Soul in Exile

Fawaz Turki

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 1988
• ISBN:
  9781583675243
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Poet and essayist Fawaz Turki begins his search for answers in the hallways of the 1983 Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers. He then recalls his family's flight into Lebanon when he was eight, childhood in a refugee camp and the streets of Beirut, and years spent in Australia, France, and the United States in search of his identity, both personal and national. In describing this journey, Fawaz Turki also relates the stories of family, friends, and comrades, those who fought the battles and those who walked away from them. Together, these episodes comprise a panoramic history of a generation formed in exile, of a homeless people caught in the violent storm of Middle East politics.

1

In the panic, some children suddenly found no hands to hold. They ran up and down the coast road looking for their parents. Clusters of men and women, tired from the long trek, sat by the bushes to rest, staring into the horizon as if crazed by sorrow and incomprehension. A few miles before we reached the Lebanese border, a crowd of people gathered around a woman who lay by the wayside screaming with labor pains. No one knew that this was our last day in Palestine, that this chaos would leave a gap in our soul. And we, the children, did not know that the memory of it was later to haunt the inner history of our whole generation.

In our refugee camp in Beirut, my father complains that the Lord’s way has become wanton and absurd, but adds that every event in His creation has reason, meaning. If it had not meaning, then what has happened to us would not have happened. He could not explain the meaning of the events that led to our last day in Palestine. He just trusted that it was there, somewhere. The beginning of every act in His creation was simply the beginning of another.

Maybe he was right. No one can say. I just know that for my own generation of Palestinians our last day in Palestine was the first day that we began to define our Palestinian identity. Like the olive trees and the land and the stone houses and the sea and the dabki dances and the ululation at weddings. Everything was where it belonged. Everything coalesced into a coherent whole. It had never occurred to anyone to define it, or to endow it with any special attributes. Until we were severed from it.

I was just another eight-year-old child growing up in the refugee camps. All around me people talked about Palestine as if it were the center where all the impulses of their human identity intersected. And everybody was angry. Their anger tangled in the hair of the tents and the muddy lanes of the refugee camps. The men and women were angry because they had to count their years without the harvest. The children were angry because, as they began to acquire a past, moment by moment, touch by touch, encounter by encounter, they discovered that a sense of otherness governed their lives.

In exile, Palestinians lived in their little world and waited for a kind of deliverance. And soon our lives would intertwine with the lives of other people in the world. Then, in the overlapping of strange sorrows, it would be difficult to say whose mouth should turn angry.

In the early 1950s it was still unclear who was in exile, we or our homeland. The refugee camps we lived in were beginning to resemble the people who inhabited them.

In the winter it rained heavily. The dirt tracks of the Bourj el Barajneh camp turned to impassable mud. Families stayed in their tents or, the lucky ones, in their mud huts. After the torrents came the bitter frosts. The cold ate into our flesh. The whole camp was transformed into a swamp, with steam coming out of the belly of the earth and our mouths, and the walls of the mud houses.

The people were wrapped in rags given to them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. Rags originally “donated by the American people.” The girls walked around wearing baseball hats. Out of the sacks our UNRWA flour rations came in mothers cut underpants for their sons. I often walked around with my behind covered with a handshake and the proclamation that the contents were a “gift from the American people.”

Everybody shivered. All over the camp, the emaciated dogs died. Every day had a thousand and one wrinkles and a thousand and one knots. The men looked for employment, for food. They avoided the police, who were then implicating Palestinians in everything from inflation and communist plots to cold spells. And once every month they lined up, as if in a funeral procession, to receive their UNRWA rations of flour, powdered milk, and dates. The rations lasted a week. Then people ate words. The words led to orange groves in Jaffa, to olive trees in Tershiha, to cloudless summers in Haifa. And back again to Bourj el Barajneh.

In the summer it was fiercely hot. Big bowflies buzzed in the air. A sense of ennui, of resignation, ruled the camp, our lives. It was going to take a new generation to bring down the camp’s flag of surrender and raise a flag of rebellion in its place.

In the 1950s I lived in the streets of Beirut. There was nowhere else to go. I worked in the streets, played in the streets, grew up in the streets, virtually all the streets of the city. In those days, Beirut was owned by street people. They poured over them, day and night, in an intricate communion with a city crazed by its colonial past and class dichotomies. Street peddlers, lottery-ticket sellers, shoeshine boys, hustlers, pimps, black marketeers, as well as Palestinian children in oversized business jackets down to their knees, donated by UNRWA, selling chewing gum and trinkets. At the age of ten I sold chewing gum, trying to hide my Palestinian accent for fear of getting beaten up by Lebanese kids who called me “a two-bit Palestinian” and a coward who “sold his land to the Jews.” That is, till I learned to band with other Palestinian kids in the streets for protection, for union, for commonality.

We wandered the streets of Beirut together, peddling, shining shoes, hustling, stealing. And talking. We were all Palestinians and we all came from the camps. We spoke the same language, lived the same tensions. The geography of our souls intersected. We called ourselves Awlad Falasteen. A name that you choose for yourself, that you endow with your own symbolic constructs, has an indefinable exquisiteness. It unifies you, brings you close to yourself.

The streets of Beirut, as we worked and lived and played there, held a pain that gave us meaning. The image of children wandering around selling Chiclets chewing gum outside sidestreet cafes and restaurants and schools and office buildings has meaning. The aimlessness of street life has meaning. The sun was so hot it made the streets sing. The sounds came from everywhere, as they always do in the streets of third world cities. These ancient streets were so narrow and the houses were so close to each other on either side that people were constantly on their balconies, talking, shouting, shrieking at each other. The peddlers, with their carts, shouted the virtues of their goods to heaven. All of this overpowered us, demolished us, till we learned to assimilate it and make it a part of our consciousness. And when the streets breathed, the smell blew at us as if it had come past centuries, after circling the oceans and the deserts and the stars. And always the faces. The faces of people earnest with impatience or quiet resignation. In some streets it seemed as if there was not an inch of space to spare. Human beings were walking, living, working, riding their buses and trams, tending their shops, sitting in their cafés, as if shoulder to shoulder. Nobody knew for sure why they cried or mourned. They just did. And waited for a Messiah, a prophet, a revolutionary, a rebel, an ideologue to explain their subjective pain, and give it objective coherence.

In the midst of all of this, we Palestinian children tried to make a living. Going to school was still a dream, a precious thought, like first love.

Ibrahim Adel became my friend almost the first day we arrived in Beirut. His family’s tent was next to ours. We took to working the streets together. He shined shoes. Some of his customers called him Baldy. In fact, most Palestinian children were called Baldy in the streets. When our parents sent us to a barber (usually to one from Palestine who now made a living with a chair and a small table with the tools of his trade on it, propped up against a mud wall somewhere down the end of a dirt track in our refugee camp), we had all our hair shaved off. That way, because we needed a haircut only every three months or so, our fathers could save a lot of money. We often held that against our fathers. Ibrahim did not. He worshiped his father.

Abu Ibrahim^* was revered by everyone at the camp because he had been a guerrilla in the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine and two of his brothers had fallen in battle. He was also a “people’s poet,” an activist who composed poetry orally and recited it to the masses, often political poetry about the land and struggle and freedom and life and death in the cause of Palestine. When people in the camp, sitting in the evening around the kerosene lamps in sidestreet cafés sipping their tea and smoking their waterpipes, came across a metaphysical question to which they were hard put for an answer, they murmured the common Palestinian phrase: “Surely the answer, brothers, lies only in the heart of the poet.” And if Abu Ibrahim happened to be there, they all turned silently to him. He would pull gently on his thick moustache, sheepishly looking down the bridge of his nose, and begin: “Brothers, as the Prophet Mohammed revealed … and the poet confirmed …”

Ibrahim would always be there, looking up at his father, hanging on his every word.

In the streets, Ibrahim never learned to hustle, to fend for himself. We called him Maktabi (the library) because he was always reading books and because we were awed by his ability to write the English alphabet. He did not know any English yet, but he could transliterate any word in Arabic into English letters. All of which was never an asset in the streets.

One day Ibrahim and I are downtown working a street together. He with his shoeshine gear slung over his shoulder and I with my supply of chewing gum. On formidably hot days like this one the heat takes your breath away. If you walk for more than a block, you feel you are about to choke, your lungs struggling for air. On such days we worked the cafés, where it was cool inside, and even cool outside because the waiters would splash buckets of water every now and again on the pavement in front of the tables. Ibrahim and I have not eaten. We are both anxious to make some money, enough money to buy a falafel—a vegetable patty—or better still a shawarmeh, a chopped meat sandwich.

Usually when there was no food around the house because the UNRWA rations were gone and we had to leave without breakfast, the kids from Awlad Falasteen could be seen around the Beirut port, picking up oranges, apples, tomatoes, and the like that had fallen from the vegetable and fruit crates being shipped to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond. Sometimes Ibrahim and I would go to the American University of Beirut campus, sneak into the architecture department, where students would have their lunch bags ready for them before they went on their regular outings to study city buildings, and simply walk off with four of five of the bags. We were never caught.

Today it is too hot to go anywhere. Ibrahim walks around the Mashrek Café, near the Corniche, desperately soliciting business. He looks even to me, so little, so trusting, so vulnerable, as he maneuvers his way around the tables offering to shine shoes.

When he stops by Abu Majid’s table, I know there is going to be trouble. Abu Majid is a neighborhood zaim—in the Lebanese tradition of the 1950s a huckster who lived, and earned his living, by the code of the bully. Like other neighborhood zaims, Abu Majid is known to have extensive holdings in business and politics—established politics being, in those days, as authentic a source of income as any other. His friends, like him, are thugs who prey on the poor and the helpless in the neighborhood.

In addition to this, Abu Majid hates Palestinians. Sitting at his table at the Mashrek Café surrounded by his friends, he is often heard mimicking our accent and talking, between giggles, about how he had just picked up his food rations at the UNRWA depot.

I stand in a corner of the café watching Ibrahim. The damp penetrating heat I feel is the heat of hatred. I hate this man and his friends. And his world. And ours. When a child hates, it is the voice of reason traveling home over lost roads, with the sound of blood rushing to the ears. One does not “learn” to hate. A child hates because it has been robbed of conditions of love. Standing in a corner of the Mashrek Café that day, I hate this man and his universe.

“Do you want your shoes shined, zaim?” Ibrahim asks Abu Majid.

“Well, son of the camps, son of Palestine! We love Palestinians here,” he says, turning to his friends with a knowing smile. “Right brothers?”

They all mumble their agreement. I know immediately that this repulsive creature, made inhuman by his calling as a zaim, is about to play a practical joke on Ibrahim, to humiliate him, because that is how people like Abu Majid and his friends derive their enjoyment.

“I will shine your shoes for a quarter of a lira,” Ibrahim says.

“I will give you half a lira,” the zaim replies, again looking knowingly at his cronies.

Ibrahim’s face lights up and he proceeds to put down his shoeshine pack.

“Before I give you the money, you have to do one thing.”

My friend looks up as if nothing unusual is about to happen. “Sure, what would you like done?”

“First, you have to kiss my foot.”

Ibrahim remains squatting behind his gear, staring at the man. The request has taken the will out of his muscles, his ability to respond.

Around the café, no one seems to notice. Busboys are running around with burning coals for the customers’ waterpipes. Waiters are shouting to other waiters to bring a new deck of cards to a table whose occupants, in turn, are shouting greetings to people sitting at other tables. Outside there are beggars and lottery-ticket sellers and vendors and veiled women. And children in rags, with no hands to hold theirs. And people haggling over prices of food and soap and rosewater and a respite from pain.

“You want me to kiss your foot?” asks Ibrahim incredulously.

“For that you get half a lira.”

I can see Ibrahim is getting flustered at the strange proposition. I cringe with mortification as I see my friend prepare to kiss the zaim’s foot, looking abjectly at the gathering. I am consumed by hate. I am hating Ibrahim with all my might because I know he is going to do it. I am furious at him. I am furious at everything around me.

“Kiss my foot, boy, kiss my foot, son of the camps,” the man is saying, almost shouting with delight. His companions are roaring with laughter and anticipation of the result of their practical joke.

Ibrahim squats there in front of the man and waits for the excitement and laughter to die down. And I am thinking of that day, about a year before we left Palestine, when my uncle had brought home a hand grenade and I was allowed to hold it for a moment. I remember feeling the cool of the metal on my skin, contemplating the web of lines on its surface and being fascinated by the magic it transmuted to me. The terror of knowing how such a small object could wreak devastation on an enemy. Now, as I stand in the café, I am holding the same grenade, shouting “die, die, die, you mob of two-bit Lebanese sons of whores. Die.” I am throwing the hand grenade into the crowd of people as they contentedly drink their glasses of tea and torment us. Because we have less than they do. Because we are hungry. Because we are Palestinians. But when it explodes, it explodes only in my head and my soul. It is only my sense of worth that explodes. My rage. At the whole world. At the whole community of civilized nations and peoples that send us blankets and figs and powdered milk. That give us a tent to live in. And a foot to kiss. No one dies in this explosion, no one is mutilated, except us, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, as we silently go about our business of growing up.

We Palestinians often picture ourselves as a proud people, a people hardened by adversity to the point where we would not compromise our meaning. Well in the 1950s we were, as children, hungry. And hunger has a meaning, a logic, all its own. Just as our metaphysical need to be free declares its own form of meaning, so does our physical need to eat. A human being, triggered uncontrollably to gratify either need, will do anything—and a child will more readily than an adult.

The man puts his foot forward and Ibrahim bends down to kiss it. Just as my friend is about an inch away, the man withdraws it. There is a sudden explosion of laughter. The zaim’s friends are slapping their knees and doubling up with joy. Ibrahim demands his half lira, and the zaim, in between roars of laughter, repeats: “But you did not kiss my foot, you did not kiss it.”

“I want my money,” Ibrahim is demanding, virtually in tears.

“You will get your half lira only after you have kissed my foot.”

The man puts his foot forward again. “Kiss it now. You’ll get your money.”

Again Ibrahim tries. And again the man pulls his foot away and his friends break up.

I go over to Ibrahim and drag him away. We walk out of the Mashrek Café and head to the Corniche, where we sit by the water.

Ibrahim, my friend. Ibrahim, whom we called “the library.” Ibrahim, whose full name translates to Abraham the Just. Ibrahim, who is like me, and other Palestinian children growing up in the streets, learning what living in exile means.

We sit by the water for a long while, not saying much.

“Sons of whores,” he suddenly shouts. “May the Lord destroy their homes.”

“And pour acid on their souls,” I add. “May they all die away from their homeland, in the ghourba, in the countries of others.”

“Hey, tell me,” Ibrahim asks with passion, “when do you think we shall return to Haifa?”

“I don’t know for sure. A year or two. Maybe three.”

“You think it’s going to be that long?”

So you are abused by time. And wizened by it. For every moment in your existence, as a Palestinian child, thrusts you beyond your fixed meaning, a meaning that is difficult to explain to others. Meaning, after all, is hardly neutral or reducible to a static definition divorced from its existential setting. The range of significance that we endow ourselves and our history with is irreducibly Palestinian, the product of infinite adaptations in our social system. And it is, in the common sense of the word, private.

How the fuck do I explain why I am angry at the West, at the rich and powerful in the Arab world? How do I explain why I am now a revolutionary, why the vision of the return to Palestine has been, all my life, indispensable to my feelings, as it was to the feelings of my parents’ generation and later became to the feelings of the generation of Palestinians that grew up after mine? How do I explain any of that without explaining the overlap of every event in my life and my history and my social system? And how do we go about repudiating the sense of otherness thrust upon us, without repeated spasms of despair, without muttering cruel prayers and drinking rain?

In the end you just return to the streets, which you have come to know so well and with which you have developed a subtle relationship of hate and love. In Beirut, as in other third world citie...