Several times in her recent article in the Guardian, Hala Alyan quotes a line by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who lived for many years in exile in Beirut and Paris: “I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here.” As she muses on what it means to witness from a distance the suffering in Gaza, she says:
Let me start at the beginning. Let me start at a beginning: my father was born in Gaza. What, then, is my claim to Gaza? my claim is my father. Born without a passport, now an American. His mother and father married in Gaza in 1954. My grandfather’s family was living in a refugee camp near the beach. My grandmother had a house in Haret el Daraj: the neighborhood of stairs.
He was born on a Wednesday by a midwife, the third son. One year later, his family moved to Kuwait, and he spent every summer of his childhood in Gaza. He played with chicks in a courtyard. He learned soccer there. He was bathed by his grandmother. He ate her hot bread. He was born in Gaza because the other villages – places of farming, of almond trees and grape crops – were eradicated.
Ms. Alyan, born in Illinois in 1986 and now living in Brooklyn, records what she often forgets about Gaza:
I forget about the land all the time. I forget about the sea. I forget about the stones stacked into houses, forget my grandparents and great-grandparents lived next to water. I forget about their sage, their za’atar, their olive trees. I forget about their sunsets.
I forget about land in general. I’ve spent my life in cities. I am American and Arab, but come from a long line of farmers and peasants and merchants – a great-grandfather who traveled the sea for textiles and garments, another who spent his life caretaking the earth, people who knew the land and water intimately, as recently as two generations ago.
A clinical psychologist, novelist and poet, Ms. Alyan sees her role now as a witness. But she asks: “In the face of incomprehensible destruction, what does the witness have to offer? Our poetry? Our hoarse voices at a protest, seared by what we’ve been spared?”
What is the role of the witness? To remain steadfast in what she has seen, what she has understood and learned. To remain undistracted. I write a poem. I write another poem. I construct arguments that go nowhere. I give talks about endurance, about building our capacity to keep watching.
Then I go to a holiday gathering and spend two hours trying to convince a woman why withholding water in Gaza is a war crime. Eventually, she acknowledges that this is terrible – if that is the case. I decide this concession is the best I’ll get, and pretend to take a phone call.
Ms. Alyan says: “The task of the witness is to cultivate steadiness, not to raise her voice, to stay calm.” She explains “sumud.”
The idea of sumud has become a multifaceted cultural concept among Palestinians: it means steadfastness, a derivative of “arranging” or “saving up”, even “adorning”. It implies composure braided with rootedness, a posture that might bend but will not break.
Ms. Alyan quotes David Ben-Gurion when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in 1948: “We must do everything to ensure they never do return.” She responds powerfully:
Our claim to the land is non-negotiable. It requires no permission. It requires no mediation. I don’t need that claim sanctioned by anyone. That is where my grandparents lived. Their grandparents. Their grandparents. You can destroy all the libraries and archives and villages in the world, you can make return impossible, you can rename a city, you can blow up a university, refashion a history book, and it still won’t change that fact.
Ms. Alyan expresses her dismay at the US role in Gaza:
Tragic, the newscasters say, as though the starvation and massacres are acts of God. Tragic, the president with my vote says. The president I toasted a mimosa to on election day. Fourteen years sober and I still sipped that sugar. It was sunny and strangers played music and I danced on the pavements of Williamsburg.
Now I watch that president bypass Congress to send in more weapons, and in the coming days witness what those weapons do to the bodies of my kin.
Perhaps considering her current situation as a kind of exile, Ms. Alyan quotes Jerusalem-born Edward Said, who was a professor of literature at Columbia for many years:
Exile is strangely compelling to think about, but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place.
www.theguardian.com/...