Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  The House of Poetry named this new generation of Palestinian poets, somewhat melodramatically, the Everlasting Guests of Fire and published an anthology of their work in the mid-1990s. They used to gather at Ziryab, a café-restaurant on Ramallah’s main street. The owner let the poets linger until two or three in the morning drinking beer and debating literature. Palestinian poets used to come from as far away as Haifa to spend nights there. But the Everlasting Guests proved to be less than everlasting. Time fractured the group. Some poets moved away. Most stopped writing. Rada Shafeh, a promising poet and a favorite of Darwish, disappeared altogether. “There was a mystery about her,” Mahmoud said. “Some say she became a Sufi mystic. Others say she married a strict Muslim and they moved to Afghanistan. No one knows.”

  As for today’s poets, Mahmoud sees a continuation of the post-Oslo mood in which the personal dominates the political. “Everybody wants to figure out his own life,” Mahmoud said. “The writers address the national failure but not in a direct way. They talk about their own failures. Their own supplications. The failure of the national project makes their writing take another direction.”

  Writer Maya Abu-Alhayyat met me at the traffic circle in the center of town and led me to Café Ramallah. “I hope you don’t mind smoky cafés,” she said. It was early evening, and the ground floor was full of men wearing blazers over collared shirts, drinking tea and tiny coffees and pulling long drags on their nargileh pipes. I could see a few framed portraits of Darwish, Kanafani, and other Palestinian authors through the haze at the back of the room.

  The Middle East is full of cafés like this. Rows of water pipes on a shelf. Glass jars filled with mint or sage for tea. Tiny coffee cups that get rinsed rather than washed between customers. Often a television will hang from a ceiling bracket, usually broadcasting news in Arabic or one of the Saudi movie channels, but unless an important football match is happening the customers tend to ignore it. There is no Wi-Fi here either, though I usually managed to hijack the signal from Ziryab Café next door—where the Everlasting Guests of Fire used to meet. People come, instead, to talk. To discuss politics, sports, or family matters while they blacken their lungs with tobacco and yellow their teeth with coffee.

  I’ve read travelers’ accounts that liken these cafés to Western-style pubs, but I believe the comparison demeans them. The old Arab cafés are for thinkers. There is no wine to dull the intellect or beer to soften the tongue. Conversation, highbrow or otherwise, remains unslurred. Tempers, if they flare, do so unaided by alcohol’s muffling of inhibition. And no lonely drunks slump on back corner tables. The café is not the place to chase oblivion.

  Such places are usually the preserves of men, but Maya was clearly a regular here. After we found a quiet table on the second floor, a young waiter approached with Maya’s usual—a nargileh loaded with lemon-mint tobacco. I ordered one of the same, and we chatted beneath a poster of Elvis Presley.

  Maya started writing poems and stories when she was a child. “Writing was the way I could express things, and people would hug me. I wrote so my teachers would give me love.” Maya was born in Lebanon in 1980 to a Lebanese mother and a Palestinian father, Mohammad al-Nabulsi, a high-ranking official with the PLO. Maya told me he forced her mother to marry him and that their marriage did not last long. The pair divorced when Maya was only a year old. Her father retained custody of Maya and sent her to live with his sister in Jordan while he worked for the PLO in Beirut. Maya assumed her aunt was her mother until she was six years old, and she wouldn’t see her actual mother again until she took a trip to Jordan when she was twenty-one. Her father didn’t approve of the visit, even after so many years. “We had the system of not talking about my mother,” Maya said.

  If Maya’s mother was a distant and unknowable factor of her childhood, so too was Palestine. “I was the child of a PLO fighter,” she said. “Palestine was a place for my father, not for me.” Maya lived with her father in Lebanon and Tunis but never in the land he struggled for, the land she was supposed to desire. Maya didn’t understand the idea of returning to a place she’d never been. “I only knew Palestine from what I saw on television,” she said, “and what I read in the poems of Mahmoud Darwish.” She never imagined Palestine as some sort of lost paradise. For her, Palestine was a place where there were no cities, where people lived in tents, and where “everything is about children throwing stones.”

  In 1993, after the Oslo Accords, Maya and her father moved from Tunis to Jordan, then crossed into Palestine and settled in Nablus in 1995. Maya was sixteen years old. “I felt that Tunisia kicked us out,” she said, “but my father didn’t feel this way. He told me, ‘I just want to live in a dump in Nablus.’” All Maya’s father ever wanted, all he ever fought for, was the opportunity to return home. “He was really happy,” Maya said. “He just wanted to sit in his flat in Nablus and do nothing. Just be a Palestinian in Palestine.” For the teenage Maya, settling in Nablus marked the end of an exhausting nomadic existence. “I loved living in Palestine. I loved the feeling of not having to think of leaving again.”

  Maya finished her secondary schooling in Nablus before enrolling in a civil engineering program at An-Najah National University. Then, on the first day of the Second Intifada in 2000, Israeli forces shot Maya’s boyfriend at a demonstration in Nablus. He died of his wounds later that day in the hospital. Because of a curfew enforced by the Israel Defense Forces, Maya could not go to the hospital to say goodbye. “It was a big shock for me,” Maya said. “One of those things that break you very hard.”

  Her boyfriend’s death was followed by the perverse violence of the Second Intifada. Just as the Oslo Accords might be credited for the end of the First Intifada, the failure of the accords to bring about positive changes for Palestinians could be blamed for the second. The five-year surge of Palestinian terror attacks and Israeli military reprisals left three thousand Palestinians and one thousand Israelis dead. Nablus, considered a wellspring of Palestinian suicide bombers, became one of the Second Intifada’s bloodiest battlegrounds. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers, tanks, and armored vehicles entered the city in the spring of 2002 to engage with militants. Much of the fighting took place in the twisted alleyways of the Old City where buildings, some dating back to Byzantine times, were shelled by tanks, leveled by rockets, and flattened by Israeli bulldozers. More than seventy Nablusi died during the four-day siege. Maya was nearly one of them. She recalls looking out of her bedroom window one day at a gunfight happening on the street below. Just as she turned away from the window to answer her phone, a volley of bullets slammed into her room. Had she still been standing in the window, she would have been shot.

  The sorrow of her lost love and the greater conflict exploding around her was nearly too much for Maya to bear. “I needed to believe in something,” she said. So Maya put on the veil and sought comfort in the strictures of conservative Islam. She prayed five times a day, attended Friday prayers at the mosque, and refused to shake the hands of men who were not related to her. Maya’s father disapproved. He was traditional, Maya says, but hardly devout, and he didn’t like Maya’s newfound piety. Maya also stopped writing for the first time in her life.

  After two years of self-imposed devotion, Maya realized that religion was not comforting her. She’d found little solace in the mosque or under her hijab. So she started writing again. Maya penned her first book in between her college studies. She based the novel, Grains of Sugar, on her lost boyfriend. Maya discovered that writing granted her everything religion had failed to provide. She found meaning while crafting stories and developing characters. “I survived by writing this novel,” she told me. Maya abandoned her hijab and her prayers when the book was finished and moved from conservative Nablus to the more secular environs of Ramallah. She kept the book a secret from her father until after it was published. “He didn’t like writers and artists,” Maya said, and he believed the best way to raise his daughters was to keep them out of the public eye. Keeping h
er writing a secret also granted Maya a certain freedom on the page. “I could write without being conscious of who around me would read it.”

  Maya’s father passed away before she wrote her most recent novel, Bloodtype. He would not have liked it. The novel challenges the notion of the infallible mother and father common in Palestinian culture. The society expects children to revere their parents, but the mother and father in Maya’s novel are deeply flawed. “I don’t know if it was their mistakes or history’s mistakes,” Maya said, “but we all have mental disease because of everything that happened in our history as Palestinians. The whole thing makes us ill.”

  Maya’s novel centers on a family that closely resembles her own. A father in the PLO who longs to return to Nablus. A forced marriage and early divorce. A girl who discovers that writing poetry can earn the affection of the adults she loves. A daughter sent to live with her aunt in Jordan. A move to Tunis. Maya, though, insisted the book is fictional and bristled at my clumsy questions about whether certain events in the novel happened in real life. Was her father part of Black September, the Jordanian civil war of 1970, like the father in the book? Did he really threaten to blow up a soccer stadium or put a gun to her mother’s head? “I don’t know why you ask these kinds of questions, which I really hate and don’t enjoy answering,” she scolded.

  Maya said she lacked the courage to write such a personal novel while her father was still alive. “Otherwise it would have been a disaster for me,” she laughed. She did not, however, consider her mother’s reaction. Since Maya did not grow up with her mother, she was less protective of her feelings. “Besides, I didn’t expect her to read it,” she said, laughing. Maya’s mother felt the novel revealed too many family secrets. The flawed character of the mother in the book also disturbed her, though Maya insists most readers sympathize with the character in spite of her imperfections. Maya’s mother hadn’t spoken to her since the novel came out.

  A few years ago, Maya married an “IT guy” and moved to East Jerusalem, where he is from. “We don’t have some great love story,” she said, but she enjoys a degree of independence not common in Palestinian marriages. They have three young children, nine-year-old twins—a boy and a girl—and a six-year-old daughter. Since they were born in Jerusalem, the children all have blue Israeli identity cards. “But mine is green,” Maya said.

  Maya started writing for children soon after her twins were born. Even though her children’s books have earned accolades in the Arabic-speaking world, Maya finds the genre challenging. “It takes a lot of courage to write for children,” she said. In one of her books, a child longs for his father, who, unbeknownst to him, is serving a sentence in an Israeli prison. His mother suggests the child write a letter to his father to ask him to come home. He does this, but the father does not return. Then his mother suggests he pray for his father’s return, but God does not bring his father back, either. “It is a Palestinian story,” Maya said.

  Maya derives more joy from working with kids than from writing books for them. She pays regular visits to rural villages and refugee camps where she gives storytelling workshops to children. “I feel sorry for them,” she said. Palestinian children believe their parents and teachers want them to behave like adults and participate in the struggle. “To throw stones. To fight. To be a hero.” The refugee children want to tell stories about people they know who were killed at a checkpoint. “It is heartbreaking,” she said. “These are their stories. This is what they know.”

  I remembered how Kanafani wrote that a Palestinian child is “born suddenly” and “one scene can hurl him down from the ceiling of childhood on to the ruggedness of the road.” Maya’s workshops grant these otherwise serious children a respite from this ruggedness. Maya coaxes silliness out of them, if only for a little while.

  Maya and her husband do their best to shield their own children from politics, lest the occupation toughen them like the refugee camp kids she works with. They also keep their children away from religion. Maya never returned to the veil she abandoned after writing her first novel, and neither she nor her husband are practicing Muslims. Too often, Palestinian governments use religion as “an excuse not to change things,” Maya said. “They don’t provide you what you need, but they point you to God.” If you are good Muslims, the men in charge suggest, all we deny you in this life will be granted to you in the next.

  I confessed to Maya my habit of trying to find the conflict in everything I read by Palestinian authors. She said that this is not necessarily wrong. “There is always something political, even in the small details of life,” Maya said. “My whole life story gives me depth. And I don’t write as a victim. I always write as a person. I am a person struggling all her life. I am a very strong woman. And I am Palestinian.” Maya’s comment reminded me of my favorite poem of hers, simply titled “Children.” The poem portrays the fears all parents everywhere have for their children’s safety, but at the same time, it remains undeniably rooted in Palestine:

  Whenever I see an image of a child’s hand

  Sticking out of the rubble of a collapsed building

  I check the hands of my three children

  I count the fingers of their hands, the toes on their feet,

  I check the numbers of teeth in their mouths, every

  Last hair in each finely marked wee eyebrow

  Whenever a child goes silent in Al Yarmuk Camp

  I turn up the volume on the TV, the songs on the radio,

  I pinch my three children

  To make them cry and squirm with life

  Whenever my sore heart gets hungry

  At Qalandia checkpoint

  I comfort-eat, I

  Emotionally overeat, craving excessive salt

  As if I could then somehow say: enough, block out

  The salt spark of the tears everyone around me is crying.

  Being a female writer in Palestine means following a unique set of rules and being “nice” to the men who control the cultural life. “Especially,” Maya said with some modesty, “if you are a little bit beautiful.” Her male colleagues didn’t take her seriously at first. Then they wanted to take credit for “discovering” her. “But mostly the men want you to clap for them.” Maya believes the major difference between male and female writing in the Arab world, and in Palestine in particular, is that men focus on big issues while women are interested in the intricacies of life. Also, men “can’t write about weakness. Not even their own weakness. Even if they are not heroes, they will not portray themselves as weak. They will remain strong.”

  Maya took a long pull from her pipe and leaned back in her chair. She feels more comfortable in Ramallah than she does in East Jerusalem. Maya comes to Ramallah—a trip that can take up to three hours depending on the crowds at the checkpoint—just to spend thirty minutes smoking nargileh at Café Ramallah before returning home. She doesn’t have a network of friends in Jerusalem. “I feel free in Ramallah,” she said. “I can be with people I know and love.” Jerusalem boasts a vibrant cultural scene, “but it is not for me,” Maya said. “In Jerusalem, the life you want to live is for Israelis. Not for Palestinians. We feel we are living in the enemy’s culture.”

  Israelis rarely appear in Maya’s stories and poems for the simple fact that she doesn’t know them. “For me, they are aliens,” she said. Maya cannot speak Hebrew, for one thing, but the anxiety of the conflict erects higher barriers than language. “Living in Jerusalem is different than living in other cities,” Maya said. “It is full of fear for us Arabs.” She rarely sees any Israelis in East Jerusalem, and she always feels uncomfortable in the predominantly Israeli west.

  Maya illustrates this estrangement near the end of Bloodtype. As her character Jumana rides the city’s light-rail train, a Jewish woman asks her something in Hebrew. Jumana confesses in English that she doesn’t understand. And when her phone rings on the train, she answers it in English rather than Arabic. Jumana does not want to be identified a
s Palestinian:

  Whenever I board the train, I worry about being found out. If anyone I know sees me—especially Laila or any of her Jerusalem-ID friends—they’ll simply brand me a normalizer and probably lecture me on how I should boycott the light-rail system because it’s designed to help expand the settlements. . . . If, on the other hand, Israelis realized I was Arab, I’d be subjected to all kinds of unseemly staring, and the security guard would ask to see my ID. . . . That’s why I practice sitting in the most neutral and least terroristic way every time I use the train.

  Maya wishes she knew Israelis well enough to write them as more than nameless faces on a train. Her work focuses on the realistic stories of everyday life, and she considers it important to have contact with the Israelis. She admires the bravery of her fellow Palestinian writers who are able to write Israelis as fully formed characters rather than one-dimensional villains. “I don’t want to write in clichés,” she said. “Israelis are humans. And if you want to write about them, you have to know their motivations.”

  Once our tobacco had burned black, Maya invited me to join her and her friends at a nearby bar for a drink. Everyone on Ramallah’s main street, men and women both, turned to look at Maya when she passed. She had to stop several times to return their various greetings. “You see I am famous,” she laughed. These fans recognized her from television, especially for her acting roles in the popular monthlong television soap operas that run each year during Ramadan.

  Maya said she had always wanted to be an actress, but her father prohibited it. After he died, a producer saw Maya interviewed on television talking about her writing. He liked her look and her energy and offered her a role on a television show. Since then, she has appeared regularly in movies and commercials—including an ad for a mobile phone company I kept seeing over and over. She also starred in a film comedy called Love, Theft and Other Entanglements, in which a bumbling petty thief named Musa unwittingly steals a car with a kidnapped Israeli soldier in the trunk. Maya plays Musa’s married girlfriend. The film screened at both the Seattle Film Festival and Berlin Biennale. “I went and walked the red carpet,” she said, beaming. “I was living the Hollywood dream.”