A Map of Absence Read online

No longer his village he found his tree amputated.

  Between one falling and the next

  There’s a weightless state. There was a woman

  Who loved me. Asked me how to say tree

  In Arabic. I didn’t tell her. She was sad. I didn’t understand.

  When she left, I saw a man in my sleep three times. A man I knew

  Could turn anyone into one-half reptile.

  I was immune. I thought I was. I was terrified of being

  The only one left. When we woke my father

  He was running away from soldiers. Now

  He doesn’t remember that night. He laughs

  About another sleep, he raised his arms to strike a king

  And tried not to stop. He flew

  But mother woke him and held him for an hour,

  Or half an hour, or as long as it takes a migration inward.

  Maybe if I had just said it,

  Shejerah, she would’ve remembered me longer. Maybe

  I don’t know much about dreams

  But my mother taught me the law of omen. The dead

  Know about the dying and sometimes

  Catch them in sleep like the sycamore tree

  My father used to climb

  When he was young to watch the rain stream,

  And he would gently swing.

  Still Life

  You write your name on unstained glass

  So you’re either broken or seen through

  When it came time for the affidavit

  The panel asked how much art

  Over the blood of strangers the word

  Mentioned the weather and the sleepers

  Under the weather all this

  Was preceded by tension enzymatic

  To the hills behind us and the forests ahead

  Where children don’t sleep

  In resting tremor and shelling

  The earth is a pomegranate

  A helmet ochre or copper sinks

  In buoyant salt water

  Divers seek its womb despite its dura mater

  And it hangs on trees like pregnant mistletoes

  I’ll stand next to one

  And have my German lover

  Remember me on a Mediterranean island

  Though she would eventually wed

  An Israeli once she’d realised

  What she wanted from life

  A mother of two

  On the nose of Mount Carmel

  Where my wife’s father was born driven out

  My father’s hands depearl

  The fruit in a few minutes add a drop

  Of rose water some shredded coconut

  For us to gather around him

  He will lead his grandchildren out transfer

  Bundles of pine branches in the yard to where

  His tomatoes and cucumbers grow in summer

  Let them let them

  Gather the dried pine needles forever he says

  They will refuse to believe the fire dies

  And they will listen to his first fire

  On a cold night in a forest of eucalyptus trees

  The British had planted as natural reserve

  Outside Gaza

  HANAN ASHRAWI

  Hadeel’s Song

  Some words are hard to pronounce –

  He-li-cop-ter is most vexing

  (A-pa-che or Co-bra is impossible)

  But how it can stand still in the sky

  I cannot understand –

  What holds it up

  What bears its weight

  (Not clouds, I know)

  It sends a flashing light – so smooth –

  It makes a deafening sound

  The house shakes

  (There are holes in the wall by my bed)

  Flash-boom-light-sound –

  And I have a hard time sleeping

  (I felt ashamed when I wet my bed, but no one scolded me).

  Plane – a word much easier to say –

  It flies, tayyara,

  My mother told me

  A word must have a meaning

  A name must have a meaning

  Like mine,

  (Hadeel, the cooing of the dove)

  Tanks, though, make a different sound

  They shudder when they shoot

  Dabbabeh is a heavy word

  As heavy as its meaning.

  Hadeel – the dove – she coos

  Tayyara – she flies

  Dabbabeh – she crawls

  My Mother – she cries

  And cries and cries

  My Brother – Rami – he lies

  DEAD

  And lies and lies, his eyes

  Closed.

  Hit by a bullet in the head

  (bullet is a female lead – rasasa – she kills,

  my pencil is a male lead – rasas – he writes)

  What’s the difference between a shell and a bullet?

  (What’s five-hundred-milli-metre-

  Or eight-hundred-milli-metre-shell?)

  Numbers are more vexing than words –

  I count to ten, then ten-and-one, ten-and-two

  But what happens after ten-and-ten,

  How should I know?

  Rami, my brother, was one

  Of hundreds killed –

  They say thousands are hurt,

  But which is more

  A hundred or a thousand (miyyeh or alf)

  I cannot tell –

  So big – so large – so huge –

  Too many, too much.

  Palestine – Falasteen – I’m used to,

  It’s not so hard to say,

  It means we’re here – to stay –

  Even though the place is hard

  On kids and mothers too

  For soldiers shoot

  And airplanes shell

  And tanks boom

  And tear gas makes you cry

  (Though I don’t think it’s tear gas that makes my mother cry)

  I’d better go and hug her

  Sit in her lap a while

  Touch her face (my fingers wet)

  Look in her eyes

  Until I see myself again

  A girl within her mother’s sight.

  If words have meaning, Mama,

  What is Is-ra-el?

  What does a word mean

  if it is mixed

  with another –

  If all soldiers, tanks, planes and guns are

  Is-ra-el-i

  What are they doing here

  In a place I know

  In a word I know – (Palestine)

  In a life that I no longer know?

  From the Diary of an Almost-Four-Year-Old

  Tomorrow, the bandages

  will come off. I wonder

  will I see half an orange,

  half an apple, half my

  mother’s face

  with my one remaining eye?

  I did not see the bullet

  but felt its pain

  exploding in my head.

  His image did not

  vanish, the soldier

  with a big gun, unsteady

  hands, and a look in

  his eyes

  I could not understand.

  If I can see him so clearly

  with my eyes closed,

  it could be that inside our heads

  we each have one spare set

  of eyes

  to make up for the ones we lose.

  Next month, on my birthday,

  I’ll have a brand-new glass eye,

  maybe things will look round

  and fat in the middle –

  I’ve gazed through all my marbles,

  they made the world look strange.

  I hear a nine-month-old

  has also lost an eye,

  I wonder if my soldier

  shot her too – a soldier

  looking for little girls who

  look him in the eye –


  I’m old enough, almost four,

  I’ve seen enough of life,

  but she’s just a baby

  who didn’t know any better.

  SAYED KASHUA

  On Nakba Day

  On Nakba Day I can’t stop thinking about my grandmother. If only she were still alive; if only she was the way I like to remember her: strong, sharp-witted, always waiting for me after another day of school, sitting on her lambs’ wool prayer rug. I would shrug off my heavy book bag and run to her, bury my head in her bosom and silently weep.

  ‘Why are you crying again, my child?’ She could sense my body trembling.

  ‘They keep picking on me,’ I would tell her. ‘They keep picking on me and won’t let me breathe.’

  ‘Who?’ she would ask. ‘Tell me who and I’ll show them what’s what.’

  ‘Everybody,’ I’d answer her. ‘And my friends are worse than the others.’

  ‘That’s how it is.’ I’d like to hear her say that now, just like then, as she stroked my head. ‘Because you’re a smart boy, the smartest, and they all want to be like you but they can’t.’

  If I’m so smart, Grandma, then how do you explain the fact that I still haven’t figured out how to get along in life? If I’m so smart, how do you explain the terrible fears? And, yes, I’m sorry: I no longer sleep with a small Koran under my pillow, as you taught me to do when I was young. I want to tell you that it never helped, Grandma, I was always afraid at night, and now more than ever. Except I no longer have anywhere to escape to, there’s nowhere to hide. And you know, I’m a father now and I have children who get scared at night and come to me to hide. Three children, Grandma. Sometimes I tell them the same bedtime stories you used to tell me.

  I told them how you used to have these huge watermelons that you would load on the backs of a convoy of camels, to take to the sea to be loaded on boats. I told them about the cows, the donkeys and the horses. About how on holidays you would dress up in a man’s clothes, put on an abaya and a keffiyeh, and gallop on the horse together with Grandpa all the way to Jaffa. About the café in Jaffa and how you always told us about the city women who sat there shamelessly smoking narghiles just like the men.

  ‘But so did you!’ I would always say, laughing, and you would answer: ‘Yes, but no one knew I was a woman, not like those wanton Jaffa women. You should have seen them, coming into the theatre after us and sitting next to us, those loose women, may God roast them in the fires of hell.’

  But the other stories, Grandma, the ones that made you emotional, that made you cry when you told them, those I haven’t yet dared to tell. Sometimes I think I wouldn’t want my kids to have to bear that burden, maybe because I want to give them the illusion that a home is a permanent thing, strong, protective, so they wouldn’t fear, as I do, a disaster lurking just beyond the doorstep. So I haven’t yet told them that Grandpa was killed in the ’48 war and I haven’t told them how you became a young widow. I haven’t told them about your lands, which were all lost. Or about the bullets that whistled all around and the shells that fell right and left.

  I haven’t told them about how you hunched over your baby son, my father, in the wheat fields, using your own body to protect him from the fire, and how you always used to say at that point, ‘as if my body would have really protected him if the fire would have caught me it would have taken him, too, but at least I would have died before my son.’

  So I don’t tell them that one, or the most terrible of all your stories, about that moment when the shelling ceased and silence suddenly descended, that moment when you tried to go and bring food from the field for your children and you saw that nothing was the same anymore. I remember that look, Grandma, that same look on your face each one of the thousands of times you described that awful day, always the same look, with eyes glazed over with tears in just the same way. And I remember you always pulling out your handkerchief with that same delicate motion, and saying, ‘In that one moment I understood that everything I had was lost.’

  How hard it is to live with this feeling, with the constant fear of the future, the idea that I must always be prepared for the worst. The feeling that at any moment everything I have could be lost. That a house is never a certainty and that refugee-hood is a sword hanging over me.

  Meanwhile, I’ve become a storyteller myself. In a language you wouldn’t understand, but don’t worry: not that many people who speak it really understand. Sometimes I feel like I’m basically telling all the same stories I heard from you, and just like you used to do, I repeat them time after time in all different ways and all different forms, to no avail. People here aren’t ready to believe your stories, Grandma, or mine. If only you were here now, on this Nakba Day, I would get on a horse and gallop all the way home, ask your forgiveness for having run away from you in your final days, and bury my head in your bosom for more silent weeping.

  ‘Why are you crying, my child?’

  If you only knew what I go through, if you only knew how hard it is to tell stories.

  ‘Who’s picking on you? Tell me and I’ll show them what’s what.’

  ‘Everybody, Grandma, and what really makes it hurt is I thought they were my friends.’

  ‘That’s how it is,’ I know you would have said, as you stroked my head until the trembling stopped. And then you’d say: ‘So, are you hungry?’

  LISA SUHAIR MAJAJ

  Fifty Years On / Stones in an Unfinished Wall

  1.

  Fifty years on

  I am trying to tell the story

  of what was lost

  before my birth

  the story of what was there

  before the stone house fell

  mortar blasted loose

  rocks carted away for new purposes, or smashed

  the land declared clean, empty

  before the oranges bowed in grief

  blossoms sifting to the ground like snow

  quickly melting

  before my father clamped his teeth

  hard

  on the pit of exile

  slammed shut the door to his eyes

  before tears turned to disbelief

  disbelief to anguish

  anguish to helplessness

  helplessness to rage

  rage to despair

  before the cup was filled

  raised forcibly to our lips

  fifty years on

  I am trying to tell the story

  of what we are still losing

  2.

  I am trying to find a home in history

  but there is no more space in the books

  for exiles

  the arbiters of justice

  have no time

  for the dispossessed

  without credentials

  and what good are words

  when there is no page

  for the story?

  3.

  the aftersong filters down

  like memory

  echo of ash

  history erased the names

  of four hundred eighteen villages

  emptied, razed

  but cactus still rims the perimeters

  emblem of what will not stay hidden

  In the Jaffa district alone:

  Al-‘Abbasiyya

  Abu Kishk

  Bayt Dajan

  Biyar ‘Adas

  Fajja

  Al-Haram

  Ijlil al-Qibliyya

  Ijlil al-Shamaliyya

  al-Jammasin al-Gharbi

  al-Jammasin al-Sharqi

  Jarisha

  Kafr ‘Ana

  al-Khayriyya

  al-Mas’udiyya

  al-Mirr

  al-Muwaylih

  Ranitya

  al-Safiriyya

  Salama

  Saqiya

  al-Sawalima

  al-Shaykh Muwannis

  Yazur

  all that remains

  a scattering of stones and rubble

 
across a forgotten landscape

  fifty years on

  the words push through

  a splintered song

  forced out one note

  at a time

  4.

  The immensity of loss

  shrouds everything

  in despair

  we seek the particular

  light angling gently

  in single rays

  the houses of Dayr Yasin

  were built of stone, strongly built

  with thick walls

  a girls’ school a boys’ school a bakery

  two guest-houses a social club a thrift fund

  three shops four wells two mosques

  a village of stone cutters

  a village of teachers and shopkeepers

  an ordinary village

  with a peaceful reputation

  until the massacre

  carried out without discriminating

  among men and women

  children and old people

  in the aftermath

  light remembers

  light searches out the hidden places

  fills every crevice

  light peers through windows

  slides across neatly swept doorsteps

  finds the hiding places of the children

  light slips into every place

  where the villagers were killed

  the houses, the streets, the doorways

  light traces the bloodstains

  light glints off the trucks

  that carried the men through the streets

  like sheep before butchering

  light pours into the wells

  where they threw the bodies

  light seeks out the places where sound

  was silenced

  light streams across stone

  light stops at the quarry

  5.

  near Qisraya, circa 1938

  a fisherman leans forward,

  flings his net

  across a sea slightly stirred

  by wind

  to his left

  land tumbles

  rocky blurred

  to his right

  sky is hemmed

  by an unclear

  horizon

  (ten years

  before the Nakbeh –

  the future

  already closing

  down)

  6.

  fifty years later

  shock still hollows the throats

  of those driven out

  without water, we stumbled into the hills

  a small child lay beside the road

  sucking the breast of its dead mother

  outside Lydda

  soldiers ordered everyone

  to throw all valuables onto a blanket