the settlers there and when he returned again, waiting soldiers shot him. For trespassing. For the security of Israel. For the fight against terrorism. For nothing.

Susan Abulhawa is a Palestinian living in Pennsylvania. She is the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, a non-profit organization dedicated to building playgrounds and recreation areas for Palestinian children living under military occupation. Email: sjabulhawa@yahoo.com. © Copyright 2003 by Susan Abulhawa. This essay may not be reproduced or reposted in any form without author’s permission.