WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT
ROMEO AND JULIET IN PALESTINE
A book of vivid first-hand experience about the daily lives, suffering and courage of Palestinians living in the West Bank. Read it, imagine it and pass it around.
John Berger
Cool and understated, Romeo and Juliet in Palestine is at once a finely observant account of a teacher at work in the Occupied Territories and a cumulatively powerful indictment of the systematic constraints young Palestinian men and women experience, as they try to get a university education in difficult times. Sperlinger comes across as a gifted, sympathetic, and resourceful classroom teacher, wonderfully inventive in his approach to his texts and to his students, humorous, hard on himself, open to all the strangeness of his situation. This is a wise and moving document.
Neil Hertz, author of Pastoral in Palestine and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins University
It’s often said that Romeo and Juliet is a universal tale, carrying its story of love across languages and cultures. Tom Sperlinger’s elegantly-written prose instead gently unpicks the array of meanings, experiences and emotions which his Palestinian university students find in Shakespeare. Reminiscent of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, this is a wise, humble meditation on knowledge, learning, and the challenges of imagining a life beyond occupation.
Sarah Irving, author of Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation and The Bradt Guide to Palestine and co-editor of A Bird is Not a Stone: An Anthology of Contemporary Palestinian Poetry
This honest and thoughtful memoir is also a good introduction to a slice of Palestinian reality. Sperlinger has the decency not to pretend to understand everything he sees; the reader learns along with him. When he and his students at Abu Dis achieve a moment of connection over English literature (even as Sperlinger struggles with the postcolonial implications of what he is doing) the reader is moved.
Margaret Litvin, author of Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine has a visionary force and clarity.
Tom Paulin
First published by Zero Books, 2015
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,
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For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.
Text copyright: Tom Sperlinger 2014
ISBN: 978 1 78279 637 4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014957342
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Tom Sperlinger as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Lee Nash
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CONTENTS
Author’s note
Map
1. Romeo and Juliet in Palestine
2. No such place
3. This mad reality
4. I was part of the story
5. The rights of the reader
6. Storm warnings
7. Some boy
8. When I was out
9. You may kill me
10. Hamlet’s dangerous state
11. Split the air
12. My country’s friend
13. Schools to me
Acknowledgements
We are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint.
Hannah Arendt
It is a well-known fact that Shakespeare is a Palestinian.
Amir Nizar Zuabi
Author’s note
This book is an account of the spring semester in 2013, during which I taught English Literature at Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, in the occupied West Bank. It includes stories that my students told me as well as some of the experiences that we shared in class. I have changed some names and various details to protect the identities of those involved.
During the semester, I taught two classes, Shakespearean Drama and Special Topics in Literature. I refer throughout the book to several of the key texts we used. All quotations from Romeo and Juliet are from the 2012 Arden edition edited by René Weis; references to Julius Caesar are from the 2004 updated edition of the New Cambridge Shakespeare edited by Marvin Spevack.
1
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine
Just before 2pm, on a warm day in March, three students came into the office and told me that campus was being evacuated.
I had finished teaching just after noon and walked up towards the English Department office. Al-Quds University is on a hillside, levelled into a series of plateaus connected by steep concrete steps. When I reached the top, I heard a shout and I caught a glimpse of movement in the square below. Recently students had gathered there to support Samer Issawi and other Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli gaol. At first, I thought it was another protest. But a gang of twenty or thirty boys was marching across the square. They were mostly teenagers, although some looked younger. They were shouting and brandishing bats, sticks, and strips of wood torn from fences, as they marched up the steps in front of me.
‘Don’t be scared,’ someone whispered. I was standing with a few other teachers. ‘You should go inside,’ a woman who sounded American told me: ‘You have an English accent.’ I discovered later that students at nearby Birzeit University had confronted a British diplomat a few days before.
When I heard that campus was being evacuated, I was waiting to meet students who were due to take an exam. I found a colleague, Ahmed, who also lived in Ramallah, and we left together. Security guards had closed off the glass doors at the end of the building, which we would normally have used. A fight was taking place on the road outside. We made our way back down the steps, at the bottom of which there was now a Red Crescent ambulance. ‘The problem is that people think they will be martyrs if they die,’ said Ahmed, who told me that he had heard gunshots while he was teaching. Later, he said that some boys fought to impress girls.
Outside campus, people were streaming in every direction, trying to leave. Ahmed and I eventually got into a servees, one of the minibuses that are used as shared taxis. I was wedged in behind the gap between the two front seats. It could take up to an hour to get back to Ramallah, and sometimes the servees went terrifyingly fast. But it was an unusually quiet journey home.
On the morning of the fight, we had finished reading Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespeare course I was teaching was a slow pleasure. At home, on a module of this kind, we might read nine or ten plays, skating the surface at a rate of one a week. Here we spent several weeks reading each play aloud, almost line by line. The closing scene of Romeo and Juliet worked well as a finale, partly because it requires so many voices. There were 40 students in the class.
I asked the students how the play might be adapted as a film in Palestine. One young woman said she would set the film in the present because the Palestinians are at the peak of their troubles, economically and politically. Another said she would set it in the late 1940s or 50s, when there had been a famous dispute between two families in Jerusalem. A third said the play could be set at any time in Palestine becaus
e of the violent context. Most of the students thought that Verona ought to be Jerusalem and that Romeo might be banished to Ramallah or Gaza, or somewhere in Jordan, in place of Mantua. One suggestion was that Juliet might be from Jerusalem and Romeo from the West Bank: their difficulties would then arise from the fact that they have different ID cards. The Oslo Accords of 1993 divided Palestinians into different ‘groups’ with separate forms of ID for the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. My students wrestled with similar practical difficulties. One told me he was engaged but didn’t know when he could marry because he had a West Bank card and his fiancée had a Jerusalem one. Other ideas were that Juliet should be a Christian Palestinian and Romeo a Muslim, or Romeo could be Israeli and Juliet could be a Palestinian. (‘That happens a lot,’ one young woman said.) Another student said that if it were an Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the ending would have to change, because the Montagues and Capulets would never join hands.
I wondered what the students would cut or add in a film version of the play. ‘I’d cut the kiss,’ said one woman, ‘because of their age.’ ‘More kissing!’ retorted several men. ‘Cut Rosaline,’ another woman said with a sigh. (She’d earlier lamented how fickle Romeo could be.) ‘Make them older,’ someone said. ‘Cut the Nurse!’ ‘Cut all of the long speeches!’ ‘Put in a song.’ One student said the play should be in modern slang, with the Nurse speaking in dialect. A man said he would draw out the action over a month, rather than five days, to make the love story more plausible. ‘Give it a happy ending!’ But if Romeo and Juliet live, I suggested, the Montagues and Capulets can’t be reconciled. So would they want Romeo and Juliet to escape together into exile? ‘Yes!’ a few roared. ‘To Gaza?’ I asked, to general laughter. ‘To Jordan,’ they suggested.
The students continued to re-imagine the play in a piece of homework. In a rewrite by a student called Qais, Romeo was Rami, a resident of Ramallah, and Juliet was Juweida, from Barta’a, a Palestinian village in Israel. Qais set the play towards the end of the second intifada, the Palestinian uprising in 2000-2005, during which it was nearly impossible for young men like Rami to go into Israel. Rami and Juweida can only meet on the internet, and ‘as if the existing political issues aren’t enough, their main problem is surprisingly family tradition’. Both families are Arab and both feel ‘bitterness’ about the Palestinians’ plight. But Juweida’s family are Israeli citizens and think ‘they are privileged and live within a modern, stable “country” and view Rami as a broke loser.’
Qais re-wrote the scene in which Romeo hears of Juliet’s apparent death. In his version, Rami is visited by his friend, Ameen, who tells him that Juweida has transferred her affections to a rich Israeli Arab, the term applied to Palestinians who are citizens of Israel. Qais noted that ‘for a big minority of Palestinian youth, using English as one third of their daily speech is normal’ and that the lovers are ‘fans of foreign dialects of English and are particularly obsessed with a rapper from Liverpool.’ And so he used a mix of Shakespearean verse, Arabic and Scouse for the encounter between Rami and Ameen:
Ameen: Allo, my kidda.
Rami: Marhaba Ameen, what hath made you such a beanie this morning? Is my Judy well?
Ameen: She is well, better than thee and I!
Let it bother you not, she may have been a sloobag…
Rami: Ya kalb! Mark your words, for you be speaking of my beloved!
Ameen: I would’ve ne’er spoken ill of someone I’ve not seen doing ill. Your Ju was with a smile next to a soft lad with a Merc…
I had lived in Liverpool for several years and was surprised to see familiar Scouse terms—‘kidda’ (young guy), ‘judy’ (young woman), ‘beanie’ (annoying person), ‘sloobag’ (promiscuous person), and ‘soft lad’ (idiot)—alongside Arabic words I was learning, such as ‘marhaba’ for ‘hello’ and ‘kalb’ for ‘dog’.
Another student, Woroud, set her version of the play during the Six Day War in 1967. In her version, Romeo is Saleem and Juliet is Jamila and there are ‘no fights or disputes between the two families’. Instead, they are separated by the events of the war. In the scene that Woroud re-wrote, the two families are hiding in a deserted cave in Jericho, having walked long distances to escape ‘Israeli bombs and explosions’ and to protect ‘their daughters and kids from rapes and kidnappings’. Saleem and Jamila must part from one another—as the lovers part after their only night together in the play—because Saleem’s family is leaving for Lebanon.
Saleem: Habibtie, by the blessed moon up there That tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops, I swear to look for you the seven earths.
Jamila: O, don’t swear by the moon, the inconstant moon, That monthly goes through changes in her circled orbit, For fear that your love prove as variable as the moon.
Saleem: What shall I swear by?
Jamila: (crying) Don’t swear at all
Or if you will, swear by Allah,
Which is the god that we worship,
the god who sees us right now
And I’ll believe you.
Saleem: I swear by Allah; Al Qadeer.
Jamila: Although I have joy in you,
I’m very sad this night;
Look at this bud of love that, ripened by summer’s breezes, May become a beautiful flower when next we meet.
Saleem: Insha’Allah
Jamila: Insha’Allah
Woroud’s version was not the only one to offer glimpses inside Palestinian history. Other students set the play during the first intifada in the late 1980s, in present-day Gaza, or in 1948, when Israel was founded and many Palestinians were expelled from their land.
In our first class on the play, I’d asked the students: why is it dangerous for Romeo and Juliet to fall in love? ‘Because their parents hate each other,’ they replied. ‘Why?’ I asked. The lack of an explanation for this hatred may be one reason the play is so effective. It is typical of the gaps in Shakespeare’s plays, which leave them open to interpretation. However, there is also an absence of authority in the play. As Hannah Arendt has written: ‘Violence appears where power is in jeopardy.’ In one discussion, the students probed the relationship between the Prince and the two families. Why does he struggle to be heard by the families, or to impose his will on them? Is he, as in the Baz Luhrmann film version, something closer to a chief of police and thus an agent of the law rather than a man in power?
Over the weeks that followed I picked up anecdotal scraps of information, sometimes contradictory, about what had happened that day on campus. The boys who had arrived were from Sawahera, a village next to Abu Dis, which is divided in two by the Wall. Apparently they’d been pursuing a dispute with a boy from Abu Dis, who was studying at the university. I was told it was about a girl, but also that it was part of a series of skirmishes between two families. Nobody seemed sure about the origins of the feud, which had been going on for several years.
The West Bank is carved into three administrative areas, with 60% in Area C, under full Israeli control. Area A, which makes up 18%, is under Palestinian Authority civil and security control. It includes Ramallah, and other cities in the West Bank, and Israeli citizens are forbidden from entering these areas (although during military crackdowns the Israeli Defence Force has invaded them). The Abu Dis campus is situated in Area B, which is under Palestinian civil control and joint Israeli-Palestinian security control, but which is effectively lawless. There is often tension in Abu Dis between Israeli forces and the local population. On several occasions, our classes were disrupted by tear gas, fired by Israeli soldiers at local teenagers. Amira Hass wrote in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in 2011: ‘Palestinian police are unable to operate in the area around Abu Dis, but Israeli forces don’t appear interested in stopping the villages from becoming a breeding ground for drug dealers and crime.’ As a consequence of this power vacuum, she noted, a ‘conflict between two families’ in the area can spin ‘out of control’.
Whenever ‘trouble’ erupted in the West Bank while I was there
—when there was a modest rise in the tension, for example after a Palestinian prisoner died in an Israeli gaol—the most visible sign was young boys and teenagers on the streets, armed with stones and catapults. On the way home from campus one evening, in a servees, we passed a boy of about ten who was standing at the centre of a mini-roundabout, hurling stones. As we turned right off the roundabout, in the direction he had thrown them, we passed a burning tyre. A hundred yards behind it were a couple of Israeli soldiers. As we moved parallel with them, one of the soldiers tossed a stone up in the air and caught it. Hillel Frisch, an expert on the conflict from Bar-Ilan University, told The Guardian in February 2013: ‘The people being wounded in [the current] clashes are 13 and 16-year-old kids, not the 17 to 32-year-old men [who] have been either decimated or incarcerated since the second intifada.’ In the same week as the fight on campus, UNICEF released a report on the treatment of children in Israeli military detention. It stated that children aged 12-13 years old can be imprisoned for up to 6 months for throwing stones, or 5 years if they are 14-15, and those over 16 for ten years. The report concluded: ‘Ill-treatment of Palestinian children in the Israeli military detention system appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalized.’
For a couple of days after the fight, the university was closed. I kept in touch with my students by e-mail and through a Facebook group they had started. There were lots of rumours about the fight. One student, called Haytham, wrote to me to explain that there had been another fight of a similar kind a few months before:
The guy who died [in the earlier fight] was my friend, and he’s from the same village [as me]. The guys who did this were his cousins, and best friends. They wanted to take revenge of him but never kill him but it went bad and the knife managed to work deeper than expected. He was killed in front of my eyes. The ones who killed him are in jail now and one of them is crying till this moment as he never wanted to kill his cousin. He was one hell of a good friend and we all got shocked of the fact of his death but yet we’re kinda used and always ready to lose close friends.
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