Many consider the Israelis’ action at the center part of an ongoing “cultural cleansing” of Palestine. Just as the Knesset opposed the idea of allowing Israeli children to read Darwish’s “love story” for the hills of Palestine, the trashing of the center aimed to obliterate evidence of Palestinian presence on the land. “Israelis never wanted Palestinians to express themselves in a creative way,” Mahmoud Abu Hashhash once said. “Because, to Israel, the most dangerous thing is to start seeing the Palestinians as artists who can express and convey the spirit of the times.”
Adila Laïdi, the center’s director at the time, was more blunt: “I guess our art is very dangerous if you don’t want us to exist at all.”
I was in Ramallah for the beginning of Ramadan, the monthlong fast when observant Muslims are forbidden to eat, drink, or smoke during daylight hours—and when Maya Abu-Alhayyat appears on every television on the Ramadan soap operas. The day before the fast began, Moheeb reassured me that Café Ramallah would remain open during the day, even during fasting hours. “The front door will be locked,” he said, “but you can come around the back.” I loved how Ramadan transformed my local café into an Arab speakeasy with a secret entrance.
I’d planned to meet Dr. Sharif Kanaana one morning at Rukab’s Ice Cream shop so we could talk about Palestinian folktales over breakfast sundaes. The shop, of course, was closed, so I led Sharif across the street to Café Ramallah. Metal shutters had been pulled down over the front door and windows, just as Moheeb predicted, but I told Sharif we could enter through the back. He was skeptical. He followed me slowly behind the building but paused before entering the back door. “Are you sure?” he asked.
We stepped past the washrooms into a café filled with men cheating on their fast. Because the windows and doors were closed, the place was dark and hazy with unventilated smoke. The proprietor nodded at me, and Sharif and I found a table beneath the television. Sharif doesn’t hear well, so he sat close to me and spoke softly through his thick white mustache.
Sharif told me about the fading tradition of Palestinian storytelling, or hikaye. During the winter months, when there was less work to do in the fields and people had more time to receive guests, Palestinians would gather after dinner to hear storytellers recite their favorite folktales from memory. Hikaye was predominantly a female art form. Boys might be encouraged to recite stories for their younger siblings, but once they reached puberty, boys typically stopped telling tales for fear of seeming womanly. Such stories often involve magic or the fictional quarrels between female family members—tales considered too frivolous for serious men. Participating in the hikaye could earn a man the unflattering label of niswanji: a man who prefers the company of women.
Individual storytellers embellished the tales as they told them, and the best hikaye tellers had their own distinctive styles. The tradition, though, allowed for no significant improvisation. Just as Cinderella’s fantasy ends at midnight in every retelling, hikaye narratives remain the same. Some stories are famous. “Half-a-Halfling,” a tale about the adventures of a tiny boy hero, and “Little Piece of Cheese,” about a girl with skin as perfectly white as cheese, are as familiar to most Palestinians as Disney’s versions of Grimm’s fairy tales would be to people in the West.
But the days of gathering in the salon to listen to Grandmother tell old stories are over. Sharif believes that the tradition waned after 1948, when Jewish immigrants from Europe introduced radios, and then televisions, to the Palestinian population. These devices replaced the storytellers. But the emotional impact of the Nakba also played a part in hikaye’s decline. “The whole mood changed,” Sharif said. “The whole life was something different.” The Nakba displaced half of the Palestinian population. No family was unscathed. Sharif’s mother, for example, lost her own mother and sister to exile in Lebanon. Families lost touch with each other. They feared the soldiers in the streets. They rationed food and struggled to survive in an upended society. Among all that the Palestinians lost during those years was the inclination to tell amusing stories.
Sharif knew he could not save the storytelling tradition, but he could at least rescue the stories themselves. In his work as an anthropologist during the late 1970s, Sharif collected about fifteen hundred of these old folktales, mostly from women. He and his colleague Ibrahim Muhawi published forty-five of the stories in a book called Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales. The Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut distributed three thousand copies to school libraries throughout Palestine in 2001.
The book drew controversy in 2006 after Hamas, a militant nationalist-Islamist movement known for violent resistance against Israel, won a slim majority of seats in the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Many viewed Hamas’s victory as a rejection of the incumbent Fatah party that had dominated Palestinian politics for decades and was widely seen as ineffectual and corrupt. The Hamas government turned out to be short-lived. Violence between Hamas and Fatah in Gaza compelled President Abbas to dismiss the Hamas-led cabinet the following year. At the time, though, many Palestinians and outside observers wondered how a parliament guided by fundamentalist Islam would govern.
They did not have to wonder long. Hamas’s newly appointed minister of education, Nasser al-Din al-Shaer, promptly sent a notice calling for the removal of Speak Bird, Speak Again from school shelves because of content that “insulted the common sense of decent people.” Hamas wasn’t satisfied with simply culling Speak Bird. It wanted the books burned. “The memo said that the school principal should be present when the books were pulled to ensure that they were properly destroyed,” Sharif told me.
For those who feared Hamas planned to impose its strict interpretation of Islam on Palestinians, the action against Speak Bird represented the canary in the coal mine. The call to destroy the books spurred street protests in Ramallah, though Sharif believes party politics inspired the protesters more than any notions of cultural freedom. “Most of the demonstrators were from Fatah, of course,” Sharif said. Then the international news media descended. Sharif remembers coming home one evening to find a reporter and cameraman waiting for him in his salon, another group of reporters in his kitchen, and a third waiting outside his front door. Sharif knew the journalists cared little about Palestinian education or literature. They wanted a story that criticized Hamas and the party’s members in the new unity government. “Had the minister not belonged to Hamas, it would have not gotten so much attention,” Sharif said. He refused to publicly condemn Hamas for the reporters crowding his home.
Sharif thought the ban was more personal than religious anyway. Sharif and Minister al-Shaer had their own troubled history. Al-Shaer had led a religious student group at An-Najah National University years earlier when Sharif was the university’s president. After al-Shaer’s group brawled with a nationalist student group on campus, Sharif suspended both leaders. Sharif figured al-Shaer’s call for the destruction of his book was merely an act of delayed vengeance.
Still, Speak Bird contains plenty of material a conservative parent, or a Hamas education minister, might object to. The text is peppered with obscenities. “There were words like ‘son of a whore.’ Or ‘your mother is a this-or-that,’” Sharif said. “I collected them because this is the way the stories sounded.” Sharif figured two stories in particular troubled the minister. One was “The Little Bird,” a truly bizarre tale in which the sultan’s son shoots, plucks, cooks, and swallows a female bird who manages to sing throughout each step of her ordeal. At the end, after the sultan’s son “got up and shat her,” the bird continued to sing:
“Ho! Ho! I saw the prince’s hole,
It’s red, red like a burning coal.”
Another story is titled, bluntly, “The Woman Who Married Her Son.” In this tale, a mother is so jealous of her daughter-in-law’s beauty that she throws her out of the house while her son is on hajj. The mother disguises herself as her daughter-in-law, sleeps with her son when he returns from Mecca, an
d becomes pregnant. While on an errand to fetch sour grapes—pregnant Palestinian women crave sour grapes the same way Western women crave pickles—the son discovers his mother’s deception. He then sets a bundle of wood on fire and burns his mother to death. “Hamas thought this story was very terrible,” Sharif said.
The education minister reversed the ban on Speak Bird after a few weeks. “Al-Shaer sent around an order saying we should keep the book, but he did not admit he was wrong,” Sharif said. “Things went back to normal.” The only lasting effect of the ban was, unsurprisingly, to boost the book’s popularity. The Institute for Palestine Studies had to print hundreds more copies to meet the new demand.
A decade later, government authorities pulled another title from Palestinian bookshelves. In 2017, the attorney general of the Palestinian Authority, now back under the control of Fatah, sent police to raid a Ramallah bookshop and seize copies of Abbad Yahya’s novel Crime in Ramallah. The attorney general also ordered the confiscation of all one thousand copies of the book from libraries and bookstores across the West Bank and summoned Yahya for questioning. Hamas issued a statement condemning the book, too, and calls for Yahya’s lynching started appearing on his Facebook page. A Nablus book club canceled a planned discussion of Crime in Ramallah after receiving its own storm of death threats. Yahya was visiting Qatar at the time. “I don’t know what to do,” he said in an email. “If I go back, I will be arrested, and if I stay here, I will be far from my home and family.”
Crime in Ramallah focuses on three young men connected to the murder of a woman outside a Ramallah bar. The police arrest one of the men. He is eventually cleared and released but not before officers savagely beat him when they learn he is gay. The second man works at the bar where the murder took place. His conservative family shuns him for serving alcohol, and he becomes an Islamic extremist. The third man, the boyfriend of the murdered woman, kills himself.
The attorney general claimed Crime in Ramallah “contained indecent texts and terms that threaten morality and public decency, which could affect the population, in particular minors.” The book’s sexually explicit language included references to homosexuality, masturbation, and this particularly icky description of a Yasser Arafat poster:
When I came out of school, I was facing a poster of Arafat in army fatigues. He was clutching a rifle, which looked like a giant penis . . . The cheap white glue they used to stick the posters to the gate was dripping from the edge of the paper toward the mouth of the barrel. The scene was perfect. A white liquid trickling from the rifle.
Palestine’s writers didn’t believe the ban had anything to do with morality. Other sexually explicit novels by Arab authors and foreigners such as Henry Miller remained available in Palestinian bookstores and libraries. And the child protection laws the attorney general invoked would not apply to a book like Yahya’s, which was clearly written for adults. Instead, most observers believed Fatah banned the novel for disrespecting Arafat, revered by Fatah as the godfather of the Palestinian cause. Worst of all, the book painted a bleak picture of contemporary life in Ramallah under the Palestinian Authority. The government based its decision on politics rather than ethics.
The Independent Commission for Human Rights, an agency within the PA itself, opposed the decision. Even the Palestinian minister of culture, Ehab Bseiso, demanded that the attorney general revoke the ban and cheekily announced he would immediately start reading the book. Nearly one hundred Palestinian authors, artists, and intellectuals signed a statement protesting the government action.
Yahya has not returned to Palestine. He accepted an invitation by the German PEN Center, which offered him a scholarship and a yearlong “writers-in-exile” fellowship. I reached him the day after his arrival in Germany. He told me his wife would join him but that their future remained uncertain. “I’m already confused about my stay, my wife’s status, and my work,” he wrote. “I can’t think clearly about what I want to do after the fellowship ends.”
Even in Ramallah, at the font of Palestinian artistic expression, writers can find themselves besieged by those who strive to restrict and suppress their work. And the Israeli occupation does not always reign as the primary bogeyman. Political feuds and personal grudges, sensitive mothers and disapproving fathers, religion, tradition, and gender: all throw up their own barriers before the authors of Palestine, who must find their way over, under, or around them.
While Café Ramallah remained my daytime haunt, I’d take nightly coffee, beer, and nargileh at Café La Vie, a lovely garden café not far from the guesthouse at Qattan. An American woman named Morgan runs the café with her Palestinian husband. When I walked into La Vie on the first night of my last trip to Ramallah, Morgan beamed. “I guess our nargileh sales are going to go up,” she said. It felt good to be recognized, but Morgan was pregnant at the time and avoided my table when I was smoking. I would read and write beneath the tiny spring figs on La Vie’s trees and watch groups of young Palestinian women wave fiercely at the slow-moving waiters. Eventually, the alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine would collude to swirl away my attention. Then I’d return to my guesthouse a little light-headed and rubber-legged.
Morgan occasionally hosts author readings at La Vie, and I performed at one of these a few years earlier when I was writer-in-residence. Accustomed to Canada’s poorly attended literary readings, I was unprepared for La Vie’s crowd. The staff had moved nearly every chair from the inside of the café outside for the reading, and each of these was full. (Only a few chairs remained indoors for the handful of customers wanting to watch a high-stakes European Cup match. Poetry trumps soccer at La Vie.) Fairy lights hung from the trees and wrapped around the tree trunks. Thick clouds of citrus-scented smoke tumbled out of the mouths of the nargileh smokers. Lemon-mint was the preferred flavor that spring, though I was more partial to watermelon.
Several foreigners sat among the crowd, young activist types wearing keffiyehs and speaking tortured Arabic with European accents. Most of the audience, though, were Palestinians of varying ages. I shared the night with a couple of local poets, the visiting Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan, and a fabulous local guitarist. The main draw, though, was Kifah Fanni, a local poet in his fifties. During his reading, Morgan whispered to me that Fanni rarely reads in public, and his appearance at La Vie was an extraordinary occasion. Fanni, suitably bohemian in his beard and beret, recited soft Arabic verses from loose pages while the audience sat still and respectful.
When it was my turn at the microphone, I decided not to read anything I’d written about Palestine. The idea of reflecting my outsider’s experiences of the struggle back to those who live it every day struck me as arrogant. More than this, though, I didn’t want to darken such a night with bleak politics. Despite the foreign activists, their keffiyehs broadcasting solidarity with the Palestinian cause, this was a venue for art.
I recited a magazine piece I wrote years earlier about becoming a father. It is a story about love—and beauty. I don’t know how many in the garden fully understood my reading. English was a first language for very few. But the audience was quiet and attentive. I could sense, in a tiny way and only for a moment, what Darwish meant when he said writing about love liberated his humanity. To stand in Palestine and read aloud about something other than the familiar narrative—to speak not of the Nakba or the checkpoints or the fallen olive trees—felt both subversive and profoundly human. I read from the same story back home several times, but nowhere did the experience feel as visceral as that night at La Vie. Nowhere did it mean as much to me.
My map of Palestine is a mess of barriers and forbidden space. A pox of red X’s denote military checkpoints. Red lines indicating Israel’s “separation barrier” lacerate the edges of Palestine’s border and slash inward to embrace the blue blotches of Israeli settlements. Purple tangles show where stretches of new walls will rise.
Israel started its wall project in the fall of 2002, during the bloodiest days of the Second Inti
fada. More than six hundred and fifty Israeli civilians had been killed by suicide attacks since the outbreak of violence in 2000. Palestinian terrorists blew themselves up in restaurants, cafés, and buses. The checkpoints and military incursions into the West Bank were not working, and the terrified Israeli populace demanded a different response from their government. Israel began to erect a seven-hundred-kilometer-long system of security barriers around the West Bank. For most of its route the barrier is a three-meter-high fence equipped with barbed wire, electronic sensors, and night-vision cameras. Smooth strips of sand next to the fence reveal the footprints of anyone who makes it over. Red signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English threaten “mortal danger” and warn “any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.”
Alongside the larger Palestinian centers, the barrier is more wall than fence. Great gray slabs of concrete rise out of the ground, bound so tightly together not even a thread of sunlight can infiltrate. Floodlights and security cameras mark the length on top of the wall, and cylindrical watchtowers pose like vertical cannons along the route. I’d passed through the wall’s checkpoint dozens of times, but I was always struck by the barrier’s concrete brashness, its proud rejection of nuance and grace.
Only a tenth of the wall follows the Green Line, the armistice boundary drawn in 1949 and the internationally accepted border between Israel and the West Bank. Most of the barrier creeps east of the Green Line and inside Palestinian territory. In some areas, the barrier plunges deep into the West Bank, swinging wide around Jewish settlements in order to keep them, and much of the land surrounding them, on the Israeli side. The barrier also divides Palestinian villages from both their farmland and neighboring towns, and annexes a tenth of Palestinian land in the West Bank to Israel. The International Court of Justice declared the wall illegal in 2004, and while proponents claim the barrier saves lives, officials in Israel’s own intelligence agency concede the barrier does not play a major role in reducing terrorist attacks. If the wall can be admired at all, it must be for its audacity.
Pay No Heed to the Rockets Page 7
