Once Upon a Country

by Sari Nusseibeh

  Compounding my parents’ worries was my sad habit of underperforming on exams, which must have had something to do with my inability to drum up interest in subjects requiring rote learning—physics, chemistry, math, and geography. My imagination needed to be activated, and this happened only in classes taught by teachers with a flare for narrative.

  The best teachers in this regard were Arab nationalists, who spiced up history with emotion and imagination. In their hands, even the stories of Jesus and Mary—taught from Muslim sources—included a dash of pan-Arab nationalism. In the classroom, Jesus was a human, though Mary’s Immaculate Conception was spiritual, even mystical. It came about through a breath from God’s soul. Mary was a good mother who raised her son, a dyed-in-the-wool Palestinian revolutionary, to be a noble prophet of humanity. For their part, the Twelve Disciples were Palestinian-Arab nationalists avant la lettre, precursors, as it were, to the Central Committee of the Palestine Revolutionary Council.

  The people who taught English literature classes were expatriates, adventurers, or pilgrims who had ended up in Palestine. The way they taught us, straight from their native hearts, implanted in me a love of literature. I was able to visualize Hamlet, existentially lost like me, and the three witches of Macbeth. As the son of the governor, I identified with the rowdy and rebellious Prince Hal, more at home in the taverns of London than at his father’s court. The far-flung voyages and adventures of Ulysses by Tennyson captured my imagination, as did the metaphor of “drinking life to the lees” by seeking newer and higher worlds. Jane Austen evoked grand expectations of English life, all fated to be utterly dashed later, while Thomas Hardy took my mind to wooded mountains where a scholarly recluse hunched over a candlelit desk writing out lofty esoteric truths with his quill.

  At its best, classes in Arabic literature produced similarly evocative images. The instructor, a Christian Arab who later took up a teaching post at McGill University, started us off on a rigorous regime of grammar and poetry, largely drawn from the Koran, a book that, like his fellow Christian and literary luminary Khalil al-Sakakini, he considered the source of his own language and culture. In his class I learned to see Omar the Just as a hulking but humble giant of a man who, with vast empires at his feet, slept unattended in the wilderness under a tree. And the burning love between black Qays and the aristocratic Laila, a tale reminiscent of Othello and Desdemona that had inspired tribal wars and epic poetry of Homeric magnitude, continued to play in my mind long after classes were done. I allowed myself to enter their world, and eventually to become lost in it.

  Eventually this teacher supplemented traditional Arabic tales and poetry with the free verse of, say, Adonis. In him we were exposed to a magic carpet of words, wonderful sounds that seemed to dance on the tongue. A Syrian Shiite who fled to Beirut because of his political views, he changed his name from Ali Ahmad Said Asbar to Adonis, in honor of the Greek god of desire. To this day I can still hear our teacher recite “The Language of Sin”:

  I burn my inheritance, I say:

  “My land is virgin, and no graves in my youth.”

  I transcend both God and Satan

  (my path goes beyond the paths of God and Satan).

  I go across in my book,

  in the procession of the luminous thunderbolt,

  the procession of the green thunderbolt,

  shouting:

  “After me there’s no Paradise, no Fall,”

  and abolishing the language of sin.2

  Like every other big event at the time, the sixties rebellion made it to our section of Jerusalem by way of several detours, and by the time it arrived there was little of it left. There were no Arab hippies, no drugs, and the ethos of respecting your elders was as strong as ever. Of course, there were no antiwar protests; quite the contrary. If there was any stir of dissent, it was over the king’s passivity toward the “Zionist enemy.” But this, too, was largely derivative, aping the Pan-Arabism of Beirut. There, at least, Arab students were shaking off the dust and cobwebs of the past, liberating themselves equally from theocratic shackles and colonial oppression. In Beirut, a new nation was breaking out, and by marching boldly into the future, its avant-garde was recovering the powers of the past: such, at least, was the vision.

  The Sturm und Drang of the age reinforced my ambivalent relationship with politics. On the one hand, my earlier ritual of staring out my bedroom window at the ultraorthodox gave way to a new hobby: that of beginning to pick up my elder siblings’ taste for foreign music—Edith Piaf and Enrico Macias were my sister’s favorites, but I soon picked up my brother’s taste for Elvis.

  Being the son of the governor, however, I couldn’t ignore politics completely. Yet I was still in such dazed confusion that as a passive bystander, I followed from a safe distance as my schoolmates lined up behind the political program of Arab nationalism coming from the coffeehouses of Beirut, or from Nasser’s oracular radio addresses. That the Beirut anarchists’ visions and Nasser’s Arab socialism were diametrically opposed ideologies didn’t seem to bother anyone. Students wanted renewal, even at the cost of logic.

  The West Bank and our section of Jerusalem were part of Jordan, and King Hussein made it clear he would brook no rebellious talk, which only increased the prestige of the students in their clandestine groups whispering slogans in an atmosphere of playful subversion. There were even a couple of demonstrations. I tagged along once or twice, then prudently stopped, after one of my cousins got grazed in the leg by a rubber bullet.

  As occurs in many authoritarian societies badly in need of reform, the regime permitted an outlet for dissent. In our case, it was the evil Zionists just beyond No Man’s Land. King Hussein had a live-and-let-live relationship with his former Israeli partners; he even preferred them to many of his other neighbors, whom he constantly suspected of expansionist designs. He certainly trusted Moshe Dayan more than Yasir Arafat, whose plans posed a direct threat to the Hashemite kingdom.

  But a new campaign against Israel was popular on the street, and the king couldn’t afford to suppress it. The first Palestine National Congress met in Jerusalem in 1964, establishing the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), laying down the structure of the Palestine Arab Liberation Army and drafting the Palestinian National Covenant, which among other things called Zionism “a colonialist movement in its inception, aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations, and fascist in its means and aims.” The only solution was the total liberation of Palestine through armed revolution.

  Father was cynical about this new concoction of Palestinian leadership. He had experienced enough in 1947 and 1948, and he had had his fill while serving in Cairo in the Palestinian government. He sincerely believed that such bravado only guaranteed fresh calamities.

  Father similarly shied away from the vulgar bombast of the Arab “revolutionaries” and their loose talk of “racism” and “fascism,” which only served to intoxicate Arab thinking (an inebriation that allowed the Arabs to forget how weak their institutions were). To be sure, Father didn’t mince words when it came to the Zionists. In his manuscript, he writes about their “will-to-power,” which he linked up to the revolutionary spirit of France and Communist Russia. “When I see earnest, bespectacled young men patting each other on the back and talking of the utter stupidity, doleful incompetence, and shocking ignorance of the so-called older generation, I feel uncomfortable.” Judaism was not at fault here, but rather a cadre of revolutionaries willing to wipe the slate clean in order to materialize their dreams.

  I was fifteen when the Congress was convened, but so lost was I in the alleys of the Old City and the stories of the mind that I ignored the entire affair as just another gathering of blustering nobles in a hotel lobby up the road, much as they had been congregating in the family living room for as long as I could remember.

  • • •

  At the age of sixteen I was slowly, dimly, becoming aware of myself.

  One particularl
y poignant recollection of my school days is walking in the evening with a school friend named Bashir. The two of us liked to march the two hundred feet between my house and his over and over until one of us got tired, or it became too late. Bashir was a Christian, and I a Muslim, but this difference never occurred to us, because it never seemed important to discuss our respective faiths. We had bigger fish to fry: existence. What was the universe made of? Where did it start or end? What role did we have in it? Could we choose our actions? Could we choose who we were? What was I doing here? Who was I really? And what if there was no God after all? We shuddered asking this last question.

  One day we decided to take our questions to the British Council library. Scouring the shelves, we came across a volume by Bertrand Russell. The only dealing I’d had with philosophy up to that point was with the ideas Lewis Carroll buried in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But with Russell, philosophy wasn’t tucked into a children’s tale; it was right on the surface. You could say that reading Russell shocked me out of my intellectual stupor by giving me a taste of rigorous thought. Russell struck such a chord in me that I’ve never shaken the questions he raised in me the first time I opened up one of his books:

  There are many questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man?3

  Russell’s reminiscences put words to the questions and riddles I had been literally walking around with. Henceforth the focus in my reading shifted to the books of philosophy at the British Council library. There weren’t many to choose from, but at least I now had an inkling of what to do with myself.

  One question Bashir and I never asked during our peripatetic inquiries was about the moorings of the post-1948 order. No one understood, and I least of all, that the world we lived in was doomed to be swept away by new disasters. Our blindness was due to youth, compounded by the total security of our Brahmin homes.

  Looking back on our life in Jerusalem on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, at the time nothing seemed realer than our tottering make-believe world. Sometimes the king visited with his retinue, flanked by colorfully clad Bedouin guards. The noble families continued to outdo one another with tales of ancient ancestors—it was extraordinary how many “direct” descendants of the Prophet lived in Jerusalem in those days. No Man’s Land seemed as immutable as the desert at our back. The 1948 catastrophe was there as a reminder that cataclysms do occur, but no one expected another one. Nor was there much talk of reclaiming the “other side”; irredentism was coming out of Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, not Jerusalem. Father, using another cliché, sometimes said one had to “let sleeping dogs lie.” I had long outlived the fear of a monster in the pepper tree. No Man’s Land had become a benign presence, like Father’s metal leg.

  I was in my junior year at St. George’s when the cold brutalities of power made a brief cameo appearance in my family’s life. If I had to describe the family in 1965, I’d say that my father was the proud patriarch. Mother still had her wounds from the past, but she, too, was happy. She always seemed young to me. Only a few strands of gray hair mingled in with her jet-black curls. My sister Saedah had just gotten married, and was gearing up to move with her husband to Abu Dhabi. Munira was studying in Cairo, with her heart set on Paris. Zaki was about to begin his studies at Queen’s College, Cambridge. My two younger siblings, Hatem and Saker, were in school.

  Father had been serving as Jerusalem governor for the previous two years, and the only Jordanian soldiers I ever saw were friendly members of the army contingent housed along the border next to our home, or the officer with his anachronistic pointed helmet who directed traffic, or those who accompanied King Hussein when he dropped by the house for lunch. One day, as I sauntered back from school, I found our house surrounded by armed soldiers and armored vehicles. Slipping innocuously past the soldiers, I managed to enter the house.

  There was a buzz of frenetic activity inside. Father was on the phone with his brother Hazem, who at the time was minister of the royal court. My mother was racing from room to room like a passionate revolutionary. As I was soon to discover, Father, loyal as always to his principles, had infuriated the king, who had ordered the armed siege of the house because he thought he had a full-fledged Palestinian rebellion on his hands.

  Compared with the other political crises that have plagued Palestine over the years, it may strike one today as ludicrously overblown, like the proverbial tempest in a teapot. As governor of Jerusalem, Father was tasked with overseeing the crossings at Mandelbaum Gate. Typically, consuls-general, religious dignitaries, official visitors, and UN officials were the only ones permitted to cross from one side of the city to the other. Once every two Wednesdays, an armored Israeli convoy headed up to Mount Scopus, the only Israeli enclave left on the Arab side of the border. And at Christmas, of course, ordinary people crossed over in order to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

  Out of the blue, however, the guards at the gate had phoned Father’s office one day and asked if they should open the gate to a prominent American Jew who was insisting that he had made personal arrangements with the king to cross through. The guards phoned because they normally took their instructions from the governor’s office, but this time they had none, only the impassioned assurances given by the American.

  Father made some phone calls and found out that the king had indeed been expecting the visitor, but he had failed to inform him. King or no king, Father felt that established procedures and simple human courtesy and respect had to be maintained—it was his decision to make, not the king’s. He phoned the guards and told them to keep the gate closed.

  King Hussein, needless to say, was outraged at this act of defiance and insisted that my father open the gate. “I will not,” Father said, digging in his heels. A man of unbreakable will who had absorbed al-Sakakini’s defiant verse to his bones, he maintained that it was the king who had made a mistake, and therefore it was he who must back down. Uncle Hazem tried to intervene, and in vain pleaded with my father to yield. The crisis was mounting. Now tanks rolled into our neighborhood and parked in our front yard.

  As the news leaked out, crowds of protesters gathered in front of the house in support of Father’s defiance. The already tenuous relationship between Palestinians and Jordanians edged toward rebellion.

  The king’s response was swift. He fired Father immediately from his post. Not wishing for a recurrence of Palestinian impudence, he appointed a Jordanian as his replacement.

  For the following few days, the entire West Bank broke into nationalist demonstrations and confrontations with Jordanian soldiers.

  Chapter Six

  A Grapevine

  AS A SIGN OF HOW THEATRICAL the showdown was, the king never lost his respect for my father, and Father continued to have a paternal relationship to the young king, at the time barely over thirty.

  Shortly after the mini-revolt, King Hussein made Father his ambassador to London. It was an act of gratitude, for Father had arranged for the king’s first official audience at Buckingham Palace. So, in 1965, Father took up his post as Jordanian ambassador in London. Given his still-wobbly relationship with the monarch, no one knew how long it would last.

  My own future was already laid out for me. I was about to graduate from St. George’s, and it seemed logical to my parents that I would follow in my elder brother’s footsteps by going to a public school in England. The plan was for me to spend two years at Rugby, which Zaki had attended, before moving on to either Cambridge or Oxford.

  The first part of the plan went with
out a hitch. I traveled by ship alone to Europe, first to Venice and then by train through the Italian and French countryside, all the way to the English Channel. Finally arriving at Victoria Station was thrilling for a teenager who had been cooped up his entire life in the desiccated hills of the Middle East.

  But the excitement of what seemed like boundless individual freedom soon clashed with the reality of a highbrow public school, the breeding ground for English dukes and princes, but manifestly not for brown-skinned Arabs. Like Eton and Harrow, Rugby was overburdened with the heavy weight of tradition. Its suits and ties, coat of arms, formalities, upper-class pretensions, and impenetrable social snobbery were more than I could stomach. By comparison, St. George’s had been a humble, lowbrow place. All I wanted to do was to slip my jeans back on and explore the world. Instead I found myself tethered to suffocating traditions of tailed jackets and caps, and the disciplined mannerisms of a class and a nation I didn’t belong to.

  “But how shall I behave if I sit next to Her Majesty?” I once asked Rugby’s aloof headmaster as he huddled with a select number of students before a special dinner in honor of the queen. “You should just behave as one normally would,” snapped the headmaster in a subtle but unmistakable reproach for my not having mastered the air of a young English gentleman. I gritted my teeth and did my best. The headmaster sat me as far away from the royalty as possible.

  I wanted to leave Rugby, but my parents wouldn’t hear of it. They assumed that the place would eventually grow on me, and that I would be groomed as the young gentleman they wished me to become. What they had yet to figure out was just how similar to my father I had become. Having determined to leave, nothing was going to stop me. And so, after my repeated requests went unheeded, I simply absconded. I packed my bags and headed for London. The path to university would now be longer and more arduous, but at least I wouldn’t have to play-act any longer. An aunt with a flat near Kensington was kind enough to offer me temporary refuge.