The guards dragged him out of the chamber to his unceasing stream of insults. I saw the scene when it was picked up by the television stations. I thought, I’ll write this poet as he clenches his fist and bawls, knowing that it makes no difference — and here I am doing so.
We left the city of Nazareth like the Japanese tourists. We got into the car and set off for Jaffa and Haifa — Jaffa, the city that liberated the Mediterranean from its long name when the Palestinians decided that ‘the Sea of Jaffa’ was enough.
Haifa, though, is the city that imagination built as it wanted and as all cities would want to be built. To climb to the top of Mount Carmel and look out over the city and its sea is to climb to the meaning of beauty. I climbed Carmel and thought, now I am in it, I am in Haifa, this ‘beautiful city.’ Say that and nothing more. And I will say nothing more.
It seems Tamim thought I’d dropped off. He’d gone inside, taken a shower, and was waiting to hear my plan, still examining ‘Omar al-Salih al-Barghouti’s old furniture, his black telephone, his salon set which had been so splendid in its day, and a part of his library.
Later, his book Marahil (Stages), a huge work containing his memoirs from the end of the nineteenth century to the year of his death in Ramallah in 1965, will be published and I will buy a copy at the Cairo Book Fair. The second part of Marahil consists of political memoirs covering the period of the British Mandate over Palestine and the political, party-based, cultural, and educational work undertaken in an attempt to save it from the Zionist plan that aimed to establish a state for the Jews on the rubble of our cities and villages. These are memoirs from the pen of a lawyer well-versed in political analysis. The first part, however, is devoted to the family and the village of Deir Ghassanah. It is full of vaunting and boasting about everything to do with the Barghouti family, which the head of the family comes close to canonizing and whose every distinguishing characteristic he takes pains to record, as though it were God’s Chosen Family. Soon enough, however, he forgets himself and describes how the same family oppressed women and the weak that lived around them. He recounts, for example, how the Barghoutis would send the nawar (gypsies) who lived on the edges of Deir Ghassanah to do compulsory Ottoman military service in place of the sons of the family, and that the family owned slaves, which was “something natural at the time,” and that poor members of the family used to walk with a “sloping shoulder” indicating that they performed manual labor to support their families when in general the Barghoutis didn’t need to do any physically demanding work. If a man passed a woman, she was not allowed to keep on walking; she was supposed to squat on her haunches until the man had gone and then continue on her way. He also boasts of the Barghoutis’ clothes because “the Barghoutis had pockets” while the peasants in the other villages put their money either in their head coverings or their belts. I read what he has to say in praise of the pocket:
Villagers put many of their belongings in their head gear, between their skull caps and their tarbushes. If one of them is wearing a kufiya with a rope retainer he places his papers and his money in his belt. Thus they use their head covering or their belts as places to keep things. The Barghouti, however, used to view this as shameful and would put his belongings in his pockets. A member of the family once told me that a large number of village headmen were summoned by the governor of Jerusalem, who told them to put their seals to an official document. All of them pulled their seals out from their belts, except for the head-man of Deir Ghassanah, whose seal was in his pocket. “Are you a Barghouti?” the governor asked him, to which the man replied, “That I am!”
I laughed for a long time over this paragraph and mentioned it to my friends. It became a common habit of theirs to accost me whenever we met with the mocking question, “Do you have pockets, Mourid?”
I’d complete the exchange for them by answering, “Then you must be a Barghouti!”
I go inside to take a shower and change my clothes.
Anis, Husam, and Abu Ya‘qoub come and we go together to have lunch at Abu Hazim’s. Afterward I take Tamim on a tour of Ramallah and al-Bireh and he is amazed at how the two cities intermesh. The right side of a street may be in al-Bireh while the left falls in Ramallah. I take him to al-Manara, the Ramallah Secondary School, Batn al-Hawa and the Church of God, the Friends’ School for Boys and the Friends’ School for Girls, Ziryab’s Café, Rukab’s ice cream parlor, Ramallah Municipality Public Library, the Arts Center, the Qasaba Theater and cinema, the Sakakini Cultural Center, and Shari‘ al-Iza‘a.
“In the fifties we used to call it Lovers’ Lane.”
“It doesn’t look like that now. Where are the lovers? Where are the girls? Where are the trees?”
“It seems everything goes backward everywhere.”
“It seems Ramallah’s like today’s Cairo — a ‘city of Islamic law.’”
“The boys and girls from the secondary schools — Ramallah, the Friends, the Hashimiya, and so on — used to take their strolls here in the afternoons and on the weekends, promenading and making dates. They were experts in the art of flirting and attracting attention in all its forms. Stories of love, both dumb and fantastic, were born here. Scandals, embarrassments, and.… ”
“Normal life, in other words.”
In the evening, we eat at al-Bardouni’s. We agree to meet Husam the following morning to arrange our ‘infiltration’ into Jerusalem. At night, Tamim and I go back to the Yasmin Building. We go out onto the balcony. Jerusalem looks like a great crescent of lights crowning the quiet of the night.
Half asleep and half awake, I return as a boy a little younger than Tamim is now to the nearby school with the arches. I wonder, was I less in pain in those days than he is? The place was mine and my body was free in a free city that knew no dour looks and had yet to acquire the strict moralistic atmosphere in which Cairo, and all Arab cities, live today. At Cairo University, the beautiful cafeteria has been torn down and all the other cafeterias in Egyptian universities have been closed so that the students can’t socialize between lectures. As a result, there’s no place left to talk about politics and no place left for stories of love. Ninety per cent of the girl students wear the headscarf or the face veil — from religious belief, to fit in, because they’ve been preached at, out of poverty, or by contagion.
In that dreamy space where the world had the feel of velvet and the taste of peaches, and the lusts of adolescence shot sparks from my growing body, I’d go during the day with my friends to the city’s gardens, cafés, and parks. If one of us got to know a girl, we’d hide our pounding hearts from our families. We’d lie to get out of homework so we could go out and exchange visits and small gifts on our birthdays and dance and have fun and commit small stupidities.
At night, almost every night, I turned to poetry, writing and erasing, or to the short story, writing and tearing up, or to drawing with a pencil, never keeping anything I’d done.
On mornings during term time, everything about school was inviting, because it was a wider society than that of the house and there was nothing to spoil it apart from the math exam and Muhammad Basala.
Basala was top of the class each year and I’d be second and each year this got on my nerves when the final results were announced because I couldn’t think of any reason why my final mark should always be one lower than his. Things continued like that until one year I got first place and Basala got second. I took my friends to the cinema in celebration of this coup and we saw The King and I with Yul Brynner at the Cinema Dunya, though we didn’t take any of it in because we were more interested in the Ramallah girls around us in the elegant theater. Falling in love, a possibility in Ramallah, acted on my body and soul as much as a love fulfilled would have done. Our adolescence passed in a state of infatuation with the world, music, pictures, colors, of the first rain in September and the first snow on the hills, as well as of gratitude to any family that might visit ours bringing their daughter with them. We experimented with all the different ways of showing interest — gentleness and aggressiveness, calculated neglect and going too far, displays of shyness and claims of experience and multiple relationships, and always we wanted to appear older than we were. The girl would try out all her weapons at one go — bashfulness and openness, retreat and advance, closing all doors and then leaving them a little ajar — and when she walked on Shari‘ al-Iza‘a, I’d feel she could see me walking behind her through the back of her head without turning around and would adjust the rhythm of her steps as the fancy took her, hurrying up or slowing down according to her whim, sending silent messages of encouragement or rejection. This in itself was enchanting.