A Map of Absence Page 12
Who calls anyone civilised?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?
Everything in Our World Did Not Seem to Fit
Once they started invading us.
Taking our houses and trees, drawing lines,
pushing us into tiny places.
It wasn’t a bargain or deal or even a real war.
To this day they pretend it was.
But it was something else.
We were sorry what happened to them but
we had nothing to do with it.
You don’t think what a little plot of land means
till someone takes it and you can’t go back.
Your feet still want to walk there.
Now you are drifting worse
than homeless dust, very lost feeling.
I cried even to think of our hallway,
cool stone passage inside the door.
Nothing would fit for years.
They came with guns, uniforms, declarations.
LIFE magazine said,
‘It was surprising to find some Arabs still in their houses.’
Surprising? Where else would we be?
Up in the hillsides?
Conversing with mint and sheep, digging in dirt?
Why was someone else’s need for a home
greater than our own need for our own homes
we were already living in? No one has ever been able
to explain this sufficiently. But they find
a lot of other things to talk about.
How Palestinians Keep Warm
Choose one word and say it over
and over, till it builds a fire inside your mouth.
Adhafera, the one who holds out, Alphard, solitary one,
the stars were named by people like us.
Each night they line up on the long path between worlds.
They nod and blink, no right or wrong
in their yellow eyes. Dirah, little house,
unfold your walls and take us in.
My well went dry, my grandfather’s grapes
have stopped singing. I stir the coals,
my babies cry. How will I teach them
they belong to the stars?
They build forts of white stone and say, ‘This is mine’.
How will I teach them to love Mizar, veil, cloak,
to know that behind it an ancient man
is fanning a flame?
He stirs the dark wind of our breath.
He says the veil will rise
till they see us shining, spreading like embers
on the blessed hills.
Well, I made that up. I’m not so sure about Mizar.
But I know we need to keep warm here on earth
And when your shawl is as thin as mine is, you tell stories.
NATHALIE HANDAL
Echoes: A Historical Afterward
The reason is they’ve been killed
The truth you’ve been too
The truth is you are now without a home
The reason is they’re in your home
The reason is they’ve convinced themselves you left
The truth is you only went to safety
The truth is they never let you back
The reason is they needed to protect their tribe
The truth is you are part of the same tribe
But no one speaks about that
The reason is it’s easier to be a threat
How else can they justify the killing.
Here
The Old Port of Jaffa
Is here
The sunlight poised
On our memories
Here
The old stone houses
With our tiles tiles tiles
Evidence of homes buried
In different names
Here
The years we never defined
Here
The echoes we collected
In each other
Here
The shivering breeze
Against our skin
The dark paradise
Under our eyes
Here
But you were not here
And I was not here
They say
But we were here
We are here
We are here.
The Oranges
They were all around me
but grew heavier and heavier
until I couldn’t carry them
anymore –
who can live with such weight
around the heart
who can carry a bent flame
across the night
where pieces of a moon
keep trying to declare something
to each other
but never do
who can see anything
when light is displaced
when the oranges have been taken
far away from where they belong
To Sami, Jaffa
when you don’t touch me
it’s your noise that blows open
my darkness
and maybe, I ask
(but never ask you)
the hole you fell into
is nothing
it’s what remains around it
that matters
But even in love
war inhabits me
Gaza City
I sit in a grey room on a bed with a grey blanket
and wait for the muezzin to stand up.
The chants enter my window and I think of all
those men and women bowing in prayer, fear escaping
them at every stroke, a new sadness entering
their spirit as their children line up in the streets
like prisoners in a death camp.
I walk towards the broken window
my head slightly slanted and try to catch a glimpse
of the city of spirits – those killed
who pass through the narrow opening of their tombs.
My hands and the side of my right face
against the cold wall, I hide like a slut, ashamed.
I pull the collar of my light blue robe so hard
it tears, one side hanging as everyone’s lives hang here.
My fingers sink deep into my flesh,
I scratch myself, three lines scar my chests,
three faiths pound in my head and I wonder
if God is buried in the rubble. Every house is a prison,
every room a dog cage. Debke is no longer part of life,
only funerals are. Gaza is pregnant
with people and no one helps with the labour.
There are no streets, no hospitals, no schools,
no airport, no air to breathe.
And here I am in a room behind a window,
helpless, useless.
In America, I would be watching television
listening to CNN saying the Israelis demand,
terrorism must stop. Here all I see is inflicted terror,
children who no longer know they are children.
Milosevic is put on trail, but what about Sharon?
I finally get dressed, stand directly in front of the window
and choke on my spit as the gun shots start,
the F16 fighter jets pass in their daily routine.
Jenin
A night without a blanket, a blanket
belonging to someone else, someone
else living in our homes.
All I want is the quietness of blame to leave,
the words from dying tongues to fall,
all I want is to see a row of olive trees,
a field of tulips, to forget
the maze of intestines, the dried corners
of a soldier’s mouth, all I want is for
the small black-eyed child to stop
wondering when the fever will stop
the nois
e will stop, all I want is
a loaf of bread, some water
and help for the stranger’s torn arm,
all I want is what we have inherited
from the doves, a perfect line of white,
but a question still haunts me at night:
where are the bodies?
Bethlehem
Secrets live in the space between our footsteps.
The words of my grandfather echoed in my dreams, as the years kept his beads and town.
I saw Bethlehem, all in dust, an empty town with a torn piece of newspaper lost in its narrow streets.
Where could everyone be? Graffiti and stones answered.
And where was the real Bethlehem – the one my grandfather came from?
Handkerchiefs dried the pain from my hands. Olive trees and tears continued to remember.
I walked the town until I reached an old Arab man dressed in a white robe.
I stopped him and asked, ‘Aren’t you the man I saw in my grandfather’s stories?’
He looked at me and left. I followed him – asked him why he left?
He continued walking. I stopped, turned around and realised
he had left me the secrets in the space between his footsteps.
SHARIF S. ELMUSA
Flawed Landscape
And it came to pass,
We lost the war; and became a nation of refugees.
It is always the beginning.
Fuelled by fear; my father gathered
The clan, lugged me in his arms,
And headed, on his peasant feet,
Across plain and impassable mountain,
Without a compass, headed east.
We set down in a camp in a desert,
Without the sinuous sands of the movies,
By the gateless town of Jericho.
In that flawed landscape,
Under the shadow of the dark rocks
Of the Mount of Temptation,
The world was kind to us.
The United Nations, our godfather;
Doled out flour and rice and cheddar;
‘yellow’, cheese – sharp beyond our palettes.
My father remembered his twelve olive trees
Every day for ten years. He remembered
The peasants saying to the olive tree,
Had she felt for their toil,
She’d yield not olives, but tears,
And the tree answering,
Tears you have enough; I give you oil
To light your lamps, to nourish, and to heal.
Then one day he let go. Let go.
My father was no Ulysses.
He found a new land, and stayed away
On the farm, eking out some rough happiness.
My mother stayed home.
Shepherded a pack of twelve, cleaned and yelled
And, for punishment, summoned father’s shadow.
She stuffed our thin bones with sentiments,
As if to make us immobile.
Her past was insatiable:
The new house they had just built,
Windows on four sides, tall and arched,
To let in the ample light,
To spread out the prayers;
How my father rushed to ask for her hand
The day after she had kept him in line
At the water well; how they found
The body of her brother soaked
In sweet-scented blood,
At the police station,
After he had been killed by the discriminate bullets
Of the British soldiers.
No statues were built in the camp;
The dead would have been ashamed.
The living dreamed – the dreams of the wounded.
In their houses the radio was the hearth,
And the news of the oracle.
In the Refugee Camp
The huts were made of mud and hay,
Their thin roofs feared the rains,
And walls slouched like humbled me.
The streets were laid out in a grid,
As in New York,
But without the dignity of names
Or asphalt. Dust reigned.
Women grew pale
Chickens and children
Feeding them fables from the lost land.
And a madman sawed the minaret
Where a melodious voice
Cried for help on behalf of the believers.
Of course I gazed at the sky
On clear nights,
At stars drizzling
Soft grains of light,
At the moon’s deliberate face,
At the good angel wrapped in purple air:
I had no holder
And nothing from heaven fell
In my crescent hands.
Ah, how I cursed Adam and Eve
And the one who made them refugees.
LIANA BADR
One Sky
He was standing at the side of the road, atop a pile of gravel, between the asphalt and the rocky mountainside. Frozen in place, with a fixed gaze, like a wax doll, his black eye gleaming at me. His serious stance, like a miniature knight on a chess board, caught my eye. I bent over and picked him up as if he were a piece of carbonised sand. His other eye appeared to be closed. The eyelid was swollen, covering it. Between his eyes was a red scar, evidence of a blow, below which his feathers had been plucked out.
His injury suggested that a predator had pecked him between his eyes but had not succeeded in killing him. One of our group speculated that a passing car had hit the reckless bird, being unable to avoid it, as birds do not recognise potential danger posed by moving vehicles. Another commented that a bird of prey must have attacked him to inflict such a severe injury.
I picked him up immediately and wrapped him in the white, silky shawl that still retained a blue mark in the form of the gold brooch that fastens the fabric of the traditional Tunisian sefseri cloak. I thanked God that the changeable spring weather had compelled me to bring what I had wrapped around my neck, so that I could use it to lift the injured bird from the dust without causing it to panic.
Cradling the small bird, I resumed walking towards the grassy slope, above which a patch of blue sky appeared. I hugged him close to my chest, hoping that the beating of my heart would transmit some warmth into his tiny, exhausted body. It seemed to me that the bird’s fragility in the face of the random blows was at odds with the strength of his wings that carried him above the laws of earthly gravity. How much stronger than us he was, and yet immeasurably more fragile!
We carried on towards the slope. Above us shone the fresh spring sky, the brightness of which we had not known since the cold days of winter.
We proceed at a vigorous pace, leaving behind us a temporary construction for the curfew, following a month and a half of confinement by the tanks and armoured vehicles that had devastated the city. The soles of our feet enjoy the feel of the solid earth despite the large amount of gravel scattered on it. The features of our faces relax, after having stiffened from compulsory listening to the babble of the political programmes on the satellite television stations, which discuss our situation in a style no different from the entertainment programmes.
Our senses are shaken by the noise of the loudspeakers fixed to the Israeli Jeeps, which multiply around us like dangerous viruses as they recite their orders at us. We walk with all our determination, escaping, albeit temporarily, from the smells of poisonous gas bombs, and the garbage and waste, which has not been collected because of the curfew. Attempting to flee, if only for a moment, from our houses that have become our prisons. Expending most of our energy through our steps placed in the direction of the open air, so that we might forget how many incessant announcements are repeated around us at all hours of the night or day. Trying to ensure that, despite everything, our fundamental dreams of a different life are not shaken from our souls. As if that excursion of ours were no more than a break from all the i
nstructions and orders that have been instilled in us and imposed upon us, like cages of chain mail.
Merely perhaps … in order that we peek out between the solid bars of our prison, between one prohibition and another, at another blue patch of the sky of Palestine.
A sky that looks down on mountainous lands encircled by the ancient dry-stone walls that have prevented the earth from crumbling and collapsing since the times of the Romans and Phoenicians. A vast expanse, and over its hills spread the stone huts, like miniature fortresses, their rough stones forming houses to protect the crops and sheep of farmers since times long past, and forgotten by subsequent generations.
Under the shadows of the clouds, ceaselessly wandering above the eternally recurring summits, emerge from time to time the fortifications of Israeli military positions surrounded by barbed wire, ready to assume their roles in the conversion of our agricultural land into colonial settlements.
Looking from the West, these occupation positions surrounded by searchlights and barbed wire, with their immoral nature, are bathed in the splendour transmitted by these hills over which advance infinite clusters of olive trees. Converging in turn with the streamlined peaks stretching to the distant sea. Above its bright, shimmering waters another sky gently touches that iridescent, red copper twilight of the evening.
A sea, whose shimmering shadows we only glimpse from afar, because it remains hidden in the direction of the beach, which we are forbidden from reaching. Yet we never tire of gazing towards it whenever possible, making walking to it evidence of nostalgia. We use as a pretext the search for the flowers which the desert bears at this time of year. Scarlet anemones and rosy-lilac gazelles’ horns, or yellow aspalathus. We search for various types of small lilies, with rippling, rose-like sheen, our tense gazes like closed petals, bursting towards their ripeness, as if we are redrawing the freedom of release from the closed borders imposed upon us.
We complete our tour, and the small bird with the closed eye is wrapped in the shawl against my chest, and we took him along with us.
At home, I named him Robin, based on the assurances of our bird-loving neighbour. When I expressed my doubt about the name due to the incomplete red ruff on his neck feathers, he told me: ‘This is a young bird. The full red has not yet appeared on his feathers.’
At home, I put him under a sieve made of metal wire and left him some water and seeds. The first day passed and he was rigid and motionless. He stood frozen, as if he had been glued in place. He could not be seen clearly between the thin metal wires, as his dark colouring blended with the metal. He was unmoving and did not budge. I recalled the day a canary froze in my house, when his cage accidentally fell from the window ledge while I was out. The shock had caused it to stand frozen in place for two days without eating or drinking. Thus, I assessed that Robin would get better after a day or two.