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.
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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.