The end of Shuhada Street is blocked by a beige portakabin, and we were stopped by a group of soldiers just before it. One of them inspected my passport, and Khalid again rehearsed his story about being a student. The soldier nearest to us indicated that we could go. ‘Take care of this place for us,’ Khalid said, as we turned. I knew he was pushing his luck, and the solider seemed to hesitate. I touched Khalid on the elbow and we walked quickly away.
I said to the students: ‘Imagine that instead of Caesar being a political leader, he is your teacher; imagine that I am Caesar. Some students love me, and others hate me. What will happen after the ones who hate me have got rid of me?’
‘Civil war,’ said Amjad quietly.
‘Some people will run away.’
‘There will be a lot of corruption and arguments.’
We read Act IV scene iii, which is an argument between the conspirators Brutus and Cassius, in which they sound almost like lovers. I read Brutus’s part and Abd read Cassius. The argument starts because Brutus has condemned a man called Lucius Pella for taking bribes, after Cassius supported him. Brutus accuses Cassius of being greedy (perhaps even of taking bribes himself) and Cassius says that, if anyone other than Brutus had said that, he would have killed him. The students laughed a little at the pantomime elements: ‘I denied you not,’ ‘You did,’ ‘I did not.’
After class, I put a quotation on Facebook from an essay about the play by William Hazlitt from his 1817 book Characters of Shakespear’s Plays:
The whole design of the conspirators to liberate their country fails from the generous temper and over-weening confidence of Brutus in the goodness of their cause and the assistance of others… Those who mean well themselves think well of others… That humanity and honesty which dispose men to resist injustice and tyranny render them unfit to cope with the cunning and power of those who are opposed to them… Cassius was better cut out for a conspirator.
A discussion followed, to which Qais contributed:
Haha, this is a surprisingly identical interpretation of the way I thought of the main characters today… I was thinking of comparing this to the Arab countries. Putting devilish ideology aside, Brutus and Cassius are no different from those who overthrew [the] kings of Iraq and Syria over decades ago in hope of “change”… Finding so many similarities, I am amazed how they never thought they’d end up just like the conspirators from Julius Caesar! Also, conspirators always have so much confidence in a way that they believe they should be the ones to lead the masses… Brutus thought the people were too immature to resort to, in the same way Al Bitar and Michel Aflaq thought the people of Syria at the time needed to be educated (Ba’athingly) the way he saw best, then liberated.
We were pushed for time by the point we reached Act V, in which the conspiracy unravels. We paused over a confusing moment on the battlefield in which Antony’s soldiers come across a man named Lucilius, who claims:
… I am Brutus, Marcus Brutus, I,
Brutus, my country’s friend. Know me for Brutus!
I let the students’ confusion settle for a moment, and then asked them why Lucilius would pretend to the soldiers that he is someone else. ‘He wants to protect Brutus,’ one woman said. ‘No, he is protecting himself, because they will kill Lucilius, but they might capture Brutus, but keep him alive.’
Brutus and Antony suddenly seem almost like colleagues at the end, after being enemies throughout: they have shared experience, as survivors. In contrast, Caesar’s nephew Octavius, who inherits power, sounds high-pitched and out of tune as he closes the play: ‘So call the field to rest, and let’s away / To part the glories of this happy day.’ Anwar suggested (acutely) that, when Octavius talks about honouring Brutus in his death, he sounds like a politician, as though he is doing this because he knows it might be popular. The students also noted the loose threads at the end. For example, Antony spares Lucilius, which they pointed out was similar to the conspirators sparing Antony.
I asked the students in Special Topics to tell me about ‘adab,’ the Arabic word for literature. They explained that the word had a relationship to ‘politeness,’ but also to ‘the arts’ in general—for example, it was used to describe ‘The Arts Building’ on campus. I asked if anyone could think of a word that was similar to the word ‘literature’ in English. It was the worst kind of question you can ask as a teacher. I was fishing for a particular answer, hoping someone would say ‘literate.’
I could see Haytham feeling the weight of a contribution he might make before he spoke. He smiled. ‘Furniture,’ he said crisply. We all laughed, and I was about to move on. ‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I’ll take that. What is “furniture?”’
There was a baffled silence. I asked the students to name items of furniture—a chair, a table, a desk and so on. ‘But can we come up for a rule for furniture? It is always something you sit on? Is it always something you have in your home?’ We played around with different definitions, edging closer to something conclusive, but each time finding an exception that did not fit the rule.
I asked the students how they would spot the difference if I gave them two stories and told them only one of the two was ‘literature.’ We talked about the differences in language there might be between the two stories, and that one might recognise a type or genre of literature in one story. But again, we could not come up with a simple rule. Haytham asked whether the Bible was considered literature, which led to a good discussion about whether literature needed to be true or fictional, and whether we always know the difference.
‘So, who decides which literature is studied on your degree?’
My question was met with blank looks.
‘You do,’ said one woman.
‘On what basis?’ I asked.
A man gave an answer I did not hear properly, and I asked him to repeat it.
‘Your knowledge,’ he said, more loudly.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘I thought you said “your mother….”’
We all laughed. I knew it was a moment that would have been impossible earlier in the term.
Haytham had been pushing a slightly different argument in the discussion about the Bible. He wanted to know whether there were limits to what literature could include. He pointed out that in Palestine you would know one of the stories was not literature if it included descriptions of ‘physical love.’ He was worried that literature was used too often in Palestine to enforce a particular moral perspective. This led us on to a discussion about whether literature is moral and polite or whether it can be subversive. I pointed out that Haytham’s comment about ‘furniture’ had been subversive in a good way, that it had turned the discussion upside down.
In both courses, I was starting to prepare students for their final exam. In Special Topics, I was going to ask the students to debate a statement from two points of view. We held a practice debate on the statement: ‘Literature is a more effective art form than film.’ At the beginning, I asked the class to vote on whether they agreed, disagreed or didn’t know. A slim majority disagreed and most of the students did not vote, in spite of my prompting. Haytham suggested that we needed a category for those who ‘don’t know if they don’t know.’ This led nicely into the idea of abstentions, although I knew that Haytham had meant those who were not thinking. Ruba said that it was hard to judge what one thought because the statement was vague.
The debate was structured so that one argument was made proposing the motion, then two opposing, followed by two proposing, two more for each side and then a final point from the opposition. The comparison with film brought out real feeling, including among those who felt reading was boring. The first proposal was along the lines that literature has been around for longer and existed all over the world, and that it influenced film, for example in the Harry Potter series. Wafa lead the charge; she was the most committed reader in the class. Others said that film was better because everything was imagined in it, and because it could take us closer to literature of some kinds: we unders
tand Shakespeare better when his work is performed. There was also a nice argument that even if literature was more effective, this includes bad effects, so it did not mean literature had won.
‘What about Titanic?’ asked Haytham. ‘This is a film that everybody has seen and it makes people cry. Literature does not do that.’
‘Did you cry, Haytham?’ I asked.
He smiled.
This led to a discussion about whether film was more effective because it reached more people.
At the end, I asked the students to vote again. A substantial majority, 14 to 7, were now against the motion. But one woman said she was confused because she agreed with different arguments from each side. I called this don’t know ‘plus.’ It was perfect. In the exam, I said, the students would need to come to some sort of complex conclusion rather than a vote; they would need to weigh how much their own conclusion fell on either side.
One evening, Haytham posted a message on Facebook:
When they ask you why do you wanna leave this country, answer with the following;- This is a country that whenever you decide to be your self it shuts you down. This is a country that’s filled with people claiming to be Muslims but they’re far away from Islam. This is a country with a society that’s controlled by a fictional fame that never existed and will never benefit them a damn. This is a country that whenever you want to go around you have to jump like a clown. This is a country that only reminds me of something Brown! Still looking for an answer?
The post prompted a fierce debate. Basilah lamented that Haytham’s comments were ‘full of misery and self hate.’ She added: ‘We don’t have a country yet to rail against; perhaps we should wait until we do before we curse it.’ When someone challenged her, she clarified her position: ‘In our situation as Palestinians, we have to be careful about how we [criticize our country]. Criticizing is one thing; being down on ourselves is another. So many young people feel discouraged and actually end up leaving.’ Haytham replied:
Well, just because I criticized the country it doesn’t necessarily mean that I hate it or I hate being in it […] I’m only criticizing and hoping that the parts that I have criticized [will] get better and better and that pretty much will show my love to this country by pointing out the bad habits that should be rearranged in order for this country to develop its way of growing up. So I’m pretty proud of being a Palestinian but I am disappointed of seeing my beloved country collapsing.
I e-mailed Haytham, to say that his remarks reminded me of something Stanley Cavell had once written: ‘Those who voice politically radical wishes for this country may forget the radical hopes it holds for itself.’ Cavell’s point was partly that criticising one’s own country could also be a version of patriotism.
Haytham insisted on coming to see me in the office, to teach me about what would happen when I left. He told me that I should deny that I had been in the West Bank or that I knew any Palestinians, and that the Israeli security forces at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv might check my Facebook account or my e-mail. I was already feeling paranoid, as my Facebook account had been hacked a few days before. Haytham also warned me that there were spies at the university and that the Israelis would already know everything I had been doing.
‘They must be the only country in the world who don’t need any more spies. If someone comes and volunteers they say: “No, thanks—we’re full up….”’
Haytham described being in Ma’ale Adummim once and talking to a soldier, who offered him chocolate, a cigarette—and who was trying to tempt him, in a friendly way, to become an informer. He feigned incompetence, saying he was lazy and only interested in girls. ‘And then I come back here and everyone’s like: “Hey, Haytham, why do you have a beard? Are you joining Hamas now?”’
We wandered out into the hallway, so that Haytham could have a cigarette. ‘I could get out,’ he said. ‘If it wasn’t for this green tree in my pocket.’ He told me that his uncle was an ‘Israeli Arab’ and had suggested that Haytham marry his daughter, so that he could have a blue ID card instead.
‘Were you tempted?’
‘No, it’s just gonna mean more problems.’
I asked him about a job as a teaching assistant that I knew staff in the department wanted him to apply for when he graduated. Ahmed had told me that if Haytham took the job they would try to get funding for him to go abroad and do an MA.
‘Yeah, but then I’d have to come back.’
I told Haytham that I had been thinking about staying.
‘If you were born here, you wouldn’t want to. I would never have children here, so they would have to live like this.’
He described how close his family’s house was to the Wall and told me that sometimes he put his music on loud, just because he knew that the soldiers could hear it.
‘You’re here because you pity us, aren’t you?’
13
Schools to me
I had put off meeting Eliana until I was nearly due to leave the West Bank. I could never get used to crossing from east to west Jerusalem. Israel took over Jerusalem in the war in 1967, and you could still buy postcards in Ramallah that stated that the city was part of Jordan. It has been divided into two halves, which co-exist in uneasy proximity. East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory under international law, although it is now on the Israeli side of the Wall. There is no physical barrier, yet it felt jarring to walk from the packed market around the Damascus Gate to the broad streets and European-style shops and cafés just half a mile away. Eliana and I had a mutual friend in London, and she had been suggesting that we meet up since I arrived. In late May, I made the trip to have dinner with her.
Eliana’s hand shook with nerves as we greeted one another. While we were still looking politely at the menu, she asked: ‘What is Ramallah like? We cannot go there.’
Eliana was a teacher, and she told me that she was a couple of years away from retirement. She described the growing bureaucratic load in her school, and I told her a little about the teaching I had done at Al-Quds.
Towards the end of the meal, as we were waiting for the bill, we talked in a stop-start way about the political situation, mostly in pleasantries. I thought the conversation had finished, when Eliana returned to it, as if she was impulsively touching a sore spot.
‘The real problem,’ she said, ‘is that Palestinian children are taught to hate us.’
‘The funny thing,’ I said, ‘is that they would say the same thing about Israelis.’
I knew, as I said it, that I had hit the wrong note, that I was responding too much in kind.
‘It isn’t funny,’ she replied.
I asked Eliana where she lived and she named a suburb in the north of Jerusalem. ‘It was one of the first to be developed after the 1967 war. My father bought the land and cultivated it from nothing. But now there are problems. The whole area has become totally dominated by the Orthodox—and they… Well, it’s all very different now. So, I will probably move. I am being driven from my home. And we’re all Jews!’
The next day, I had been invited to meet with senior staff at Al-Quds to discuss my impressions of the university. I sat at one corner of a long table, opposite four administrators, three men and one woman, all of whom were smoking. The questions they asked me were the same ones that senior academics had posed to me on other occasions. ‘Tell us about the problems you have encountered’; ‘How is the standard of our students, compared to those you teach at home?’; ‘What could we do to improve things?’ It felt as though they were anticipating criticism from me; taking sides with a Western academic against their own students. I became banal and upbeat in response: ‘My students have been wonderful, I’ve learnt a great deal from them….’
There is another answer I might have given, to them and to Eliana, which I could not articulate at the time. Not long after I graduated, in 2002, I applied for a job at Liverpool Hope University. A few weeks later, I arrived home and my friend, James, was leaning out of the kitchen windo
w of our first-floor flat. We had both been unemployed for the summer after graduation, and one morning we’d had a row after he had finished the last of the bread; eventually our anger dissolved into laughter. He shouted down to me from the window: ‘I think you’ve got a job!’
It wasn’t the job I had applied for, but I had been asked to teach on an Access course. The tutor had quit just before the second year of the course, and they needed someone to teach Othello. The class met on Wednesdays from 6pm at Colwell Primary School in Dovecot. It was a long, cavernous building that was otherwise deserted at night. On the first evening, I drove the circuitous route I had been given to the school and parked up outside. It was in the middle of a housing estate, the central road of which was blocked off to prevent teenagers from racing their cars along it. Our classroom was at the centre of the building, and would be the only one lit.
In the reception area, I found a few of the students hanging around, chatting with the caretaker. ‘Are you new?’ a woman called Jackie asked me. I nodded sheepishly. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, patting my elbow: ‘You’ll soon settle in.’
My abiding memory of that first evening is of standing on a chair, trying to explain that the stage at the Globe Theatre was divided between an upper and lower section. As I boomed out a bit of the first scene of the play, I looked down and saw a dozen sceptical faces looking back at me. Later, one of the students said: ‘I thought maybe you were going to kill us.’
In the second week, I asked the students how they were getting on with a research project they had been working on over the summer. They had each been asked to select a novel and to write an essay about it. Most of the students raised problems about structure or about finishing their assignment. But one woman, called Julie, replied: ‘I haven’t started it.’ Julie was in her 30s. As she spoke, her whole body was radiating defiance.
Romeo and Juliet in Palestine Page 13
