Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  The bar was the antithesis of Café Ramallah—the sort of slick but generic cocktail bar that could exist anywhere in the world. Three young women were waiting for Maya at a table inside. One was Dalia Taha, a poet and playwright whose play Fireworks had been staged in London earlier that year. I recognized Dalia from a story the Guardian published about her, in which she scolded her interviewer for his preoccupation with politics. “I hate these questions,” she told him. “It’s always like this for artists or writers who come from places with conflicts and wars. You expect us to make a political statement, to tell the story of our suffering.” I told Dalia I would like to speak with her about her work and that after reading the Guardian piece I considered myself warned. In the end, she opted not to meet with me. She never told me why. I suspect she didn’t trust I could see anything but politics in her work.

  Another one of Maya’s friends gave me a second warning. Upon hearing of my interest in Palestinian literature, she asked me flat out how I would “avoid being Orientalist.” The question startled me. I didn’t have a good answer for her. As we left the bar, she apologized for putting me on the spot, adding, “A lot of foreigners are coming here to write about Palestinians. They weren’t interested in us when we were blowing ourselves up.”

  After my meeting with Maya, I visited Café Ramallah nearly every day to smoke nargileh, drink coffee, and write in my notebook. One afternoon, a man with a reddish beard, a fedora, and a gray T-shirt printed with the image of the Persian poet Rumi walked in. He borrowed a tube of Krazy Glue from the owner at the desk, then scanned the room for a place to sit. The only empty chair was at my table. The man sat down and, without looking at me, plucked his eyeglasses from his face and dabbed tiny blobs of glue on the broken frames. He noticed my notebook and told me in growly imperfect English that he was also a writer. He introduced himself as Moheeb Barghouti.

  While Moheeb returned his attention to his eyeglass frames, I googled his name on my phone. Moheeb used to be a photojournalist who covered political demonstrations. I found a Facebook page with a photo of Moheeb lying in a hospital bed showing off the bullet wounds in his legs he suffered during a protest. Another article told a story of Moheeb suffering injuries during a different demonstration. The story included photos of Moheeb smiling in spite of the blood streaming down his face from a wound on his head.

  I held up my phone to Moheeb and showed him the photos. “Is this you?” I asked.

  He slipped his glasses back on his face and squinted at the screen. “Yes,” he said. “But I don’t cover protests anymore. Nothing new is happening.” Now Moheeb writes poems.

  Moheeb was at Café Ramallah, sitting amid the smoke and gossip, nearly every time I came in. I’d sit with him and we’d talk about his favorite books, his former life as a Trotskyist, and the years he spent in Jordanian, Syrian, and Iraqi prisons. He told me that until he read Charles Bukowski he didn’t know that Americans did anything “except kill people with guns.” Mostly, he would talk about the philosophy that fuels his own poetry. “My darkness is my best friend,” he’d say. Or, “I don’t believe Sartre that hell is other people. Hell is in the mirror.” Or, “I want to write poems that change myself. Not change the world. Fuck the world. The world is not my problem.”

  Later, I’d find a couple of Moheeb’s poems translated to English in a British literary journal, and at the end of a poem called “Death Squad,” I find Café Ramallah:

  Hey short story writers, poets and novelists of either sex,

  kick me out of your gatherings, and pour oil on my memory,

  for the likes of me are good for nothing but homelessness and leftovers.

  You deserve Kundera, Georges Bataille, Rimbaud, and Sartre.

  My thoughts are sinful, my waters sewage

  and my room is smaller than Your Excellencies’ bathrooms . . .

  Oh, friends of cookery,

  do as you wish;

  use every weapon of torture and destruction to inflict pain on me, to turn me into ruins,

  and use every kind of technology to drag my memory through the streets;

  yet I beg of Your Excellencies and I crave from Your Honours;

  leave me Café Ramallah

  and go wherever you wish, even to hell.

  “I like to believe I was born in 1954,” poet Ghassan Zaqtan told me, but he doesn’t know for sure. After the Nakba and the scattering of Palestinians from their homes, official records were often lost. Ghassan chose 1954 because it is the Year of the Horse according to the Chinese zodiac. “Nineteen fifty-five was the goat and 1956 was the monkey, but I like horses better,” Ghassan said. “This is the only reason.” The bass and timbre of Ghassan’s voice reminded me of an Arab Leonard Cohen. His rumbling laugh resonated below the screech of the espresso grinder at Zamn, a café that opted for a polished aesthetic more akin to Starbucks than the smoky masculinity of Café Ramallah.

  Ghassan’s family came from Zakariyya, a village named for the father of John the Baptist. The Zaqtans fled Zakariyya in 1948 and settled in Beit Jala, where Ghassan was born. His father worked for the Red Cross during the Nakba then found a job as a schoolmaster in the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, where he started the camp’s first school for girls. This placed him at odds with some of his more conservative colleagues and led the family to leave Beit Jala in 1961. The loss of his childhood home figures in an achingly sad poem Ghassan would write decades later called “A Picture of the House in Beit Jala”:

  He has to return to shut that window,

  it isn’t entirely clear

  whether this is what he must do,

  things are no longer clear

  since he lost them,

  and it seems a hole somewhere within him has opened up . . .

  . . . he must return to shut that window

  the upper-story window which he often forgets

  at the end of the stairway that leads to the roof

  Since he lost them

  he aimlessly walks

  and the day’s small

  purposes are also no longer clear.

  Ghassan’s family settled in Jordan’s Karameh refugee camp, but not for too long. Karameh grew into a center of Palestinian resistance in the 1960s, and the Israel Defense Forces razed the entire camp to the ground in 1968. As a young refugee in Jordan, sports interested Ghassan more than poetry or politics. He played amateur basketball before quitting to become a coach and phys ed teacher. “If I had been five centimeters taller my life would’ve been very different,” he said. Ghassan started to write poetry in between classes and basketball practices. One of his poems won a prize from the Jordanian Writers Union. Ghassan’s attendance at the award ceremony was cause enough for the Jordanian authorities, who had no love for the union’s leftist tendencies, to arrest and imprison him for three months. Ghassan hesitated to tell me this. Compared to the long and multiple sentences so many Palestinian men serve, Ghassan considers his three-month turn insignificant. He felt embarrassed to even mention it.

  Still, three months was enough time for Ghassan to decide to commit himself to both poetry and politics. Upon his release from prison, Ghassan left his teaching job, sold his car, and prepared to move to Beirut. “It was 1979,” he said. “Beirut was the center of the revolution. The PLO was there. So were many of my leftist friends.” Ghassan delayed telling his father his Beirut plans as he was certain his father would disapprove. “I prepared myself for a clash,” Ghassan said, but his father gave him his blessing. Looking back, Ghassan figures that his father regretted not joining the resistance himself as a young man and so supported Ghassan’s decision.

  Ghassan was living in Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War. His poetry collection Old Reasons had been published a few days before the Israeli invasion. As Darwish stirred coffee elsewhere in the city and tried to “pay no heed to the rockets,” Ghassan had no such luxury. An Israeli missile struck Ghassan’s third-floor apartment while he was out on an
errand and incinerated everything inside, including his fifteen author copies of Old Reasons. Then a fire broke out in the warehouse where boxes of his new book were being stored. They all burned. Only about a hundred copies of Old Reasons that his publisher sent out in advance, and the two copies Ghassan had on his person at the time, survived the Lebanon War.

  Like Maya’s father and other PLO activists of the time, Ghassan traveled constantly. He spent a few months in the Soviet Union, where he frequented a library full of nineteenth-century Russian novels translated into Arabic. There he met a Jew from Odesa with whom he debated literature and politics and who inspired him to be a reader as well as a writer. Although they were an odd pair—a Russian communist Jew and a Palestinian poet from the PLO—the two grew close. “He was a good teacher,” Ghassan said. He returned to Beirut from the USSR and then bounced back and forth between Damascus, Tunis, Cyprus, and Gaza.

  Ghassan is often compared to Mahmoud Darwish. The two poets became friends in Tunis in 1988 after Ghassan published his book The Heroism of Things. Once Darwish read the book, he instructed his writer friends: “Bring Zaqtan to me.” Duly summoned, Ghassan visited Darwish at his home in the early evening, a few hours before Darwish was scheduled to meet with the Algerian foreign minister. He and Ghassan talked until four in the morning, and Darwish missed his meeting altogether. I asked Ghassan what they talked about. “He talked. I listened,” Ghassan corrected me. “We talked about my book.”

  “For ten hours?” I asked.

  “There may have been some alcohol involved,” Ghassan said.

  The two poets grew closer once they’d both moved to Ramallah after Oslo. “He was a good leader,” Ghassan said. “He was my teacher, but not as a poet. As a thinker. He had a very wide knowledge, especially in the Hebrew language and in Hebrew literature. And he was very generous with his knowledge.” Ghassan said Darwish possessed a great sense of humor and a quick wit, but he protected his privacy. “There were rumors about him,” Ghassan said, whispers about women and money problems. “But not facts.” Darwish also generously shouldered the Palestinian cause. With a global audience focused on Darwish as the Palestinian flag-bearer, writers like Ghassan could focus on their own work. Darwish used to joke with Ghassan about his bad luck ending up as the mouthpiece for his people while everyone else could just be a poet.

  Another of Darwish’s contributions to Palestinian poetry, according to Ghassan, was his unique ability to portray Israelis as individual humans rather than a uniform collective of villainous ghosts. In an essay titled “We Were Born in the Houses of Storytellers,” Ghassan argues:

  It is easy to defeat a ghost, to burden it with the causes and excuses of loss, to achieve a desired heroism through ignorance and exaggeration. But it is difficult, to the extent it is realistic, to confront an “enemy” who contains contradictions and human tendencies with all their attendant implications.

  The occupation—for all its cruelties—allows Palestinians to come into daily contact with Israelis. “Quotidian life,” Ghassan writes, enables Palestinians to humanize the Israeli and “grant him nuance without excusing him for the basic condition under which the ‘relationship’ has come about, the occupation.”

  Darwish was particularly adept at this, Ghassan says. His poetry managed to express his Palestinian identity while simultaneously revealing the individual humanity of his Israeli characters “as if uncovering cracks in a wall.” Ghassan presents Darwish’s famous poem “Rita and the Rifle” as an example. The poem—inspired by Darwish’s own romance with a Jewish dancer named Tamar Ben Ami—describes a forbidden love affair between the poet and an Israeli soldier. Rita’s name was a feast in the poet’s mouth, her body a wedding in his blood. But in spite of her “honey-colored eyes” and her “loveliest of braids,” Rita always remains a soldier of the enemy. “Between Rita and my eyes,” Darwish writes, “there is a rifle.”

  In 2013, Canada’s Griffin Trust shortlisted Ghassan’s book Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems for the Griffin Poetry Prize. The prize committee invited Ghassan to attend the award ceremony, but the Canadian diplomatic office in Ramallah denied his visa request. In its rejection letter, the office stated that the $65,000 award, one of the world’s richest poetry prizes, provided “insufficient grounds for a visa.” It also expressed “uncertainty” about both Ghassan’s financial situation and his “true desire to return home.”

  The irony of the visa official questioning a Palestinian refugee’s desire to return to Palestine was not lost on Ghassan, but the Canadian decision neither offended nor surprised him. The previous year, Ghassan canceled a two-month book tour to the United States because of visa delays. “It is a policy against the Palestinians, and not only in Canada and the US. Even in the Arab world. We have this problem everywhere. It is not personal. I am sure about that.”

  Barred from Canada, Ghassan traveled to Turkey instead, where he gave readings at Istanbul University. Then he got a call from his wife. The Canadian visa office had changed its mind and approved Ghassan’s application. Ghassan figured it was too late. He told the Canadian office that he was traveling and would not return to Ramallah in time to pick up the visa. When Ghassan mentioned he was en route to Jordan from Turkey, the Canadians offered to send his visa to their office in Amman. “So I went there. I waited twenty minutes, and then they gave me the visa.” Six hours later, he was on a plane to Toronto. Ghassan was more surprised at the lengths to which the Canadians went to eventually deliver his visa than he was at being rejected in the first place.

  Ghassan won the Griffin. One of the judges, Chinese poet Wang Ping, wrote of Ghassan’s book:

  What does poetry do? Nothing and everything, like air, water, soil, like birds, fish, trees, like love, spirit, our daily words. . . . It lives with us, in and outside us, everywhere, all the time, and yet, we are too often oblivious of this gift. It’s a poet’s job to bring this gift out and back, this gift that makes us human again. And Mr. Zaqtan has done it.

  Many in the poetry world have bestowed Darwish’s “Poet of Palestine” mantle onto Ghassan. Darwish himself christened Ghassan the most important Palestinian poet living today. But Ghassan doesn’t believe that Palestinians need a poet-spokesperson anymore, and believes that poetry’s importance to Palestinian society has diminished. Besides, “politics corrodes and constrains poetry,” Ghassan said. He feels the poet needs to “clear his body from political speeches. From political statements. It is time to clean it.”

  Ghassan suspected I would not like this idea. He figured that I, as a foreigner, would prefer to hear that his work advanced Palestine’s national cause. Maybe he was right. I admitted to Ghassan that I reflexively sought politics lurking between his stanzas and behind his metaphors—and in all Palestinian writing—even if there is none. “That is your problem,” he said bluntly. “You can interpret what you like.” Ghassan doesn’t want to speak on behalf of his people. He prefers to “walk behind the demonstrations and see what falls and catch the evidence. The handkerchief. The child’s backpack. The purse.” Ghassan believes Palestinians need to stop seeking inspiration from their leaders of the past, however iconic, and instead look to those who populate their daily lives. “The taxi driver. The physical therapist. These are our heroes now.”

  The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center occupies another gorgeous stone mansion a little down the hill from the Qattan Foundation. Since its establishment in 1996, the center has hosted and promoted events such as art exhibits, film screenings, and author readings. The building also held the offices of Al-Karmel, the literary quarterly Mahmoud Darwish edited until his death.

  The center has preserved Darwish’s office as he left it before he died. Writers dream of such a workspace. Large windows allow sunlight to reflect off the polished stone tile floors. A simple sofa and coffee table sit in one corner where Darwish used to entertain visitors. The caretaker told me Darwish’s desk remains exactly how he left it. I am not so sure. The clutter seem
ed staged to me, the pile of letters and envelopes on his desk blotter too artfully messy. Still, I felt a sort of thrill in seeing his leather-bound phone book and 1970s-era pen holders—and sadness for his unflipped desk calendar.

  In 2002, only days after Darwish and an international cadre of writers, including Wole Soyinka, José Saramago, and Russell Banks, gave a reading in Ramallah’s Al-Kasaba Theatre, the Israel Defense Forces launched Operation Defensive Shield. The goal of the massive military operation into the West Bank—the largest such incursion since 1967’s Six-Day War—was to root out the terrorist factions responsible for a plague of bloody suicide bombings in Israel. During their three-week occupation of Ramallah, IDF soldiers used explosives to blast their way into the Sakakini Center. They ransacked rooms, broke sculptures, and trashed Darwish’s second-floor office. The soldiers pulled Darwish’s books and manuscripts from their shelves and trampled them. They left shattered glass all over the floor and a bullet hole in a window.

  Palestinians could not see any security justification for the invasion of Sakakini. They wondered how an institution that sponsors concerts, art exhibits, and poetry readings could be a target for the Israeli military. But Darwish knew. When he heard news of the soldiers ransacking his office, he said: “They wanted to give us a message that nobody is immune, including cultural life. I took the message personally. I know they’re strong and can invade and kill anyone. But they can’t break or occupy my words.”