I Was Born There, I Was Born Here

“They’ve agreed.”

“When’s the conference?”

“Next week.”

Majid came from Doha to Amman. There our mother decided to come with him, to see me, Ramallah, and Deir Ghassanah.

On the promised day, I asked Tamim to go to Amman to accompany his grandmother and uncle on the journey. I took him as far as Jericho and he went on to Amman. Then the three of them returned together and the Alhambra was brought to life.

Majid, who hadn’t seen Ramallah since he’d gone there clandestinely on foot after the occupation in 1967, was in seventh heaven.

I had to make a great effort to prevent my mother from getting engrossed in straightening up the apartment and making improvements.

Nothing about my rented apartment pleased her. The kitchen was “the size of a needle’s eye,” of course. The living room set was “commercial furniture” and the arrangement of the chairs was “wrong — this way’s better.” She asked me to buy new kitchen equipment and what not. When she learned that I ate in restaurants, she said pityingly, “Restaurant food will make you sick, you poor thing. What could be better than home cooking?”

“You’re my guest. I’m the one who’s going to cook and do the washing up and clean the house. Okay?”

“It won’t do, my son.”

“It will and that’s it.”

She smiled like one who doesn’t want to hear.

Majid was only nine months old when the Nakba occurred in 1948 (even my youngest brother is nine months older than the State of Israel). We were living in the city of Lydda, where my father worked, and there Majid was born in 1947, his birth bringing the number of brothers to three — Mounif, the eldest, who was born in Jericho, then me, who was born in Deir Ghassanah, then Majid. The attacks on Lydda by armed Zionists struck terror into the hearts of its inhabitants, not to mention the news that reached them of the killings and forced migration to which the other Palestinian cities, towns, and villages up and down the coast had been subjected. Reports of the hundreds of thousands who had fled by boat to Gaza or on foot to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan came in quick succession. My father decided to take us back with him to our house in Deir Ghassanah. Traveling the mountain roads was extremely unsafe but it was the only way. They returned with us and the baby Majid, who was still in swaddling bands; whenever he wanted to be fed, we would pause under a tree so that my mother could give him a few gulps from her breast, waiting minutes that seemed longer than they really were because of our fear of ambushes, shelling, and the other surprises of the road.

I’ve never in my life seen a hyena, a wolf, or a jackal, but terror at the thought that they might appear on the road as we fled from Lydda to Deir Ghassanah brought them to life before my eyes. I’ve seen scorpions and vipers but never feared them as much as I did those creatures of my imagination. A child’s facts are his fears, not objective facts. On that journey, I became aware that I was involved in something beyond my power as a child to understand. In fact, now, at the moment of writing, I discover that I can’t remember its details.

Later, the Palestinians would develop a collective memory as precise as any individual’s, as though whatever had touched one of them had touched them all. I asked my mother and she tells me that the passing of a bus or a car was a temporary lifebelt. We would get on without asking where it was heading and it didn’t matter if it carried us one kilometer or took us to a village we didn’t know. What mattered was that it take us away, or even that we should have the chance to sit for a while. I urge my mother to remember. Memory refuses to come to her aid but the phrase ‘they betrayed us’ repeats itself an amazing number of times in the course of her few sentences. From her sporadic words, I piece together the atmosphere of that sad exodus. Anxiety over what people had left behind and anxiety over what lay ahead. A world vanishing and another forming in its place beyond the control of the displaced. Everything that was known making way for everything that was unknown. Self-respect taking a back seat to necessity. Only necessity.

A father, a mother carrying a baby, and two small boys — Mounif, aged seven, and me, aged four. We walked inside fear itself toward the village that we thought of as our solution. At the time, we didn’t know we were merely a tiny detail in a scene from the Nakba that befell the entire Palestinian people.

Thereafter Palestinian migrations would diversify, stretching from the coast to the mountains, from Palestine to abroad, and from one country to another, bringing the wandering in the wilderness full circle. The worst of these migrations was that of our fathers to the Gulf states, where money was plentiful. Some (I do not say all) of these produced the youth of that lost generation that received an upbringing based on affluence and a day-by-day and year-after-year fading of the memory of Palestine. Some of this generation have become used to taking and are no longer able to give. They behave as though their prosperity in the Gulf states is a natural thing that will last forever. They enter universities not by virtue of their superior academic performance and high scores but by virtue of their family’s money. The student insists from first year onward on having a car and doesn’t care who pays for it or covers its ru

Later, at the time of the Six Day War, Mounif will be working in Doha, I will be a student in Cairo, Majid will be at the University of Jordan, and ‘Alaa will be with my father and mother and attending primary school in Ramallah.

Majid decides to infiltrate on foot into Ramallah. He actually carries out his plan but is obliged to return to his studies a few days later. Since that visit, he hasn’t seen the city. The family ties that link us are totally at odds with our geographical dispersal around the world. We can no longer tell which of us is the one who cares most about these ties but we all recognize that everyone needs everyone else and that no one is happy with his forced separation from the others, whatever the reason — study, work, or the Occupation.

I’ll never forget something that ‘Alaa, whose job as an engineer forced him to live for many years in Qatar, once said. We were all grown up and had been dispersed among many countries. In his summer vacation, which isn’t more than one month a year, ‘Alaa returns to Amman and lives in bliss at being back among the family again. Once, when the time came for him to return to his job and I went with him to the airport to say goodbye, he surprised me by saying, “I’ve started to hate love.”