Going Home

by Raja Shehadeh

  In the late 1970s, moving out of the family house before getting married was not common in conservative Ramallah. Hence there was no community of young people living on their own. Society was very family-orientated. The path to adulthood that society charted was unflinchingly clear: first, work to raise enough money to get settled, then marriage and children and, if possible, construct your own house. But at that point in my life I did not want any of this. Instead I wanted to emulate what I believed had been my father’s way of life as a young bachelor, which I imagined to be the ideal life. Though doing so did not make me feel closer to my father, I did, however, buck the trend and choose to live alone, in this stone dwelling, determined to pay no heed to prevailing social norms.

  I was relieved to find my house still standing, though it was now abandoned. Helen had died several years ago, and was already a widow when I rented from her. Her husband had been a political activist with the Communist Party and had spent many years in prison. ‘He gave me a lot of heartache,’ she once confided. After her death, her two sons emigrated to the US. At some point they will, no doubt, look to sell the house, which will fetch a high price because of the scarcity of land. Whoever buys the property will surely demolish it and use the expensive land to construct a building as high as the law allows.

  Helen was an efficient, kind and progressive working woman who never interfered with me or objected to the loud music I often played or the gatherings of friends that sometimes lasted late into the night, even though the flat that I rented shared a wall with hers. Nor to my knowledge did she comment on or gossip about my strange behaviour. In this two-room flat I tried to create a home for myself, decorating it in the manner that pleased me. I went through a phase when I smoked pot. I would close the flimsy curtains and then, concealed from the outside, escape into my own world. Sitting cross-legged in a yoga position, I would slip into various parts of my body, experiencing new sensations and passions whirling in me as I sought to still the turbulence and find my equilibrium. But they were only flimsy curtains offering limited respite until the next incursion and interruption.

  So determined was I to protect my privacy that when my father insisted that I get a phone I banished it to the laundry basket and never admitted to having one. Then one day while a friend was visiting it rang. I had forgotten to disconnect it and so out of the laundry basket came the sound of ringing. I sat still, showing no sign of awareness of the offensive intrusion, seemingly oblivious to the persistent sound. ‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ my friend asked. In a desperate effort to keep my secret, I claimed that it was the neighbour’s phone. She was too bright to be taken in by this, but too polite to contradict me as we both sat waiting for the ringing to stop.

  The windows of the abandoned house were now concealed by the overgrown shrubs entangled in the iron bars. How like a cocoon, I thought, as I looked at it from the outside.

  One afternoon in 1980 I remember returning home and realising that I did not have my front door key. I had lent my car to my brother, Samer, and forgotten to take the house key from the key-chain I handed over to him. As I waited for him to bring back the car, I stood there before the closed curtains, observing the house from the outside. Now, with the windows concealed by shrubs, it was all coming back.

  The more I looked, the more I felt that the house resembled me. The simplicity of the place was deliberate. I had come back intending to live an alternative, non-material lifestyle. I made a simple bed from blocks of wood on which I mounted a thin sheet of plywood (which I could remove and lean against the wall when the bedroom was transformed into a dance floor). I also made a bookshelf which kept tumbling down. I did not want to be a lawyer who shared the material values of other lawyers. I wanted to avoid ostentatious living, to better relate to my society, seeking to be closer to them through living like an ordinary person, simply. It was here in this house that, as a young man, I lived a life of rebellion against all sorts of conventions and materialism. I was unappreciative of father’s expressed wish to have grandchildren. I didn’t feel he had the right to expect this of me when I was not ready. I wanted to be free to live with little and walk in the hills, which at the time was not something that others did. My father thought I was self-indulgent and told me so. ‘You simply don’t want to be bothered,’ he said. At the same time I wanted to practise law – wear the tailored suits I had brought from London and go to court, donning the barrister’s black robe that I had also carried back with me. On such occasions I would wear my serious, authoritative face and proceed to play the part of the lawyer. This did not mean that I neglected my other two roles as the human rights activist who exposed Israeli violations and the writer who wrote about ordinary Palestinians carrying on with their daily lives under Israeli occupation. I had no time to waste. I proceeded with all the energy I could muster to do the work, paying no heed to what society around me thought. This was precisely what worried my father.

  During the day I wanted to be serious and work hard. At the weekend I wanted to enjoy my other interests, preserving my frivolous side and expressing that playful, juvenile aspect of my character that was still refusing to grow up. If only my father could have understood that it was the time in my life, late in arriving, when I wanted to regain and live the lost opportunities that usually come at an earlier age but which, with the onset of the occupation and the periods of prolonged curfews when I was sixteen, had to be postponed.

  I was also working on my writing, which required distance. But solitude was deemed disrespectful, weird or ill-mannered and could only indicate that I was elitist, angry or deranged. Who would choose to live alone? people wondered – unless there was something genuinely wrong with him or he was on bad terms with his family.

  There was a small garden at the back of the house which got little sun and had terrible soil, yet, ever the enthusiastic gardener, I tried to make the most of it. But it didn’t really matter if little grew there because the hills all around the house were a natural wild garden that was lovely in all seasons, with different colours throughout the year. Right next to the door there was a shrub with graceful yellow flowers which in Arabic are called asafeer al janneh (birds of paradise). Out of a slab of rock a fig tree grew. In the midst of so much chaos and confusion, fear and uncertainty, I managed to ensure isolated moments of calm, peace and beauty.

  At this period I spent a lot of time researching the legal violations the Israeli occupation was committing. I became a vocal advocate for human rights. As I looked at my former house by the fig tree, its windows now almost covered by the branches of the shrubs and trees growing in the garden, in my mind’s eye I could still see the floor carpeted with copies of military orders spread over the tiles in preparation for my testimony before the Geneva-based UN Committee investigating Israeli practices in the occupied territories. During that time in my life I had felt like a man obsessed, privy to information which had escaped others and which it was incumbent upon me to make known, and make known now, before the practices of the occupation, such as the Jewish settlements, became entrenched and it would be too late.

  Back then I believed that people wore their serious faces, as I did, at will, like a mask they could just as easily drop. I remember, when I was a student in the ninth grade, stepping into the office of the dean, Mr Farid Tabri, and being unable to stop giggling at his serious face. There he was in his office, all alone and with little to do, so he did not need to put on such a pinched, scary look. I had assumed that his serious face, with the two parallel lines engraved on his cheeks, was to keep us at bay, to intimidate us and put us in our place. Surely, when he retired alone to his office, he relaxed and perhaps managed a smile? To see him with that face when there was no one around to frighten seemed so incongruous that I could not stop giggling.

  I wanted to be multi-faced, with one face for when I was with my friends, another for the courts of law and another for when I was advocating for human rights. For the longest time when I lived in that house, I was trying
on those different masks.

  I would walk in the hills to relieve that grip over my features, starting with the face. As I walked or sat under an olive tree, I would feel each part of my face in turn relaxing, the unclenching of my teeth, the easing of the pressure in my eyes, the slow release of the sides of my mouth that had been held tight to retain the serious expression. Then the rest of the muscles in my body would, one by one, begin to loosen up. I could feel my stomach muscles soften and my shoulders expand after being hunched from hours at my typewriter. Returned to myself, I would begin to look and feel like a different man.

  In the silence of Helen’s house I also worked on writing a humorous book in which I made fun of everything, of myself and my work, which I was fond of describing as that of an administrative guerrilla. Alone, I would laugh at everything, but primarily at myself and how seriously I was taking matters. Now, after fifty years of occupation, settlements are no longer a mere possibility but a defining reality. And so it makes no sense to laugh them off. Our horizons have narrowed as the prospects for peace have vanished. I’ve aged, as has the present cast of characters at the top of the Palestinian political ladder. Our only hope is in the next generation.

  Yet even when I thought I was a rebel I still had an inflated sense of myself, believing that my work posed a threat to the Israeli authorities. I presumed that I was under surveillance and that it was likely that Israel would try and do away with my life, or that of my friends, as they had done to many prominent and effective Palestinians who participated in the struggle.

  Once, just before midnight, I was saying goodbye to a friend, Ellen Cantarow, when we heard ticking near the fuel tank of her rented car. We became worried that the car would explode when she started it. We kept circling that vehicle, trying to figure out the cause of that ticking. I finally decided to take my chance, despite the lateness of the hour, and knocked on the door of a neighbour who owned a garage. He was kind enough to check and calm us down. But then when he invited us in we got stuck with him as he raged against the occupation, directing the full brunt of his anger at my American friend. We sat there and listened to his explosive diatribe directed mainly against her country. He spoke so fast that he barely paused for breath. We felt like hostages. It was well past midnight when we were finally able to extricate ourselves from his clutches and Ellen started her car without any further explosions from either this angry man or that imaginary ticking bomb.

  My former home is now dwarfed by the tall buildings all around it. The road leading to it used to stop a few metres from my house but now continues all the way down to Wadi Al Kalb, with buildings on either side. Long gone is that old meandering track following the contours of the hills which I used to follow down to the wadi. The last time I visited the wadi I noticed that all the springs had dried up. Much of the rainwater that used to seep through the bare earth to feed these springs can no longer do so due to the massive amount of building and the paving of the roads that have sealed the earth above. Also gone are those wonderful days when I could just take off and walk in the hills, down to the valley along the old paths that started right next to my house. How lovely were the hills at every season, whether in the lush springtime or the early autumn when the different kinds of thistle bloomed with violet puffs out of the thorny head of the plant.

  It was after the false peace ushered in by the Oslo Accord of 1995 that economic development, held back for many years by Israeli-imposed restrictions, began to be fostered and financed by EU and US aid programmes. This was coupled with law reform programmes aimed at the commodification of real estate, making it possible to market apartments in a building rather than own them communally. It was a similar process to that which the British initiated in Palestine during the Mandate in order to facilitate the sale of Palestinian land to the Zionists. The change in the law made it possible for investors to build high-rise blocks and sell the individual flats. With the scarcity of land available for Palestinians, inappropriately high buildings were piled up on the hills with little space in between. Every plot had to be exploited to the maximum to make up for the high price paid to acquire it. Houses with gardens became a luxury which only a few could afford. Every city needs open green areas, breathing spaces between the dense construction. Our city cannot have those because the land left for its development and expansion is restricted. The Jewish settlements all around have the larger share of land. The settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, sits on an area larger than Tel Aviv. They have vast swathes in which to establish green open spaces, whereas we in Ramallah have to live in a confined space. On Fridays the nearby hills, which lie in what is called Area C under Israeli jurisdiction, where building is not allowed, fill up with families taking their grills and sitting under the olive trees to enjoy the outdoors. The rules imposed by Israel prevent us from turning these into proper parks.

  The area where I lived at the edge of town, which used to be pastoral, has been invaded by developments and become a busy, crowded place. The end of the street where the meandering path once began has become a crossroads, connecting roads that extend in every direction. At all times of day and night innumerable cars pass by my old one-storey, semi-detached house, heading to the various tall buildings all around it. So many roads have been opened through the once-lovely hills. The terraces and olive trees are gone. The attractive hills on the periphery, where it used to be possible to ramble, have become blocked by landslides of rubble from the nearby construction work. My old stone house by the fig tree, once surrounded by low drystone walls and situated in a veritable natural garden of rolling hills criss-crossed by ancient paths that one could take at will and walk all the way to the surrounding villages, has become confined, surrounded by tall buildings on all sides.

  Even before the problem became endemic I could see where we were heading. I knew how much the city would benefit from leaving one of the hillsides green with the stone terracing intact, yet I realised it would be futile to lobby for this. The obstacles were too many. The price of land was prohibitive. Instead I wrote and lamented the vanishing of the unique landscape. The activist in me was turned into the writer.

  And now we live in a crowded city where the beauty and innocence all around us have been destroyed. In the past it did not matter that there were no designated green areas in Ramallah, situated as it was in a large natural garden of its own. But now that the surrounding hills have been built upon, when Ramallah desperately needs those open areas, the land is not available.

  I remember standing, not long ago, on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem and seeing how the Israeli authorities were not leaving any land for the Palestinians of Jerusalem, taking what they could and changing the status of what they couldn’t into green areas, simply so that the Palestinians would be unable to use them. I consoled myself by thinking that this injustice couldn’t possibly last. As I played the role of incorrigible optimist despite all the dreadful examples of oppression I saw around me, I could sense a look of extreme sadness descending on my face, which became contorted with pain even as it strove to hide behind that expression of confidence and hope I was committed to preserve. Perhaps both faces were false.

  After I got married in 1988 I left Helen’s house, hauling with me box after box full of copies of my journals and published writings produced over the years that I’d spent there. When I think of the massive amount of writing I did about the legal and human rights aspects of the occupation and how little difference it made, I wonder whether I wasted a large part of my life on a useless activity. To warn? But whom? I was still naïve enough to believe that the world was ruled by a benevolent father who would ultimately come to our assistance and save us if only he knew. My father died and the world has abandoned us. And I’ve had to accept this. That impish look on my face is long gone.

  As I continued looking at my former house with the overgrown shrubs and trees surrounding it, a more worrisome thought came to me and I found myself asking: could it be that I have lived a mock existence of word
s, led a false paper life? And yet what gave meaning and weight to the various periods of my life was the writing I did. Could writing, then, have been the home I was always searching for?

  I do not begrudge my time as an activist. How can I? It was what gave meaning to my life then, what gave me hope, what saved me from getting depressed and giving up. It allowed me to stand up and be counted. It helped make me who I am. Was it not worth it for that? And yet as I pursued my triple profession as a lawyer, writer and human rights activist, I became arrogant and vain, and this had complicated my relationship with my father.

  Neither my father nor my mother ever visited me here. Perhaps they were ashamed of the conditions I was living in, perhaps they wanted to respect my privacy. But once, before I was due to travel to the US for another of those human rights conferences, my father drove over and honked. I went out to see who it was. He had brought me some baraziq (very thin, crisp, salty sesame cakes) from Jerusalem. He knew how much I liked these. They always reminded me of happy times spent with my grandmother in the garden at the Grand Hotel. It was a generous gesture on his part, but rather than use the opportunity of his being here without my mother to invite him in and perhaps have a man-to-man conversation, I took his present, thanked him and bid him farewell.

  Shortly after, while I was away, I learned of his murder. That brief encounter was one of my last with my father.