There were fewer men than women in this class and the men would often sit together at the back. Whereas any sign of touching between the sexes was taboo, the men were strikingly physical with one another. They sometimes greeted one another with a kiss on each cheek, and they would sit in class with an arm over one another’s shoulder, or tap a friend on the thigh to make a point. Haytham had swapped to the Special Topics course. Students often shifted about in the early part of term, to get into the courses they wanted or so they would have enough credits for the semester. One of the men had been trying to make a point but struggling to articulate it. ‘What he is trying to say,’ Haytham said, ‘is that the wrong person always gets rewarded. It’s like in Egypt, the wrong person ends up in power, by accident or because they have no passion and so nobody is afraid of them.’
One afternoon in the staff room, I talked to Lynn about writers we were both interested in and I mentioned the Sufis, a mystical branch of Islam that had influenced Ted Hughes and Doris Lessing. Lynn warned me that the Sufis were controversial for some sects within Islam. She explained that she had been asked to teach religion and mythology because she was a Christian, so could remain outside such disputes. (Later, Lynn told me that she had converted to Judaism and moved to Israel nearly thirty years earlier and had taught in Israeli universities before coming to Al-Quds.)
I forgot about this conversation. As we were speaking, the photocopier jammed while it was churning out handouts for Lynn’s class. We opened up a compartment at the end, to retrieve the lost paper and ended up with our hands covered in ink, as though we had just had our fingerprints taken. We were giggling when another lecturer came in, who Lynn introduced as Rashad. She said: ‘He is the one who all the students respect.’ Rashad was a thin man, who was dressed in a smart blazer. ‘They will do anything he asks,’ Lynn said. Rashad responded with a saying in Arabic and then translated it. ‘Be firm, but not inflexible; bend, but do not break.’
A few weeks later, I ran into Fu’ad after class and he took me to the Faculty of Da’wa and Religious Studies. I’d told him that I was interested in finding out more about the Sufis. We met an academic called Mohammed, who said he was ‘half a Sufi’ and who asked us to come back in an hour. In the meantime, we dropped in to another office along the corridor, in which two men were drinking coffee and smoking. Fu’ad explained that one of them was a lecturer and the other had just been released from prison. Fu’ad said that he had taught this man ‘after many years.’
The conversation was fragmented, as neither of the men spoke English. Fu’ad reported that they had not heard of Idries Shah, whose work had influenced Lessing and Hughes. Eventually I realised that the discussion was becoming tense. Fu’ad stopped translating. In the midst of a long speech, the lecturer said two words that I understood: ‘Salman Rushdie’. Fu’ad started to move only sporadically into English. He suggested that people should have debated Rushdie instead of condemning him. The conversation came to an abrupt end and Fu’ad stood up. We went through the usual pleasantries on our way out, shaking hands and saying a few polite phrases in a perfunctory way. I felt embarrassed as we left and feared that I had offended the men. We went back to meet Mohammed, who rocked back in his chair, laughing, when Fu’ad explained what had happened. ‘These guys hate the Sufis!’
My conversation with Khalid became part of the first assignment I set in Special Topics. I asked the students to listen to a story being told around them, or to choose a famous spoken story they were familiar with, and to analyse it using the approach we had developed in class, paying attention to its form, the language, who was telling the story, the type of story and then giving some commentary on why they liked or disliked it. I asked them also to include three Arabic words or phrases that were important in the narrative and to translate them. My encounter in the Faculty of Da’wa and Religious Studies had made me aware of just how much I did not understand the structures and tensions of the society I was living within, not least because I could not speak Arabic. I hoped my students would teach me more about Palestine, as well as articulating their own experiences.
The stories that the students shared were a mixture of folk or fairy tales, episodes from family history, and incidents that had happened to them. I found that a few of the stories had been plagiarised from the internet. These ones tended to sound like lost tales from the Arabian Nights and I wondered whether the students were giving me what they thought I wanted, a generic folk tale about the Middle East.
Wafa included a story which her grandmother had told her. A young prince asks to marry his cousin, but she humiliates him by making him pick a pomegranate berry off the floor with his mouth. The prince sneaks back into the palace disguised as a poor man and sings to his cousin, who falls in love with him. She lives with him in poverty and disgrace, before he reveals himself to be the real prince. Wafa explained why she liked the story:
I heard it when I was young and I love the ending, ‘they lived happily ever after.’ Some of the dialogue is presented by songs. On the one hand, it’s similar to the stories which we read in class, it’s a fairytale as is ‘A Toy Princess’. On the other hand, it’s different. The story is told in my language, it’s full of terms that only Palestinians know and, most importantly, it’s an oral story. Each time my grandmother Wajiha tells the story, she adds some events and omits some. Her way of storytelling hooks us immediately, the way she sings and the intonation while she imitates the characters. The story is from Palestinian folklore, it’s not very famous, it’s called ‘Haj Brambo’. It shows how Palestinian cousins are used to getting married, especially in the previous generation. It also gives a moral that we have to think in our heart and mind, not only our heart, when we get married.
A number of the stories were about real events. A young woman called Marah wrote about an incident that had occurred in Nablus:
My grandmother told me the story when I was little. The story took place during the 1960s in Palestine, at the Turkish baths. They used firewood, timber and sawdust to heat the bathroom floor. The domes and skylight of most of the bathrooms were made of wood. Women used to go there on special occasions and before their weddings. A fire spread in the bathroom that was for women only. Usually, the women went there naked and others used to put a towel around their body. When the fire spread around the place, some women were smuggled out, but the naked women remained there out of fear and shyness. When they asked the doorman if anyone had died, he said: ‘The women who were shy died’ (‘Elli estaho mato’).
Marah included an aside, explaining that the phrase ‘the women who were shy died’ now had a wider application. She said it was used to describe a loss of modesty in Palestine; the fact that traditional religious values were not respected as they had once been.
I had asked the students to note down who had told them the story, and usually they were narrated by other family members. One of the women wrote:
My father told me this story two years ago, while we were at a picnic. In a small village near Ramallah, about 25 years ago, the Israeli soldiers broke into our house. My grandfather was the most dangerous wanted man in Palestine because he had an unwarranted weapon. The Israeli soldiers were doing raids to catch people who went against their laws. Two months later, they came again and tried to torture us to confess where he was. But no-one told them this secret, where he was hiding. Two years passed: then they caught him. The Israeli soldiers decided to execute him publicly and then hang his body in the village, so all the villagers would see him and be afraid to do what he did. My father ended the story by describing how brave and courageous my grandfather was. I like this story very much because it’s realistic. This story talks about our reality and our society. It also describes our current situation. It seems that this is happening now. I also like it because my grandfather was very courageous. He protected his country and died while doing that. He was a hero, at least my family and I think that. He was not a terrorist. I’m very proud of him, because he died while he was
holding his gun.
The students sometimes set the stories against key episodes in Palestinian history, as they did when they re-wrote Romeo and Juliet. One student wrote about a young nurse called Inas, who chose to stay in Akka in 1948 when the rest of her family had fled, because she had fallen in love with an ill man named Ramez. She was killed a few months later by invading Israeli forces, as she tried to send food to Ramez. ‘Although Inas’s death makes me very sad,’ she wrote, ‘it also established the idea that our land is the most important thing that we have.’ Another student wrote a story about a 7-year old boy in contemporary Gaza, who chose to throw stones at the Israelis when he found out that they had killed his father and brother, and who was subsequently killed.
In Ruba’s story, she was both the narrator and a participant:
I was a part of the story, and one of the people who actually told it many times, and also heard a lot of family members and friends telling it and talking about it. It happened on a very normal day, just like any other day, after midnight in 2005. My family and I were sitting in the living room, chatting and watching TV, about to prepare ourselves for bedtime. All of a sudden we heard someone knocking on our door and screaming: ‘Open up, open up!’ My father got up, opened it and in a second the whole building we live in was filled with Israeli soldiers, guns, boxes and the first thing they did, they locked all of us in the living room, put the power off, and asked us not to move or make any sound or even light a candle. A few hours later, they took my father. We had no idea where, whether he was still alive or not, and after that all we heard was gunshots, and speakers asking two guys to walk out of the house. Twelve hours passed and we did not hear anything about my father. When the morning came, my father came in, shaking, his whole body was weak and it was the first time in my life I saw tears coming down from his eyes. Suddenly, the Israeli soldiers put their guns down, started talking and joking, like none of this was happening, they finished what they came for. They killed two young men, they destroyed the entire building. It turned out the two men were wanted by the Israelis and, after they had accomplished their mission, they took my father as a human shield, to drag the bodies out. It was terrifying and it was probably the worst day of my life and the hardest to forget.
I was struck that Ruba told the story in such a straightforward way. I read it several times and I wondered what I might say to a student in England, if she reported an incident this traumatic; what my role would be as her teacher. I was glad that Ruba had written about her experience. But I also felt powerless. Ruba had taught me, among other things, what it feels like to have no part in the story.
5
The rights of the reader
I had been trying to persuade Haytham to do the reading for class, so when I got an e-mail from him, after we had looked at an extract from Malcolm X’s Autobiography, it felt like a small breakthrough:
Regarding why do I think that reading is not necessary, the whole idea got changed after hearing Malcolm’s part of the story which actually convinced me. However I would love to re-talk about [it] all on Tuesday and I think I have some cool thoughts regarding this matter.
Haytham was not the only student who often did not do the reading. Some of the students were taking six or seven classes at the same time and claimed they had too much preparatory work to do. Others saw the reading as peripheral; they wanted to come to class, write down the answers, and prepare themselves for the exam. But Haytham’s resistance bothered me. He was one of the most engaged students in seminars, participating in debates with passion and humour. I could not make sense of his reluctance.
Then I met Farooq. He had lived in the UK and we’d been put in touch by mutual friends. Farooq was in his early forties. He told me he was a Bedouin and that his family was from a village in the very south of the West Bank, which was being encircled by settlements. Their original land, including an orchard, was now part of an Israeli kibbutz, just the other side of the border. Farooq had won a scholarship for refugee children and moved to England. He described his disorientation when he arrived in the UK: ‘Until I was ten, I lived in tents made of goat’s hair.’
Farooq had a grant to do work in the West Bank and in Gaza, helping schools with aspects of child development and especially with reading. He showed me photographs of the fish markets in Gaza, which he had just visited, including huge crates full of crabs. He told me he had a British passport as well as a Palestinian identity card. ‘The Israelis want me to give up my ID card, of course,’ he said. ‘It’s ethnic cleansing by stealth.’
Several people had told me that reading was not part of the culture in Palestine. Farooq was dismissive. ‘I’ve heard that a lot—it’s nonsense,’ he said ‘It’s to do with deprivation, not culture. I don’t read a lot because I grew up in an illiterate culture, whereas my wife always has two, three, four books on the go.’ Farooq was involved in setting up a project to encourage young people to read. But, like many people I met in Ramallah, he had become sceptical about development, because it was becoming an ‘industry’ with the proliferation of NGOs in the West Bank.
Farooq’s response emboldened me. In one of the next Special Topics classes, I asked the students why they did not read. A couple of students said they preferred films or computer games. Another student said that he did not like reading because it meant not taking any action. One of the women said she preferred spoken stories. Salwa talked about how some books were threatening to her religious beliefs, and Nazeeha said she stopped reading a book if she did not like the way it made her think. A student called Tamam cited a lack of time, because of his job. He was working fulltime to help open a shop, while also trying to complete his degree. (Towards the end of the semester, he was lucky to escape unscathed from a fire at the shop.)
I asked the students to imagine what life would be like if you could not read at all. This was an exercise I had sometimes used at home, with mature students who were being asked to set up a reading group in the community. I would ask them to create two fictional characters, a reader and a non-reader: ‘Just think: if you could not read at all,’ I said, repeating a line I had used in seminars in Bristol, ‘you would not be able to read what was for sale in a shop, or on a street sign….’ Tariq interrupted me, good-humouredly: ‘But here there are no signs for anything!’
The discussion about why one would read was a little slower. Haytham was sharp in asking about the distinction between being able to read and choosing to read literature. He noted that to learn a language, one only needs to speak it, and he gave the example that many Palestinians working in Israel could speak Hebrew fluently, but could not read it. This brought us to the perennial concern among the students that reading literature was irrelevant to learning the English language.
I gave the students an extract from Malcolm X’s Autobiography, in which he describes his growing awareness of his illiteracy while in prison: ‘I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there.’ He starts to copy out the dictionary, and ultimately becomes an obsessive reader. He is outraged by the prison’s policy of putting the lights out at 10pm: ‘It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of something engrossing.’
Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow into my room. The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So when “lights out” came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow. At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard approached again. That went on until three or four every morning. Three or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me.
Malcolm X concludes the account by saying that reading ‘awo
ke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.’ We talked about the opposite of being ‘mentally alive,’ and Adel suggested it would mean being a ‘zombie.’
I had given the students a few other quotations about reading, one of which was a remark attributed to Einstein: ‘Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times.’ Tariq linked this to Malcolm X’s claim that he read primarily those works that would help ‘the black man’: ‘Isn’t he near-sighted too, because he is always reading for a purpose?’ Haytham, who up until this point had seemed openly sceptical, said that Malcolm X read in order to have power. After class, one woman came up to me and said she thought this was not quite right. She suggested that he had read, and written, in order to lead.
That afternoon, Lynn arrived in the office, tearful, having again walked out of a class. She told me that she had been having problems getting students to buy books, so she had made all the material available online this time, which they also complained about. She had already spoken to Ahmed about it and I offered to walk her down the road to the servees. When we got to the front gate of campus, I said that the students wanted to get under her skin and she shouldn’t let them and I encouraged her to go home and enjoy the sunshine.
‘What did you do about the books?’ I asked, as she turned to leave.
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine Page 5
