After this brief reflection, I decide to lose the man in the blue day coat. He walks too slow and I am unnerved by the high gray wall, prison-like, surrounding the cemetery. I have no particular desire to get to know who lives here, and apart from observing the people around me, which quickly bores me, I am suddenly wandering without a motive.

I deal with a momentary crisis as I confront a particular anxiety that tends to flare in the space of death. Perhaps it is not anxiety after all, but comfort in the certainty of knowing where I will be after my death. I am all too familiar with cemeteries. Not comfortable, but familiar. As a child, near my house in suburban Houston, I once discovered a forgotten cemetery from the 1920s, where members of a small family were buried together. I told only my sister. Together, we would ride our bicycles to this enchanted Texas forest and tell stories over their graves. One of the buried was a child, only 4 or 5 years old when she died. My sister said it was the plague that killed them. I said they were murdered. We never bothered to know the history of the cemetery or who the family was. For all I know there are children, today, trampling over their weed-hidden graves, oblivious of what lays beneath them.

Just like here, where pilgrims everywhere trample over graves. Some are crying over the dead they never knew, and some are strolling in a meditation.

In Nazareth, I lived a bone’s throw from the town’s oldest cemetery. When a person died, a ritual ensued that began at the mosque and ended in the cemetery. The procession always passed my home and it was nearly impossible to not know it was happening, for it was the local imam, always leading the procession in song, whose powerful voice came to captivate me. So spectacular was his voice that I developed a curious attachment to these processions. The coffin, perched on the shoulders of men, always followed the imam. I longed to participate but I never saw women in the crowd. Interpreters of Islam claim women are forbidden to attend funerals. I once asked my mother why and she said it is because women wail too loudly. And although I never participated in a funeral, I spent a lot of time in the cemetery near my apartment. It was a place I frequented to write. It was where I went when I needed privacy. Most graves were disarranged and unmarked, distinguished only by a rock.

But here, at Père Lachaise, routine determines action. Flowers are placed, tears are shed, photos are captured. And as for Edith and Jim? They are still singing: Why do you leave us at the edges of cities?

this is a photograph of eros, a woman i made using malleable wire.

The pigeon, always present in this prose, believes not in hibernation. Perched on a bookshelf of a room not his, he coos, with his comrades, only when it is dark. The battle starts promptly when you turn on the light. You see that he has destroyed all your novels, including your cherished lamp. You call for help. He interrupts you with doctrines of an -ism, claiming the house was his long before yours, and points at the historical proof: shit, two-feet thick, that is crusted on the ground. You repudiate mythology and tell him it is not convincing, and that building a wall made of shit is an even greater fabrication. You try sweetly to negotiate with him: I stay, but you can have the roof. You tell him he can have the satellites and ledges, and any other rooftop crevice to perch and shit on. You think you have convinced him; but, when you later turn on the light, you find that he is now perched on the window, ready to announce an air strike of shit and piss. You throw a book at him, the only weapon you can find, and you think you have killed him. But right when you are about to celebrate victory, he swarms at you with a combative impulse, knocking you down to the ground. His contempt does not subdue you, but you happen to be tired: a fatigue convincing enough for you to believe that the only solution is to obtain a reconciliation with the pigeon.

…because little girls need guns, too.

It was May 15, (the date of the Nakba) and an exhibition was organized by a friend of mine who had been collecting household items from historic Saffuriyeh. One could politely call them antiques: the irons and scissors, mirrors and pots, carpets and jewelry, but that word seems too pretentious. These items were much more meaningful, for they laid bare a history one could never forget: items that were left behind when the villagers of Saffuriyeh fled their homes in 1948. Thousands waited, wanting to go back, but the village was surrounded by unfamiliar people brandishing weapons and divine manifestations. They waited and waited, but for each day the people waited the feeling of indignation became more unbearable. And so, one day, the people went back into their homes and took back what was theirs – their brushes and clothing, food and canisters, pipes and cutlery – all that they could hold was carried away to their itinerant homes in nearby Nazareth.

There she was, walking around the room singing and smiling. When she saw an old pair of brass scissors that once belonged to a barber of Saffuriyeh she looked around for acknowledgement then picked the scissors up and pretended to cut her hair, which was loosely covered by a white scarf.

A crowd gathered around her, and so began her monologue: I am 77 years old (or is it 81?) and I was born here. No matter that she was unaware of her age, for her memory of everything else was acute. With pride and humor, she told us stories about her childhood in her birthplace, Saffuriyeh: a village in the north of Palestine that was once surrounded by innumerable trees. Today, it is a colony named Tzippori where Jewish-Israeli settlers live inside the ravaged memories of homes not theirs. She retracted the statement about her age. I don’t know how old I am, I don’t know when I was born, she said. I imagined what the empty inscription on her tombstone would inevitably say. When people ask me how old my father was when he died, I respond with hesitancy and a vague number. He never had a birth certificate, like the lady in the scarf. We calculated that he may have been born in the late ‘30’s or early ’40’s, but we never precisely knew.

Saffuriyeh – that is my town, the lady in the scarf said. I lived there, we lived there. We had a home but it’s gone now. The lady stopped talking and went back to her reflective nature. Her clothes looked big on her. She looked like a little girl dressed in her father’s coat and mother’s heels. A costume, one would assume, of the archetypal shrunken matriarch. She smiled that joyful smile again and began to sing.

How odd it must have been for her to step into that room, I thought. It was decorated precisely as it would have been 62 years ago. Did she know it was all fabricated? No matter. This is her time to play. And so she picked up and put down all the pieces that lay bare on the shelves, whether it was the oversized mortar that was once used to pound herbs, or the hair comb that looked like it had been made in haste – she played and played as if the world was on pause in 1948, singing all along. I pictured my mother standing in our kitchen wearing a floral dress and singing as she did when she cleaned or cooked. I searched for my memories as she searched for hers. There were moments when the time and space confused her, but onward she went gazing at the broken memories surrounding her. Pay no heed to the fluorescent lights above your head or the fabricated landscape outside the window. Pay no heed, I wanted to tell her. But I never did. I never even asked for her name.

You are slowly dying, Israel. Your racialized Zionism continues to be a threat to the moral stability of Israeli nationalism. Jewish-Israelis are fleeing back to their home countries, kids are refusing to join the army, and many people are asking themselves what this is all worth. The continued existence of a Jewish supremacist/racist settler-colony is being delegitimized and the world is uncovering the truth of your apartheid policies.

The reactions are pasted below, anonymously.

^^^^

Denial: I am not an apartheid state.

Anger: I want to kill more Palestinians, annex more of their land, and appropriate more from their culture!

Bargaining: What if I give the Arabs their very own state? But it must be demilitarized, and I have to control the borders, air, and land.

Depression: I am only defending myself, but everyone hates me and delegitimizes my existence.

Acceptance: I am an apartheid state and I need to cover it up.

^^^^

Denial: Zionism is not threatening the moral stability of Israeli nationalism.

Anger:  I will just have to dramatically increase the amount of money I spend into making sure everyone else believes that as well.

Bargaining:  I should loosen up some of the laws on the Arab-Israelis to make it look like they are part of our society.

Depression:  There is no way to maintain Jewish hegemony and coexist with a rapidly increasing non-Jewish presence within our borders.

Acceptance:  Maybe we are threatening moral stability by excluding others, but so what? We have suffered enough. Never again.

^^^^

Oh wall of all walls.  The way you cut and carve the landscape to caress that which you hold most dear.  The towering obstacle you provide those who tend to your loving foundation. What is thy ultimate objective?  Why split the whole that supports you best?

Oh wall of all walls, when will you learn?  What of your ancestors and their deeds which were ultimately failures? Your brick and mortar are no match for the fluid which seeps a dark burgundy and stains your structure.  The grit, moistened by those who dare pass before, now crumbles as the rains from heaven reveal your inevitable demise.

Oh wall of all walls, why do you bother, when you know you crack the earth upon which you must stand?

Denial:  I am a wall and there is nothing you can do to surmount me.

Anger: I will stand here and wreak havoc on your daily lives and make it impossible for you to be as one, divided you are conquered!!

Bargaining: OK I will take down part of my wall, and this in turn justifies the existence of the rest.

Depression: I was only built out of necessity and now i am covered in epithet and cacography.  Why am I so ugly?

Acceptance:  There is no purpose to my existence, as history has shown us time and time again that I only cork an already shaken champagne bottle.

^^^^

Denial: I arrived to an empty desert. “Them” Bedouins attacked me from seven directions! oh! the horrid memory! They then ran away when I gloriously fought back, I won. I secured my walls.

Anger: I won’t forget! I won’t forgive! I kill to live!! (How could they make me kill their kids?!)

Bargaining: WELL!! I leave them this vast desert! They keep this entire tiny Oasis.

Depression: How can I ever give back what is rightfully mine (I have supporting divine documents)…..

Acceptance: My name is Israel, I am a born serial war criminal, I must live with my nature, and I deserve to be loved.

^^^^

Denial: This is my homeland, my holy land and I am of the chosen people.

Anger: What are these “bedouin” gentiles doing on my land?  I will kill and oppress them and make life hell for these subhumans who are trying to take over my holy land.

Bargaining: Perhaps I can trick the world into thinking that they are the terrorists and that way I don’t actually have to face the horrors that I have done.

Depression: I can’t understand why people don’t see that this is Jewish land and that only Jews have rights to this land.

Acceptance: I am a settler colonialist that has been oppressing and ethnically cleansing another group of human beings.

# 1: The Palestinian Libertine

And what of the Palestinian woman bent on proving herself as liberated? She uses sex and sexuality. Let me promptly tell you where she stands.

“I love the hallucinogenic feeling of the flame on my tongue and fingertips.”

To her, being open sexually defies all conventional standards of the Palestinian woman; it defies being traditional; it, for her, means freedom. Their circles are incestuous. She sleeps with she, and he with her. Of course, this caricature plays only with the sons and daughters of elite fathers. She keeps to her performance by manifesting her anxieties and talking about prohibitions, mostly. Her life is tragic, she insists on what is factual: that history barely mentions her;  not because it is the truth but because she is hindered, somewhat, by her two lovers.

Depending on her mood and victim, she exoticizes her story to those she seeks to seduce – a Bedouin from the Galillee, an unwanted child from Kufr Kar’eh, a descendent of Armenia, or a black African from Jerusalem (if she’s tanned enough.) No matter that nobody takes her seriously. She is unshackled and happens to be tired of being a woman – only she does not know how to say this.

Tattooed on each of her breasts is an ant: one queen ant and one worker ant. This is a reminder, she will say, that the empire needs constant suckling.

*************************************************************************

# 2: The Arabist Journalist

She wears white linen, smokes duty-free Marlboros, and sips her beer at a pseudo-Italian café called Pronto.

“Where there’s a church, there’s a liquor store,” she says with conviction, as if revealing a secret.

Holding her cigarette with a hand of fragility, she talks in a melancholic voice, a voice that tells you she’s been far from home for too long. She is alone. Her hair is tied. She looks as if she would be inspired by T.E. Lawrence. Carrying a plastic bottle filled with vodka in her purse, she insists on speaking in Orientalized Arabic – a process that deconstructs the very concept of phonetics. Twelve years it’s been since the porous red-faced woman left her Ford truck in the driveway of her rural East Coast home; she says this while convincing a young Palestinian man that “it’s all worth it”, that her work in the Middle East has helped people.

I watch her from a nearby table and all I can think of is that blue alien in the Avatar movie that everyone shamelessly talks about. They say he helps to liberate the natives, I say it’s a bunch of neo-imperialist propaganda.

“You know what I’d give for a hot dog and some ketchup?”

Aha!, her true motives come out. She files and flies, day in and day out, forgetting her story by sunset after fishing for stupor from the sky. It’s the “conflict” they will say, same shit different day.

*************************************************************************

# 3: The American Fetishist

I know nothing detailed, nothing perfectly true and substantial about her. All that I know is from what her words and actions tell me. She keeps up to the demands of a different reality, one made of the mind and the imagination. And so it is that I absorbed this assemblage – a sudden barge of repeated and self-righteous virtual imagining – in a land of contradictions where caricatures seek to “become” in a land under siege.

A composite being emerges in a burnt orange scarf that covers her mopped hair – an article worn, she surmises, to display her cultural sensitivity. Dressed in neo-colonialist sartorial, a white linen tunic and Jesus sandals, she came to the Bank to work with a solidarity movement. No, I mean to study Iran. Iran? Why come to Palestine to study Iran? Never mind you – I was abandoned by my Iranian father you see? And my mother made sure I learned Arabic. Arabic? Iranians do not speak Arabic, dear.  Never mind you – I found my love, and want to help develop this land.

It does not matter to us, dear fetishist, if you offer extreme courtesy and rush to wash the dirty foot of that wretched atheist. Fulfillment will not be found here.

Her idealisms are a reaction to the intifada stories told from a male Palestinian perspective wrapped in romanticizations. Influenced by the heat and violence, and their tragedies of being Palestinian, the man wearing the red Che shirt and keffiyeh – the Palestinian Romeo – self-aggrandizes a collective past, exploiting a people’s sorrow. He likes his women crusty. No matter. You fit the role. The activist-cum-fetishist pities the man, and asks to comfort him in bed. Amidst the political adventures she unravels herself in, she starts to love – unreal, lopsided love. But once she catches a glimpse of her newfound pet tarsier whispering his tragedies to another woman, a Swedish NGO worker probably, she ventures on to the next tragedy, only this time told in three acts, not nine.

Every day is like yesterday but with a new name. She does not sleep. Every day they eat tabbouleh made by men in a small kitchen, drink almaza from a glass bottle, and talk about the commodification of the image with cosmopolitan crowds: they who raise their petty bourgeoisie pinkies to the trinkets of whiskey and waltzes. Of course, there is no such thing. In Hamra, the same 19 people attend every art exhibition and lecture. When a movement consists of the same 19 people, there is no movement at all. I have to insist on this. Sorry Beirut but you are draining me with your intellectual masturbation and coteries of pontification. This is not an open letter. I make an exception to those who are true and sincere to decolonization and liberation. This is not an open letter.

*Nazareth Anxities*

I live in an asylum: an outdoor institution where hunchbacks and sexually repressed boys follow my every thought. They consume me. It seems that I, too, have been inflicted with a sort of hysteria; there are traces of sorrow in my steps. I suppose the mad are not really mad, they are people who are capable of embracing their anxiety. So if anxiety is a way of control and I am unable to embrace it, am I a capitalist, then, of desire? If all the interests that I produce and consume have been shifted to desire, then maybe I am a prisoner of that which is not absolute. Dostoevsky rejects the absolute (2 x 2 is not 4) but I make sense of none of these images. All I hear is the rain and the hulk. Somewhere in the streets below he is thumping and screaming the incoherent.

*Yucatan Sketches*

When Adelita died, the girl with the gypsy scarf mourned by painting tulips on her face – white tulips because that was the color of Adelita’s skin. She never worked outside like the rest of her comrades. The girl with the gypsy scarf liked to be comforted; sometimes she was much too expectant of it. Love, to her, was something she could only feel from afar, so she loved almost everyone from her window: Emile, the man who smuggled weapons; Fernando, the revolution’s strategist; Samuel, the man who documented every death; and even Marabel, the woman who seduced the enemy for information. The girl with the gypsy scarf mourned for Adelita on the day of the dead by dressing up as death. She held her scythe and walked the streets, but the ritual did not satiate her.  Adelita was the only person who could ever satisfy the gypsy girl’s longings and calm her chronic hysteria. And so she walked past.

*Ceylon Scribbles*

In Vavuniya, the Sri Lanka Army is dressed in full combat.  Roads in Sri Lanka’s North-East Province are mostly unpaved, and every 10 km there is a checkpoint or military outpost made of palmyrah fronds and collected timber from the nearby arid forest.  Charles, a Tamil Christian, lives in Vavuniya with his wife and two sons. Despite running a successful garment trade in Jaffna, he – like thousands of his neighbors – fled the northern peninsula in 1996. He boasts how the only piece of ‘furniture’ he took with him is his antique piano. Now, he runs a small and modest music academy where he is finalizing edits for an album that will be released soon.

]]> http://www.sousanhammad.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=260 0 http://www.sousanhammad.com/blog/?p=222 http://www.sousanhammad.com/blog/?p=222#comments Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:40:39 +0000 admin http://www.sousanhammad.com/blog/?p=222 I wait to be approached by the supreme marker, the Israeli “security” officer who tags passports of the departed with a number that will decide the traveler’s fate. A group of Americans are in the queue beside me and so begins her monologue: What was yough pughpose of visiting Isghayel? Do you have a bomb with you? Weapons? Whegh in Isghayel did you go? Do you have any fghiends in Ghamallah? and on and on and on… As the lady moves to the next group, I, anxious and curious, ask the Americans what number they received. Number? yeah, what number did she give you? Uhhh…I’m not following you. let me see your passport. you see? I point to the sticker on the passport where there is a number  hidden between chickenscratch and Hebrew. see the 3? Oh… so what does that mean? asked the bemused American who looked like a soldier. Yes, I thought, he is definitely a soldier…

It was at this moment when I decided to stage a teach-in at Ben Gurion airport’s check-in line. If these tourists don’t know how Palestinians are treated then they will get a very brief lecture. Basically, it’s racial profiling, I say, by using a marking system with barcodes and all – it looks fucking sophisticated, but it’s really all systematic… and racist. You will know this because of their machinated reactions. Actually, sometimes I wonder if the head of airport security is human. But that’s another story. Let’s start with the marking system. Numbers go from 1 to 6. You got a 3 and that means you are neutral, most probably you are a religious tourist but in this case you are a U.S. soldier from Iraq who came to see the besieged birthplace of Jesus. Actually, said the soldier, I am based in Georgia. Ah…well, I guess that is why you got a 3 because if you were in Iraq and the girl saw that on your passport you wouldn’t get a 3, you would probably get a 5. A “3” is safe, you won’t get questioned and your bags won’t get torn apart. You don’t want a 4, 5 or 6. What number do you get? he asks. I usually get a 5 or a 6 – which entails a puerile interrogation, getting poked at with a piece of cotton on a stick while taking your clothes off then on, and what I like to call V.I.P. treatment: a ‘shadow’, which is someone who has to walk you to your gate. A “6” is kind of like the Nazi’s yellow star. Remember in the Holocaust how German soldiers would pin a yellow star on a Jew to demarcate his or her fate? Well, the 6 is the worst and it’s usually the Palestinians who get it. A 4 or 5 will also get you questioned and x-rayed, but it’s not like the 6er whose books she or he carries has to be “analyzed” by the Israeli kid who just graduated from high school. G-E-N-E-T. Jeen Gennett? he will say. What is this thief’s joughnal ah? Oh, it’s really fascinating – you should read it. It’s everything you ever wanted to know about sex and death, especially if you like men. (This will take the kid off track from his trained routine.) Back to the marking system. Now, a 1 means you are a white Russian, or Israeli settler. The 1’s are the chosen ones – they are treated like gods and even get to skip in line at the ticket counter. The 2 could mean you are a half-Jew or a brown Jew. Watch and see what happens to me.

Three hours later…

She sits down at a table  in the airport’s cafeteria next to people who are speaking Arabic. Filled with indignation and impatience the girl puts her bags down and looks at the young Israeli security officer who shadows her every move. why do you do this? It is protocol. protocol? don’t talk to me about protocols, this is absolutely racist – everyone in line with me was Palestinian. We do this for your safety. she looks into his eyes and they are empty, she wonders if he is real. safety? when’s the last time something happened in this airport? Well….that’s exactly it – never. exactly, never.

The girl gets up to get a coffee. He follows. i’m just getting a coffee – you stay and watch my things – that’s your job right?

The portly light-haired security officer asks her about Jose Saramago – the author of the book she is reading. you’re interrupting me, i was just at the part when Ricardo Reis is being interrogated by a police officer. Why is he being interrogated? no reason. they are skeptical of him because he is a writer. Ah, these writers.

She wants to mention all the Palestinian writers that the Mossad has assassinated - but stays quiet. She knows her role.

By the time she boarded her flight to Berlin – she wanted nothing more than to sleep. Her mind was elsewhere – already nervous about her re-entry in five days. If they deny me entry, I will go to Beirut, or maybe Amman – or Cairo…or…and on her mind wanders, anticipating her return home.

It was yesterday morning when I decided that I needed a more visceral reminder of the State’s brutality, so I packed a small bag and headed to Jerusalem…well, first to West Jerusalem. At the Afula bus station, while in transit, I witnessed a “roadside memorial” if you will. An orthodox Jewish man whose beard fell down to his chest was holding black leather straps in his hand. He ushered a group of young Jewish kids who wore baggy jeans and baseball caps to his table of worship and tied the black leather straps neatly around each of their arms. The old man then exchanged their baseball caps for yarmulkes and tied a Lego block the size of a Buick around their heads. I, having attended the imaginary school of heretics at the age of 9, felt out of place once the servants of god began to shake and convulse to the written scriptures they held. Then, the negotiations. Processions of Prayer for free? No, no young boys. You must pay for God to forgive you. Of course, the conversation was in Hebrew, which I do not care to learn, but I noticed the exchange of currency and dissatisfaction on the boy’s faces. (And I’m usually right about my assumptions anyway.)

I board the bus, penned between soldiers wearing boots and strapped with M-16s. Everyone says I tend to exaggerate my anxieties but try being on a bus filled with 18-year-old unwavering nationalists who are armed and weary. You should witness the beauty, though, that is on my left: the hills and shrubs, olive trees and cactus, the stone – the long life of the stone whose birth we did not witness, and death we will not see. It makes me forget about this anger I’ve conjured. When I left Nazareth I walked past my friend’s ‘holy land’ souvenir shop, Where are you going? to Ramallah, When are you coming back? tomorrow, That’s a short trip  for such a long trip. i need a reminder. And so she left in haste.

So here I am, reminded of the sheer malice of Israel’s Apartheid. The word indignation comes to mind, but I suppose somewhere in some places people struggle for love, too. You must see West Jerusalem to believe it, and how the sun penetrates the watchtowers at the cattle-trade checkpoints. Then it’s the sulta falistineeya (Palestinian Authority.) It’s one oppression after another. Anger then subjection, subjection then anger – I wonder sometimes if my dissatisfaction will be everlasting.

Four hours pass and I reach Ramallah. I used to like traveling on the buses from Jerusalem to Ramallah because I would hear the most profound and absurd stories from Palestine’s pessimists, but it seems that a silent endemic is passing from traveler to traveler. Nobody spoke a word. I continue reading Saramago while looking out from my window on occasion. Once in Ramallah, I met with my friend at a pseudo Italian café where all the NGO workers go. On one table a British man is talking about the ‘conflict’ with some guy wearing a suit, and at the table next to Ra’fat and I was a Palestinian Romeo seducing an American Fetishist, probably some NGO worker. Can we go somewhere else? I hate this fucking place, it’s not good for my anxieties. He agreed and we left.

An overcast fills the sky. It is raining wherever one looks. The night freezes and so does the rain. A two month hiatus from Ramallah and what do I see? Hail, more and more tyrranical police on the street, shiny new road signs, and yellow hyphens painted on the road to separate traffic (shoo hatha al kharabeesh? a driver said to me.) But the best of all, or most absurd depending on how you look at it, is the metered parking. Funded by who, you ask? The World Bank. Because, you see, Palestinians need to know the value of western civil structure and order. No matter how silly it all seems, Hope is emerging – this is what North American journalists claim. I am convinced that Salam Fayyad, the appointed prime minister, has scissors sewn to his hand. He is the ubiquitous ribbon-cutting ceremonial puppet. A check point opens? He’s there, cutting a big red ribbon. An absurd spectacle celebrating some new Guinness world record that’s just been broken? He’s there, cutting a big red ribbon. A child who was born in prison is freed after two years? He’s there, cutting a big red ribbon.

I go to drink coffee with my familiar friends in Ramallah. Some Danish professor sits with us and asks us questions about Palestinian icons for a book he is writing (what promising field work, I say to myself.) I am surrounded by comrades who also happen to be professors - J, who teaches philosophy at Bir Zeit, and A who teaches a course on anthropology (also at Bir Zeit.) I leave the familiarity and intellectual masturbation to visit a friend at his al-Manarah office. After hiking to the seventh floor of a building we listen to Oum Kalthoum, exchange stories, and drink beer. His office is even higher than Al Jazeera’s, so we can see everything from the window. We even anticipate the winter’s night. I thought of Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and I felt like that deconstructed traveler. You never really know who the traveler is anyway so it very well could have been me or my friend, maybe even Salam Fayyad.

Everything’s changed in Ramallah. I’ve only known her for four years, but in four years the World Bank, Keith Dayton, and Fatah’s mafia have rewritten its history. Two years and another intifada is bound to happen, this time against the sulta. And the resistance will be started by the taxi drivers.