From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Tue Jul 28 2009 - 22:19:08 EDT
Exile: The Wandering Arab.
Take time out, read some Arab literature. Get reading; walk in the shoes of
others
by Felicity Arbuthnot
.
Global Research, July 27, 2009
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"We go to a country not of our flesh. The chestnut trees are not of
our bones … We go to a country that does not hang a special sun over us."
("We go to a country", Mahmud Darwish.)
Washington, London and Tel Aviv again talk empty words, of a "two state
solution", for the land Israel has appropriated and the remnants which
remain, of Palestine. Tony Blair, arguably a war criminal, now
"Kafkaesquely", Middle East 'peace envoy', having enjoined in destroying
Mesopotamia, Afghanistan and the Balkans, establishes a "Faith Foundation"
to "create understanding between religions" (not bombing them would be a
good start.) However there is a vital route all involved should take.
Forget politics, "extremism", "terrorism", "moderates', "freedom",
"democracy", "liberation", "road maps." Abandon "experts", "think tanks",
"Institutes" and "Foundations" that study the Middle East - though seldom
as areas of gut wrenching history, beauty, warmth; flesh and blood.
Take time out, read some Arab literature - all that is needed to understand.
In every letter, in every word of every sentence, of every paragraph, a
soul on the page. A mourning for lands beloved, loves lost, for the
departed, the exiled. For remembered scents, for homes now rubble or
denied; for separation. They are songs of absence, yearning, displacement;
of crushed olive, apricot and citrus groves, of dashed youthful dreams and
hopes - yet a resilience to shame the reader.
They are unbearable yearnings, somehow borne, for family now fragmented;
for the familiar. They are the key of the door, the only momento of the
home left behind, the deeds of the house, bulldozed, bombed, looted,
stolen; from which evicted
They are also birds without borders, a sun, once more without walls.
There are titles which haunt before a page has been turned: Raja Shehade's
"Palestinian Walks - notes on a vanishing landscape"; Mai Ghoussoub's
''Leaving Beirut"; Mourid Barghouti's searing "I saw Ramalla", his
heartbreaking writings of his brief permitted return home after thirty
years exile. Mahmoud Darwish - who returned finally to Ramallah after
living in Moscow, Cairo, Beirut, Cyprus and Paris, who died abroad last
August, treatment he needed being limited in Palestine, due to Israel's
blockade. His titles include: "Unfortunately, It was Paradise", "Don't
Apologise for What you've Done", "A State of Siege", and "The Butterfly's
Burden."
Darwish also contributed, with Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) and Samih al-Qasim,
to the anthology 'Victims of a Map', whose title says it all, not alone for
the Middle East but for souls in so many countries already in the eye of
the storm, or threatened with one.
For the Middle East, the main modern historical threat, before the
establishment of the State of Israel was the desire of (mainly) the West,
to get their hands of the region's oil and natural gas (which has now been
discovered off Gaza, which may possibly explain why Israel would like the
Strip empty, with no troublesome Palestinians claiming it theirs.) The
other, throughout history, as now, was the region's strategic placing.
Now a marauding, mendacious neighbour, a cuckoo in the nest, which usurps
painstakingly created personal havens and hurls even embryonic life to
infinity, has been added. The 'wandering Jew, has 'settled' - and created
the 'wandering Arab.'
Palestinians are displaced by the previously displaced; dispossessed by the
previously dispossessed; degraded by the formerly degraded; systematically
erased, by those whose people were systematically erased; ghettoised by the
previously ghettoised - and walled in by the previously walled in. Writing
is injustices looking glass. Take Shehada in "Palestinian Walks". He
quotes: "..the Israeli architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman perceptively
(uncovering) a cruel paradox': 'the very thing that renders the landscape
"biblical", its traditional habitation and cultivation in terraces, olive
orchards, stone building … is produced by the Palestinians (now)
themseves excluded from the panorama." To accommodate three and a half
million settlers in just thirty years, in just 5,900 square kilometres,
writes Shehadeh"…enormous amounts of concrete were poured to build entire
cities …wadis, springs, cliffs and ancient ruins were destroyed by those
who claim to have a superior love of the land… I hope to preserve, at
least in words, what has been lost for ever." In "I Saw Ramallah" Mourid
Barghouti too, writes of loss: "Displacement is like death. One thinks it
only happens to other people. From the summer of '67 I became that
displaced stranger whom I had always thought was someone else."
Perhaps the poetry, above all, the economy, with no wasted word,
illuminates the inhumanity which has befallen the people, rooted in the
Middle East, especially since 1948.
In Barghouti's most recent volume of poetry, Muntasaf al-Layl ("Midnight",
Arc Publications, 2008) he writes the reality ("Give me your boots", p226)
" … I'll look for the remaining survivors The rest of your family
I'll tell them how lonely you were I'll talk to them about you I'll give
them your belongings If they haven't died in the massacre.
A heap of dead bodies A heap of hearts A heap of rubble A heap of
yearnings A heap of dreams … A heap of roofs … A sandal in the yard A
heap of screams A heap of silence … A heap of toys A heap of weariness
… All now covered by Death's Silence-dotted white sheet.
In the 138 pages of prose from which the book takes its name, he writes of:
"… the hand that tames the thorny slopes … the hand that opens in
forgiveness the hand that closes on the candy with which he surprises his
grandchildren the hand that was amputated many years ago."
And he ponders:
"Why are there more bullets-holes? In threadbare clothes?"
Unbearably: … "a life in bare feet came out to blame death."
Barghouti: "four years older than the state of Israel", which rendered him
stateless, as any Palestinian who was outside their country: " for tourism,
education, medical treatment or any reason", when the 1967 war broke out.
They were simply deemed "Not-Palestinian" and forbidden to return, even to
Egypt, Syria and Jordan, of which Israel now occupied parts. When Israel
invaded Lebanon in 1982 (an incursion the invaders named, apparently with
no irony, "Operation Peace for Galilee") he was not allowed there either.
Finally permitted to return to his family home in the village of Deir
Ghassanah in 1996. He is still stateless.
In the Translators Preface to Mahmoud Darwish's "The Butterfly's Burden"
(Bloodaxe Books, 2007) Fady Joudah explains how the family, with six year
old Mahmoud, fled the 1948 bloodshed that was the founding of Israel, to
Lebanon. Returning just months later, they were deemed "present-absentee"
and could not be recognised as Israeli Arab." His long, exiled life began
at twenty-two. He had already published four volumes of poems. He too was
in Beirut In 1982. Yet another forced departure to: "..roam the
Mediterranean (Greece, Cyprus, Tunisia.)Heart wrenching for Darwish, who
seemed unable, outside his own writing, to survive to survive another
glaring mirror of exile, of dispossession."
"My friends, do not die the way you used to die I beg you, do not die, wait
another year for me One year."
And:
"… I hold this delicious air the Galilee air with both of my hands
… I will enter the mulberry trees where the silkworm makes me into a silk
thread, then I'll enter a woman's needle in One of the myths And fly like a
shawl with the wind …"
The book includes his 2002 "State of Siege":
"… We measure the distance between our bodies And mortar shells …
with the sixth sense
… When the fighter planes disappear; the doves fly White, white,
white. Washing the sky's cheek With free wings, reclaiming splendour and
sovereignty Of air and play. Higher and higher The doves fly, white white.
I wish the sky Were real (a man passing between two bombs told me.) … I
wrote twenty lines about love And imagined The siege Had withdrawn Twenty
metres! …"
In "Victims of a Map" (Saqi Books, 2005) Samih al-Qasim, born in 1939, from
the village of Rama, in Galilee writes: "While I was still at Primary
school, the 1948 Palestinian tragedy occurred. I regard that date, as the
date of my birth, because the first images I can remember are of the 1948
events. My thoughts and images spring from the number 48.
"…I have chosen to remain in my own country not because I love myself
less, but because I love my homeland more."
Asked by his friend, Iraqi poet Buland al-Haidari: "if I had visited
Baghdad, he said: "that I haven't visited Baghdad or any Arab city. But I
follow everything that goes on in those cities from my great prison…. I
could walk through (their) streets as if I had been born and lived there
for centuries."
Slit Lips:
"I would have liked to tell you The story of a nightingale that died I
would have liked to tell you The story Had they not slit my lips"
Travel Tickets
"On the day you kill me You'll find in my pocket Travel tickets To
peace, To the Fields and the rain, To people's conscience. Don't waste the
tickets."
Samih al-Qasim has been imprisoned may times for political activities, also
put under house arrest:
End of a Discussion With a Jailor:
"From the window of my small cell I can see trees smiling at me, Roofs
filled with my people, Windows weeping and praying for me. From the windows
of my small cell I can see your large cell."
Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) was born in the village of Qassabin, Syria, in
1930. At fourteen, he wrote a poem that so impressed the President, that he
was given a grant to continue his studies.
Enrolling at Damascus University in 1950, he began writing and publishing
poems … questioning the social and political structure of Syria." That
ended his honeymoon with the President; he was imprisoned and then went
into exile in Lebanon. He subsequently founded, with Lebanese poet Yusuf
al-Khal the publishing house Dar Majallat Shi'r and in 1968 the journal
Mawaqif, an influential and widely circulated journal of Arab poetry.
He is credited with having "a far reaching influence" on Arab poetry and
"revived and modified the classical Qit'a (short poem)
Also from "Victims of a Map":
The Minaret:
A stranger arrived. The minaret wept: He bought it and topped it with a
chimney.
Song: … He never slept in a bed of myths He didn't live his dreams. …
You angels, Pure ones, Liberators, Leaders, Wise men etc
At this moment all I ask of you is a miracle: Just for you to know how to
say Goodbye GOODBYE Just a miracle: a Goodbye
As distant as our souls As distant as a journey into the space of the soul.
The Desert (The Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982).
"… They found people in sacks: One without a head One without a
tongue or hands One squashed The rest without names. Have you gone mad?
Please, Do not write about these things … They took him to a ditch and
burnt him. He was not a murderer, he was a boy, He was not … He was a
voice Vibrating, scaling the steps of space. And now he's fluting in the
air. … The earth's trees have become tears on heaven's cheeks. … You do
not die because you are created or because you have a body You die because
you are the face of the future.
The flower that tempted the wind to carry its perfume Died yesterday." …
By 1949, the United Nations had registered Palestinian 726,000 refugees,
they have been haemorrhaging from their land ever since.
Another generation of Palestinians were displaced after the 2003 invasion
of Iraq, which had, since 1948, taken in approximately 35,000. Just ten
thousand remain in Iraq, mostly, reportedly internally displaced. Other
managed to flee, mainly to Jordan and Syria, having again lost everything.
Hundreds have remained in limbo on the Jordanian-Iraqi border and the
Syrian-Iraq border and only recently gradually found a welcome as far away
as South America and Croatia. "Before I die, I would like to see Palestine
for just three minutes", said one of them. Born in Iraq, he was the
grandson of a family who fled the founding of the State of Israel. He was
just nineteen.
Since 2003, four million Iraqis have joined the Palestinians in the
becoming the new 'people without a land', displaced near equally,
internally and externally.
As the United States and British governments talk of the reason to remain
in far away places being to prevent extremism on the streets at home, in
the light of injustices of such enormity, one can only be humbled that
there has been so little, in sixty one years of injustice in which the
perpetrators have been Israel, backed by the US and UK - or the US and UK
acting like - indeed often being trained by - Israel.
"The papers that love ink, The alphabet, the poets, say goodbye, And the
poem says goodbye."
(Samih al-Qasim, The Desert.)
Get reading; walk in the shoes of others.
Felicity Arbuthnot is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global
Research Articles by Felicity Arbuthnot