The Man from Deir Gassanah
'The man from Deir Gassanah' - that's how Mourid Barghouti described himself to a friend of mine in London. Deir Gassanah is the name of the village outside Ramallah that Barghouti once called home, and to which he returned on a visit after almost thirty years later when it was under Israeli occupation. The exile was a forced one. He was in Cairo studying English literature (Yeats and Eliot were the only things he cared about then), when the 1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out. That war saw the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and the subsequent beginning of an occupation whose continuing cruelty and barbarity continue to exact a heavy toll of its original Arab inhabitants. "The essential American soul," wrote D.H. Lawrence in a celebrated description, "is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer." Had he been alive today, he would have changed the words to 'Israeli soul.'
I Saw Ramallah is an acknowledged classic. In re-reading it, I can see why again. Mourid Barghouti (born July 8, 1944) is a poet with 12 published volumes of poetry, and his recording eye is an unsparing, specific and unsentimental one. The book fittingly begins on a bridge across the Jordan River as the author makes his painful journey back to Ramallah, coming back home briefly after a lifetime Elsewhere, in Kuwait, Cairo, Budapest, London, Amman. It is the same bridge he crossed thirty years back, at that time unheedingly, on his way to Cairo University to sit for his Latin exam. The return journey is fraught with the weight of the years gone by, years when he lived in double exile when an Anwar Sadat, preparing for his 'peace mission' to Israel, deported Barghouti from Egypt, and every tree, every olive grove, every turn of the road is overcast with memories, and broken dreams, and with such a furious longing for lost land that one can taste it raw in the mouth. Not for nothing had Franz Fanon said that, "For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread, and above all, dignity." The book ends with Barghouti lying in bed on his final night in Ramallah "in a small room, under a window that looks out on countless questions, looks out also on a (Israeli) settlement."
There are three tales here - the Palestinian Diaspora, the loss of home, and the mercilessness of the Israeli occupation - but so interwoven in the poetic stream that the three streams of thought flow into each other, making for a narrative that is, as Edward Said said in his foreword, "one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement." John Berger found it to be a book that reached "no conclusions, only the passionate pain of exile, recounted at the end of the day by a true poet." Barghouti's language, at least in the unmatched English translation by the equally well-known Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, is spare and unsparing at the same time. It is poetic in its compression, and in the way that each thing is seen in its concrete physical denseness, a compression and density that then transcends its physicality to attain the flight of metaphor and associative thought. It is by that rich mix of concrete detail and metaphorical flight that the book achieves its undoubtedly haunting effect. The tale is told with remarkable simplicity and in a tone that can be universally understood, yet its texture and details, in some case quite unfathomably, remains Arabic, and rooted specifically in the Palestinian earth.
One doubts whether anything similar exists in the dishearteningly burgeoning literature of political exile, asylum, and flight.
Shahzad Khan teaches high school English in Seattle.
Extract
The car moves toward Ramallah…
I used to tell my Egyptian friends at university that Palestine was green and covered with trees and shrubs and wild flowers. What are these hills? Bare and chalky. Had I been lying to people, then? Or has Israel changed the route to the bridge and exchanged it for this dull road that I do not remember ever seeing in my childhood?
…Did I really know a great deal about the Palestinian countryside? The car moves on and I continue to look out of the windows to my right and to the left of the driver. What is this Israeli flag? We entered our 'areas' a while ago. These, then, are the settlements.
Statistics are meaningless. Discussions and speeches and proposals and condemnations and reasons and amps for negotiation and the excuses of negotiators and all we have heard and read about the settlements, all this is worth nothing. You have to see them for yourself.
Buildings of white stone standing together on a stepped incline. One behind the other in neat rows. Solid where they stand. Some are apartment blocks and some are houses with tiled roofs. This is what the eye sees from a distance.
I wonder what their lives look like on the inside.
Who lives in this settlement? Where were they before they were brought here? Do their kids play football behind those walls? Do their men and women make love behind those windows? Do they make love with guns strapped to their sides? Do they hang loaded machine guns ready on their bedroom walls?
On television we only ever see them armed.
Are they really afraid of us, or is it we who are afraid?
If you hear a speaker on some platform use the phrase 'dismantling the settlements,' then laugh to your heart's content. These are not children's fortresses of Lego or Meccano. These are Israel itself; Israel the idea and the ideology and the geography and the trick and the excuse. It is the place that is ours and that they have made theirs. The settlements are their book, their first form. They are our absence. The settlements are the Palestinian Diaspora itself.
I said to myself that the negotiators of Oslo were ignorant of the true meaning of these settlements, otherwise they would never have signed the Agreement.
You look out of the car window on your right and are surprised to find that the narrow, worn strip that carries you has turned into a wide, smooth elegant road. The asphalt shines, and soon it separates out, rising to a hill with classy buildings, and you realize it leads to a settlement.
After a while you look out to your left and you see another settlement and another good, wide road leading up to it. Then you see a third and a fourth and a tenth, and so on.
Israeli flags rise at the entrances, and the signposts are in Hebrew.
Who built all this?
When I crossed the bridge, the leader of the Likud, Benyamin Netanyahu, was waiting for the final results that would confirm that he had won the elections. It is the Labor Party then.
Since the time of Ben Gurion, the Labor Party has been building these settlements on our land. The fools of the Likud make a lot of noise about their settlement policy and about each new settlement they build. But the brains of the Labor Party remind me of a story I read long ago about a thief who stole a car:
He returned it to its owners the next day and left them inside it a polite not of apology. He said he had not meant to steal their car, he had just needed it for one night to go out with his sweetheart. And he is returning the car, with two theatre tickets, in apology and to show his goodwill.
The owners smiled and admired the sensitivity of the lover/thief and his good manners.
In the evening they went to the theater.
They returned late at night to find everything of value stolen from their home.
A killer can strangle you with a silk scarf, or can smash your haed in with an axe; in both cases you are dead.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments