Before they stand to leave, Said turns to his weeping wife and says, “Do you know what the homeland is, Safiyya? The homeland is where none of this can happen.” He thinks of their son in Ramallah—Khalid—who yearned to take up arms against the occupation, but Said wouldn’t allow it. “We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past,” he tells Safiyya. “For Khalid, the homeland is the future.” At the end of the story, as their car reaches the outskirts of Ramallah, Said hopes that Khalid has disobeyed him and joined the resistance. “I pray that Khalid will have gone—while we were away!”
Students throughout the Middle East still read and study Returning to Haifa. The book is considered a masterpiece of Arabic literature, and it inspired Susan Abulhawa’s epic 2010 novel Mornings in Jenin. But of all Kanafani’s work that I’ve read, a letter he wrote to his son, Fayez, during the 1967 war most affected me. Kanafani’s letter describes overhearing Fayez, still a young boy, ask Anni: “Mama, am I a Palestinian?” When she tells him yes, he is silent for a while. Then he begins to cry. Kanafani believes his son’s tears to be the pangs of his inevitable birth as a true Palestinian. “It was as if a blessed scalpel was cutting up your chest and putting there the heart that belongs to you,” Kanafani wrote. “I knew that a distant homeland was being born again; hills, plains, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child.” A Palestinian boy does not grow into manhood. Instead, “he is born suddenly—a word, in a moment, penetrates his heart to a new throb. One scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood onto the ruggedness of the road.”
On the morning of July 8, 1972, just after fixing Fayez’s electric train, Kanafani walked out of his house in Lebanon with his teenage niece, Lamis. Kanafani’s five-year-old daughter, Leila, was sitting on the building’s front steps. Kanafani bent down to give her a piece of chocolate and kiss her goodbye before walking with Lamis to his car. Lamis was visiting from Kuwait, and Kanafani had agreed to take her to visit her cousins in downtown Beirut.
Lamis adored her Uncle Ghassan. Every January, Kanafani would handwrite and illustrate a book for her on her birthday. He had long considered Lamis his muse. But the two had been quarreling that day. Kanafani’s work with the PFLP meant Israeli agents continually pursued him. Kanafani stubbornly refused to travel with a bodyguard, and Lamis feared for his safety. She begged her uncle to cease his revolutionary actions and focus instead on writing fiction. “Your stories are beautiful,” she’d told him the day before, hoping to flatter him away from his dangerous politics.
“Go back to writing stories? I write well because I believe in a cause, in principles,” Kanafani told her. “The day I leave these principles, my stories will become empty. If I were to leave behind my principles, you yourself would not respect me.”
When Kanafani turned his key in the ignition, the booby-trapped car exploded. The blast killed them both and scattered fragments of their bodies over the ground.
Anni frowned at me when I said I knew why the Israelis killed her husband. “What do you think you know?” she asked. I told her I’d read how the PFLP recruited members of the Japanese Red Army—a communist militant group founded in Lebanon—to attack the Lod Airport near Tel Aviv in May 1972. Three Red Army agents pulled Czech assault rifles and hand grenades from violin cases and murdered twenty-six people. Eighty more were injured. I’d also read that after the massacre a photo emerged of Kanafani with one of the Japanese terrorists. I thought Kanafani’s assassination was retribution for his suspected role in planning the attack.
Anni scoffed. “The plan of the Zionists was to liquidate all the intellectuals. Ghassan’s murder was ordered by Golda Meir herself,” Anni said, referring to the Israeli prime minister who famously claimed there is “no such thing as a Palestinian people.” Anni didn’t know if a Mossad operative or a Lebanese collaborator killed Kanafani, only that his name appeared on a list of PFLP members to be eliminated. “He was very dangerous,” Anni said. “He didn’t carry a gun, but he carried a pen.”
I don’t know if Kanafani helped plan the airport attacks, or if he ever carried a gun, but he was unquestionably an influential member of an organization that bombed supermarkets and hijacked airplanes—the latter being something of a PFLP specialty at the time. Kanafani himself openly advocated “revolutionary violence” as a means to liberate the oppressed.
I’ve seen black-and-white photos of Kanafani playing with his children, of him tossing his infant daughter into the air with the same paternal danger I risk with my own son. Anni sold me a reproduction of The Little Lantern, the book Kanafani wrote for Lamis on her eighth birthday, about a young princess who must bring the sun inside the palace walls in order to claim the throne. I read the book to my son at bedtime. But I can’t help but wonder if the man who wrote and illustrated that charming book, and the smiling mustached man in the photos I’d seen, could see a kind of victory in the spilling of innocent blood. Did beauty coexist with its opposite in Kanafani’s hands?
I didn’t ask Anni this. I am not sure why. Maybe I couldn’t find a way to question a widow about her dead husband’s cruelty as she served me coffee and biscuits. Or maybe I am just a coward. I am sure, though, that had the situation been reversed, Kanafani would have asked the question.
Darwish was in Beirut when Kanafani was assassinated. In the eulogy he wrote, Darwish revealed the two men had planned to meet the day of the bombing:
My friend Ghassan! We did not eat our last lunch together, and you didn’t even apologize for your lateness. I lifted the telephone to scold you as usual: “It’s two o’clock and you’re not here yet. Please rid yourself of this bad habit.” But then they told me—he already blew up. No man can live how he pleases. But we see you in every place. You live within us and for us, without even knowing it.
Later, Darwish would compose a poem full of sadness and fury for his friend. “Blessed is the heart that does not stop because of a bullet,” Darwish wrote. “A bullet is not enough! They blew you up like they would a front, a base, a mountain, a capital, and they waged on you a war, like they were fighting an army.” Darwish calls his friend a volcano, and in the end he pleads, “All I want to ask of you now is to allow me to cry a little, do you allow it? Do you forgive me?”
Darwish had gone to the Soviet Union two years earlier to study political economics at Moscow’s Academy of Social Sciences, a move which had angered Kanafani and other Arab writers who considered his leaving Israel a betrayal of his role as a resistance poet. Kanafani wrote to Darwish, “We are in the midst of the stage of Return and Steadfastness, the stage of eternal exile has ended. Let us hope you will return to Israel . . . to prison, whatever the price may be.”
The friction between the two men was mild and would not endure. When Darwish left Moscow for Cairo, Kanafani wrote glowingly of his friend in a weekly Egyptian newspaper. “His sharp poetry has placed him in confrontation with the enemy’s authorities,” Kanafani noted. “First he struggled for his livelihood, and then also for his freedom. He was distanced from his village, arrested, and from prison he wrote the best and most subversive of his poetry.” Kanafani’s introduction endeared Darwish to Cairo’s literary society. He wrote for the newspaper Al-Ahram and attended salons alongside great Arabic writers such as Yusuf Idris, Tawfiq al-Hakim, and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz.
After Cairo, Darwish moved to Beirut, where he founded the literary journal Al-Karmel. He lived in Beirut for a decade, enduring both the Lebanese Civil War and the 1982 Lebanon War between the Israelis and Lebanon-based Syrian and Palestinian forces. One of my favorite pieces of Darwish’s writing comes from a long meditation about brewing coffee during Israel’s siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982:
Gently place one spoonful of the ground coffee, electrified with the aroma of cardamom, on the rippling surface of the hot water, then stir slowly, first clockwise, then up and down. Add the second
spoonful and stir up and down, then counterclockwise. Now add the third. Between spoonfuls, take the pot away from the fire and bring it back. For the final touch, dip the spoon in the melting powder, fill and raise it a little over the pot, then let it drop back. Repeat this several times until the water boils again and a small mass of the blond coffee remains on the surface, rippling and ready to sink. Don’t let it sink. Turn off the heat, and pay no heed to the rockets.
Darwish could not ignore the rockets for long and left Lebanon. In 1985—after stints in Damascus, Tripoli, and Tunis—Darwish reached Paris. He considered the city his birthplace as a poet. “I cherish my poetry that I wrote in Paris during the eighties and beyond,” Darwish said. Paris afforded him the time and freedom to write undisturbed by gunfire and bomb blasts. He also avoided the social distractions of the Paris cafés, preferring instead to work in his apartment, where he would read for ten hours a day and write for four. Being far from Palestine also granted Darwish a healthy perspective. “There, I had the opportunity to reflect and look at the homeland and the world and things from a distance—the distance of light. When you see from a distance, you see better, and see the scene entirely.” Exile, “a misunderstanding between existence and borders,” both saddened and inspired him.
Like Kanafani, Darwish involved himself in official Palestinian politics. He joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1973. At the time, the organization advocated violence and armed struggle as tools to advance the Palestinian cause. Darwish’s PLO membership resulted in his being banned from returning to Israel. He joined the PLO’s executive committee in 1987 and penned the Palestinian Declaration of Independence the following year. Still, Darwish never felt comfortable with party politics and resigned after the PLO and Israel signed the Oslo Accords in 1993.
The accords were intended to be an interim agreement that would, after five years, lead to the end of the conflict. In exchange for the PLO’s recognition of Israel and renouncing of terrorism, Israel agreed to accept the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and withdraw its military forces from Palestinian territories. The accords created the Palestinian Authority and granted the PA limited governance over the West Bank and Gaza. Some credit Oslo for bringing an end to the First Intifada, a violent uprising against the Israeli occupation that had raged since 1987.
The Oslo Accords won Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres a Nobel Peace Prize, but most Palestinians consider the agreement a shameful surrender. Today, the PA governs less than 20 percent of the West Bank territory, which is divided into eight noncontiguous areas. Israel maintains exclusive control over 60 percent. (The rest falls under joint Israeli-Palestinian jurisdiction.) Israeli settlements divide Palestinian towns and villages. Military checkpoints control Palestinian roads while settlers speed along on highways built exclusively for them. Today the dream of a viable Palestinian state is more distant than in 1993.
Oslo’s failure did not surprise Darwish. “I felt Oslo would pave the way for escalation,” he said. “I hoped I was wrong. I’m very sad that I was right.” Darwish’s stance on Olso angered Yasser Arafat, who even demanded Darwish alter one of his most critical poems about the agreement. Darwish complied, changing the line “Like a handful of dust this peace will leave us” to “Like a handful of dust this journey will leave us.” But Darwish remained outspoken against the accords. In his 2006 memoir, he wrote: “What cunning rule or language could formulate an agreement for peace and good neighborliness between a palace and a hut, between a guard and a prisoner?”
For all their failures, the accords did allow political exiles like Darwish to return to the West Bank and Gaza. Darwish moved to Ramallah in 1996—the same year Mourid Barghouti crossed over the Allenby Bridge. Darwish did not consider his return to Palestine the end of his expulsion. “Exile is not a geographic state,” he said. “I carry it everywhere as I carry my homeland.” And al-Birwa had long since been destroyed. Still, Darwish preferred his return to Palestine to the decades he spent wandering. In a poem, he wrote, “the house is more beautiful than the path to the house.”
Darwish was an international literary star by then. Readers throughout the Arabic-speaking world read and memorized his poems, and he became the bestselling poet in France. At a 1987 poetry reading in Rabat, five thousand fans crowded into a theater hall to listen to Darwish while loudspeakers broadcast the reading to forty thousand others listening in the streets outside. A reading in Tunisia in 1994 drew a throng of sixteen thousand. Twenty-five thousand fans filled a Beirut soccer stadium to hear him recite his poems. In 2007, he read from atop a bridge in Macedonia to thousands of fans on the riverbanks below. Boats crowded the river, and fireworks burst overhead in his honor.
For Palestinians, Darwish was more than just a poet. He was their champion, the eloquent voice of their struggle. Darwish never desired this role, but nor did he resist it. He first began composing poems as a means of self-expression, he wrote, “but my individual case, the great uprooting from place, was the story of an entire people. So, the people found in my individual voice their individual and collective voices.” Even Darwish’s poem about a prisoner’s quiet longing for his mother’s coffee became a rallying cry.
But the Palestinian adoration for Darwish sometimes manifested as possession. His readers felt that he belonged to them. They expected poetic nationalism from Darwish, often demanding he recite his most famous “resistance” poems during readings, and judged him harshly when he deviated from his role as his nation’s voice. While in Cairo, Darwish wrote an article titled “Am I Free to Marry a Woman?” that expressed his desire to take a sabbatical from politics and focus on his personal life. This outraged his critics, who considered such trivialities beneath a man who had more important things to do. Then, in 1998, Darwish produced a book of love poems called A Bed for the Stranger. His critics felt it vain and shallow for a Palestinian poet, especially Darwish, to write about love while under occupation. They felt the book amounted to Darwish abandoning his people. His friend author Anton Shammas accused Darwish of sending the message: “To hell with Palestine—now I’m on my own!”
In response to Shammas, Darwish wrote: “I am waiting for the moment when I shall be able to say ‘to hell with Palestine.’ But this will not come before Palestine is free. I can’t achieve my private freedom before the freedom of my country. When it’s free, I can curse it.”
Darwish believed that Palestinian literature needed to explore metaphysical themes like love and death and liberate itself from an airless preoccupation with politics and oppression. “The Palestinian cannot just be defined as terrorist or freedom fighter,” Darwish said. “Any trite, routine image ends up reducing and usurping the humanity of the Palestinian and renders him unable to be seen as merely human. He becomes either the hero or the victim—not just a human being. Therefore, I very seriously advocate our right to be frivolous.” According to Darwish, Palestinians should not shackle themselves to the solitary idea of political liberation. “This is a prison,” he said. “We’re human, we love, we fear death, we enjoy the first flowers of spring. So to express this is resistance against having our subject dictated to us. If I write love poems, I resist the conditions that don’t allow me to write love poems.”
I would have disappointed Darwish. I had been as guilty as anyone of anticipating politics in the Palestinian writing I’d read. I found it difficult not to see the conflict lurking between each line of verse and hiding behind each metaphor. Every mother in every poem stood for the land of Palestine. Each description of red anemones blooming on a hillside represented the blood of martyrs. I couldn’t see beauty for beauty’s sake. Darwish felt that Palestinian literature was under attack by readers like me. “It is as if the text is expected to adhere to previous expectations, as if there is a reading that precedes the poem,” he wrote. “It is essentially a siege of reading.”
Darwish lived quietly in Ramallah, preferring solitude to the noisy cafés or the
social obligations his celebrity might have demanded. “No artistic work can be done without isolation,” he said. “You must be alone, plucking your thorns with your hands.” Darwish was not religious but he had his rituals. He woke each morning at eight and opened his bedside dictionary to a random word to conduct “cerebral calisthenics”: memorizing lines of poetry that corresponded to the various meanings of his chosen word. He would drink a glass of cold orange juice then brew his coffee according to “strict ritual and the teachings of the roaster of cardamom.” Before he sat at his desk to write, Darwish dressed in proper clothes and elegant black shoes, treating his writing time with the same formal respect as any other professional. Then he entered his office. “Your cup of coffee is on the left side of the desk and on the right side is a box of pens, next to a pot of black ink. In the middle, there is white paper full of white writing. It calls to you and you call to it. It holds and hides the memories of predecessors. Alone, without assistance or assurance, you try to find your own line in this white thicket that stretches between writing and speech. You no longer ask, What will I write? but rather, How will I write?”
The power of Darwish’s poetry to portray Palestinian identity bred fierce opposition against it. In 2000, the Israeli education minister decided to include some of Darwish’s poems in an optional multicultural school curriculum. Considering Darwish’s birthplace and global recognition, the inclusion of his work in such a book seems obvious. But the move enraged right-wing members of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. “Only a society that wants to commit suicide would put Darwish’s poetry on its curriculum,” one MK seethed. When members of the ruling coalition threatened to oust then prime minister Ehud Barak over the matter with a vote of nonconfidence, Barak backed down, claiming that Israelis were “not ready” for Darwish. The fury of the debate amused the poet, who said, “Israelis do not want to teach students that there is a love story between an Arab poet and this land.” The education ministry eventually relented and allowed Jewish schools in Israel the option of studying Darwish, but it wasn’t until 2012 that the ministry approved the inclusion of Darwish in the curriculum of Arab schools.
Pay No Heed to the Rockets Page 3