In my solitude..

The following is an excerpt from a self-portrait I had to write as a project a while back. A dear professor once said that one way to resist the occupation is to show the world that Palestinians are human beings that feel pain and love. People who laugh and cry. People who write and reflect. This is a piece written by one Palestinian as a daughter with thoughts on her father – the once activist who gave his life and soul to Palestine, but no longer does. Maybe one day, when I muster enough courage, I’ll post the whole portrait unedited.

…I believe my dad was an idealist who had so much hope for his cause, who actually believed that things would change in his lifetime, anytime soon now. It will change, he told himself. I will fight for it all I can; I will write, I will speak, I will call on everyone willing to listen because I believe. I have faith in justice and in life, in hope and in tomorrow. My dad lived off the fire of his cause. I can see him in the eye of my mind, with his classic pose- smoking over Turkish coffee, blowing the fumes from his cigarette into a haze of long lost memories and an irretrievable past. The look in his eyes; how can I begin to describe it? It’s a soulful look that speaks of a loss so deep, of a pain so strong, of a struggle so sorely inevitable. I think my dad was losing faith. The same faith that sustained his fight, that fed his resistance to giving up, the faith that whispered every morning in his ear that today, today things will change. Yes, that faith was dying. As he slowly but surely felt his dreams slip through the fingers that held his cigarette, my dad became hard with cynicism. It’s strange how hope softens our skin, how it shines through our eyes; a reflection of light, no matter how tiny and how far.

I don’t know precisely when it was that my dad reached a complete halt. I don’t recall when exactly it dawned on him that the place he called home will remain a slave to his imagination, or that his mother who gave birth to him, flesh and blood, will transform from a physical body into a wistful voice on the distance line. My grandmother died in my father’s imagination; she died in the homeland that became bound to his imagination. Like a mirage testing his sanity, my father’s life became a hazy mix of the real and the unreal. All of this lay heavy on his shoulders and the man that once felt he could conquer the world with his words suddenly had no more to say. My dad quit journalism and immersed himself in the commercial sector where he taught himself the techniques of trade. My dad the journalist became a businessman. In a way, I think, he wanted to materialize his existence because he felt like he was holding onto thin air.

I am sad for my father. I feel like he sold out on his cause and that he aches over it whenever he gives himself the luxury of reminiscence. The only thing that remains from that time when he had so much vigour is that look in his eyes- that soulful look that has become eternally linked with my image of dad. What makes this look so distinct in my mind is that it is this look that often made my dad seem distant to me. Dad would not let anyone intrude on what went on behind that look. That he still has the same look today only makes me believe that my father was a changed man forever. The person he was some 25 years ago only exists in his mind as a memory not as a self; a memory that resurfaces only when he has that look. And I know-I also feel- that in him there is so much regret. If you’ve ever felt regret you’ll understand that a lifetime filled with it is suicidal to one’s soul. I can almost taste the bitterness of my dad’s thoughts, as bitter as the Turkish coffee he sips. How can one go about forgiving himself for betraying what he stood for? Back then, my dad had absolutely nothing, yet he had so much. You can sense it in the way he moved, the intensity that illuminated his words, making way for more greatness to come. Yet he turned his back on his passion. Or did he turn his back on it after it seized being a passion? Still, I wonder how my dad decided to put down his pen once and for all. I wonder how much it hurt…

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(Homecoming)

This summer, I had a beautiful experience. To feel so in tune with what you’re thinking – so much that everything around you seems to be a vivid manifestation of what your mind’s thoughts looks like – that’s what a perfectly beautiful experience feels like.

This summer I stood in a refuge camp and saw the meaning of home emblazoned on an old woman’s brown forehead .

Hajje Fatima was shy at the beginning. I noticed because she stood awkwardly in her tiny living room/bedroom, embarrassed because she couldn’t invite us to sit – she had only bed sheets spread on the floor. I felt embarrassed because here I was, a girl old enough to be her granddaughter, and I was causing her discomfort. But as I began engaging her in a conversation about how her house can be renovated, she warmed up and her eyes looked twenty years younger as they sparkled with excitement. She spoke of how she wanted just enough space for her granddaughter to play and a well-lit kitchen that wasn’t too stuffy for when she cooked meals for her tiny family. Her hopeful tone didn’t go unnoticed but what got to me, really, was how her eyes turned into star-filled skies, soft and hypnotizing. In her eyes, I saw how she imagined herself standing in her sunny kitchen; whipping up a meal from the available ingredients and love while her granddaughter babbled away her six-month-old vocabulary in the tiny living room.

Something else struck me in her eyes – dependency. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean the overbearing type of dependency in which one becomes a burden on someone else. This was more a…delicate dependency. Something in her eyes clung to me, seeking healthy compassion – humanity, not to be mistaken with pity. I guess that encounter was enough to hook me. That old woman was a breath of fresh air to me. In her face, I saw raw emotions that I’ve never seen or have seen occasionally and missed. Beautifully unrefined, that’s how I would describe her. I felt fervour. I felt a need to act unlike anything I’ve ever known. I felt my dad’s previous zeal now running through my blood. It was my priceless inheritance. I saw my dad’s words becoming my actions. It occurred to me, my dad has been indirectly raising me to become his translator, his mediator. Things fell into place in my mind so beautifully. I was unknowingly paying tribute to my father in that old woman’s house, because she represented my father, my relationship to him, and his relationship to home, his cause, and its effects. Everything made sense all of a sudden, even my infatuation with the image of abundant light drifting into a room because that was how I felt standing there and then – warmed by the rays of light seeping through, vision all clear.

 

Thoughts on Finkelstein & the good things in life

I stood there in the kitchen, simultaneously waiting over the tea kettle boiling with ginger and honey for my brother with a flu and reading Norman Finkelstein’s ‘The Rise and Fall of Palestine: a personal account of the Intifada years’ when one particular passage gripped me. Throughout the book, one could sense Finkelstein’s struggle to comprehend how his people could inflict so much pain on others who, to complicate matters, treat him with so much courtesy despite his ‘Jewishness’. At one point, an overwhelmed soul that bares the burden of his fellow people confesses,

‘For three weeks, I was treated with decency and generosity by Samira and her family. I was a virtual stranger, an American and a Jew. Although they were strapped financially, they still took me in. As I sat on the porch sobbing one night, Samira came out to comfort me. I had snapped. Shaking my head, I kept repeating that it wasn’t fair. In an odd reversal of roles, Samira reminded me that Palestinians weren’t the only people in the world to have suffered from injustice. True enough. And yet, in one distinctive sense, the martyrdom of the Palestinians was worse. It was usual for victims of injustice not to be accorded sympathy. Yet Israel had managed so successfully to invert reality that Palestinians had been collectively demonized. As we talked that night, my mind kept flashing back to a student in my English class. His face was perpetually lit up by a boyishly innocent, if slightly devilish, grin. Except once. What, he asked, did Americans think of Palestinians? Before I could reply, he sputtered with barely suppressed rage, “They think we’re animals, don’t they?” I didn’t have it in me to tell him it was true.’

I looked at the inside of the kettle brimming with ginger bits and honey and thought to myself that this is one of those moments, where somehow Finkelstein becomes linked with a certain waft of ginger and honey – the good things in life. I visualized this dignified being weeping, magnifying his humanity a hundred fold. You need to understand, at a time like this, what with Gaza under siege and the road to peace seemingly all but promising – I need this. I need to remember that real human beings need no passports, no demarcations, no ‘Chosen’ status to feel pain for their fellow human beings who suffer from the ugliest crimes humanity has ever known.

 

I think to myself, I now live a state of mental intifada, every thought surging up with an urgency to surface against the darkness that threatens to silence it forever.

 

Would you rather live a life of comfort, knowing that tragedies do happen around the world, around the corner, next door – but that they happen in a hazy sort of way. Never clear enough to hit you in the face and evidently not real enough to move you out of your reclining chair as you watch the day’s death toll on the evening news. Would it be easier to live life that way, occasionally sensing that mighty noose of hollowness hanging there in every dark confine of your mind waiting for you to get it over with already? Get it over with and kill every bit of yourself that makes you more human than some. Or at least less cattle-like than many.

 

Sure, the awareness that comes with witnessing suffering is painful. I bet it will make plenty of nights sleepless. But would you ever trade knowing with not knowing? Would you ever give up that smack-up with the brutality of our world for a daintier existence that is less meaningful, but hey – at least you can sleep at night – kind of thing?

 

Is it even possible to un-know what you already do because you just can’t take it anymore? More importantly, is it moral to do so? Once you’ve been exposed to human suffering, doesn’t that automatically burden you with the responsibility to take action?

 

 

Do you, in the ethical sense, have a choice?