The Woman From Tantoura (32 page)

For the next three days the newspaper did not carry Naji’s daily drawing. Because what happened surpassed all words? Or because he mourned for three days? Only on Wednesday, September 22, did the newspaper publish a drawing of Naji’s in its usual place, on the last page: the Lebanese flag, with the cedar in the foreground, cut lengthwise by a band on which he had written ‘The End’ in English, and beneath it in Arabic. Under the flag there was a pile of bloody bodies, with Hanzala looking at them.

Strange; I remember the dates as if years had not passed since then, or as if I had learned them by heart.

I read the interview with Naji in the morning, and at night I took the newspaper to bed and read it again. I thought, when Naji moved to the Gulf he was afraid, like me. He was a young man, and he was afraid for himself. I’m no longer young—I’ve become a grandmother, and my children are the age he was when he left Ain al-Helwa to work in Kuwait. I slept, and then got up; and before I lifted my head from the pillow, I found myself thinking, I’m not afraid for myself but for Maryam. What amulet does she have?

As she was getting ready to go to school, I talked to her about Naji and Hanzala. She said, “I used to follow his drawings, I really loved them.” I found it strange.

In the evening when I was alone with her in our room, I returned to the subject of Naji’s drawings. I said, “What do you like about the drawings?”

She said, “The clarity.”

I didn’t understand, so I asked her to explain what she meant. She said, “Hanzala is clear, from his name that means a bitter fruit, to his shape, and to his stance. He’s a little boy who looks on. His enemies are also clear: men who are short and fat and look ugly, who want the world completely at their disposal. They’re also clear in the destruction they cause.”

Tears nearly sprang from my eyes. I hugged her, and she asked, laughing, “Is this a sentimental Arab film? What happened?”

Maybe I shouldn’t be so afraid for Maryam. She surprises me. One day Abed called her “Surprising Maryam,” but he hadn’t seen her for two years, so even he was surprised by that same spring inside her. It’s different from the young men’s spring; they call it “the girls’ lathe.” Abed found his sister a teen, a small woman. She was no taller than he was or than her two other brothers, but she had grown suddenly from a child with two braids into a teenager with all the curves of a young woman. She had been shaped on the girls’ lathe. I smiled. But the spring was working on her mind also. It takes me by surprise.

She was sixteen, in the second year of high school, when she came back from school and announced proudly: “I received full marks for my composition! The teacher told us in class: ‘I’ve been working in teaching for twenty years and I’ve never given a student full marks. But I liked what Maryam wrote so much that I even thought of giving her full marks, plus five marks.’ The girls laughed at the idea. When class was over they gathered around me, wanting me to read what I wrote. I said, ‘Tomorrow. I’ll give it to my mother to read first.”

I asked her, “What was the subject the teacher set for you?”

She said, “‘The memory of a man you love.’ Most of the girls wrote about their grandfather, but I’ve never seen my grandfather Abu Amin.”

Sadiq laughed, and said, “You wrote about your grandmother?”

She said, “No,” so I knew she had written about her father. I changed the subject: “Turn on the television, Sadiq, we’ll miss the news.”

Sadiq smiled, “Mama watches the news seven times a day!”

Maryam laughed. “In Beirut it was the newspapers and the radio, now it’s the television!”

“In Beirut you were little and you wanted attention. You were even jealous of the newspaper!”

“Mama, admit it: did you read the newspaper or did you stop at every paragraph and every line and every word, as if you were going to be tested on it the next day? Maybe all you needed was a red pen, to underline the important paragraphs so you could learn them by heart! And the scissors, they were always near you so you could clip a news item here or an article there, along with Naji al-Ali’s daily drawings. Abed insisted that you were working secretly for some archive, which we didn’t know anything about!”

I laughed and so did Sadiq. He said, “It’s strange.”

“What’s strange?”

“In an earlier time Mama would go out early to buy the papers.

She would go out before having her coffee. Then she would throw
them in the trash without reading them. ‘Where are the papers, Mama?’ She would say, ‘I don’t know,’ and then admit that she had gotten rid of them!”

Randa said, “I don’t believe it.”

Maryam said, giving me a pat and putting her arms around my shoulders, “Believe it. That’s Mama. Every time period has its own set system.”

I said, “Raise the volume, Sadiq, the news is starting.”

The children are right, I’ve become addicted to the news. Sometimes we turn on the television to watch the news and Sadiq or Maryam or Randa says, changing the channel, “There’s nothing new.” But I ask them to go back to the same channel; I follow the pictures of the young men throwing stones at the soldiers of the occupation. A woman facing an enlisted man, her hands in his face, shouting. Enlisted men wearing armor firing their rifles or pursuing kids down the side streets. Army cars, ambulances, police raids, arrests, demonstrations, the refrigerators of the autopsy room, the funerals. Yes, I had a desire to watch what I had watched in the previous newscast and maybe the one before it. Why? I don’t know.

I watch, and I wait.

42

The Son of al-Shajara

Maryam wrote:

On July 22, 1987, someone shot the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, using a pistol equipped with a silencer. The shooting occurred in London and resulted in the death of Naji al-Ali five weeks later. The fifth anniversary of the event fell during the vacation this last summer, and some newspapers called attention to it. I did not learn the date of the anniversary from the newspaper, however, because I remembered it, and I don’t believe that I could ever forget it in the future.

In July of 1987, which was the first summer after we moved from Lebanon to live in Abu Dhabi, my older brother and guardian took me and my mother and his family to spend some of the vacation in Greece. I was eleven years old, and I loved playing, I loved the sea, I loved the sand, I loved eating fish, and I loved listening to the Greek music that resounded in the restaurants and cafés to which my brother took us. I even loved the line dances they would dance in the restaurants; I would jump up and join in, giving my right hand to the person standing on my right and my left hand to the person on my left, and dancing. These
were among the happiest days of my life. When we returned to Abu Dhabi I learned by chance, from some words that passed between my mother and my brother, that Naji had been assassinated in London. I cried out, “Naji of Ain al-Helwa? The cartoonist?” Afterward, for a week or more, I was very distressed. I was sad over the passing of Naji al-Ali, but my distress and my anger with myself were greater than my sadness. My father was a doctor in Acre Hospital and was martyred in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila; would it be possible, for example, for Acre Hospital to be mentioned, or for the anniversary of the massacres to pass, when I was immersed in the pleasure of a beautiful summer resort, and that I would not stop for a moment, if only in my imagination, to mourn and to salute his memory? I had not known of the martyrdom of Naji al-Ali at the time, and I hated myself as if I had committed a crime.

Naji al-Ali was a native of the village of al-Shajara in upper Galilee, in Palestine. His family went to south Lebanon as refugees at the time of the Nakba—Catastrophe—in 1948, when he was a boy of eleven. He lived with his family in the Ain al-Helwa camp, and he remained connected to the camp even after he grew up and moved to the Gulf to work as a cartoonist. He never forgot that his land was stolen from him and that he was unjustly turned out of his country, so that he was forced to live as a refugee in a camp in Lebanon. He did not forget that he was a son of the camp, and that his mother made his underwear from leftover sacks that had contained flour distributed by the aid agency, and that she also used them to make a cloth bag in which he could put his notebooks when he went to school. He did not forget that when he was a boy he worked selling vegetables and picking oranges to contribute to the family income. He did not forget that his family lived in Ain al-Helwa and that Israeli planes shelled the camp regularly, as if killing people were a daily duty assigned to them.

I love Naji al-Ali’s cartoons; there are many of them, and they are rich in meaning, teaching us a great deal. I love Hanzala, because he has become familiar due to his reappearance in the drawings, and because he makes me think that I am like him, for some reason I don’t understand. This happens even though Hanzala is barefoot and his patched clothes
show that he is poor, while I have not just one but several pairs of shoes, and my father was a doctor and my brother works here in Abu Dhabi, where he provides us with an easy, even luxurious life. I love Hanzala’s mother Zeinab; even though she wears a peasant dress, she still carries the key to her house in Palestine suspended on a cord around her neck, like my mother. Hanzala’s father is a peasant with big feet, barefoot and defeated; he always makes me think of my father and brothers, because I know that they feel defeated. Even the fedayeen fighter whom Naji draws swimming, returning to Beirut after the departure of the fedayeen in 1982, reminds me of my brother Abed, who was a fedayeen fighter and who was about to get on the ship when it was decided that the fedayeen would evacuate Beirut, but who turned around and came back to us in the house. Finally, Naji drew the children of the stones and named them before the Intifada arose and before they were known by this name; he drew the children as they were throwing stones at the occupiers, and from the little stones he formed an oncoming tank. He even drew our Lord Jesus on his cross, lifting his hand to throw a stone at the oppressors.

My mother is from Tantoura, a little village on the Palestinian coast, not one of the villages of Galilee, and I don’t believe she ever met Naji personally. But she loves his drawings. All during the war and the Siege of Beirut she followed his drawings, and sometimes she would show me a cartoon in the newspaper. Since I was six years old, she would explain the meaning to me. When we moved to Abu Dhabi, my mother brought five clippings of Naji’s drawings with her in her wallet. Among them was the drawing of a girl looking out of an opening made by a missile in the wall of her house. Our house in Beirut was also struck by a missile that made a hole like that one in the wall, but fortunately it struck the other side of the building. In the picture the opening looks like a window, and under it Hanzala is raising his hand with a flower and saying, “Good morning, Beirut.” My mother told me that the cartoon appeared in the
Safir
newspaper after a night of shelling so heavy that people thought that day would never dawn; and when the day did dawn and the newspaper came out, they found Hanzala saying good morning to them with a flower.

There is another cartoon among the five in my mother’s wallet that I would like to talk about. The father, the peasant with his two bare feet, is squatting on the right side of the picture, holding up a sign on which is written “In memory of Hittin.” He’s thinking, “If only Saladin were alive.” On the left of the picture, Hanzala is looking at short, fat men with big rears, and thinking, as if he heard the thoughts of his father, “They would assassinate him.”

Naji al-Ali was not a political or military leader like Saladin. It was not to be expected that he would lead us in a battle in which we would vanquish our enemies and liberate Palestine. But his drawings speak for me, and they make me discover my feelings and the things that weigh on me and hurt me, and the things I want to accomplish.

Naji al-Ali’s cartoons make us know ourselves.

When we know ourselves, we are empowered.

Perhaps that is why they assassinated him.

43

Another Time

Sadiq said to me, “I’ve been cherishing the hope that Maryam would major in architecture and work with me here, in the company. The girl is smart and hard working, and she will be important in her field. I’ll send her to study at the American University of Beirut, as soon as she gets her high school diploma.”

He called Maryam, and said, “Then you intend to enroll in the College of the Humanities?”

She looked at him in surprise, and said, “‘Then’ referring to what?”

He laughed, “Referring to the subject of the beautiful composition you wrote.”

She said, “First, it’s not a composition. Second, I’m going to go the College of Medicine.”

Another one of her surprises. She had given no previous indication of that.

Sadiq said, “Seven years of study, and afterward, a specialization. When will you get married?”

Maryam flew to an eloquent defense of her desire to enter medical school, why she wanted to study it, why this profession was
right for her, why … Sadiq laughed.

“Neither literature not architecture. The best would be for you to become a lawyer—you and your brother Abed could work together to change the system of the whole universe, by words!”

Maryam returned to asserting that she would enroll in the College of Medicine, and Sadiq announced that these were the dreams of a child, that she just thought that this was what she wanted, that she was too young to decide. He settled the discussion by saying, “I will not permit you to enter the College of Medicine.”

No sooner had he left the room than she looked at me and said, “And I won’t permit Sadiq to impose a major on me!”

Maryam is older than her years. I repeat to myself, why are you so afraid for her? There’s nothing to fear for her. But I am afraid. In the future Maryam would say to me, “Your constant anxiety over me is unjustified. It chains me and I’m distracted by your fear, and concerned for you.”

I said, “I’ve lost four men who were the dearest to my heart. It’s natural for me to be afraid.”