KABOBfest » sunbula

The Whistling of Places: A Short Text by Raji Bathish

sunbula — Tue, 11 May 2010 22:51:19 +0000

Raji Bathish is a (relatively) young experimental Palestinian author from Nazareth who writes texts that blur the boundary between poetry and prose, and shake the Arab reader out of a naive, stereotypically heroic image of the Palestinian living in occupied Palestine. I felt like sharing a particularly compelling text of his from his blog:

The Whistling of Places

My car breaks down

I stand, like a fragile creature; scared, wet and stripped naked; completely hapless, just like those before him and after him, living and dead.

I cannot find the strength to change the tire, nor do I know how, since papa’s driver used to carry out these tasks instead of me, before maman wasted all the money, beauty, morals and high standing she possessed. The driver used to perform various physical services – among other things – for the family members, in addition to mounting the steering wheel to breathe life into the fuel, until it waned and evaporated, dead and berated. Just as he would wait for everyone to sleep, to search for the beginning of a ruse among the winter’s mud and the smell of rottenness in the back squares, for the spark of a tragedy and a destructive secret, or a lie that might burn everything standing that did not yet exist, and the mirage (has anyone ever watched a mirage burn?). If I decide to leave my vehicle and escape, there are enough fields inside me that await bulldozers to rummage inside of them to extract transparent liquids that do not ease even the effects of a passing fever, lest we say deadly…with a retroactive effect.

2
My car breaks down
I notice a powerful white light approaching me. According to Mike Leigh’s cinematic logic, that is tantamount to a train hurtling towards me and it will pass from the beginning of the tunnel to the last bone in the body
A car stops. I get on top of it.
-I beg you, take me away from here, so that this smell turns into the smell of a mere memory, or a perfumed deception.
-Where to? Where do you live?
-I do not know.
-You do not know where you’re going? Or where you live?
-Both.
-I have never met in my whole life a person who does not know where they live! Who are you? Why do I imagine that I see you everywhere, in every occasion, every bend in the road, as if you’re a magician or a genie passing by every crossroad or exit or square in which dozens of people were stampeded to death, murdered, or committed suicide…
-No, it is simply that anywhere I live, I try to shape the alphabets of the relationship with places and people and the air anew every time. And as soon as the strip begins to be fastened, a qualitative monotony is born, somewhat specific, until I depart to another place in which I try to shape the alphabets of a relationship…etc, etc.
-Interesting, a truly interesting mutual attraction…
-Then I return to the first place once again and try to shape those alphabets. But all these formations do not always resemble each other, meaning that they might bring a troubling joy or a sticky tragedy with the taste of disintegration.

3
We notice a powerful white light approaching us. According to Mike Leigh’s cinematic logic, that is tantamount to a train hurtling towards me and it will pass, swaggering proudly from the beginning of the tunnel till the last drop of a sigh…my sigh…our sigh, it does not matter.

I chide him with silence
-Why didn’t you suggest that I change the vehicle’s tires?
-I am escaping from such places. There is something waiting for me always, something more important. I have no time, I have no time to put out the fires of non-certainty.
-I do not understand. What awaits you?
-A small child in a forgotten mountain home, at the top of a hill that looks out onto a lake of pearls. The child can do nothing but await me, and knows nothing other than his need for me and my existence, which is an extension of his existence and a reason for it.
-And is he waiting by himself in the faraway house?
-Yes, his loneliness awaits me
-But still!!
-Just as a city of secrets, teeming with the clamor of the question, awaits me. From amongst the walls of its towers there rises up a froth of tears, questions, lipstick, annihilated stars, post-filth sweat, warm semen, the saliva of sweat, the deep green dawn of a tavern, the cries of vendors, the fragrance of coffee and the bubbling of its preparation, eyeliner, eyeliner that runs, eyeliner that stains a neck that has been licked a little while ago in a party that began and will not end…and eyeliner that melts inside froth, and so on.
-But still!!

4
I leave the ever-standing vehicle
I arrive at a new place, one I have been in all my life. I try to absorb its features. I try to shape the alphabets of some relationship with it that had been broken off after I left it, with rituals that seemed dramatic at the time, as if had not been planned for ages.
I find myself returning after three days to the same coordinates where my car is located, and its withered-up back left tire. I stand near it. I contemplate the tire’s emaciation (as in spite of this, Papa’s driver taught me how to use awkward situations as an excuse to delay looking into the mirror)
I notice a powerful white light approaching me. And according to Khaled Yousef’s cinematic logic, it is tantamount to a train hurtling in my direction, which will carry me and my car to a village on the plane of whispering.

For Cultural Purposes Only

sunbula — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 14:49:43 +0000

Update

here

from Sight and Sound Magazine

The Palestinian Film Archive vanished during the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut. Sarah Wood’s ‘For Cultural Purposes Only’ revives the memory of its contents through verbal description and drawings. Palestinian writer Adania Shibli finds her own memories stirred

Sometimes, when you talk to someone, for instance about your first day in school, the other person rushes to remember their own first day in school as well. I am well aware that this can be annoying. Still, this is exactly what I shall proceed to do in relation to Sarah Wood’s experimental film For Cultural Purposes Only.

The film consists of flashes of memory that run parallel in the said and in the seen. In the former one hears a number of people, including Palestinian film-makers, describe specific scenes they remember watching from Palestinian films that, at least in their original versions, were lost with the disappearance of Palestinian Film Archive during the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. The seen part of the film attempts to document these scenes, which are no longer possible to watch, by drawing them.

The story of the loss of the Palestinian Film Archive is one that is being lived out by those interested in Palestinian cinema, rather like the way in which the Palestinian refugees are living the story of their loss of all they owned following the Nakba (‘Palestinian Catastrophe’) of 1948. The Palestinian film-maker Azzah al-Hasan made a documentary on the issue, Kings and Extras (2006), in which she attempted, like a private detective, to search for the archive and all those connected with it up until the moment of its disappearance. And just last August, al-Aqsa University in Gaza (yes, Gaza!) hosted a conference that dealt with the issue of the loss of the archive and its consequences, including the inability of early Palestinian cinema to take its place in the archive of world cinema.

For me, however, as for many of the younger generation, the question of the archive’s disappearance has meant something else completely. It has meant our inability to watch these pioneering films, or to even know that they exist. Our knowledge of Palestinian films is restricted to those produced since the 1980s, as if Palestinian cinema did not exist before then. And so I had not watched any of the films that Wood referenced in her film, or even recognised any of their titles, bar one – Qasim Hawl’s Aa’id ila Haifa (Return to Haifa, 1981).

I got to know about the existence of this film only in 2004, when I watched it during the Palestinian film festival titled ‘Dreams of a Nation’, organised by Hamid Dabashi, a film professor at Columbia University in New York, and Palestinian film-maker Annemarie Jacir. The festival screened that film on videocassette, along with others whose original prints had also been lost. Among them was Laysa Lahum Wujud (They Do Not Exist, 1974), by Mustafa Abu Ali, one of the pioneers of Palestinian documentary cinema, and one of the film-makers to whose works Wood refers in her film.

They Do Not Exist takes its title from a reply by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, to a question about the Palestinians, and it depicts scenes of life from the Palestinian refugee camp of Nabatiyeh in Lebanon. It begins with long shots that carefully but unassumingly contemplate a casual morning in the camp, with women busy eating breakfast, hanging up washing, sweeping the courtyard or kneading dough, while the children are either playing or disturbing their mothers. One of the women sidesteps this disturbance by pressing a piece of dough into the hand of her breastfeeding child, whose body in her lap surrenders to the rhythm of her movements that are dictated by the kneading. In the background, one can hear one of Umm Kulthum’s songs, which women normally listen to in the morning. Later, this music is replaced by the voice of a little girl reading out a letter she has written to someone, in which she explains that she is giving him a towel and a piece of soap as a present; then she apologises for the meagerness of her gift. The voice of this young girl in turn transports the viewer out of the camp to the recipient of the letter, a resistance fighter huddled in the hills out in the wilderness, then to Israeli warplanes hovering in the sky, which bring us back to the camp, now completely destroyed. At that moment, one cannot help but recall the images of that casual morning in the camp, with its women and children, as well as the little girl who was reading the letter, all of whom “no longer exist”.

I had met Abu Ali, the film’s director, a few times before. But until then I had not seen any of his films; nor had I been particularly keen on doing so. I do not know if this was because of his bellowing laughter, his thick glasses, or his voracious smoking. After watching the film, I felt terribly ashamed of my sheer ignorance of what he had offered to documentary cinema, especially that pertaining to Palestine. Usually, films of this kind are impressive to the same extent as news from Palestine is impressive. The story of Palestine has been impressive for at least the last hundred years. Yet They Do Not Exist does not depict any impressive story, but instead a simple, normal daily life that the viewer cannot overly sanctify. And suddenly, this life no longer exists. That is all there is to it. In other words, the film does not follow any particular event to narrate the Palestinian tragedy. Rather, by merely documenting the non-event and its disappearance, it manages to penetrate the extent of this tragedy.

A few weeks ago, Abu Ali unexpectedly passed away, having offered nothing of note to Palestinian cinema since 1982. And just as his film consecrates the memory of a life that no longer exists, and so summons it back to existence anew, Sarah Wood’s film consecrates the memory of this film-maker who is no longer with us, along with the Palestinian Film Archive, and summons them both back to existence anew.

Translated by Suneela Mubayi.

‘For Cultural Purposes Only’ is one of four AnimateTV 2009 commissions screened on Channel 4 on 20 November and at Tate Modern on 3 December. All four are available to view at animateprojects.org from 21 December.
Sight & Sound

Fuzzy Math: Israel’s Dead Soldiers Numbers Don’t Add Up

Mohammad — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:52:00 +0000

This coffin apparently also contained the 120 other fallen soldiers.

Israel’s deranged war on Gaza earlier this year was one of the most painful episodes in recent Palestinian history, in which one of the world’s most advanced armies devastated the towns and refugee camps they had caused decades earlier with the most brutal weaponry.

Although numbers can never convey the grotesque manner of the slaughter, Palestinian medical officials counted over 1,400 dead, mostly civilians and including close to more than 500 women and children.

Israel, on the other hand, claimed to have only lost 13 citizens, the bulk of whom were soldiers killed by friendly fire.

But some extraordinary vigilance by me (okay, I was playing on my phone next to the TV and overheard something) has uncovered some startling figures. Tuesday was Israel’s Independence Day, when it granted Palestinian lands independence from its Palestinian owners, and there was some official memorial service held that night for Israelis killed ‘in the service of the state’ over the past year.

Oddly, that number came to 133. That is WAY more then the 13 soldiers and less than 20 civilians that had been counted by the Israeli army and government during that time period.

The following dialogue captures the moment of discovery:

MHMD: not that it really matters anymore, but today israel held a memorial service for all of its soldiers killed in the past year. the total number came to 134. perhaps the israelis werent being quite so honest about their dead in gaza?

Um Mazen: where did you see the 134 figure?

MHMD: not sure, heard it on tv, wasn’t paying attention. Ah, off Haaretz: 133 soldiers and civilians. Still, I don’t recall that many being killed. The number is definitely much larger than what was let on…it was what..less than 15 civilian deaths due to fire from Gaza, and less than 5 in the West Bank?

Um Mazen: 133 killed in the service of the state. No way! Either hey are including police officers and others killed in the ‘line of duty’ (ie. whether by other Israelis or in car accidents) or they are obscuring Gaza figures.

MHMD: definitely sounds like a gaza coverup.

According to the Defense Ministry, 133 soldiers and civilians died during the past year either in the course of military service or as civilian casualties of hostile activity.

military service or civilian casualties of hostile activity.

those are not car accidents.

Fadi: why didn’t they mention the gazillions of rockets. isn’t that a more important statistic than number of deaths? i thought the number of rockets was the most important statistic in the world, ever. i think israel is soon going to have a national holiday dedicated just to the gazillions of rockets. there will be an hour of silence, and mahmoud abbAss will partake in it. Assali will wake up in the middle of the night in order to partake in the silence as well, from d.c. they will release a gazillion balloons in the air, each balloon representing a square inch of metal used in the rockets. this is the only way people will fully comprehend just how relevant these rockets are. this needs to happen.

Um Mazen: You forgot Insane Ibish. He will weep.

Fadi: I think the next statistic will be the number of civilian and military deaths resulting from terror attacks, terrorism, Palestinian violence, Islamofascism, Muslims, Arabs, sexually transmitted diseases from Arabs/Muslims, pan-Arabism, Hizballah, Hamas, and/or natural causes. they need to find ways to conflate the type of victims and the causes of death in order to inflate the threat of Islam, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, terrorism, and the rockets. I think this will work. They should definitely do this. I imagine these types of conversations must take place within the ministry of information.

Subula: be thankful that you guys didnt have to be here when the siren blared to commemorate the deaths of all the soldiers that have died fighting for israel. everyone is supposed to just stop what they’re doing and be silent the whole time until it stops.

Um Mazen: I heard it – office is next to Beit El.

MHMD: We hear it every year. There’s enough settlements in our midst to make sure we do. And the firework displays. It’s sick watching them celebrate in Psagot, just a few hundred yards away.

So basically, the mythical lions of the Israeli Occupation Forces took a bit of a beating from Palestinian fighters armed with nothing more than Kalashnikovs and fighting on flat, open terrain. No wonder the bullies took it out on so many children.

Interestingly, the total number of Israelis killed by ‘terror’ or war in its entire existence does not exceed 24,000, roughly three times the number of Palestinians it has killed in the last 8 years alone.

They Waltz Like This with Bashir…

sunbula — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:30:00 +0000

My friend from the Occupied Golan Heights just published his own review of Waltz with Bashir in al-Quds al-Arabi a few days ago. Here is my translation of it:

On the Israeli Film “Waltz with Bashir”: What Fault is it of these Poor Horses that are Dying?

Salim Abu Jabal

The only thing that can make an Israeli director search for his place as a soldier in the Sabra and Shatila massacre is to make a film in which he narrates his own personal story as a soldier. In the case of Ari Folman, he is aiming for more – to recover his memory by jogging it with pictures of killing! Waltz With Bashir is a documentary film made with animation techniques; it is also a personal film in which the director tries to recover his lost memory from the days of his participation in the war on Lebanon in 1982. For this sake, Folman speaks with his buddies one by one, bringing the viewer as close to them as possible, as they enter Lebanese territory on the first day on their tanks singing “Good Morning, Lebanon”.

The film begins with a nightmare dreamt by the soldier Boaz, in which he sees 26 dogs that he had killed in Lebanese villages. This prompts Folman to recall where he was when the Sabra and Shatila massacre happened, and for some reason, he is unable!

Who killed Bashir Gemayel?

Punishing Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps with the excuse of avenging the murder of Bashir Gemayel is certainly a criminal act, but the facts indicate that the perpetrator was not Palestinian. Habib al-Shartuni was apprehended just two days after carrying out the operation, and confessed that he had wanted to punish the Lebanese President – in Gemayel’s case, that meant a death sentence. Because Lebanon in that period was not in a state of centralized rule that would permit justice to take its course, and because Gemayel was so powerful that he could not be punished, Shartuni, a member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, executed Gemayel by blowing up his office on the third floor of the Phalange Party headquarters that were in the same building. He supported his actions with Article 274 of the Lebanese Penal Code, which stipulates the death sentence for anyone who collaborates with a foreign power to disturb Lebanese internal security. Shartuni was apprehended in and remained in custody without trial in the Baabda Palace until the beginning of the nineties.

Those Responsible for the Massacre

In his film, Folman brings into question the role of the Israeli army in the massacre, making it seem a moral issue. But in truth, his questions lead to a single conclusion, namely, that the Christian militias, as he calls them, bear the primary responsibility, and that it was only possible for the army occupying Lebanese territory to stop the massacre after 36 hours.

The Israeli role in the massacre provoked debate for unclear reasons, as if its carrying out at the hands of the Lebanese Forces could even have occurred if not for the occupation of Lebanon and the protection and nurturing of the Israeli army. So who holds the higher number in the death toll? Let it be a fair competition and let the judges be neutral and we will not get upset if Israel wins fair and square!

Actually, the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian victims of the Israeli army far outnumber the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The principal aim of the invasion of Lebanon was to expel the Palestinians, one that Israel and the Lebanese Forces shared. This explains the joint planning between the two sides, as confirmed by testimonies of Forces members in the film Massacre directed by the German Monika Bergman.

Massacre by Monika Bergman

In her film, Bergman interviewed a group of LF members who participated in carrying out the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The film presents an ugly picture of the slaughter, its perpetrators and their relationship to Israel. The testimonies make clear Israel’s involvement in the operation from the stage of planning to execution. One of them speaks about the training camps in Haifa and Eilat for an LF group years before the war: “We arrived in Haifa from the sea during the afternoon, we got off on land, group after group…we looked around, we couldn’t believe it! We were in Israel!”

In another testimony, the Israeli complicity in the slaughter seems evident, from his description of how it started: “We had arrived at 6pm, a little before sunset, while Elie Hobeika was meeting with some Israeli officers in a nearby building. We were certain that the Palestinians had killed Bashir Gemayel and we wanted to avenge his death…we wanted to wipe them off the face of the earth.” Another person says in his testimony: “We were seething…an Israeli called Shlomo – I can still recall him uptil now – came and asked us to accompany him to Sabra and Shatila.” Another LF Officer says: “On September 16 [1982], an order reached our base, weapons and ammunition were given to my men and Israeli cars were put under our bidding.”

After the murder of defenseless Palestinian refugees carried out in the refugee camps, the LF had to carry the corpses in trucks and dump them far away. Another group was dumping corpses in a large well, or putting them in bags and sprinkling chemicals on them and then burying them in the dirt. Bergman asks one of them: “Where did you get the bags from?” He answers: “The Jews brought them…they said we would need them. They prepared everything…they had thought of all the details.”

Folman in the Reserves

In this film, Israeli cinema once again repeats the discourse of the soldier as the victim of the wars he wages. The Nazi Holocaust should not be absent from our minds – it is on screen. Folman’s psychotherapist friend tells him: “For you this massacre is linked to another one, that of your family in Auschwitz” – another confirmation that the Israeli soldier is a victim of his own wars.

Folman follows the same path that justifies the Israeli military’s crimes – the blame for committing the massacres falls on that damn Nazi Holocaust!

In the commentary accompanying the film, Folman says: “I don’t think the human mind can believe that there are people murdering families for no reason just meters away from you!” Then, at another point, he says: “I don’t understand the point of wars being waged and people fighting each other over a piece of land.”

Put simply, this is an antiwar stance, a noble humanitarian stance, but it is also extremely vile in its neutrality and two-facedness, especially when we know that Folman remained a reservist in the Israeli army, writing scripts for its propaganda films until a few years ago.

The Israeli Soldier as a Victim of His Own Wars

One of the soldiers in the film, whose job was to take photographs, sorrowfully describes a scene in Beirut in which horses die: “What fault is it of the
se horses that they should have to die in the wars of humans?” Another confirmation of the pills of neutrality that the film tries to make the viewer swallow…

Waltz with Bashir can be added to the list of films that serve to beautify the offensive face of Israel. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has proudly adopted it and Folman boasts in interviews that Israeli ambassadors have received him everywhere he has gone to screen the film.

Folman did not condemn the recent war on Gaza when he was on various podiums to receive his prizes. It is clear that he has not stepped out of the consensus on killing Arabs from the time of Deir Yassin until Rafah. Given this, Waltz with Bashir is another film in the same apparatus that sees the Arab either though camera lenses or the barrels of guns; the same apparatus that justifies the crimes Israel commits, relying on the soldier’s lost memory and military’s selective memory. Without doubt, these are Israeli characteristics par excellence!

Salim Abu Jabal is a critic from the occupied Golan Heights, residing in Haifa.

“Welcome to Egypt!”

sunbula — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:55:00 +0000

It must sound familiar for some of the readers who have visited Egypt and heard this (often misleading) phrase bandied around, but for journalist Laila el-Haddad this time around, it carried a completely different meaning…

And seriously, when the Zionists have such great Arab allies to oppress the Palestinians for them, why do they need to do anything themselves? Truly, “the road to Palestine runs through the Arab capitals“…

I was born Palestinian

“Its not very comfortable in there is it?” said the stony faced official, cigarette smoke forming a haze around his gleaming oval head.

“Its OK. We’re fine” i replied wearily, delirious after being awake for a straight period of 30 hours.
“You could be in there for days you know. For weeks. Indefinitely. “So, tell me, you are taking a plane tomorrow morning to the US?”

****
It was our journey home that began with the standard packing frenzy: squeezing everything precious and dear and useful into two suitcases that would be our sustenance for the course of 3 months.

The trips to the outdoor recreation store- in preparation for what I anticipated to be a long and tortuous journey across Rafah Crossing to Gaza. The inspect repellent; the mosquito netting; the water purifier; the potty toppers for my kids ad the granola bars and portion sized peanut butter cups. This time, I wanted to be ready, I thought to myself-just in case I got stuck at the Crossing. The Crossing. My presumptuousness is like a dull hit to the back of my head now.

In addition to all the packing of suitcases, we were also packing up our house- my husband was finishing up his residency at duke University and set to start a medical fellowship at Johns Hopkins in July. In the meantime, we were “closing shop”, putting our things in storage, selling the rest, and heading overseas: me to Gaza, he to Lebanon to visit his family; and eventually I was too meet him there (assuming i could get into Gaza, and the, assuming I could get out). Yassine is a third-generation Palestinian refugee from the village of Waarit al-Siris in nothern historic Palestine; he was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon and holds a Laizze Passe for Palestinian refugees. Israel denies him return to his own home- or even to the home of his spouse in Gaza. So when we go overseas, we often go our separate ways; we cannot live legally, as a unit, as a family, in our own homes.

I hold a Palestinian Authority passport. It replaced the “temporary two-year Jordanian passport for Gaza residents” that we held until the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid ’90s, which itself replaced the Egyptian travel documents we held before that. A progression in a long line of stateless documentation.

It is a passport that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry to my own home. This is its purpose: to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identity.

***

We finished packing as much as we could of the house, leaving the rest to Yassine who was to leave a week after us, and drove 4 hours to Washington to spend a few day sat my brother’s house before we took off.

First, we headed to the the Egyptian embassy.

Last year, my parents were visiting us from Gaza City when Rafah was sealed hermetically. They attempted to fly back to Egypt to wait for the border to open- but were now allowed to board the plane in Washington. “Palestinians cannot fly to Egypt now without a visa, new rules” the airline personnel explained, “and no visas can be issued until Rafah is open” added the Egyptian embassy official. They were in a conundrum, aggravated by the fact that their US stay entry stamp had reach passed its six-month limit. Eventually, they got around the issue by obtaining an Egyptian tourist visa, made easier by their old age, which they used to wait in Egypt for one month until Rafah Crossing opened again.

I did not want to repeat their ordeal, so I called the embassy this time, which assured me the protocol had changed: now, it was only Palestinian men who were not allowed to fly to or enter Egypt. Women were, and would get their visa at the Egyptian port of destination. I was given a signed and dated letter (April 6, 2009) by the consul to take with me in case I encountered any problems: “The Consular Section of the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt hereby confirms that women, who are residents of the Gaza Strip, and who hold passports issued by the Palestinian Authority are required to get their visa to enter Egypt at Egyptian ports and NOT at the various Egyptian consulates in the United States on their way to the Gaza Strip for the purpose of reaching their destination (i.e. Gaza Strip)” it read.

With letter and bags in hand, we took off, worried only about the possibility of entering Gaza- the thought of being able to enter Egypt never crossing my mind.

2 long-haul flights and one 7 hour transit later, we made it. I knew the routine by heart. Upon our arrival, I was quick to hit the bank to buy the $15 visa stamps for Yousuf and Noor’s American passports and exchange some dollars into Egyptian pounds. I figured it would help pass the time while the lines got shorter.

I then went and filled out my entry cards-an officer came and filled them out with me seeing my hands were full, a daypack on my back, Noor strapped to my chest in a carrier, Yousuf in my hand…

we then submitted our passports, things seemed to be going smoothly. Just then the officer explained he needed to run something by his superior. “You have a Palestinian passport; Rafah crossing is closed…”

“I promise it will just be 5 minutes” he assured me. But that’s all i needed to hear. I knew I was in for a long wait. It was at this point I yanked out my laptop and began to tweet and blog about my experience (full progression of tweets here courtesy Hootsbuddy). At first I thought it would simply help pass the time; it developed into a way to pool resources together that could help me; and ended as a public awareness campaign.

****
The faces were different each time. 3 or four different rooms and hallways to navigate down. They refused to give names and the answers they gave were always in the form of cryptic questions.

The first explained I would not be allowed entry into Egypt because Palestinians without permanent residency abroad are not allowed in; and besides- Rafah Crossing is closed he said (my response: so open it?). I was told I was to be deported to the UK first. “But I had no British visa” I explained. I was ordered to agree to get on the next flight. I refused-I didn’t come all this way to turn back.

I was escorted to the “extended transit terminal”. It was empty at first, save for a south Asian man in tightly buckled jeans and a small duffel bag that spent the good part of our time there there in a deep sleep. During the day the hall would fill up with locally deported passengers- from villages of cities across Egypt, and we would move our things to the upper waiting area.

Most of the time was spent in this w
aiting area with low level guards who knew nothing and could do nothing.

At different intervals, a frustrated Yousuf would approach them angrily about “why they wouldn’t let him go see his seedo and tete?” and why “they put cockroaches on the floor”. When we first arrived, he asked if these were the “yahood”, his only experiences with extended closure, delay, and denial of entry being at the hands of the israeli soldiers and government. “No, but why don’t you ask them why they are are allowed through to sunbathe and we aren’t to our own homes?”

“Rabina kbeer” came the response, signifyig impotence. God is great.

There was very little time I was given access to anyone who had any authority. I seemed to be called in whenever the new person on duty arrived, when they were scheduled for their thrice daily interrogation and intimidation, their shooting and crying.

Officers came and went as shifts began and ended. But our status was always the same. Our “problem”, our case, our issue was always the same. We remained, sitting on our chairs, with our papers and documents in hand, waiting, and no one the better.

Always waiting. For this is what the Palestinian does: we wait. For an answer to be given, for a question to be asked; for a marriage proposal to be made, for a divorce to be finalized; for a border to open, for a permit to be issued; for a war to end; for a war to begin; for a child to be born; for one to die a martyr; for retirement or a new job; for exile to a better place and for return to the only place that knows us; for our prisoners to come home; for our home to no longer be prisons; for our children to be free; for freedom from a time when we no longer have to wait.

We waited for the next shift as we were instructed by those who made their own instructions. Funny how when you need to pass the time, the time does not pass.

“You need to speak with whose in charge-and their shift starts at 10 am”. So we pass the night and wait until 10. “Well by the time they really get started its more like noon”. So we wait till noon. “Well the real work isn’t until the evening”. And we wait until evening. Then the cycle starts again.

Every now and then the numberless phone would ring requesting me, and a somber voice would ask if I changed my mind. I insisted all I wanted to do was go home; that it was not that complicated.

“But Gaza is a special case, we all know that” I was told.

Special, as in expendable, not human, not entitled to rights special, I thought.

Unfamiliar faces that acted as though though I was a long-lost friend kept popping in and out to see me. As though I were an amnesiac in a penitentiary. They all kept asking the same cryptic question “so you are getting on a plane soon, right?”

First, a gentleman from the Palestinian representative’s office that someone else whose name I was meant to recognize sent. ” It’ll all be resolved within the hour” he promised confidently, before going on to tell me about his son who worked with Motorola in Florida;

“Helping Israeli drones do their job?”

“That’s right!” he beamed.

An hour came and went, and suddenly the issue was “irresolvable”, and I was “a journalist up to trouble”.

***

Friends and family in Egypt, the US, and Gaza, worked around the clock with me, calling in any favors they had, anyone they knew, doing anything they could to get some answers and let me through. But the answer was always the same: Amn il Dawla (State Security and Intelligence) says no, and they are the ultimate authorities. No one goes past them.

Later a second Palestinian representative came to see me.

“So you are not going on that second flight are you?”

“What are you talking about? Why does everyone speak to me in question form?”

“Answer the question”

“No, I came here to go to Gaza, not to return to the US”

“Ok that’s all I needed to know; there is a convoy of injured Palestinian with security clearance heading to the border with some space; we are trying to get you on there with them; 15 minutes and it’ll all be resolved, we just need clearance, its all over” he assured me.

Yousuf smashed another cockroach.

****
We were taken down a new hallway. A new room. A new face. The man behind the desk explained how he was losing sleep over my case, how I had the while airport working on it, ho he had a son Yousuf’s age; and then offered me an apple and a bottle of water and told me istaraya7i, to rest, a command I would hear again and again over the course of the 36 hours.

Is this man for real??? an apple and a bottle of water? I thought to myself, my eyes nearly popping out of my face.

“I don’t want your food. I don’t want to rest. I don’t want your sympathy. I JUST WANT TO GO HOME. To my country. To my parents. IS THAT TOO HARD TO UNDERSTAND?” I screamed, breaking my level-headed calm of the past 20 hours.

“Please don’t yell, just calm down, calm down, everyone outside will think I am treating you badly, c’mon, and besides its ‘ayb (disgraceful) not to accept the apple from me”.

“‘Ayb?? What’s ‘AYB is you denying my entry to my own home! And why should I be calm? This situation doesn’t call for calm; it makes no sense and neither should I!”

“C’mon lady don’t have a breakdown in front of your kids please. You know I have a kid your son’s age and its breaking my heart to do this, to see him in these conditions, to put him in the conditions, so please take the plane.”

“So don’t see me in these conditions! There’s a simple solution you know. LET ME GO HOME. Its not asking a lot is it?”

“Hey now look lady” he said, stiffening suddenly into bad cop, his helpless grimace disappeared.
“Rules are rules, you need a visa to get in here like any other country, can you go to Jordan without a visa?’

“Don’t play the rules game with me. I HAD APPROVAL FROM YOUR EMBASSY, FROM YOUR CONSUL GENERAL, to cross into Egypt and go to Gaza; and besides how else am I supposed to get into Gaza???” I shouted, frantically waving the stamped and signed document in front of him as though it were a magic wand.

“So sue him. Amn il Dawla supercedes the foreign ministry’s orders, he must have outdated protocol.”

“The letter was dated April 6, that is 2 days ago, how outdated could it be?? Look- if I could parachute into Gaza I would, trust me. With all do respect to your country, I’m not here to sight-see. Do you have a parachute for me? If I could sail there I would do that too, but last I check Israel was ramming and turning those boats back. Do you have another suggestions?

“What is it you want lady- do you want to just live in the airport? is that it? Because we have no problems letting you live here, really. We can set up a shelter for you. And no one will ever ask about you or know you exist. In any case you don’t have permanent residency abroad so our government policies say we can’t let a Palestinian who does not have permanent residency abroad”

“I have a US Visa- its expired but my extension of status document is valid until the end of June. and besides- what kind of illogical law is that? you aren’t allowing me back home if I don’t have permanent residency abroad?”

“I don’t read English please translate..”

“You see it says here that my status is valid until June 30, 2009″

“Good, so then we CAN deport you back to the US” he said, picking up the phone and giving a quick order for the Palestinian convoy of injured Palestinians heading to the Crossing to go on without me, my only hope of returning home dissipating before my eyes at the hands of a barely literate manipulative enforcer.

“You just said if i have permanent residency abroad I can go home, now you say I can’t, which is it??”

“I’m sorry you are refusing to go on the plane. Take her away please.”

We were ushere
d back to the extended waiting area, back to our roach ridden premises that had become our home, along with a newly arrived Luxembourgian and French couple and their two children who had failed to produce their passports and were being sent back home. Here I was, about to be deported away from home, over prepared, with my documents and signed papers, from consulates and universities and governments; and they, used to traveling passport-free the EU, being sent back home because they had only an ID card.

***

It wasn’t long before a new guard came to us, and request we follow him “to a more isolated room”. “It will be better for you- more private. All the African flights are arriving now with all their diseases, you don’t want to be here for that! It’ll get overcrowded and awful in here.”

Given the the well-wishes that preceded my last interrogation about the “uncomfortableness” I may endure, I somehow had a feeling where we were headed.

We were asked to bring all our luggage and escorted down a different hallway; this time we were asked to leave everything behind, and to give up our cameras, laptops, and mobile phones. We took our seats in the front of a tiny filthy room, where 17 other men (and one Indonesian woman was sleeping on the floor in the back, occasionally shouting out in the middle of her interrupted sleep) of varying nationalities were already waiting.

A brute man-, illiterate by his own admission, took charge of each of files, spontaneously blurting out vulgarities and ordering anyone who so much as whispered to shut the hell up or get sent to real prison; the room was referred to as “7abs”, or a cell; I can probably best describe it as the detention or holding room. a heady man with a protruding belly that seems at odds with his otherwise lanky body was the door guard.

Officer #1 divided up the room into regions: the 5 or so south Asians who were there for whatever reason-expired paperwork, illegal documentation- were referred to as “Pakistan” when their attention was needed; The snoozing, sleep-talking woman in the back was “Indonesia”; and the impeccably dressed Guinean businessman, fully decked in a sharp black suit and blue lined tie, was “Kenya” (despite his persistence please to the contrary). There was a group of Egyptian peasants with forged, fake, or wrongly filed Id cards and passports: a 54 year old man whose ID said he was born in 1990; another who left his ID in his village 5 hours away, and so on.

By this point, I had not slept in 27 hours, 40 if one were to count the plane ride. My patience and my energy were wearing thing. My children were filthy and tired and confused; Noor was crying. I tried to set her cot up, but a cell within a cell did not seem to her liking and she resisted, much as I did.

We took the opportunity to chat when officer #1 was away. “”So what did you do?” asked Kenya, the Guinean.

“I was born Palestinian” I replied. “Everyone in here is being deported back home for one reason or another right? I bet I am the only one being deported away from home; the only one denied entry to my home.”

Officer #1 returned, this time he asked me to come with him “with or without your kids”. I brought them along, not knowing what was next.

There was two steely-eyed men on either end of a relatively well-furnished room, once again inquiring about my “comfort” and ordering-in the form of a question- whether I was taking a flight that morning to the US.

Noor began making a fuss, bellowing at the top of her lungs and swatting anyone that approached her.

“She is stubborn. She takes after her mother I see” said the man.

Soon we were escorted back to the waiting area. I knew there was nothing more I could do. We waited for several more hours until my children exhausted themselves and fell asleep. I bathed them in the filthy bathroom sinks with freezing tap water and hand soap and arranged their quarters on the steel chairs of the waiting room, buzzing with what seemed like a thousand gnats. Thank God for the mosquito netting.

Eventually, dawn broke, and we were escorted by two guards to the ticket counter, our $2500 flights rerouted, and put on a plane back to Washington.

I noted on one of my tweets that I would be shocked if my children’s immune system survived this jolt. It didn’t.

My daughter vomited the whole flight to London as I slipped in and out of delirium, mumbling half Arabic half English phrases to the flustered but helpful Englishman sitting next to us. I thank him wherever he is for looking after us.

Whatever she had, Yousuf an eye caught in the coming days-along with an ear and throat infection.

Eventually, we reached Dulles Airport. I walked confidently to the booth when it was my turn.

What was I going to say? How do I explain this? The man took one look at my expired visa, and my departure stamps.

“How long have you been gone?”

“36 hours” I replied bluntly.

“Yes,I see that. Do you want to explain?”

“Sure. Egypt forbade me from returning to Gaza”.

“I don’t understand- they denied you entry to your own home?”

“I don’t either, and if I did, I wouldn’t be here.”

With that, I was given a a stamp and allowed back inside.

Now that we are warm; clothes; showered, rested and recovered from whatever awful virus we picked up in the bowels of Cairo airport, I keep thinking to myself: what more could I have done?

“The quintessential Palestinian experience,” historian Rashid Khalidi has written, “takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified.”

In this place, adds Robyn Creswell, “connection” turns out to be only another word for separation or quarantine: the loop of airports never ends, like Borges’s famous library. The cruelty of the Palestinian situation is that these purgatories are in no way extraordinary but rather the backdrop of daily existence.”

Enlightened by Sight

sunbula — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:41:00 +0000

Ahmed Darwish reviews the life of one of Egypt’s most distinguished calligraphers

Khan Al-Maghrabi in Zamalek has put together an exhibition of the work of calligrapher Hamed El-Uweidi to mark the anniversary of his death last year at the age of 53. The exhibition, entitled “Love and Salute”, drew crowds of art enthusiasts and calligraphy buffs.

Calligraphy may seem to be a luxury, as it requires a skill and takes too much time, especially at a time when most of us spend our days hunched over a keyboard, the nostalgia for beautiful writing is hard to resist.

I first met El-Uweidi at an exhibition of his work at the Higher Council for Culture (HCC). The exhibition was arranged for the 20th anniversary of the death of the poet Amal Dunqul, and the event was sponsored entirely by Gaber Asfour, then secretary-general of the HCC and an old friend of Dunqul’s. At the Khan Al-Maghrabi, I felt that time had only added to the inspiration of his message.

Looking at El-Uweidi’s work, one is gripped by a persistent sense of wonder. Most of the pieces fuse old and new approaches, since El-Uweidi remains faithful to the legacy of centuries past while experimenting with new approaches with the same freshness found in such works as those of Youssef Sayeda, Kamal El-Sarrag and Naga El-Mahdawi.

Poetry is his favourite theme. “If enamoured, it’s because our faces are enlightened by sight.” One of his pieces offers the line with such a melodic tenderness that one can almost hear it.

What sets El-Uweidi apart from other calligraphers is that he uses the background of his compositions as a basic component of the piece. It is as if one is prepared for the opus with a chorus of whispers, or perhaps eased into the melee with a nudge on the shoulder. Then an oversized letter, his trademark, brings the message home on a dramatic note, one that pushes the delicate harmony of the inimitable composition out of this world and into another level of visual expression altogether.

In another piece, he presents a fragment of poetry: “He who says no to the face of he who said yes, and teaches man to tear apart the emptiness, he who says no doesn’t die, but becomes a soul in pain immortalised.” He is using a three dimensional pattern here, offering Persian script interlaced with another script called Thuluth, the word “no” blown out of proportion, offering the canvass an audio quality of immense impact.

In all El-Uweidi’s compositions there is a yearning for spirituality, a supplication to a higher power, a quest for a spiritual journey that takes him to the poetry of Ahmed Shawqi and Mahmoud Darwish and the sayings of Ibn Arabi and Omar Khayyam.

El-Uweidi, who held the post of art director at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies, was a Sufi by inclination, a poet by temperament, and a man of encyclopaedic knowledge. A keen collector of rare Quran recitals, he would spend hours listening to the great Quranic readers Mustafa Ismail and Mohamed Siddiq El-Minshawi.

He was close to his family, and used to spend most of his time at home either reading or talking to his daughter, Aida, who was 10 when he died. He was also a frequent visitor of old mosques, his favourite being the Sultan Hassan Mosque, a great place for admiring the fine examples of Mameluke calligraphy. El-Uweidi used to take his son Salah to mosques in Islamic Cairo, usually opting for the mosques with the best examples of calligraphy.

El-Uweidi owned a large collection of art, Sufi literature, and poetry, and had plans to write the whole Quran in calligraphy, but died before he could fulfil his wish. He died on 4 March 2008 and was buried in Qus village in Upper Egypt.
Tarboush tip: al-Ahram Weekly

Mada al-Carmel Issues the Second Issue of Jadal

sunbula — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:42:00 +0000

In February, I used Kabobfest to advertise the issuing of Jadal’s first issue. I will repeat my shameless exploitation of my posting privileges now that the second issue is out.

Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa, a unique research center that is attempting to create the first intellectual institution run by and for Palestinians inside Israel and give ’48 Palestinian academics a platform and home outside Israeli universities, has just released the second issue of its online magazine Jadal (meaning “debate” in Arabic). I highly recommend downloading a copy and forwarding it to your friends, media contacts and everyone else who is ignorant that the Palestinians in Israel are trying to build an intellectual base for themselves within the belly of the beast.

This issue contains three points of view that discuss the Arab participation in the Israeli parliamentary elections – Reasons for the Drop in Voting Rate among Arabs and Reasons for Participation – the Political Monitoring Program – Land Day – Palestinian Political Prisoners – and more.

You can also download the magazine in Arabic and Hebrew.

Oh, New York Times – stop trying so hard to be “objective”

sunbula — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:55:00 +0000

If the subject of Emily Jacir’s exhibition was any different, this NYT review would be all glowing with praise for an award-winner at the Guggenheim. However, here, the writer manages to disingenuously insert that Wael Zuaiter might actually have been responsible for the Munich attacks: “In the wall text that introduces the exhibition, however, there is a curious qualification. It says that Mr. Zuaiter was never “conclusively” linked to the Olympics murders. This introduces the shadow of a doubt. Is there a chance that he was somehow involved? Ms. Jacir’s exhibition can thus be viewed as a brief for the defense, but this is problematic. How can we know if the artist is manipulating her material, leaving out anything that might be suspicious or incriminating?” Would any other review for an installation art exhibit be full of such tripe? Is it her job to defend Zuaiter from the accusation? Why don’t you just admit that you’re a Zionut shmuch? And this is not the first time that the NYT has tried to do over Emily with its disingenuous so-called objective reporting on the Palestinian cause.

Tarboush Tip: Ted Swedenburg

Arab Vegans: Get Medical Supervision!

sunbula — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 23:20:00 +0000

…No it’s not an oxymoron. The article is titled: “For Vegetarians: Medical supervision is Necessary”. It opens: “It is rare for someone to give up the deliciousness of meat and animal products. His/her immediate environment may find this nutritional choice repellent. Vegetarians are a minority, but they have taken a nutritional choice different from the norm, even though they admit the deliciousness of meat.”

This and Libyan Ibrahim al-Koni‘s novel Bleeding of the Stone are the only two things in Arabic I have seen to advocate vegetarianism.*

*Note: I am not a vegetarian, although I advocate cutting down on red meat. And no, I don’t believe eating meat is morally equivalent to rape, unlike some.

Tarboush tip: Rami Zurayk

Missile Gyrations

sunbula — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 07:50:00 +0000

Can they really get any more pathetic? Could the guy at least bother to shave? And which Bollywood song is ever sung in English? They’d be better off singing it in Hebrew. You’d think with the $900 million/year they’ve been making lately from the Indians (think about how many people for how long that amount could feed), at least their music video production could improve.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktQOLO4U5iQ]

Tarboush tip: 3arabawy