by Ahdaf Soueif
There was no time to walk to the village of Ayn Qenia near the settlement of Dolev, so I chose to read a section from Palestinian Walks about my first encounter with the hill in 1979, before the establishment of this or any other settlement in the area – when indeed the land had been untouched by cement. During that walk I had decided to run up to race the setting sun. For someone who had just lost his way in these familiar hills perhaps this bravado was out of place, but the writers listened politely. My only saving grace was when I produced the cold watermelon slices I had been carrying on my back up the treacherous path.
What the writers heard me describe was a completely different reality from the present state of these hills. Several roads have now been built through them, and Jewish settlements dominate the tops of most of the hills around where we had taken our short walk. Only by looking through the narrow window of the qasr, from which none of the buildings, roads or settlements could be seen, could they get a glimpse of the unspoiled hills and imagine how the entire area had once been before the onslaught on this precious land. That is what it now takes to experience the land as it used to be: selective looking through a narrow window from one of its remaining stone structures.
As I think back over the different walks I have taken over the past nine years in these Palestinian hills with some of my favourite writers: Kamila Shamsi, Gillian Slovo, J.M. Coetzee, Henning Mankel, Colum McCann, Michael Palin, Teju Cole . . . I remember how much I have enjoyed their company and the talks we had as we walked. Some years the weather was agreeable and we were able to amble up and down and through the valley to the next village; other years it was hot and we were pressed for time. Many of their comments still ring in my mind, and if there was space I would include all of them here. But the words of Claire Messud stand out: ‘We scrambled up rocks among terraced olive groves to a stone shepherd’s hut, from which we could see the green and gold hills interlaced to the horizon. We picked our way along a dry riverbed, surprising a tortoise, and on to a small village, where a mangy donkey gazed balefully from its tether and ruddy-faced children demonstrated their tree-climbing prowess.’ With an aching heart she concluded, ‘What is a world where you cannot go for a walk, cannot assemble to read and discuss literature in public, cannot be certain of visiting your grandmother in a neighbouring city?’
Fortunately no one on any of these walks over the past nine years has sprained an ankle or collapsed from exhaustion or heat. No one was bitten by a snake or scorpion. Many shared my anger over the destruction of the spectacular land of Palestine with new roads and thousands of tons of cement; illegal homes for Israeli settlers, who have not only spoiled the landscape but also contributed to complicating and prejudicing the chances of peace in this tortured land.
LET YOUR LIVES SPEAK
Linda Spalding
At eighteen I made a pilgrimage that was unusual for a Kansas girl raised up to be Episcopalian. My fellow travellers were strangers to me, birthrite Quakers from many countries, travelling by bus in England to visit historical Quaker sites. It all came back to me forty years later when I was travelling with a different group of strangers in another bus, one that moved by slow degrees through Palestine. In England, in 1961, we teens roomed in a Manchester schoolhouse and made daily trips to old Quaker meeting houses. I had a crush on Ramsey, a boy from Lebanon. Where is he now? I wondered, looking out on the winding roads of the West Bank. I remembered an elderly woman who’d sat with us in the chilly Manchester schoolroom and unfolded her theory of resistance. Passive because she was Quaker, but fierce and dedicated to right living. Her name was Elfrida Vipont Foulds, and I was electrified by her passion, her insistence. No adult had ever spoken so fervently in my hearing and yet the message was basic and simple. She said, Let your lives speak, and the words struck me then with such force that they may be the reason I found myself on a bus in Palestine.
In spite of that insistence on making my life matter, I could not, in Palestine, imagine how to address the wounds we saw around us. How does one find words to speak of such unfairness, such horror? How abstain from complicity? We were writers, adults of various ages and countries, each of us mindful, each attentive. We looked out on a land mythical to a person of Christian or Jewish or Muslim background. Didn’t we cross the River Jordan? Weren’t the people we met familiar? But they are cut off now from the rest of the world by a vast enclosing wall. They are surrounded by soldiers holding weapons and by barricades and turnstiles and hostile faces shouting orders and insults. They are surrounded by the illegal occupiers of their land.
To the occupiers we were suspect. Writers who wanted to visit the West Bank, we were kept waiting for hours at Passports in spite of the authorisation letters we carried. We were interrogated about one thing and then another – about where we live, about where we were born, about what right or need we might or might not have to travel in the West Bank, where no one should want to go. There are certainly things better left unseen. In Hebron, Banksy has made a beautiful message out of the ugly wall, but the streets are empty, and an Israeli ambulance is painted with black silhouetted guns along with the names of the Americans from Minnesota who paid for it. There are police cars too, and tanks, all given, all funded and sent with blessings from afar. Whole streets in the old Hebron marketplace are condemned by locks and bolts on every shop door. The few stores still open are mainly on the street directly under apartments taken over by illegal Israeli occupiers who sometimes throw buckets of bleach on the shirts and shoes below. Shit too and urine, because along with the buckets, the Israelis hold the wanton power of victors. ‘Are you Jewish?’ is the question we were asked on an empty street. ‘Because you cannot walk here if you’re not.’ And so it goes for the man who cannot get to his olive trees because the roads are forbidden to him while settlers in big American cars go speeding past to their vast Soviet-style settlements, and we remind ourselves that they too carry guns. No use appealing to the Israeli soldiers as a car swerves towards us menacingly. The soldiers are girls and boys with bigger, heavier guns than any child ought to carry and an attitude too merciless to be challenged. O Israel what are you doing to your children? Do you not see what they become?
In the West Bank we went from one town to another. Hebron, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus. We gave little performances of our skills and invited participation from local residents. We visited a camp created out of tents and boxes and bits of wreckage. We watched children dance. We each of us, on both sides of the fence that separates those who are free from those who are not, entertained the other as we could. We shared a meal around long tables and joked and sang. I remember flirting with a man of my generation who was dignified and sexy. I do not remember his name as I do not remember names well any more, and he is probably like me in that way, thinking only of the hour so mutually pleasant.
Kafr Bir’im is a place of low rock walls that show the outlines of what were once homes. It was a flourishing village before its residents were required, nearly seventy years ago, to leave for two days in order to register in a census. In that ruined place we had tea with a group of people who have come back with tents to reclaim the land that was bombed while their parents and grandparents walked towards the next town as ordered. Seeing a small plane moving in the direction of their homes they must have turned as one and then stood on the dusty road and watched as those homes were destroyed in minutes. Eradicated. Disappeared. There is a pretty Christian church still standing. There is the graveyard with its stones inscribed. But the people acting their Right of Return are not permitted to live on the land that holds the bones of their families. They may not build there, and the planting they do in their fields is clandestine.
Although planting is not what it used to be in Palestine. We learned this from Raja Shehadeh, who has walked the hills for decades. He knows the ridges and the valleys and the plants and streams, and one afternoon he led us up a steep incline and into a grove of old olive trees. Each tree had been watered by hand for generations, but now the gre
at Jordan is being drained to water thirsty Israel and the life-giving trees are shrivelling.
There are a thousand ways to genocide.
At the Qalandia checkpoint we waited in a long line to enter Jerusalem. Everyone else in the line was Palestinian on the way to a job on the other side of the wall. They wait for such savage lengths of time after their early-morning commute. Then they are interrogated and harassed before being allowed to go off to work for their overlords, whether doctoring or digging ditches. This is where we heard the story of two young soccer players, Jawhar (nineteen) and Adam (seventeen), shot in the feet by Israeli soldiers because – because? They were going to play for Palestine in the World Cup. I took a photograph of our surroundings with my iPhone but inside, having made it through the turnstile, they took me to a room behind a steel door and commanded me to delete the photograph. After all, there are things that must not be seen. We were surrounded by turrets and guns and razor-wire fences very like the Nazi death camps, and that is not the image Israel wants to project. A people walled in, without rights, without freedom to move, without protection of the law, are prisoners. The guns and turrets belong to the jailors as usual.
‘I don’t know how to delete things on this phone,’ I said to the young soldier.
‘I’ll show you.’ And he did.
In Jerusalem the stone-covered tomb can be visited in a great hollow and echoing church. And the little alleys through which it is said Jesus walked on his last walking day are there too, but I had no will to follow. Instead I went into a neighbourhood of stacked dwellings cut off in the way Palestinian homes are cut off from the rest in this supposedly shared city, where in so many places the star of David announces that one more Palestinian resident has been ousted. Generations may have lived here in peace, and yet there are Israeli flags fluttering all over the city boasting of ignoble victories. I WILL NOT MOVE read a banner over a doorway. But it was a fine dwelling near a fine marketplace, and it had already been emptied and given to a Jewish family.
Well, they are losers, my father said of the Palestinian people after a trip to Israel. He said Israel should never return the territory it stole in the Six Day War. He and my mother, good Kansas Episcopalians, went to visit the Wailing Wall in 1968. They did not go to London or Paris. They did not travel to Europe even once. They went to Israel and touched the wall where Mohammed is said to have tied his wondrous steed Al-Buraq, before he was taken up through the seven heavens and into the presence of God. A year earlier and the Moroccan Quarter of Jerusalem would have been at their backs, but now even the great plaza is forbidden to anyone with a Palestinian ID. One of the first acts of the Israelis, upon occupying East Jerusalem during the 1967 war, was to give the Palestinian inhabitants of this neighbourhood a few hours to evacuate their homes. Then the bulldozers came in to make of the place a clean enough slate to accommodate Jewish pilgrims. And tourists, like my parents, who could not see or understand what had been taken away. Let your lives speak. But first know the truth. I have a vivid memory of an old Quaker woman leaning towards me with her hand upraised. I wonder, though, was she really old, or did she only seem that way because of her glow and the challenge of the words that sent us on into our lives?
A BUS STOP IN LONDON
Najwan Darwish
At the bus stop in the morning
you think of a small house in a town by the sea
that you claim is the mother of all the cities of the world.
You reflect
as you walk in the funeral of pulsing capitalism
where each step is sold by the square centimetre.
At the bus stop in the morning
you say that life is late
or that its bus has gone
but still you stand there thinking of a small house
hidden by the wind,
given away by the trees at the foot of Mount Carmel.
Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid
THE SCATTERING
Claire Messud
The cicadas sing without let in the olive grove beyond the lip of the hill, and the dry leaves clatter softly in the hot breeze. Dust rises in small clouds with each step, and settles upon her sandalled feet, greying her toes. Shading her face with her hand, the young woman turns to look back, towards where the sea ultimately lies; but between her and the water are too many hills and valleys. She sees instead the rows of gnarled trees and the golden cairn of a shepherd’s hut with its hollow black eye. Rock and no water and the sandy road. The others have gone on ahead.
That evening back at the hotel she listens to the men speak. Distant cousins, they too have come from far away; they too have histories in this place that they know only partially. They speak about the houses of their grandfathers, merchants of Haifa and Jerusalem lawyers, about ways of life and worlds now extant only in sepia photographs, plastic-coated in albums in Oklahoma City and Detroit. She has no photographs, neither here nor at home; no known grandfather’s house to lament.
Her grandmother Mona, the youngest of four, the afterthought, was transplanted first to Beirut then to Columbus, Ohio, a child of seven then for whom memories of home were already myth. The details the young woman hears now, over sweating Cokes in the hotel bar – other people’s family fables, of deeds and rusting keys carefully handed down through generations; of the spreading swallow-tailed willow and the carpet of vermilion pheasant’s eye in a summer garden; of long-legged boys splashing along the grassy banks of the al-Zarqa River – loom vivid and dream-like. Her inheritance instead is a grandmother’s American immigrant stories: of a childhood in Columbus, trailing through snow behind an older sister and two brothers chattering between themselves in Arabic; of a mother prone to migraines who required quiet and a darkened room, and a laconic father wizened by care, scrabbling to rebuild his family’s life in middle age. These, her grandmother’s stories, include dinner plates stored for years in their packing crate, carefully returned each night after washing (just in case the family had to move again); a little girl’s shame in the mid-century Midwestern playground at the blackness of her glossy braids, the wrongness of her home-made skirt and her mother’s inability to speak English; the loneliness of not-belonging, of being at home nowhere but in an imaginary land, its topography gleaned second hand from sister and brothers, because her mother and father could not speak of it.
This means, the young woman reasons, that her own Palestine is born out of the mists of myriad imaginations. In life her grandmother never returned; nor has her mother made the journey: she blesses but does not understand her daughter’s pilgrimage. The past is the past, she says, your life is here; with a gentle stamp of her sneakered foot on the plush sod outside the family house in Natick, Massachusetts (built 1989). But why, then, are the trees on this hillside so familiar? Why does the shaft of light that falls through her dust-streaked hotel-room window soon after dawn strike her as a summons?
Over four days she listens to the others, to their stories; she listens to the guide, a young man from a village not far from Ramallah who will take them wherever they ask to go – within of course the constraints of the possible and the strictures of the Israeli maps. They visit Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Bethlehem. She speaks little; asks questions, but few. She notices: the rattling exhaust pipe of their white minivan; the fluttering keffiyehs arrayed outside the shop next to the hotel; the way the old man at the corner cafe cups his cigarette inside his palm against the wind, and his avian face, reddish like modelling clay, etched by time. His tattered suit jacket hangs from his shoulders as if on a hanger, as if he had no body at all. She buys a set of coffee mugs for her mother, glazed dark blue like the night sky, and wraps them for her suitcase in her laundry. At bedtime she writes down what she has seen and heard each day in a small notebook, and sleeps with it under her pillow.
On the last day the group returns to walk in the countryside. They set out straight after breakfast, before it gets too hot. This time their guide parks the van on a ridge, half off the road
, and they pick their way across a tufted valley to clamber up the winding rutted road to a village, the guide’s village, in the gnat-whine wake of a moped. A goat sidles out to greet them, emitting its sceptical bleat. Two little boys squatting in the dust look up from their game as the party passes; an older woman pauses in her cleaning, duster aloft. Not an insignificant number, they are manifestly foreign. The young guide has friends here, calls out to a man his own age and the youth with him. The young woman, who speaks no Arabic, cannot understand what is said. Laughter is exchanged, shoulders slapped. Two of her fellow travellers who speak some Arabic join haltingly in the conversation; all the young men crowd in a circle. A few more emerge as if magically from the buildings around. The old woman, her duster on her shoulder, steps up the road to join the group, smiling now. A rooster, pecking his way across the junction, crows, jubilant.
It is easy to slip back down and around the bend, away from the people. She doesn’t have to go far to be alone. Parched, she thinks, is the word for it. If there were the sound of water only. She longs for a drink but can wait. There is a bottle in the minivan, but instead she walks beyond its shadow, above her on the ridge, and out into the valley.
She can no longer hear the villagers, the handsome young guide, her fellow travellers, the dyspeptic goat. Instead the cicadas shriek against the whispered clatter of the olive leaves. She removes from her pants pocket a large linen handkerchief, neatly folded, and from within it a small clear plastic bag, of the sort now used at airport security for toothpaste and deodorant.
The young woman listens carefully; her eyes scan the green, grey, gold, dun of the landscape before her. She can’t see anyone, anything. Hasty nevertheless, she fumbles to open the little bag’s seal and tilts it gently earthwards. A silvery spray flies into the morning air, spreading, rising, falling, dispersing. With a shake of her shoulders she tips the bag further; the rush of cinereal dust intensifies, floats and settles. When she looks down at her feet, grey-coated in their sandals, she cannot tell whether her skin carries particles of the path or of her grandmother. That is fine.