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Impressions of Palestinian
Women |
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Childhood:
I have written these pieces about my childhood and family life in
Palestine for my children, and for the later generations that may
never know about us, or our way of life. Keeping the memory of those
long-ago days is important, I think, and the hope of better days to
come for all of us can only be based on the true knowledge of the
past.
I often go back to Jerusalem in my dreams. My inner journey is not
always one of sadness and despair; sometimes the pure joy of being
there fills me with a deep warmth. I close my eyes and dream in the
privacy of my soul. I choose the company I wish to keep, the places
I want to visit, and the people I want to see. Sometimes they are
old, sometimes young; some of them have been dead for many years,
some of them are still alive.
Often I visit my grandparents, both maternal and paternal, whom I
loved so much and who loved and spoiled me and my siblings.
I have discovered that my happiest recollections are of places
rather than of people. After all, people die and take away a part of
us with them, while places live forever. So I close my eyes and go
to Jericho in winter, Sharafat in summer, and Jerusalem in spring.
It is always spring in Jerusalem for me.
Our house in Musrara was on top of the slope which led from the
Russian compound to the center of the old city. We could hear the
bells of the Russian church and the calls to prayer from the nearby
minarets. I also loved to hear the footsteps of people casually
going downhill in the street outside, beyond the iron gate of our
house.
Like all houses in Jerusalem, ours was built of heavy stone. Two
steps led down to the garden. In my dreams I seem to go back to that
garden more than anywhere else in Jerusalem. In spring it was a
carpet of green. The upper level swayed with pine trees, which
spread aromatic breezes into the house.
Summers were spent in Sharafat (a village near Jerusalem). We were
the only city family living in Sharafat, so I was eagerly received
by the girls and boys of the village. They took me to their homes
and I brought them to mine, and we played in the garden for hours on
end. There was so much to discover and enjoy. Often the hakawati,
the village story teller, sat with his rababi, playing the
instrument as he told stories of bygone days.
Early each morning me and my friend Abed would run out to pick ripe
figs in the soft light and sweet morning air. Then mother would call
us to come and have a proper breakfast of zaatar (thyme) and olive
oil with country bread, and an egg to make us grow stronger. Later
we would join our other friends in the village for more fun and
games. Climbing to the very top of the oak tree, I would stand on
the highest, thickest branch and call at the top of my voice to
Miriam, my friend: ''Hey, ya Miriam, hey!''
''Ounich!'' she would answer, ''I'm coming!'' in the village
dialect.
The long summer days passed quickly. We children grew taller and
became a little more self-conscious. The years passed, and
eventually I learned that Miriam was engaged to be married. Village
girls were married much earlier than girls in the town.
Years after these events, our lives were shattered when our lands
and our houses were occupied and our people scattered round the
world. Under the United Nations plan for the partition of Palestine,
Sharafat remained Arab, and its inhabitants, feeling safe, stayed on
their land.
Decades later, I was living with my husband in Beirut when one
evening we heard on the radio: ''Sharafat, a small village west of
Jerusalem, has been attacked. The house of Ali Mishaal, the mukhtar,
has been blown up, killing him and his family.'' (Ali Mishaal was
Miriam's father).
Later we learned more details. Miriam and her little daughter had
been buried up to the waist in the rubble for a day before being
rescued. They were taken to hospital, but died soon after.
I think of Miriam sometimes and my heart cries out, ''Hey ya Miriam,
hey!''
We always spent our winter vacations in Jericho, where I developed a
special relationship with the fields when they burst into colourful
life after the first rains.
The mountains in the background changed colors with the morning sun,
from soft pink at dawn to the yellow of the afternoon. The Dead Sea
lay further in the distance, silent and blue.
One of my favourite walks was with my father to the Mount of
Temptation. One early afternoon he said:'' Lets go to the top
today.'' I jumped up immediately, and eagerly followed him.
After a long dangerous walk up the mountain, we stood at last at the
gate of the monastery, and as I walked behind father, I felt a
strange sensation enveloping me. I had suddenly become aware that
this was the place I could see from my bedroom window in Jericho
every night, a faint light at the top of the steep mountain, so high
up it seemed almost to touch the sky.
Friendly men in dark robes moved about in this exotic space between
heaven and earth. One of them recognized father and welcomed us in.
It was difficult to remember that the space we were in was carved
within a cave, within the very rock. The walls of the corridor
leading into the monastery were naked rock, mellowed only by time.
Icons hung on the rocky walls of this corridor, which led to a large
chapel in which were exhibited the visible elements of piety and
mysticism. The altar, the candles, the incense, and the Orthodox
attire of these Russian monks were all familiar to me, along with
the symbols of the other Palestinian churches.
I stood at a big window with iron bars. Looking through it I saw
Jericho, crowded with houses and dotted with gardens of oranges,
bananas, palms and flowering trees, surrounded by far away
mountains, with the Dead Sea shining like a silver carpet under the
sun stretching between the town and the mountains beyond.
The priest must have seen my amazement and said ''Wait till I take
you to the peak where the Temptation of Christ took place.''
As he led us up, the church bells started ringing, the same bells I
had been used to hearing everyday from a distance. Now, I thought, I
am near the bells that echoed in the fields and wadis of Jericho and
I am in the room whose light twinkled like a star in the night, far
away in the distance, neighbors to the sky.
The next time I saw the Mount of Temptation, or ''Korontol'' as we
Arabs call it, was a half a century later. The Israeli army now
occupies this strategic spot, which dominates the area around and
beyond. I looked up at it from below, from the fields of Jericho,
where our house still stands.
Life under the British Mandate:
My families political activities during the 1930s brought me,
probably earlier than most girls, to political awareness. I remember
especially the rude shock I experienced when the British arrested my
father.
The modern, experimental Islamic high school to which I had been
sent closed in 1930, and my parents had to find an alternative for
me. By then I was ten and a half years old. I was sent to a boarding
school in Jerusalem along with my younger brother and sister. We
enrolled at the American Friends School in Ramallah.
We had teachers from Lebanon, the United States and Holland, as well
as those from Palestine.
Ramallah was beautiful in all seasons. Grapevines covered the slopes
and there were wild flowers in the valleys. But this easy happiness
of my childhood days was to be rudely interrupted by the harsh
realities of Palestine. The time I am describing was, after all, the
mid-1930s, and the situation in Palestine was coming to a boil. Even
in our protected school environment, we knew about the
demonstrations and strikes and began to think about politics.
Father had become the leader of the Palestinian Arab Party in 1935
and was also responsible for a political newspaper called al Liwaa'.
I asked for the paper to be delivered to my school, and after
classes my friends and I would rush to the outside gate to collect
it, pouring over it and passing it on from one group of ardent
readers to another.
One afternoon I came out of class later than the others. I looked
for my friends, but when I found them their eyes seemed to avoid
mine. I asked about the newspaper. There was a moment of hesitation;
then one of them said they had not seen it that day. I was
surprised, but not for long, because I saw one of my friends holding
the paper behind her back. I rushed to take it from her, but she ran
away and I ran after her, while all my other friends ran around the
campus. Finally I caught up with her, snatched the newspaper from
her hand and rushed to hide in a nearby lavatory.
The girls waited outside for a long time until I came out, trembling
with shock and drenched in tears. My father had been arrested! For
us, the word ''arrest'' was synonymous with shame and guilt. We
thought that only criminals were arrested. My father arrested? In
prison? Not until days later did we discover that arrest was not
only for criminals, and that Arab resistance in Palestine was being
punished by the British. For us school girls, this was our political
awakening and our childhood gave way to early maturity.
The days were bright, the nights were warm, and life was sweet when
we were children in our home in Jerusalem. Our house was our world.
Though we went away to school, we would come back to the house with
such happiness. The small garden surrounding it was full of flowers.
Three steps led up from the garden to the verandah, where we would
stretch lazily in the long chairs under the perfume of the jasmine
bushes that crept up its walls.
I remember this particular summer, when life seemed to be taking a
new turn and our garden was no longer a magical, childish place.
Having been awakened to it at school, I had gradually become more
and more aware of the situation in the country and became very
interested in the political news. There would be a demonstration one
day, a strike the next; I read of arrests, political meetings, and
violence. Sometimes I read the names of some members of our family,
and often my father's.
The six-month strike of 1936 was about to begin. Arab Palestine,
under British Mandate, was experiencing the pressure of large-scale
Jewish immigration. Feeling that their very existence was being
threatened, the leading Arab organizations declared a general
strike, challenging not only the rapidly increasing Jewish presence,
but also the Balfour Declaration and British authority in Palestine.
The whole country responded to the call for the strike, and there
followed demonstrations, clashes with the police, fiery speeches in
mosques and churches. All this filled every home in Palestine with
apprehension and anxiety.
Mother was involved in the women's movement and took part in the
many women's demonstrations as they marched through the streets to
the British High Commissioner's headquarters to protest Jewish
immigration.
Hassan, our only brother, was about nine or ten years of age. He was
the darling of the guards in the garden: it had become too dangerous
for Father not to have personal protection. Hassan joined the boys
of the neighborhood in bringing the circulation of traffic to a
standstill. The only cars which continued moving about were those
driven by British soldiers around the city. The boys did their bit
for the revolution by spreading the small nails which they carried
in their pockets around the streets, causing the puncture of the
tires of any vehicle that might be passing.
In Jerusalem, as demonstrations and confrontations continued, and
armed struggle led to greater and greater numbers of casualties, the
British government, in the brutal wisdom of its mandate, declared an
emergency law. Any home found to contain arms, even so much as a
knife a few inches long was to be blown up and the entire village
punished.
The fires of the revolution spread fast throughout the cities and
countryside. British rule grew crueler by the day. Many houses were
blown up and many villages destroyed.
One story especially circulated throughout Palestine- the story of
Aysha. Aysha was from a small village near al Bireh, not far from
Jerusalem. Her son had gone of with some of the village men to join
the demonstrations. One day, a confrontation took place between the
British army and the Palestinian fighters not far from Aysha's
village. She heard from her neighbours that the British had suffered
casualties and that a Palestinian had been killed. As had become
customary, British soldiers brought the body to the nearest village
to be identified. This enabled them to single out the house to be
destroyed and the village to be tormented.
Now they came near to her village. Everyone was forced out of their
homes and brought, one by one, to pass by the body of the young man,
to look at it, to study the face and identify it. Aysha, standing in
the long line, looked around, her heart crying out for the mother
who was to see her son lying dead on the ground.
What mother was to suffer? What village to be destroyed?
At last her turn came. She looked down and saw her son, Abed, lying
dead before her. The tremors which shook her body alerted the
soldiers. She swayed and staggered, then let go, sinking down beside
her boy.
'' You bitch!'' they cried, ''so he is your son!''
'' My son?'' she moaned. ''Who said he is my son? He is every
mother's son. I weep for his wasted youth. I weep for his mother!
For every mother! That is why I am weeping!''
She had slipped out of their hands. She had saved the village from
destruction. She went home and buried her grief in silence, while
the British took her son's body and buried it alone, far away from
her.
Living in exile in Beirut, Lebanon:
One autumn day in 1936, I was sitting by myself on the porch of our
house in Jerusalem. Time seemed to be standing still, despite the
tension in the city and the growing confrontation with the mandate
government. Father was down in Jericho, working on the banana
gardens down there while trying to keep the British authorities
confused as to his whereabouts. Mother, constantly worried, was
indoors.
It was almost twilight when I heard footsteps scuffling over the
wall near the entrance door. Then a tall man in a cloak came up the
three steps and asked to see my father, Jamal Husseini. I said that
he was not home. The man looked hard at me and said in a clear,
deliberate tone: ''listen carefully. Tell him, if you can, that he
must not be at home tonight.''
The stranger left as hurriedly as he came, and I rushed in to tell
mother what had happened.
Just as darkness fell, father walked in. We gave him the stranger's
message, but he did not want to heed it. He had had enough of hiding
and would not go away for any reason. Mother was frantic, and they
had an argument. Eventually he gave in, and went through the door to
the backyard, jumping over the fence to the neighbors'.
Very early the next morning there was a knock on the door. I rushed
from my bedroom and watched as mother opened it to face a group of
British soldiers. The senior officer said politely that they had an
order to arrest Mr. Jamal Husseini. Mother said he was not at home.
Unconvinced, they searched the house. The search ended and the
officer announced that his men would remain in the garden to watch
the house. Looking out the window, we could see that the garden was
swarming with soldiers.
Mother had decided that I was to play an active role in the
continuing drama. We had to inform father as soon as possible not to
come back home. I was to dress quickly, carry my schoolbooks and
pretend that I was going to school. Then I was to do the rounds of
my uncles and aunts, find him, and inform him of the morning's
events.
As I approached the very first house on my list, my aunt Nuzha
rushed out to tell me that father was at the house of Aunt Amina. I
rushed over there, and when I arrived, the door opened almost before
I had knocked. I had the feeling that not only the house but the
entire neighborhood had eyes watching from behind the curtains.
I entered the house and was led to a bedroom where I saw father
sitting on the edge of the bed. It had clearly not been slept in,
and he seemed exhausted. He looked at me tenderly and said that as
soon as he could, he would get in touch with us. As I hugged him and
said goodbye, he asked me especially to look after my mother.
That was the last I saw of him for some time. We heard later that
day over the radio that other political elders had been taken to a
ship waiting at sea and had gone into exile in the Seychelles
Islands. We did not know what had happened to father, only that he
had disappeared.
We left Jerusalem very soon after father disappeared. The
understanding between us had been that, should we ever be divided
and separated from Jerusalem, we should meet in Beirut.
It was an early autumn morning when we started our six-hour drive to
Beirut. Mother sat in the front seat of our car, near the driver.
She was quiet and seemed distant, dazed by the turn of events. I had
seen her brush a tear away, but knew that, being a true woman of
Jerusalem, she would not allow herself to show any more outward
signs of the deep pain she was experiencing.
At last, in mid-afternoon, we arrived in Beirut and drove straight
to the Hotel Bassoul. Though we were young and excited by our new
surroundings, each one of us felt the seriousness of our situation.
We did not ask mother questions about our future, nor did we discuss
the matter with each other. What images passed between the blackness
of the night and our dreams remained locked in each of our hearts.
Although we did not understand this at the time, a new way of life
began for all of us the very day after our arrival in Beirut form
Jerusalem. It is only looking back at it from the distance of the
decades that have passed since then that it becomes so clear that we
had crossed the fateful border between life at home and exile. At
that time, we saw our journey only as a temporary inconvenience that
would certainly pass, and there was no question in our minds that
eventually we would be restored to Jerusalem.
The Palestinian struggle against injustice had been embraced by the
entire Arab world, and so it was quite natural that when the time
came for us to leave, we would go to another Arab country. Beirut
was the closest Arab capital to Jerusalem, and being there among so
many other Palestinians who came at around the same time, made the
whole trip less terrible than it might have been.
As time passed and it became more and more clear that we were not to
go home soon, all those Palestinians who had come to Beirut and had
taken rooms in hotels, began to look for more permanent, less
expensive accommodations.
Mother, who suffered from rheumatism, decided to take advantage of
Beirut's excellent medical services. It was, in fact, at the
American University Hospital during this time that I first met my
husband to-be, Dr. Munib Shahid. He had come to Beirut with his
family from Haifa.
It was some weeks before father joined us in Beirut. That was when
we found out how he had managed to elude the British authorities. He
had joined a family of veiled women and their father, who had hired
a car to drive them out of the country. The women sat in the back
seat wearing their millayas and covering my father, who lay on the
floor of the car hidden beneath the flowing folds of their millayas.
By the time my father came, it had become clear that our stay was
going to be a long one. As that realization dawned, my parents moved
us to a smaller, less expensive hotel. Later, we moved to a pension.
It was not until our second year in exile that they took the fateful
step of renting an apartment.
At first we did not have the means to furnish our flat properly. At
night we slept on mattresses laid out on the floor, and during the
day we sat on kitchen chairs. Later, our situation improved, when
some of our income from Palestine was forwarded to us. Eventually
Beirut was to become our home.
I enrolled in the AUB (the American University of Beirut). I was
very strict with myself, perhaps, looking back at it, too strict. I
was haunted by the unhappy events in Palestine. How could I go to
the cinema when people were being killed in Palestine? How could I
go on a picnic when young men of my age, including many of my
cousins, had to terminate their education and join the resistance?
All work and no play may have made me seem dull, but at least I
concentrated on my studies.
In my freshman and sophomore years I met girls of many
nationalities, including Palestinian Jews. The presence of the
Jewish girls forced us to confront difficult situation: how were we
to behave towards one another? In the end, our youth and the
traditional practice of our people overcame political ideologies,
and the Jewish girls became part of our lives, like everyone else.
The news from Palestine became more serious by the day, and events
there more and more dangerous. More and more Palestinian families
wanted by the British mandate came to live in Beirut and some in
Damascus. When the Second World War began however, it seemed that
our cause became a minor issue to the world. The Palestinian revolt
and the quest for Palestinian rights was drowned out by the larger
turmoil.
For us Palestinians however, the struggle continued, as it does to
this day.
In 1939, my family, along with several other Palestinian political
families, moved to Baghdad. The British were gaining ground in the
area, and there was fear that they would come to Lebanon.
When exiled Palestinians first went to Iraq in 1939, the Iraqi
authorities were very cooperative. Unfortunately, this friendly
Iraqi attitude did not last long: eventually the British took over
Iraq, and the Palestinian exiles there became once again a target
for them.
1948:
I was married to Dr Munib Shahib and living in Beirut when mother
returned to Jerusalem in 1946. We had a few years of almost normal
life. My husband and I visited Jerusalem with our first daughter and
invited my parents to stay with us in Lebanon.
In 1948 the Palestine war took place and most of the country was
occupied by the new Jewish entity, Israel. That part of Jerusalem in
which our home lay had fallen to the Israelis. My family, along with
hundreds of other Palestinians, became refugees. The world looked
on, accepting the fact.
Beirut was now flooded with several hundred thousand Palestinian
refugees. The poorest took shelter in refugee camps and shacks,
living from hand to mouth on food dispensed by charity.
For my family, as for all Palestinians, this was a time of immense
stress and reflection. What now? How long would this exile last? How
would we survive? What should we do?
RETURN TO JERICHO: 1972
Mother went to live with her brother, uncle Musa, in Jericho.
Because he had remained in Jericho, since 1967 under Israeli
occupation, he had the right, under the law of ''family reunion''
(jam al shaml) to ask that his sister be allowed to join him in his
home.
Some time later, by virtue of that same law of family reunion, my
brothers, sisters, and I, were also allowed to come to Jericho to
join our mother, whose health was failing. And so it was that
twenty-five years after we left I came back to it, back to our
winter home in Jericho.
As I stepped down from the car and entered the gate, my heart
pounded. Th same feeling of anguish and despair surged in me as when
I had crossed the Allenby Bridge earlier that day. Would I let this
experience shatter me? I remembered what the boy carrying my
suitcase over the crossing had said when he saw my emotion that
morning: ''Lady,'' he said, ''you must not show them your
weakness.'' Hearing that from a young boy who worked for his living
in the shade of the occupation, I pulled myself together.
And so that morning in Jericho, I raised my head high and walked
towards the house on a narrow elevated path that separated the
orchard from the building, as the scent of the orange blossoms
wafted from the trees. I removed my eyeglasses, which had misted up
with my emotions, and found myself in the shade of the rubber tree
on the path to the house. How it had grown!
As I walked a few more steps, I looked up and saw the house. I was
overcome by a profound sense of loneliness and despondency. Our home
in Jericho. The same dark green shutters, the same slanting red
roof, wooden balcony, jasmine pergola, and the orange trees beyond.
Only the mud walls were peeling. Walking by my side was the old
gardener and caretaker, his shoulders bent, his body shaking, a long
way from the man I had known years ago.
The old man slowly opened the door to the main house, and I stepped
inside. I stood for a moment, absolutely silent and still. It only
took a few moments of stillness before the memories came surging
forth, and the empty house was filled again with voices, people,
bustling activities. They all come back: Mother, Father, Grandmother
and all the others, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends. They all rose
to life again and filled the house from the depth of my memory in
perfect clarity.
My grandmother, Im Musa, came first. After all, this house was built
for her by her husband at the turn of the century. Family and
friends loved to come to visit her and spend the day in the warmth
of the sun and enjoy her renowned cooking. Happiness welled in my
heart at the thought of these memories.
In the rush of all the memories, my mother suddenly appeared in
front of me, young and strong.
Hours after I had first re-entered the house, after I had wandered
around and relived the past in so many images, my heart was full of
happiness. Then the silence about me awoke me to reality, and to the
fact that I was the only visitor here. Again, I went from one room
to another, paused in the library with its shelves of books rescued
from our Jerusalem house many years earlier, read the titles of the
books, walked round the garden, and touched the leaves of the orange
trees.
Gradually my happiness ebbed away, and it was time to leave. I
closed the door with the keys I so cherished, walked out of the
garden, and went through the iron gate. I left behind in the house
the generations of those I had loved, and was comforted only by the
spirit of the boy on the bridge.
After a few days in Jericho, settling in and reliving the past, our
thoughts turned to Jerusalem.
In Jericho, we had not much noticed the Israeli occupation. We
stayed in the same old house, saw our aunts and cousins who were
staying there for the winter, and the few non-Arabs we saw in the
streets gave the impression that tourism was flourishing as it had
before 1948.
But in Jerusalem, things were different. Since 1967 the entire city
had been occupied by the Israelis.
My cousin Najwa drove us (my Mother and her four daughters) up to
Jerusalem. She drove us around the city, passing familiar sites
along the way. None of us mentioned going to look at our own house
in Musrara.
But at last mother asked Najwa to drive us to our old home. we four
sisters, sitting in the back of the car, objected. ''It isn't the
right moment; let us not go now; we'll go later,'' we all said, as
though in one voice. Spontaneously, without having discussed the
matter, we had each felt that we could not bear to see our home,
which was no longer ours, again. We knew it was occupied by an
Israeli family. but mother, with the authority of her eighty years,
insisted on her wish to go, and Najwa obediently drove us to our old
home.
In our hearts we had each eagerly searched for it from the distance
of Bab el Amoud. Now as the car drew up outside the front door, none
of us could move. Each of us tried to hide our tears, and our deep,
silent grief. Looking up from our former home, apparently unchanged,
with the same balcony, the same old tree, the same bedroom windows
looking up to the Virgin and Child in the Dominican compound against
the blue sky, I felt the years of separation, and they set me
trembling.
Mother, the only one of us undaunted, got out of the car. Leaning on
her cane, she walked up the three steps leading up to the main door
and, with her stick, knocked on the door three times. The door
opened and a middle-aged Jewish woman appeared. From the car we
heard mother say politely but firmly ''may I have your permission to
see the inside of my house?''
''Your house?'' the woman gasped. ''But we bought it!'' Mother said:
''I did not sell it.''
The woman spoke with an Iraqi accent. Realizing what this sudden
confrontation meant, she said ''Damn them. We had our house in Iraq.
We didn't have to come and face a situation like this.''
As the woman led the way into the house, mother looked back for us,
but none of us had the heart to follow her. The door closed behind
them, and while we sat and waited for mother to return, not one of
us uttered a single word.
Finally the door opened again, and mother and the Jewish woman
emerged. Talking together as though theirs was the most normal kind
of communication in the world, they walked slowly around the house,
mother following in the footsteps of the other woman. Finally we
heard mother thanking her. She turned and very slowly descended the
three steps down to the street. She stepped into the car, and Najwa
drove us away. None of us said a word. The charge of emotion in the
car was enough to blow it up.
At last one of us asked mother what they had talked about, and she
recounted parts of the conversation.
She had asked the woman if her family was alone in the house.
''Alone!'' the woman laughed sarcastically. ''There's a different
family living in each room.''
The woman had asked mother who had built the house. When mother said
her father had done so, the woman had wondered if it had been
intended to serve as a school. Mother told her that it had been
built for his own family.
As mother continued her account of her morning's visit, my deeply
emotional state settled into a calm admiration for mother's courage.
Her attitude became for us a model of courage and made the remainder
of our return home a little bit easier to bear. Sometimes with one
or all of my sisters, sometimes alone, I set out to explore the city
I have loved so much, from which I had been separated for so long.
At every turn we were confronted by the Israeli military occupation,
and at every turn we were confronted also by our memories. Our
emotions were so intense that we hardly spoke to one another. Had we
tried to talk, our emotions would have certainly overflowed, and
silence was our best defense. We also felt that we had no time to
waste, that we had to soak up the precious memories and store them,
and that emotional talk would have distracted us.
Fragments of life in Palestine become precious treasures many years
later. One day recently, about to throw away an old suitcase which
had been around the world with me, I checked to see if I had
forgotten anything in its folds. Sure enough, from the corner of one
of the torn pockets, I pulled out an envelope, frayed with the
passing of time. I opened it and found inside an old, faded
photograph of a family group. In the small figure at the center I
immediately recognized myself as a child of two. Surrounding me in
the picture sat my grandmother Zuleikha, her mother Asma, and my
mother Nimati.
I was delighted to find the photo, but a little shock ran through me
when I thought how it had remained hidden and undiscovered over the
decades, and how the suitcase itself had crossed so many borders,
and how the whole thing had ended up here at last, in my hands, in
my house so many years later.
I sat and looked at the picture, and as I did so, I was engulfed by
memories surging up from a forgotten well deep in my unconscious
mind. As I stared at it, I allowed myself to enjoy the warmth and
the sadness, as the memories washed over me.
Of the four generations of women sitting for the photograph that
afternoon, I think my mother's generation suffered the most. She had
had to live in exile in several Arab cities with five children to
look after, usually on her own, because her husband was either
exiled or attending a conference abroad. She often had to wait for
money, which came only after long periods of anxiety; she lived in
societies that, knowingly or not, deliberately or not, did not take
her into account. Nor was she alone in this plight: every
Palestinian was an extra number, a burden on the society in which he
or she lived in exile.
It is true that her children went on with their lives and education,
and yet she never had the peace of mind to enjoy her everyday life
with them, as previous generations had done.
I remember a tear that seemed always to sparkle in her green eyes,
and I believe that she never forgave the world for being so cruel.
Finally, I looked at myself in that old photograph. I was born in
September 1920, almost a century after my great grandmother, and in
the picture I sit close to her. As I scrutinized my image as a small
child, I could not help thinking about my life and theirs. After
allowing myself to float away on a sea of memories, I asked myself:
what does it mean to be looking at four generations of Palestinian
women?
For my grandmother, Jerusalem, with its small winding alleys, was
the world. she rarely moved from its walls. Yet she must have been
the queen of her house, in her own city and in her own country. To
her there was no shadow of doubt where she belonged and what spot of
earth belonged to her. She lived and died part of a whole that
represents the security that every human being needs.
Her daughter, who had almost the same degree of security even while
being more open to the world, suffered greatly only during the last
two decades of her life, after events in Palestine sent her into
exile. She passed away in the heat of the desert on her way from
Baghdad to Jerusalem. Today, she lies in a lonely grave in a Baghdad
cemetery.
But for some knowledge of the Koran, both my great grandmother and
grandmother were illiterate. Mother, on the other hand, spoke four
languages. I earned a university degree and traveled around the
world. yet it seems to me that the time of great grandmother Asma
was better than mine: she never had to be a refugee, looking for a
country to accept her, begging for a passport, and longing for an
unambiguous identity.
Where am I now in my twilight years? How can I ever know what their
life was really like? Don't we all take our grandparents for
granted, not realizing that time flies and that the time to ask
questions and probe the past goes, never to return? It seems to me
that the changes which took place between the time when great
grandmother was born in the early nineteenth century and my time, a
century later, were perhaps unprecedented in history.
I could not bear to look at the old family picture for very long
that morning when I first found it. The past is heavy sometimes. But
I often go back to it, and remember.
Serene Husseini Shahid was born in Jerusalem in 1920. With her
family she lived in exile in Lebanon. She married Dr. Munib Shahid
in 1944. Today she lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
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