Human Cargo (34 page)

Hanan is embarrassed by the insistence with which her father talks about the past. She does not like to see tears come into his eyes when he speaks of his own father, and the way that he cleaned his sons’ shoes and was so proud of them. “My daughters,” Tariq says, “have become English. They understand Arabic but speak very little. My wife and I speak Arabic together, but now we speak to the girls in English. They are growing up, and the most important thing is that we communicate properly. I try to avoid confusion. The worst, for us all, is a clash of cultures—one world with their friends and another with us. But I have to live knowing that if I told my mother these things, if I told her that I can accept that they may
marry English boys, she would be devastated.” Hanan herself, a neat, pretty girl who seems sensible and reflective, is clear: “I do not feel like a refugee,” she says. “I feel Palestinian. But England is my home.”

Tariq, like Zainab, dreams of a return to what was once Palestine, where he has never been but which he feels he knows better than the orderly English terraced houses and green fields that surround him. But for him, return is only a notion. The quality of his life, the possibilities for his daughters, have come to interest him more; less angry now, more accepting, he wants a settlement, the right to
something
, if return is denied. “Something” might only be, perhaps, the world’s recognition that the Palestinians exist as a distinct group and that though they may have left the lands on which they lived, they cannot be simply absorbed without trace into surrounding Arab countries. “I always talk about myself as a refugee,” he says. “I will never be anything but a refugee. Even if some day I manage to go back to finish my life in Balad al Sheik, I will call myself a refugee who returned. I was born a refugee, I grew up a refugee, it is how I think.” Tariq has indefinite leave to remain in Britain and has applied for citizenship. Under his current status, he needs a visa to travel to an Arab country, and may not go to either Israel and the Occupied Territories or to Lebanon. Laughing, a little embarrassed, he says that he has an obsession with boxes and cases, and that he keeps every container that comes into the house. “Always I feel I might need it to pack things in. In my heart, I know that I will be moved on. I own this house, but I forget.” “Record!” wrote Mahmoud Darwish, in “Bitaqit Hawia,” a poem that has become famous throughout the Arab world, “I am an Arab/Without a name—without title/Patient in a country/with people enraged.” Where collective existence assumes the shape of a philosophical paradox, where a civilization is regarded as essentially disposable and its people transported, dislocated, and dispossessed, then
awdah
, the right of return, becomes a matter of identity, too.

For some years after the Naqba, the Palestinians were silent. The “black cave of obliterated memories” was so shocking that no one
cared to write about what had happened. It was not until 1953 that the first literary work by a Palestinian appeared in Arabic, a collection of poems by George Naguib Khalil called
Roses and Thorns
. Novels, as a literary genre, are not part of Palestinian cultural tradition. It was only when the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz began writing his novels in the 1950s and 1960s that a fictional voice emerged among the Palestinians; even so, it was not until the 1970s that Palestinian women began to write and publish. The voice that has developed since is distinctive, but more, Edward Said has argued, for its form than its content. The themes are those of dispossession and exile, of houses and lands wrecked, abandoned, destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again, of collaborators—”tails,” slanderers, dangerous scorpions—and of Israeli domination in the figures of soldiers, security men, officials, employers. In Ghassan Kanafani’s
Men in the Sun
, three Palestinian refugees choose to suffocate inside a tanker transporting them illegally over the border into Kuwait, rather than make the fuss that would alert the driver to their existence. These writings employ little narrative in the recognized sense of one scene following sequentially upon another, but rather a series of broken, fragmentary compositions. It is through this form that the vulnerability of Palestinian life comes across, with sentences expressing instability and fluctuation, and self-conscious set pieces and testimonials, in which the present is always subject to echoes from the past.

To talk to Palestinian refugees today is to understand what dispersal and loss really mean. A higher proportion of Palestinians than of any other people in the modern world live away from the place they identify as home, and they can neither return to the places of their youth nor travel freely, nor do they feel safe in countries that were once open to them.
*
They also live, to a great extent, away from each other. A people singularly attached to and dependent
on family, for whom, until recently, to have fewer than seven or eight children was seen as a misfortune, they live separated not just by distance but by papers. Palestinians have identity cards, not passports. They are moved around at the whim of others’ governments. To succeed, to be educated, to find jobs and send money home, they are obliged to travel, but not necessarily to places they wish to go. The “stability of geography and the continuity of land,” wrote Said, do not exist for them. Many are required to live with the certainty that they will never see a child, a parent, a cousin again. Listening to a Palestinian describe his family is a long and complicated undertaking.

Not long ago, Mourid Barghouti wrote: “At one thirty in the morning Mounir [his brother] informed me from Qatar of the death of my father in Amman. I was in Budapest. At two fifteen in the afternoon, seven years later, my brother ‘Alaa informed me from Qatar of the death of Mounir in Paris. I was in Cairo.” This is how Palestinians live.

•   •   •

THERE ARE TWELVE
official Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, of varying sizes and degrees of segregation from the Lebanese, and more than 380,000 Palestinians, around half of whom are registered with UNRWA and live in the camps. No one knows the exact figure, for more Palestinians live in seventeen “informal” camps, in conditions of great hardship. According to recent research, camp “dwellings” average two rooms for every six people, and less than two thirds of these dwellings are connected to any form of sewage system. Among the larger families, those with seven children or more, 96 percent are said to live below the poverty line.

The camps in the south, near the border with Israel, are those the Lebanese patrol most assiduously. The largest, the one people talk of as the most Palestinian, in which the life of Palestine is least diluted, is Ein el-Helweh, the camp on the edge of Sidon to which Tariq and his family fled in 1979. The name means “Sweet Spring.” Here, in a dip between the sea and the mountains, surrounded by
hilltops capped by Lebanese gun posts, encircled by wire and walls, entered only via checkpoints run by casually contemptuous young Lebanese soldiers, live 45,000 Palestinians; or so says UNRWA, for the Palestinians themselves, for whom there is no census, put the figure at closer to 60,000. Unlike Shatila, with its cocktail of displaced people, Ein el-Helweh is regarded as a “pure” camp, for it has no outsiders. The only exceptions are a handful of wanted people, hiding out in the alleys and turned over to the Lebanese when the military search for them becomes too insistent. Ein el-Helweh is poor and cramped but has none of the claustrophobic intensity of Shatila, though the former villages of Palestine are reproduced in the same way and families live in the same kind of compounds, new rooms sprouting above and alongside the old ones on the sites of the first tents. Yet the place has a more robust, lively air. Ein el-Helweh, say its inhabitants, is truly Palestine, a Palestinian town that might just as easily be on the West Bank; unlike Shatila, it is also highly political, with eleven political parties, and a Fatah headquarters, which is itself a source of employment.

To the north of the camp, on a slight elevation and some way back from the camp’s main street, where the market takes place each morning, lies the proxy village of Sousouf. It covers some hundred square yards of ground and contains about forty families, all descendants of men and women who fled the real Sousouf near the Lebanese border in the spring and summer of 1948. In Roman times, Sousouf was Safsofa, a village with many goats and beehives. In September 1948, Ghazi was a boy of seventeen. His family was the last to leave the village. They would have left sooner, but on the ninth his father, pressing oil from their olive crop, harvested early in response to the conflict coming their way from the valley below, was kicked by their horse, fell, struck his head, and was killed, leaving a widow and seven children. On Saturday, September 18, not long after night fell, planes began to bomb the village. The bombing lasted all night, says Ghazi, and soon there was also shelling. At dawn, Israeli soldiers entered the village. Some of the men were lined up, in batches, in front of a wall, and shot; others were dropped into the
village well. A fourteen-year-old girl was raped. One old man was shot in his bed. In all, says Ghazi, forty-five died; he would have fought, but he had no weapon, the only gun owned by the family being with his uncle, who was away fighting in the hills. Ghazi on this point is absolutely clear: the British are to be blamed for the Naqba, for arming the Jews and repressing the Palestinians and for spreading propaganda that Palestine was a free and empty land; for the rest, he blames the Arabs, for promising but then failing to support the Palestinians with arms and men. The Naqba was indeed a catastrophe, not for any one person alone, but for a whole people. The Palestinians, he says, calmly but also firmly, have lived in uncertainty for fifty-four years. This uncertainty has marked his life and ruined it. It has ruined all their lives. For him to talk to me, to tell me what the last fifty-four years have been for him, was “like pulling off a plaster, opening a wound. I want to do it, but then I cannot stop talking.”

Like Zainab, like many of the 2,000 or so people still alive today who remember the flight from Palestine, Ghazi recalls life before the Naqba as a time of happiness and ease. His father had three wives and seven children; his mother was the middle one, and he her middle child. They were farmers, growing wheat, corn, tobacco, watermelons, chickpeas, and figs; they had an olive grove and vines. They kept the chickpeas, beans, and small crops of vegetables for their own consumption, and sold the figs, olive oil, and grapes. When his mother judged the moment had come when they had no choice but to flee, they crept out from where they had been hiding and ran toward the mountains during a lull in the shooting. They rook nothing with them. The border with Lebanon lay just over an hour’s walk away; they crossed over to a village called Yarcun, then on to Bint Jubeil. From there, after a month wondering whether they might be able to go home, they moved on to a camp outside Tyre, Bourj el Shemali, from which UN officials were already distributing the Palestinians to camps farther away in Lebanon as well as to Jordan and Syria. In May 1949 all those who had survived the killings in Sousouf were moved to the new camp of Fin el-Helweh.
They were given tents close together. In 1950 Ghazi married a girl from another Sousouf family.

It was, says Ghazi—at seventy-one a strong, upright man, with thick wiry gray hair cropped short—better than chaos, though it was not perfect. The two families built a fireplace near their tents, and made piles of firewood they collected from the hills around the camp. UNRWA handed out flour, sugar, and rice, and, for the first year or so, occasional tins of fish. Water was delivered in barrels to the different village quarters: theirs was known as the fountain of Sousouf and it ran out every evening, around seven. Relations with UNRWA were good: most of its employees were refugee Palestinians like themselves. The camp was surrounded by wheat fields and citrus orchards, later cut down by the Israelis when they invaded Lebanon in 1982. Ghazi got occasional jobs as a building laborer in Sidon. “I used to roam and wander the fields looking for work,” he says. “But it was very hard.” He was the eldest son, and he and his younger brother were responsible for his mother and sisters. Electricity reached Ein el-Helweh only in 1970. Until then, the younger children studying for their exams carried their books out of the camp in the evenings and sat along the highway, under the streetlights, in order to be able to read.

It was about three years, he says, before he began to realize that they were not just about to go home; then he started to talk about the need for independence, the importance of not relying on the people around them. He began to make plans; he planted a tree and found work with local farmers. But he went on thinking about Sousouf, and at night he would dream that he was still there; in the daytime, when he was working in the farmer’s fields, he would look up at the mountains around, very like his own mountains, and pretend that he was working his own fields. “I lived in the past,” he says, “remembering, all the time. At night, we sat and talked about what it had been like.” Ghazi was then nineteen. He has not stopped remembering since. “Every moment,” he says, “something reminds me. This is how I live. I remember how we used to take our olives to the press and how I used to stand around with the others and we
used to laugh and joke. I remember the weddings and parties in the village and how in the summer we used to dance. I remember the way the men sat together and talked and how as I grew up I used to sit with them, listening. I remember the way the richest man in Sousouf always had coffee ready for visitors and how the women used to visit each other in their houses while the men sat in the rich man’s house and talked. Yes, we live here with our neighbors from Sousouf and, yes, we meet and talk. But you cannot transport the life. There, our houses were surrounded by our lands. Here, it is like a prison. The land we look out at is owned by others. There, the weddings and celebrations and burials were all part of our lives, and we all shared in them. Here, unemployment and stress have driven all that away. We have become too busy thinking how to pay the rent and feed our families. We still do those things, but not with our hearts; we do them out of duty. We bring up our children to keep to our ways. But we are frightened that they will become thinned with exile.”