PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 40

hang this picture in every house in which he ever lived,
in Lebanon and in Syria, next to the symbolic picture
of Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock in the centre.
T hird image : an identity under siege
From 1948 we became itinerants. Having left Al
Ja’una, we passed through Ras Al Ahmar and Bint
Jbeil, 3 a Shi’ite village in southern Lebanon. And each
time we lingered… we still hoped that we might be
able to go home. In the end we emigrated to the Qunei-
tra district, 4 in south-western Syria. On that day it is
pouring with rain. The village is perched on the top
of a fearsomely steep hill. Too tired to carry on, the
driver of the yellow van stops in front of a little shop
and wants to leave us there because the road is too steep
and too slippery due to the mud. My mother is furious:
it is out of the question to abandon us in the middle of
nowhere, in the pouring rain with all our things. And
while we are arguing and trying to get him to change
his mind the shopkeeper comes out and intervenes.
‘You’ve got no moral decency! You cannot possibly
leave a woman and children here in the rain!’
The shopkeeper is a very big man, and in spite of
the Syrian army greatcoat that makes him look hard
and rough, he gives off a peculiar aura of gentleness,
maybe because of his big blue eyes and long hair. He
introduces himself: Aïssa. He leads us into his shop,
kept warm by an ancient oil stove. There is a table,
a single chair and a shelf full of books: that was his
world. The golden tea he pours out for us from his
old, rusty teapot warms us up. On the wall there is
a picture that catches my eye of a man with a funny
orange moustache. But we had been brought up not to
ask questions of grown-ups.
‘Come and see me. Ask your parents,’ said Aïssa slip-
ping a few sweets into my pocket.
No doubt he had realized that we are refugees. And
indeed I often went to see him in his shop at the edge
of the village. I am only five, I like sweets and I want
to know who the mysterious man with the moustache
is. Much later, when we were already old friends, I dare
to ask him:
‘Is that your father?’
‘No, it’s a painting by Picasso. It’s Stalin.’
A few months later, in winter, I see Aïssa pass in
front of our house with a donkey laden with chnan, a
dried plant that is used as a broom. I turn to my father:
‘Has Aïssa become a door-to-door salesman?’
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Memories of 1948
‘No, he’s a communist. He’s pretending to be selling
chnan but look, he’s wrapped it up in political posters!’
Henceforth we are lajiyin, refugees, and the child that
I am does not understand straight away what that means,
nor why, at school, the teacher asks the Palestinians to
put their hand up. There are four of us. Four strangers. A
stranger is someone that everyone else sees as being with-
out a history, without a culture, who knows nothing about
even the little things of everyday life. This preconception
was so well anchored into the minds of the people of our
host country that one day, in the market, a man points to
a fish and asks my mother if she happens to know what it
was. My mother, who has a sharp wit, replies:
‘Yes it’s a precious plant. We have a lot of it in Pal-
estine. You plant it in April and then at the end of the
summer…’
‘And that,’ asks the man pointing to a fig, ‘do you
know what that is?’
‘Ah, yes’, she replies, still in the same vein, ‘that too.
But those come with the rain.’
Clearly the man is convinced that we do not know
anything. Strangers are a race apart.
Let it be said though, that Syria welcomed the Pales-
tinians in 1948. 5 We were granted the same civil rights
as the Syrians, we could go to school, to university, we
had access to any kind of job, even in the civil service,
and we were not discriminated against. We were also
given a travel document, a passport. And the Syrian
state – which at the time was at the centre of Arab
Nationalist movements – took up the Palestinian cause
as though it were its own. Egypt, and in particular
Lebanon, 6 where the Palestinians were crowding into
camps, did not have the same attitude at all. My pater-
nal uncle took refuge in Beirut, but he was officially
excluded from most professions. One of my nephews
had to pretend to be a Syrian or a Lebanese who had
lost his papers in order to be able to get work.
In spite of the dispersion that took place in 1948,
Palestinians managed to make contact with other
family members by sending messages on the radio:
‘My name is Feissal and this is a message for my aunt
Samira. I don’t know where she is…’ Sometimes people
got together again. We lost an aunt and were never able
to find her again.
In Damascus there were ten or so members of the
Darraj family. We used to get together every Thursday
evening, my aunts and uncles and all their children,
to drink tea or coffee and the grown-ups would share