On Occupation, Exile and Return

Yesterday, forty years had passed since the Six Day War, when Israel conquered the current OccupiedTerritories, along with the Sinai Peninsula, that was returned in 1979. apart from the Sinai, the occupation is still going on accompanied by expanding and increasing setllements, violating international law, not forgetting the <a href="http://www.gush-shalom.org/media/seperationmap_eng.swf">wall</a>

Tomorrow, members of the Association Iceland Palestine (as most readers of my blog now, I belong to that group) can probably expect the latest edition of our magazine, which is dedicated to the Occupation. Among other stuff, there are three excellent articles that I’ve translated. The first one, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1942942,00.html">We overcame our fear</a> by Jameela ‘al-Shanti was first published in Icelandic in my translation in Morgunblaðið (one of the most widely read newspapers in Icleland) last year. The others are <a href="http://www.mediamonitors.net/uri96.html "> Revenge of a Child</a> by Uri Avnery and <a href="http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0610/S00129.htm">Education Or Mind-Infection </a> by Nurit Peled-Elhanan.

I also want to point out that the full  <a href="http://toibillboard.info/Transcript_eng.htm"> One State/Two State-debate between Ilan Pappe and Uri Avnery </a> can now be found on Gush Shalom’s website.

I am curently reading a very interesting book by the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. It’s called I Saw Ramallah. It got the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. Mourid became a refugee following the Six Day War and it was not until thirty years later that he was allowed to return to Ralallah on the West Bank. He writes especially well and describes the Palestinian  existence very effectively. Yet he first and formost looks at the postion of the refugee, his memories from before the exile, what exile feels like and the mixed emotions that arouse from having no safe home and not being able to grow permanent  ties with any place. The book is a mixture of joy and sorrows and Mourid manages in a sensitive way to describe the various fellings that fill one’s breast during such occasions. This book is at the same time personal and universal, lyrical and deep and Ahdad soueif’s translation from Arabic is written in a particularly beautiful English.  The Palestinan-American academic Edward Said (most famous for his book Orientalism) writes the intoducution and in its first lines writes:  “This compact, intensely lyrical narrative of a return from protraced exile abroad to Ramallah on the West Bank in the summer of 1996 is one of the finest existencial accounts of Palestininan displacement that we now have”. Mourid knows that nothing will be exactly as before. At one pace in the book he says: It is enough to go through the phase of the first uprooting to be uprooted forever” and elsewhere: Displacement is like death. One always thinks it happens to other people”. I couldn’t help being reminded of the poerty lines by Stephan G. Stephansson (an Icelandic poet who moved as a young man to Canada and lived there for the rest of his life) “En ég á orðið einhvern veginn ekkert föðurland”. “But lately I somehow do not posess any fatherland anymore” (rough translation by me).  Thirty years have separated Mourid and his fatherland. Yet he feels that the Occupation’s crime is how it barries the Palestinian society from developing by itself, keeping it stuck in the past. Unsurpisingly, there is also a good deal of politics in the book, but nothing beyond what would be normal and there are no abstracts or opinions driven by political movements, but stems from the reality that Palestinans face and the whole book is written with much insight, indeed better than most politcal ananysts would do, also Mourid often asks questions and looks at things rather than offering any magical solutions.  As he more than once notes in the book “life will not be simplified”.  Among the things he points out in the book is that despite the tragedies that the Palestinan people have suffered, the tragedy cannot only result in tragical literature, Palestinians also need joy and comedy and the literature cannot be too overtly political. “The Palestinian has his joys too. He has his pleasures alongside his sorrows. He has the amazing cotradictions of life, because he is a living creature before being the son of the eight o’ clock news”. I allow myself to publish a longer qote, since I find it so good:

How did I sing for my homeland when i did not know it? Should I be raised or blamed for my songs? Did I lie a little? A lot? Did I lie to myself? To others?
What love is it that does not know the beloved? And why were we not able to hold on to the song? Because the dust of fact is more powerful than the mirage of an anthem? Or because the myth had to descend from its lofty peaks to this real alleyway?
Israel succeeded in tearing away the sacred aspect of the Palestinian cause, turning it into what it is now – a series of “procedures” and “schedules” that are usually respected only by the weaker party in the conflict.
But what remains to the exile except this kind of absentee love? What remains except clinging on to the song, however ridiculous or costly it may be? And what about entire generations, born in exile, not knowing even the little that my generation knows of Palestine?
It is over. The long Occupation that created Israeli generations born in Israel and not knowing another “homeland” created at the same time generations of Palestinians strange to Palestine; born in exile and knowing nothing og the homeland except stories and news. Generations who posess an intimate knowledge of the streets of their faraway exiles, but not of their own country. Generations that never planted or built or made their small mistakes in their own country. Generations that never saw their grandmothers squatting in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his headdress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took off their clothes and bathed, naked, in the pool of ‘Ein al-Deir. Yes, the preacher steals the clothes and hides them in the bramble tree so he may gaze long and hard at the tempting beauty of the women. Never in his life will he see temptation like this: not in the nightclubs of Europe, or his gradsons’ louche parties at Lumumba University and various western capitals, or the sex shops in Pillage and St. Denis, or even in the swimming-pools of Ras Beirut and Sidi Busa’id.
The Occupation has created generations without a place whose colors, smells and sounds they can remember; a first place that belongs to them, that they can return to in their memories in their cobbled-together exiles. There is no childhood bed for them to remember, a bed on which they forgot a soft cloth doll, or whose white pillows – once the adults had gone out of an evening – where their weapons in a battle that had them shrieking with delight. This is it. The Occupation has created generations of us that have to adore an unknown beloved: distant, difficult, surrounded by guards, by walls, by nuclear missiles, by sheer terror.
The long Occupation has suceeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine. I only started to believe in myself as a poet when I discovered how faded all abstracts and absolutes were. When i discovered the accuracy of the concrete detail and the truthfulness of the five senses, and the great gift, in particular, of sight. When I discovered the justice and genious of the language of camera, which presents its view in an amazing whisper, however noisy this view was in fact or in history. Then I made the effort necessary to get rid of the poem that was an easy accompaniment to the anthem, to get rid of the badness of beings.

This is one of the books that you could quote widely and for a long time. I was similarly impressed by many of Mourid’s poems, that occur here and there in the book. I’m going to end this discussion with a poem that Mourid dedicates to his mother. He describes her as a caring, sacrificing and ambitious woman that wants all the best for her family and always has great plans in store. Since she alone is registered as a resident of the OccupiedTerritories, her children scattered here and there and Israel limits the freedom of travel, the family can only gather avery 5-10 years and ther is always uneasiness in the air, the knowledge of the reunion being short and that they will be divided for long.

I do not hesitate to recommend this book. Those interested might have to order it from the internet. As for myself, I first noticed it at the airport in Copenhagen and bought it there. I do not regret that purchase.

She wants to go to a planet away from the earth
Where the paths are crowded with people running to their rooms
And Where the beds in the morning are chaos
And the pillows wake up crumpled,
Their cotton stuffing dripping in the middle.
She wants the washing lines full and much, much rice to cook for lunch
And a large , large kettle boiling over the fire in the afternoon
And the table for everyone in the evneing, its tablecloth dripping with the sesamese of chatter.
She wants the smell of garlic at noon to gather the absent ones
And is surprised that the mother’s stew is weaker than the power of governments and that her pastry in the evening
Dries on a sheet untouched by any hand.
Can the earth contain
The cruelty of a mother making her coffee alone
On a Diaspora morning?
She wants to go to a planet away from the earth
Where all directions lead to the harbor of the bosom,
The gulf of two arms
That receive and know no farewells.
She wants airplanes to come back only.
Airports to be for those returning,
The planes to land and never leave again.

07/06/2007 01:37