Romeo and Juliet in Palestine

by Tom Sperlinger

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she replied. She explained that the Hamas student group had paid to print out copies of the material she had posted online.

  Haytham spoke first. In the next class, I gave out a copy of a ‘Bill of Rights’ for readers, by the French novelist Daniel Pennac:

  1. The right to not read

  2. The right to skip pages

  3. The right to not finish

  4. The right to reread

  5. The right to read anything

  6. The right to escapism

  7. The right to read anywhere

  8. The right to browse

  9. The right to read out loud

  10. The right to not defend your tastes

  I asked the students what they would add to or remove from Pennac’s list. Haytham said: ‘In Palestine, the first thing you would need is the right to not be arrested—for what you read, or for what you do with what you read.’ In the discussion that followed, students said that this would once have applied to the way in which the Israelis behaved, but they were now also afraid of the Palestinian Authority.

  Inas queried ‘the right to read out loud.’ She said this might annoy other people, which provoked a discussion about the balance in rights, between the individual and the effect on others. Someone said that you should have to defend your tastes; otherwise you could say something hateful and get away with it. Another student, laughing, said there should be a right ‘not to be interrupted,’ so she could always say to her mother that she could not do something else if she was reading. Tariq said you should have the right to add to what you read, to write, and to ‘protect’ what you read, by which he meant the ideas, not the physical book. We looped back to Haytham’s point, and got to the ‘right to read’ and someone else said you should have the right to ‘criticise what you read.’ Pennac made the reader important, the students noted, giving him or her power, which might normally rest with the author.

  After class, a student called Anwar trailed me back up to the office. He had spent a couple of weeks volunteering with a charity in England in the summer of 2012. He said he was surprised by how many very poor, even homeless, people there were in London. He also said he had found people materialistic and that people drank in order to talk. ‘I was asked to give a presentation at a university about the situation here, and some students interrupted me.’

  ‘What did they say?’ I asked.

  ‘They said I was a terrorist.’

  Our next short story was ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in 1892. While I was reading about Gilman’s story, I came across a quotation from the writer Maxine Hong Kingston: ‘The difference between mad people and sane people… is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.’

  ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is in the form of a diary written by a woman who has been confined to a house that has been rented for the summer by her husband, John, while she recuperates from depression. John is a doctor and he has forbidden his wife from writing, so she has to hide the journal entries from him. She becomes obsessed with the patterns and colour of the wallpaper in her room and is convinced there is a woman hiding behind it.

  The language in the story is relatively straightforward and it seemed to touch a chord. I began by talking about what ‘interpretation’ means: ‘to explain,’ said Adel; ‘to understand’ someone else said. We talked about an ‘interpreter’ as someone who would need to understand but also explain. I pointed out both that the story was open to interpretation and that illness might be as well. We discussed whether the narrator is reliable, and why she is a writer. I listed the woman behind the wallpaper as a character and then asked: if the narrator has imagined this person, and we only have her account of anything, do we know if any of the other characters are real? There was a sharp intake of breath to my left and a couple of students jolted back slightly, as if a wave of thought had hit them.

  One woman said the story was about how to treat psychological illness. Gilman herself had seen it this way, as a critique of contemporary medical practice. Someone else remarked that the narrator is a ‘prisoner,’ because she cannot go anywhere. ‘Did she do something bad?’ one student asked. She said later that John was the real prisoner because he was a victim of his own thoughts.

  At the end of the class, the students made a tentative start with teaching me some Arabic. I had told them I was taking lessons in Ramallah. ‘This is your chance to have revenge on me,’ I said. ‘This is good,’ Inas replied. I asked Marah to come up and write ‘the yellow wallpaper’ on the board in Arabic. There was a dispute among the students about whether the formal or slang version was more appropriate. At one point they were all shouting different things, and I stood aside as Marah took on the role of the teacher. ‘I love this,’ I said, as they all shouted across one another. ‘This is democracy!’

  When I first arrived in the West Bank, I had a conversation with an American friend in Ramallah. I said that I had met several people in my first few weeks at the university, both staff and students, who seemed depressed. But I was unsure whether to call it depression, which is (too) often seen as an illness afflicting an individual. The unhappiness I was encountering, in contrast, seemed to be a reflection of the intractable situation in the West Bank. The occupation is brutal in many ways, but some of the most pernicious effects are subtle and cumulative. Edward Said once wrote that Zionism was effective because of its attention to detail. Palestinian lives are disrupted in endless small ways, day to day.

  In the late 1990s, my father interviewed his mother, Lisl, about her life. He asked her what she remembered about the Nazi occupation of Vienna:

  David: So how long were you there after the Nazis came into Austria?

  Lisl: I think we left on the first or second of June [1938], something like that—and they moved in the middle of March.

  David: So what do you remember about that—about them actually being there?

  Lisl: The main thing, I really remember very vividly, is when we went through our books and burnt everything we thought with the slightest political connection or anti-…. So we had a stove and we had to burn a lot of stuff. And that was the famous occasion when we found a book that my cousin had given us to keep. He didn’t say what it was. He said: ‘Can you keep this for me?’ and [your] father put it on our bookshelf and when he went through the books—what to get rid of—he found that. And that was a plan for street fighting of the Communist Party. If they had found that it would have been the end of us.

  (In the same interview, Lisl recounted how she became a Zionist after attending a meeting in 1924, when she was sixteen. ‘It just clicked with me. I was ready for something. If I had gone by chance to a Communist meeting, that would have clicked [instead].’)

  In his novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury constructs a dystopian society, in which books are banned. The main character, Guy Montag, is a fireman, whose job is to burn books, but who gradually becomes curious about them. He becomes friends with a former English professor called Faber. ‘We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy,’ Montag laments: ‘I thought books might help.’ Faber replies:

  You’re a hopeless romantic. […] It’s not books you need, it’s some of the things that once were in books. […] The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No, no it’s not books at all you’re looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

  Faber goes on to point out that books in themselves are of no use, unless they are books of quality (‘The good writers touch life often’), and unless people
have leisure to digest them and the right to carry out actions based on what they read.

  I didn’t manage to persuade Haytham to do all of the reading for the seminars. But it turned out he was right all along. He knew, better than I did, that it was not books that he needed.

  6

  Storm warnings

  ‘Tom, salaam, keif halek?’

  I replied ‘kulshi tmam,’ a phrase that would sometimes solicit a smile or a chuckle; it means ‘everything’s perfect.’ I saw Munther wince a little as I said it. We exchanged a few more phrases of Arabic, and then he switched into English. ‘One of our guys was shot,’ he said, ‘in the chest and near the heart.’ It was lunchtime and I had gone into one of the cafés which was popular with Westerners in Ramallah. Munther, the owner, often wandered between tables, joining in with conversations and telling stories. The young man, who worked as a chef, had been at a demonstration at the Ofer prison the day before. The prison was located halfway between Ramallah and Giv’at Ze’ev.

  There had been protests across the West Bank after the death of Arafat Jaradat. He had died in an Israeli prison on 19 February 2013. He was thirty. The human rights organisation, Al-Haq, reported:

  The autopsy confirmed that he was tortured. Arafat died of shock and not of a heart attack, as was initially thought. His body showed signs of beating on his chest, back and shoulders near the spine and two broken ribs. The post-mortem found blood in Arafat’s nose and bruises inside his mouth.

  Arafat had a pre-existing back injury, from being hit with a tear gas canister. He had been arrested for throwing stones a few days before. One report said a settler had been injured. Israel’s health ministry claimed that the bruising and broken ribs were probably the result of attempts to revive him.

  Munther said that the Palestinians were in limbo, not knowing what to do. ‘Why does nobody do anything about the fact that we build the settlements? Why does nobody give the workers money not to?’ He said the Palestinian attitude to the political situation was a mess: ‘It’s like an essay where every paragraph says something different.’

  It snowed for three days in January, just after I had arrived in Ramallah. I was living on the fifth floor of an apartment block and my bedroom was battered by storms on two sides. On the first night, something fell from the roof and smashed on the terrace outside. For a few days, I slept on the sofa, where it was quieter and warmer. One morning, I came down and a sheet of ice covered the steps at the front of the building. I tried to take a step, but it was too slippery, so I sat and slid down into the street instead.

  Ramallah is a bubble in which one can sometimes blot out the worst tensions in the West Bank. It has grown rapidly. Edward Said remarked that before 1948 it had been a ‘garden suburb of Jerusalem’. It has also changed from being a predominantly Christian town, to one where the majority of the population is Muslim. The Israelis have been keen to nurture Ramallah as a potential future capital of Palestine, in place of Jerusalem. It has also grown in significance because the main Palestinian cities—including Jaffa, Haifa, and much of Jerusalem—vanished into Israel. Ramallah is in Area A, the area of the West Bank that is under civil and security control by the Palestinian Authority. Most of the Westerners living in the area settle there (I was once told that there were several hundred Finnish people in the city), and it has various bars and restaurants designed to cater for them.

  One of my friends in Ramallah held a weekly curry night for a while, through which I met an assortment of European and American journalists, NGO workers and students. I started to realise that the West Bank could be a very different place as a single woman. At one of these evenings I met Sunneva, a woman from the Faroe Islands who was teaching at a refugee camp near Birzeit. ‘Yesterday on the way to class, a boy—he was about ten—stood and threw stones at me. So I ignored him, but one hit me on the arm.’ She showed me a small bruise on her left elbow. ‘On the way back, I found as large a stone as I could, and I held it up when I passed him, and he ran away. Then a slightly older boy started walking with me. He asked what my name was and where I was going. I thought he was just being friendly and then he said that he wanted to kiss me.’

  In late February, I went walking with a group of friends near a monastery called Mar Saba, close to Bethlehem. One of the girls, Nathalie, asked if we could stop in Bethlehem to collect her boyfriend, Fadi. Six of us were crammed into a small car, and we burst out of it at intervals, in high spirits. Along the way, we stopped at a sheer cliff-face that had been turned into a rubbish tip. You could see waste material clinging to the sides all the way down, and the stench pushed us away after a few minutes.

  We had lunch overlooking the desert, towards Jordan, and then began a trek across lower ground, heading back towards Bethlehem. At the start of the walk, we had seen other groups of tourists. Now we were on our own, following Fadi’s sense of direction. At one point we all clustered around a camel, taking photographs. Fadi said something that sounded good-humoured to Nathalie. She translated: ‘He said that if you got that close to a male camel, it would swing you by the head.’

  Mar Saba is on a cliff above the Kidron River, and we were making our way back towards it on the riverbed. It was a picturesque walk. The landscape was amber-beige, with the building emerging out of the rock face. Yet the dry land was punctured, here and there, with colour: a scattering of red flowers with black centres and a clutch of small yellow flowers, with long thin petals around a red centre and prickly leaves like a cactus. But the river was full of untreated wastewater, flowing from Jerusalem about 10km east. It was covered in a dirty-white foam, and the smell was incredible: it invaded your mouth before your nostrils. Initially, we all found it quite amusing. My friend Simon shouted ‘zaki!’ (the Arabic for ‘delicious’), and Fadi roared with laughter. After a while, we all started to feel queasy. When we finally had to cross the river, we formed a human chain across a sequence of rocks, making timid leaps across small sections of water. For the last stretch of the walk, back up the valley, Fadi skipped on ahead of us as we scrambled up a rocky climb. I could see him and Nathalie just ahead of us, laughing. I looked up and Nathalie smiled: ‘He says English people don’t know how to walk.’

  According to the Applied Research Institute in Jerusalem (ARIJ), Israel controls up to 89% of the West Bank’s water systems, and there are controls over even basic access. In Area C, which is under full Israeli control, the procedure makes it almost impossible to get planning permission to build anything, including a toilet. As a result, many people build ‘illegally’, only to see the structures demolished. Between 2009 and 2011, according to a 2012 article by ARIJ researchers in This Week in Palestine, the Israeli military demolished 173 water, sanitation and hygiene structures, including 57 rainwater collection cisterns, 40 community wells, and at least 20 toilets and sinks.

  When we got back to the car, our mood revived briefly. One of the boys said: ‘Well, to begin with we were relaxed and by the end we smelled of shit and feared death at any minute.’ Simon smiled. ‘A bit like life,’ he said.

  Fadi wanted to come back with us to Ramallah, but Simon—who was driving—was hesitant. We would have to pass through the checkpoint near Bethlehem. He thought we were likely to be stopped, and Fadi did not have the right permit.

  I asked the students why one person might kill another, and they suggested emotions such as anger, love, or jealousy. Anwar said that one might kill to get respect or power. Another student said you might kill for a ‘joke.’ I said that one might also kill by accident. Then we read Act III scene i. In Mercutio’s speech, he lists the reasons why Benvolio has started quarrels:

  Thou hast quarrelled with a man for coughing in the street, because he hath wakened thy dog that hath lain sleeping in the sun. Didst thou not fall out with a tailor for wearing his new doublet before Easter, with another, for tying his new shoes with old riband? (III, I, 24-29)

  When Mercutio is killed shortly afterwards, the text offers the instruction: ‘Tybalt under Romeo�
��s arm thrusts Mercutio in and flies.’ This has been interpreted in different ways. In Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film, for example, the scene is mostly play fighting, with both Mercutio and Tybalt trying to entertain the crowd and make one other look foolish. Tybalt is horrified to realise that he has harmed Mercutio, when he sees blood on his sword as he pulls it back under Romeo’s arm.

  I asked two of the men to stand up, and I positioned one as Mercutio and the other between us, as Romeo. I killed Mercutio ‘under Romeo’s arm,’ with a whiteboard marker as a sword. I asked whether Tybalt was using Romeo as cover, and showed how he might deliberately kill Mercutio. The students were sure that, as in Zeffirelli’s film, it was an accident.

  During the snow days in January, I had started watching the American television series The Wire. I especially loved season two, about the port in Baltimore, in which a young man named Ziggy Sobotka is trying to prove himself. He is the son of a tough union leader, but he lacks his father’s guile. He is subject to a series of humiliations by the other dockworkers. In a late episode in the season, called ‘Storm Warnings’, Ziggy finally pulls off a big deal, only to find out he has been cruelly played. He goes into a rage and shoots the man who has ripped him off. Ziggy returns to his car and we see his blood-stained hand shaking, as the siren of an ambulance or a police car sounds in the background. I found that I had tears in my eyes at the end of the episode.

  I had been watching The Wire as a diversion and although I had been gripped by it, this was the first episode that moved me. It was only a couple of days later, walking around the market in Ramallah, that I understood why. Ziggy cannot read the codes of the adult world around him so, for example, he ends up boasting excessively if things go well. He is shocked by the reality of killing someone and, at that moment, he suddenly seems like an innocent. I saw echoes of his situation not only in Romeo and Tybalt, but also in the young men I was teaching. I could see how one of them might get caught up in the violence around him without understanding the possible consequences.