Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

by Tom Sperlinger

  ‘When will we have our exams back, Miss Lynn?’

  ‘Well, when I finish marking them.’

  ‘Please, Miss, when will this be?’

  I had been told that a young Canadian called Ben was teaching in the department for a year. He arrived looking harassed and trailing a gaggle of students, who were all speaking to him at once. Ben was tall, with blonde, spiky hair. He was wearing a smart shirt and jeans, and a pair of dark glasses. He sat at a desk just in front of me and we introduced ourselves. Then he turned his attention to the students.

  ‘I want to ask you about my essay,’ said a young woman, who was leaning anxiously over the desk towards him. Ben was rummaging in his bag. He pulled out her work and held it up to her. ‘This essay?’ She nodded, smiling.

  He tore it in half.

  ‘But Dr. Ben, I worked hard.’

  ‘It’s not funny,’ he said. She was still smiling. ‘Why give me an essay where the whole thing is copied from the internet? In the States, you would get thrown out of school for this.’

  On the servees back to Jerusalem, I sat next to a boy called Khalid, who had been in one of Ahmed’s classes. I was still thinking about Ben’s encounter with his student, which I had found confusing. I had sympathy for Ben, and for the worries that were written across his forehead. But I also felt there were signals in the situation that he might have been misreading. It was hard for me to tell. Khalid chatted to me about his degree. He spoke with a slight American accent, and he explained to me that he had spent a year studying in the States. About halfway through the journey, we came to a checkpoint and we all had to get out of the servees. As we queued up, Khalid whispered: ‘They’ll be nice to you. They don’t want you to think they treat us like dogs.’

  Al-Quds University was founded in the 1970s out of a women’s college and three schools, which taught Islamic theology, nursing, and science and technology. The last of the four was based in Abu Dis. Sari Nusseibeh, who became president of the university in 1995, records his early impressions in his autobiography, Once Upon a Country:

  The student body was, [to] quote from Kant, a crooked piece of timber that I now had to straighten out. These students embodied the radical ideological break between my generation and that of the students. Bearded fanatics, energised by the spirit of Hamas, allowed for no intellectual freedom, and those who tried to introduce some found themselves under constant harassment. People were terrified to speak their minds freely […] The four colleges operated more like technical schools, without a humanities program and hence without the freedom of ideas that tend to break up ossified thinking. Rote learning was the norm at Al-Quds, a parrot-like repetition of facts closely aligned with social conformity.

  Sari Nusseibeh is a philosopher who trained in Oxford. By the time I first visited in 2011, there were courses in History, Arabic Language and Literature, Development Studies, Geography and Media Studies. The university had small American and European Studies programmes and had recently opened a comparable centre in Israeli Studies. There was also a partnership college with the US liberal arts school, Bard College. When I arrived for the semester in 2013, Al-Quds Bard, a liberal arts college with about 400 students, was due to see its first students graduate at the end of the semester.

  Yet there were also evident tensions between Palestinian and Western influences. I was told that some families were suspicious of a ‘liberal’ college like Al-Quds Bard. One male student told me that the girls there had become too ‘kissy-kissy’ with one another. My first glimpse of Al-Quds Bard would be a tall student standing outside it wearing a beret, like an extra from a 1980s high school movie. Later a member of staff told me that many of the faculty members were uneasy about the partnership with Bard ‘but we know why we have to support it’. Some of the tensions were between a Palestinian elite, who were comfortable with Western influence, and others who wanted to preserve a more distinct national identity, whether religious or secular. There was visible support for Hamas and other conservative factions among a minority of students, and this seemed in part to be an expression of frustration with outside influences.

  There was still a tendency towards rote learning by 2013, although not a universal one and faculty members had varied experiences and perspectives. I was to discover the benefits of a different training. My students had an extraordinary capacity to retain information. They also had a different relationship to the texts they were reading. I started to realise that the English literary tradition is intrinsically Protestant not only in content, but also in mode. We are used to books as things that we consume and internalise privately. In Memoirs of a Leavisite, a book that chronicles the formative period of university literary study in the 1930s to 1950s, David Ellis writes: ‘Concentrating as we did on reading and sometimes re-reading a particular text, we were like nothing so much as the early Protestants let loose for the first time on the translated Bible and struggling to work out its meanings, regardless of Church authority.’ In contrast, my students at Al-Quds had been taught to memorise and recite texts, including the Qu’ran. Perhaps this is why a performance text, like a Shakespeare play, was ultimately more rewarding to teach at Al-Quds than prose fiction. The students were not used to being asked about their own response to a literary work. But they were capable of making sophisticated connections between the form and style of a varied range of poems, stories and plays.

  From the main gate of the campus in Abu Dis, the first thing you see is the Wall. It was built in 2002 and it was set to cut the campus in half, until there was a carefully coordinated protest. If you stand on the road, Jerusalem appears as a thin line, with the dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque at its centre, caught between the horizon above and the Wall below. The city should be a 20-minute drive away, but it takes students who live there up to an hour and a half to get to class. The Wall highlights a uniquely difficult set of circumstances for Al-Quds, which is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Al-Quds is the only Palestinian university not recognised by Israel’s Council for Higher Education, because it maintains campuses in both Jerusalem and the West Bank. As a consequence, it can register neither as a ‘foreign’ institution nor as an Israeli one. For a Jerusalem-based student, this means that his or her degree is not recognised in Israel—so, for example, if you qualify as a doctor at Al-Quds but live in Jerusalem, your only option is to move abroad to use your degree.

  One of my colleagues later told me about a small exchange the English Department had set up with a university in Italy. ‘The idea was that faculty could come here, and we went on a visit to them. A couple of our students went to study there for a semester. When the Italian students went to the Israeli embassy to ask for a visa to come here, they were told: “There is no such university.”’

  At the end of my trip in 2011, I went for dinner with my relatives. Only when I looked up the address they had given me did I realise that Giv’at Ze’ev was a settlement. It is in territory that is recognised under international law as part of the West Bank, but which is just a few kilometres north of Jerusalem and is treated as a suburb of the city. The journey felt as though it was through a film set, along highways that ploughed through undeveloped land and which were occasionally framed by a fence or a section of the Wall. I did not tell my family about my visit to Al-Quds. I was meeting some of my cousins for the first time and I wasn’t sure how they would react. I still felt unsure about my own view of the situation, and I did not want the whole visit to be dominated by my excursion into the West Bank.

  When they drove me home, Ofer, my cousin, and his girlfriend, Devi, took me for a drink in Jerusalem. It was a warm evening, and we sat in a bar that opened out on to the street. I had shaved my head just before I left for Israel and baldness gave me a superficial resemblance to Ofer. Perhaps hidden just out of sight was the thought that if my grandparents had emigrated to Israel, I might have grown up alongside him.

  ‘It actually changed my view of things,’ Ofer told me. ‘Mum moved to Giv’at Ze’ev, and when the shops were
shut on a Saturday, I would have to go down to the next Arab village to get petrol, or to go to a shop. And I started to think that maybe what I had been told was not true. The Arabs I met didn’t want to kill us.

  ‘It’s different for Mum’s generation, and for my grandparents. They had a sense of purpose: they were building a country. But for us….’

  The conversation was interrupted by the barman who, after he had realised I was English, spoke to Ofer briefly in Hebrew. ‘He asks if you’re going to move here,’ Ofer said to me, chuckling. It was not the only time that I was asked by an Israeli if I had considered emigrating. As the country has become dominated by more religious and orthodox traditions, the traditional ‘left’ has become isolated and it is keen to encourage secular liberal Jews to emigrate from Europe and America.

  Devi had lived in the States for ten years and her perspective seemed gently at odds with Ofer’s. She told me that her mother volunteered for a charity that helped Palestinians in the West Bank travel to Israel for medical care. I was going to ask her about it, but something in the story prompted Ofer to remember an anecdote. ‘When I was in the army, we were working on a checkpoint, and a woman came through who was about nine months pregnant. When we searched her, it turned out that it wasn’t a baby, it was explosives.’ He turned slightly towards Devi.

  Ofer went to the toilet and Devi said quietly: ‘That’s the most he’s talked about politics in years.’

  3

  This mad reality

  Murshid had a neat beard and white hair, which bristled along the back and sides of his head. I had met him on my first visit to Al-Quds. Now he had spotted me in the office, in my first week as a lecturer, and settled down to talk. He leant forward in his seat and his eyes and lips twitched, as if he was teasing me. ‘Why do we make them study literature? Do you think it helps them to learn the language?’ Murshid taught English language and Arabic-English translation. He had studied in the UK and, like many of the other lecturers, he spoke perfect English.

  I had learnt quickly that the literature element of the degree was unpopular, and that for some lecturers and students the point was to learn to speak and write in English. Murshid suggested that the degree was poorly structured, and that students should only study literature as a part of their final year, once they had learnt enough of the language. ‘But the ministry sees graduates only in terms of the number of people needed to do this or that. They don’t really think about these things.’ It seemed the university itself had relatively little control over the syllabus.

  The semester had been delayed, and I had spent some time with Ahmed in Ramallah. One morning, we sat in the window seat of a coffee shop that perched over one of the central streets in town, and he pointed out that the shops were less crowded than usual, because most people were short of money. Israel had withheld some of the tax revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority after the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN in late 2012. The lecturers at Al-Quds had only received 50% of their salary for December, and this reduction was expected to continue for three months. Other public servants were in a similar position or worse. Ahmed explained that only 4,000 of the 13,000 students at the university had registered for the semester as a consequence. He predicted that there were likely to be further strikes.

  As we walked around town, Ahmed told me about his family. His three sons from his first marriage lived with him. His new wife was pregnant, and he told me that he was hoping it would be a girl. Ahmed said he was planning to buy some land just outside Ramallah and build a house. As we walked around town, he pointed out that from some of Ramallah’s main streets you can see out of the city to Israeli settlements. I knew that Giv’at Ze’ev must be one of them.

  While we were waiting for term to start, I was asked to help invigilate an exam for students who had failed a course in the previous semester. It was in a large tiered lecture theatre and, once it was under way, I ambled up and down the steps, trying to get glimpses of the papers. One student was writing a short essay on the meaning of ‘ekphrasis’, a phrase (for writing inspired by art) which I had only come to understand as a young lecturer at Bristol, when one of my colleagues was writing a book about it. I could see that some of the students were struggling. One of the men had reproduced fragments that he had memorised, such as the title of Keats’s poem ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and technical terms such as ‘metaphor’ and ‘simile’. He had misspelt both words, as if these were fish he had just caught hold of, plucked out of a sea of language he did not understand.

  When I stood at the back of the lecture theatre, I could see the rows of students hunched over their desks in a familiar exam posture, writing furiously. I turned and looked out of the window. In a field, just down the hill, there was a shepherd, crouched down on his haunches, his back arched in the same way as the students. He was perched at the top of a slope and about a dozen sheep were clustered in the space below him.

  Ahmed was also invigilating, and so was Fu’ad, a former member of the English Department who now ran the university’s alumni office. Fu’ad circled the lecture theatre with me, commentating in a stage whisper on the students we passed: ‘This one, she’s an excellent student,’ or, ‘This one, he is no good!’ When I made my escape and sat at the front, he boomed out: ‘This is your lecturer from England! You must welcome him!’

  Fu’ad had been an athlete in his youth, but now he was portly and moved mostly in a shuffle. Once, in his office, he showed me a powder he was taking for weight loss. When Fu’ad spoke, his whole body would grapple with the story, his mouth curling downwards with disgust or amusement. He would clap his hands in delight at the punch line to a joke. He lived in al-Bireh, the town next to Ramallah, and so I would spend quite a bit of time with him and Ahmed, who were friends. Fu’ad had taught at the university for over twenty years. Once, as we walked around the market, we were stopped every few yards. ‘He’s a former student of mine,’ Fu’ad would explain afterwards, before providing a brief biography of the person who had spoken to him, who was now a teacher or a judge or a businessman. Fu’ad explained that it was an essential politeness to stop and greet one another in this way.

  Ahmed was always enthusiastic about my presence in the department, while Omar had been teasingly sceptical. Fu’ad was protective. ‘If anyone asks you about politics,’ he told me, ‘Just say you do not have an opinion. Say that you are not a political person.’ We were sitting in Fu’ad’s office before the exam as he said this, drinking coffee. Ahmed laughed. ‘He is laughing because I am a very political person,’ Fu’ad confessed.

  I was sitting in the office, making notes on what I had seen in the exam and trying to plan out my first class, when a group of students burst in. They stood apart from me, talking in Arabic. Later, my students were scrupulous about not speaking in Arabic, unless one of them translated. Once, when a man did offer an aside to the room, several students interjected to explain what he had said. Now, one of the young men finally broke off and came to speak to me. He was tall and looked slightly older than the others. He declared proudly that he had graduated and I congratulated him. ‘I like the way Dr. Ahmed teaches,’ he told me. I could not tell whether this was a welcome or a warning. I looked up at him, feeling cornered. He was smiling. ‘He teaches—he is didactic, whereas some of the other teachers use the American way, they expect students to find out for themselves.’

  One of the students who appeared was Tariq, who on my earlier visit had said that it was all a waste of time. ‘Hello, doctor!’ he greeted me. I tried to explain that I didn’t have a PhD. Tariq looked puzzled. (I soon gave up explaining this, as the students called all of the male teachers ‘doctor’ and the female lecturers ‘miss’.) Tariq stood slightly to the side of the desk and he spoke with his hands out, smiling. ‘Which courses are you teaching, doctor?’ he asked.

  ‘Shakespeare and a course called Special Topics,’ I said.

  ‘Ah, you’re teaching a seminar unit?’

  ‘No,�
� I said, pointing to a list of modules that was pasted on the wall beside my desk. ‘I think it’s called Special Topics.’

  ‘Ah!’ he replied, and I could see him making an effort. ‘But ‘seminar’ is the street name.’

  Most of the students who were drifting in and out of the office seemed to be there to complain. A lecturer explained that many of them were unhappy with the courses they were taking, while one or two were protesting about having to re-take an exam. I surfed the wave of enthusiasm that came with being a newcomer, feeling that all of this did not have to be my concern. One woman, who I hadn’t met before, came in to speak with me and told me that she liked English as a subject but that she didn’t like the department.

  ‘If you were head of the department, what would you change about it?’ I asked, hoping she would an offer an insight I could use in my preparation.

  She thought for a second and then spoke in a deep, even tone.

  ‘I would close it,’ she said.

  There were still problems with students registering, so only 13 out of 30 showed up for the first Shakespeare class. I asked the students who had come whether they were excited about the course. A young man called Adel, dressed in a stylish t-shirt and with hair gelled in a precise slope across his forehead, said he had taken the course before but had failed it because he found the language too difficult. A tall woman called Noor, who spoke confidently but looked shyly up under her hijab, said she had studied the sonnets and that she liked the ones about the dark lady, and that an ugly woman could be beautiful in a poem.

  I had worried about how to pitch the opening class, because I assumed the students would find the language difficult. But it helped that a couple of them had seen the Baz Luhrmann film version of Romeo and Juliet (‘We like the actor,’ one woman said). We read the start of the balcony scene until just before Romeo reveals himself. The students immediately said that Romeo’s speeches were easier to understand, and they spotted how he piles metaphors on metaphors to idealise Juliet. They were sceptical about Romeo. They talked about him as ‘sensitive’ and they knew this word, although not the word ‘sulk’, which I used to describe him and then had to mime.