He said a great deal about the constant anxiety he felt over his mother when he is there and about his having to be separated from everyone to earn a crust of bread and educate his children and unburdened himself to me at length, but I remain amazed at the poetry sleeping in his amazing expression, “I’ve started to hate love.”
Majid is a poet faithful to poetry but not desperate to publish his work in books. He issued his first verse collection after fifty years or a little less of continuous writing and erasing and is now preparing his second for publication. Ghassan, who introduced me to the electronic paradise through his skill at everything to do with computers, has built websites for Radwa, Tamim, and me and taught me how to edit mine — a true test of his patience and perseverance. The internet has rescued Majid particularly from his reluctance to write and publish and he has started doing so electronically and spending long hours in front of the computer, as though to make up for lost time. ‘Alaa has taught himself to play the oud and started to write poems and songs that he sets to music himself.
Once Majid was done with the expatriates’ conference, we all went together to Deir Ghassanah so that he could see it after his long absence.
My uncle’s wife gave us the best possible reception. Our first lunch had to be musakhan, of course. The strange thing is that Marwan al-Barghouti phoned me too, by coincidence, and wanted to meet me. I suggested that he join us at Dar Ra‘d, which he did, once again over Umm Talal’s musakhan. This time I discovered that his family and my uncle’s wife’s family were related, though I failed to grasp exactly how, even after a long explanation.
As we left Dar Ra‘d for the Alhambra, I was surprised to hear my mother make the following announcement: “I have decided to restore and modernize your uncle ‘Ata’s house and I shall build a new house for you all in the courtyard of Dar Ra‘d. Mourid and Tamim now have identity cards and God willing the others will be able to claim the family reunion permit, so Dar Ra‘d won’t be big enough for everyone. Also, I’ve decided to buy al-Zawiya.’”
“What’s al-Zawiya?”
“It’s a house that’s fallen down and no one lives in, but my mother and I lived there for a while long ago, when I was a child, and I want it.”
‘Omar Dhib, to whom the lodge had come by inheritance, decided to give it to my mother as a present. She actually registered it in her name at the Palestinian Lands Department and felt that she had rescued her memory and her memories. A few weeks later, she returned bringing a construction plan for the new house that was to be built in the courtyard of Dar Ra‘d.
“Who drew the plan, Mother?”
“I drew it.”
She spread out a piece of paper that she took from her handbag and there was a plan of the house, down to the smallest detail.
I brought the municipal engineer, who studied the plan, authorized it with minor modifications, and signed it, and she obtained the necessary permissions from the municipality.
She took up residence in my uncle’s house, where she started by adding a balcony and a spacious kitchen, which she asked me to photograph after the restoration to show my uncle and his family in Amman. My uncle will never be able to go to Deir Ghassanah but he wanted to redo his house in case one of his sons, daughters, or grandchildren should return to live there one day. Next she came to an agreement with the building workers, who started to dig the foundations for the new house, and its pillars started to rise. I would visit her every Friday and find her sometimes issuing instructions to the workers, at others making them lunch, and at all times offering them tea as they worked.
The sight brought me very mixed feelings since, to construct a new house in the courtyard of Dar Ra‘d, my mother had to have the workers uproot the last two orange trees there. No power could turn my mother aside from the house-building project.
“You mean to say the poet of Deir Ghassanah shouldn’t have a house there?”
She falls silent for a moment, waiting for my reaction, so I say nothing. She proceeds with her argument.
“You mean to say when your brothers come back they should stay in the village as guests? And your son and his children don’t need a house in their own village?”
I’d look at the land after the disappearance of the orange trees, one inner voice blaming my mother, another arguing for an understanding of her insistence that we should have a house of our own in Deir Ghassanah. I recalled the great khudari fig tree that I’d been so quick to blame my uncle’s wife for cutting down years ago, though later I’d come to understand her decision. Today here I was, watching as our new house drove the greenery from Dar Ra‘d. My uncle’s wife had expanded her portion of the house so that for many years now it hasn’t had a real garden. She’d thought that those who had left would never come back, and now we were back. What my mother had done seemed to symbolize how tied in with pain this return was. Had I, who had been shaken to the core on my first return by the uprooting of the great fig tree, now colluded with my mother in the uprooting of the orange trees? Why was my difference with her a whisper and a hint and not a battle? Should I have stood up to her project with all my might? I hadn’t done so. Should I blame myself or my mother or a set of circumstances none of us would have suffered had not the hand of history turned the lives of every individual, family, and household in Palestine upside down? Wasn’t it possible for us to be overcome by joy without that joy being overcome by sadness?
Were we obliged to choose between the tree that lifts the spirits and the roof that shelters?
Was that how things were — the beautiful or the necessary? The tree or the roof?
Is it freedom or disobedience to differ openly with your mother?
How often have I said that life resists simplification? Here it was, resisting again, for the thousandth time. I admired my mother’s determination and her capacity for taking decisions and her initiative and I was upset at the disappearance of the two orange trees. Soon, though, this ambiguity ceased to be important.
The new building was finished in seven months. She slaughtered a sheep in celebration. She decided to call it ‘Lightning and Ra‘d,’ after the name Ra‘d, which means ‘thunder.’ She put a little furniture in it, gave me copies of the keys, and returned to Amman, intending to come back to furnish it and get it ready to be lived in. Then I could move there on a permanent basis, for I, being the only one of my brothers who had obtained the Palestinian identity card, was the only one who had the right to go to Deir Ghassanah.
Her plans would have succeeded, but for a small development that has prevented her from seeing the house to this day. Sharon took power in Israel after his visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Intifada erupted; he imposed a siege on the Bank and Gaza and on Arafat’s headquarters and closed the roads. The Israeli army set up the Surda checkpoint, cutting the road between Ramallah and thirty villages to the north, among them Deir Ghassanah. When, years later, things got a bit easier, my mother could no longer walk or travel because of the pains in her bones. She is obliged to stick to her seat next to the window in the Shmaysani house during the day, close to the heater, and to go to bed no later than nine. Because the default situation is closure and checkpoints and the exceptions are unreliable, the journey to the bridge and the uncertainties of the road have become unthinkable for her. The destiny of Umm Mounif’s small new house is now tied to the ending of (at the least) the Middle East Crisis, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the War on Terror. At the least!