PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 44

far away from what was happening in Beirut where the Palestinians were not well thought of in the mid-1970s. At the airport I was asked to stand aside by the official to whom I showed my letter, while he went to check whether my French pass was valid for entry into the country. I did not wait: I took my suitcase and took the risk of going on. Luckily no one stopped me. For me that was a normal incident, which is why I hate borders, I hate airports and the word passport does not have the same meaning to me, or to any other Palestin- ian, as it does to ordinary people. I always get asked for my wathiqa (my ‘travel document’)! In Beirut I met up with Mahmoud Darwish. 14 Dar- wish was a fabulous poet, but above all he carried the Palestinian cause through his poetry. Through his words he became in a way the spokesman for all Pales- tinians. I had the very great pleasure of working with him on his literary review, Al Karmel. At the same time we worked for Shu’un Filastiniya, in which I published long articles each month – portraits of Noam Chom- sky, Albert Memmi, György Lukács… Darwish had connections in the Algerian Embassy and it is thanks to him that I obtained a four-year passport. I was working all the time, writing articles in for the Lebanese and Palestinian newspapers and for literary journals in Europe. But in Beirut things were getting tense and in 1976, 15 the massacre at Tel Al Zaatar blew everything sky high. The Lebanese Phalangists entered the Palestinian camp, to the east of Beirut, where about 50,000 people lived, after a siege that had lasted nearly two months, and the militias executed many hundreds of people – I have never been able to find the exact num- ber: some say there were 2000 dead, others say 4000 – even though a peace treaty had been signed and the Red Cross was supposed to be evacuating the inhabitants. For us Palestinians, Tel Al Zaatar signalled the defeat of all the values of solidarity that the Arab world had proclaimed as theirs. At the beginning of the 1980s we could feel that something was going to happen. I can remember that even I had anticipated the intervention of Israel: the collaboration between the Israeli army and some of the Lebanese factions was become more and more obvious. And then in 1982 there had been a conference of the Union of Palestinian authors of Beirut, to which one of the key personalities of the PLO was invited. He told us that our position in Beirut was likely to be under “severe threat” in the future. 42 Memories of 1948 The massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 brought the Palestinians of Beirut to their knees. We had to leave, fast. By murdering the refugees in the camps the Phalangists and the Israelis were pointing the way out to us, the only way we were allowed to go, the man- datory way where the hunters wait: mamar al ghuzlan (‘the way of the gazelles’). The PLO and 11,000 Palestinians were exiled, this time in Tunisia. Mahmoud Darwish suggested to me that I meet up with him there and that we continue publishing Al Karmel, but I refused. I was happy to write, to present at conferences but I had no desire to become a member of the PLO. I preferred to stay free. It is a position that matters a lot to me, and one I have defended right up to today – my freedom to write is my whole life. I have never been an armed militant. My weapon is writing. I obtained a grant to study at a university in Hun- gary: three years of peace lay ahead of me. S ixth image : permanent exile After Budapest there was no question of going back to Beirut – I would have been killed. So I went back to Damascus where I knew the intellectual world. Together with the famous playwright Saadallah Wannous and the novelist Abdelrahman Munif, we launched a big cultural magazine: Qadaya wa Shehadat (Causes and Testimonies). In 1993, during a trip to Amman, I ran into Mahmoud Darwish, who invited me to participate in the revival of his magazine Al Karmel. I worked with him for ten years. Those were extraordinary years, because I was completely in my element. In each issue I wrote a case-study, either on our heritage, or on a literary subject, or on the Palestinian collective mem- ory. We even published a 300-page book entitled The Memory of the Defeated, a collection of the best articles from Al Karmel. Darwish knew that I was really inter- ested in the question of memory, without which there is neither history nor future. For the last 20 years I have lived in Syria then in Jordan. 16 I have spent my life in exile. Exile means always having a temporary residence, losing any feeling of security, being perpetually worried. I have been a refugee since 1948, seven decades, a man whose exist- ence was confiscated. A non-valid man. My only con- solation is knowing that a non-valid person can still meditate on the beauty of the moon.