Pay No Heed to the Rockets

by Marcello Di Cintio

  That night I met poet Asmaa Azaizeh in a café one street up from Masada. She is almost supernaturally beautiful, with the sort of eyes Arab poets wrote ghazals about. Asmaa started to load the bowl of a briar pipe with tobacco as soon as she sat down. She laughed when I told her I’d never seen a woman smoke such a pipe. “It is my boyfriend’s,” she said. “I’ve been smoking it lately instead of cigarettes because I feel I smoke less this way. Maybe it is a fantasy.” She declined my offer to buy her a beer. “I have been drinking since ten this morning,” she admitted. A planned hiking trip with her friends devolved into a daylong bout of outdoor drinking. “And we didn’t hike anywhere,” she said.

  Asmaa comes from a village called Dabouriya in the countryside near Nazareth. She moved to Haifa when she was eighteen years old to study at the University of Haifa. Now she lives with her twin sister in an apartment across the street from the café. Asmaa’s father was a farmer who used to recite classical Arabic poetry from memory at the dinner table. “He learned the poems from school,” she said. “He loved them. And he was a good reader, too.” By the time Asmaa was seven years old she, too, was reciting poetry from memory and writing jabberwocky verses full of gibberish and made-up words.

  When she reached her teen years, Asmaa exchanged her poetry for the regular pursuits of kids her age. She hung out with her friends, listened to music, and played basketball. This sounded familiar. “You have a lot in common with Ghassan Zaqtan,” I said. “You are both poets who used to play basketball. Do you know Ghassan?”

  Asmaa smiled. “He used to be my father-in-law.”

  Ghassan and Asmaa met in 2007 when he published some of her poetry in the culture pages of Al-Ayyam. The two had coffee together whenever Asmaa was in Ramallah. Ghassan brought along his son Shadi, a fine guitarist and songwriter, to one of those café meetings in 2010. “Ghassan thought he would bring Shadi to meet me and maybe something would happen. He set it up. And it happened.” Asmaa moved to Ramallah, where she and Shadi lived together for a couple of years before getting married. They broke up three years later. Shadi stayed in Ramallah, and Asmaa returned to Haifa. “On paper we are still married,” she said, but the legal logistics of divorcing across the Green Line have proven to be complicated. For the time being, Asmaa and Shadi remain territorially divided but legally bound.

  Asmaa studied journalism and English language at the University of Haifa. She admits she was not a good student, but she considers her time at university as her cultural awakening. “I started to write. I started to see culture. To see theater. To read.” She also embraced politics. Asmaa joined the Abnaa el-Balad, or Sons of the Homeland, a movement of Palestinian citizens of Israel and like-minded Israeli Jews who advocate for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine. Asmaa edited the movement’s monthly magazine but eventually left the organization when older members of the movement started to shut the younger members out of decision-making. Asmaa also found the strict ideology of her Abnaa el-Balad activism crippled the freedom of thought she required to write her poetry. A poet can write about politics, but “you cannot be ideological in real life and be free in your poetry. You cannot be schizophrenic.” Asmaa opted for poetry.

  Like Bashar, Asmaa possesses a collective Palestinian memory of suffering she did not personally endure. Asmaa told an interviewer in 2017, “I was born in a peaceful village. I have never seen shooting in my life. I’ve never seen a dead body or a killing, but my memory and my collective consciousness has seen all this.” She addresses her lack of firsthand trauma in her poem “Do Not Believe Me If I Talked to You of War”:

  Do not believe me if I talked to you of war, because when I spoke of blood, I was drinking coffee, when I spoke of graves, I was picking yellow daisies in Marj ibn Amer, when I described the murderers, I was listening to my friend’s giggles, and when I wrote about a burnt theatre in Aleppo, I was standing before you in an air-conditioned one . . .

  Do not believe me when I talk to you of war

  Because I’ve never heard a bullet shot besides the one my father threw from his double-barreled gun into Marj ibn Amer’s doves. And I’ve never scented blood from a wound except for that which I smelled with my mother the first time I menstruated.

  I do not have an account in the bank of wars, but a Hourani woman reassured me that my cheques are valid.

  Asmaa won the A. M. Qattan Foundation’s Young Writer Award in 2010, and a Jordanian press published her first book of poetry, Liwa, in 2011. I wondered when she found the time to write it. I’ve never met anyone more engaged in the Palestinian cultural scene, in Haifa or anywhere else, than Asmaa. She began editing the arts and culture sections of local magazines and newspapers midway during her university studies. After graduating in 2006, she started working in radio and television. She hosted talk shows, worked for a Ramallah television station, acted as a cultural correspondent for an Arabic television channel in London, wrote for magazines in Haifa and Lebanon, and edited the poetry section of Ala Hlehel’s Qadita website. She curates events at Haifa’s Fattoush Art Space and Bookshop and manages a poetry initiative called Poetry Lab. She also handles media for various arts organizations, such as the Khashabi Theatre, and coordinates a booking agency for musicians.

  In 2011, the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation in Ramallah surprised Asmaa by offering her another gig: the directorship of the new Mahmoud Darwish Museum. “You don’t see young people in charge of these things in Ramallah,” Asmaa said. “The people who built the museum and established the Mahmoud Darwish Foundation are all old guys. Dinosaurs. So when they offered me the job, I couldn’t believe it.” Asmaa spent two months writing a formal seventy-seven-page proposal for the museum, including everything from strategic planning ideas to long- and short-term project proposals to outlines for running the museum gift shop. She consulted with her contacts in the arts and culture scene, in Palestine and abroad, and researched similar museums in Europe. She wanted to partner with Birzeit University to establish a creative writing college at the museum which would offer bachelor’s or master’s degree programs in creative writing, the first such programs in the Arab world. Asmaa envisioned the museum evolving into the one of the leading cultural institutions in the Middle East.

  The dinosaurs, though, didn’t bite. “They threw my idea in the trash, man!” Asmaa said, growing agitated at the memory. “They are fucked up in the head!” Instead, two months after the museum opened in 2012, the dinosaurs considered renting out the museum’s theater to one of the nearby embassies for a cocktail party. Asmaa, mortified, refused. “This is not a wedding hall,” she said.

  The museum canceled the cocktail party, but it became clear that the founders would not implement any of Asmaa’s ambitious ideas. “I was begging for them to let me work, but they didn’t want to do anything.” She quit after seven months. “I really got bored,” she said. Now the museum screens films and hosts occasional poetry readings. “Big deal,” Asmaa scoffed. “I can do that here in this coffee shop.”

  Asmaa prefers living in Haifa to Ramallah anyway. “The Palestinian places and spaces are known to us, and everybody knows everybody,” she said. “I think Haifa is a calm city. I like the sea. I like the mountain. I really feel connected. My friends are here. My work is here.” For Asmaa, the cultural initiatives she and other young Palestinian artists in Haifa engage in, on Masada and elsewhere, are “nothing short of a political revolt.” To open a music venue or start a theater in an Israeli city stands as an act of cultural resistance, a dynamic movement that battles what Asmaa terms the “linguistic and cultural occupation of Haifa.” The expression of a Palestinian identity here is a political act.

  “Do you have challenges, though, being a Palestinian artist living in an Israeli city?” I asked. “Or do you have your own scene and your own people?”

  Asmaa frowned. “You are describing it as if we live in a cultural ghetto. It is not a ghetto. It is more of a cultural bubble. In my daily life, I don’t feel I am the Oth
er. I don’t feel as if I live in an Israeli city. I really feel it is my place. I feel connected to the streets, to the people, to the bars, to the theater, to the nature. I don’t feel something is wrong.”

  “But is the whole city yours?”

  “No. I don’t go to Carmel Center to drink beer,” she said, referring to a part of Haifa that is almost entirely Jewish. Still, over the years, she stopped seeing herself as part of a simple us-and-them binary. “We started to see ourselves as our own thing. We’ve gone beyond the realization that we are a minority, that we are oppressed and depressed. I felt this more when I was younger. I came from a village and wasn’t used to living among Israelis. I wasn’t used to the two systems. Now I feel different. I am still touched when I see what is happening in Gaza and Ramallah, and also here. But in Haifa, this odd place, in this small bubble where we live, we are a little bit isolated from it all.”

  If the Masada Street scene houses Haifa’s Palestinian culture in the present tense, Wadi Nisnas represents its past. The neighborhood was founded in the nineteenth century for Arab workers. Most left after 1948, but the three thousand residents who remained preserved the neighborhood’s rural atmosphere and Arab closeness. Narrow alleys still divide the low stone houses where laundry hangs from wrought iron balconies. Pomegranate trees still rise over garden walls, and church bells still ring on Sundays.

  Khulud khamis’s father was born in this neighborhood and grew up in these alleyways. Khulud, though, was born in what was Czechoslovakia to a Slovakian mother. The family moved to Wadi Nisnas when khulud—who spells her name with lowercase k’s—was eight years old. They stayed in her grandmother’s house until her mother, valuing privacy and space more than her new Palestinian in-laws and neighbors, insisted khulud’s father find them another place to live.

  Khulud knew only two words in Arabic when she arrived in Wadi Nisnas: habibi, the common term of endearment her father and grandmother no doubt called her, and kanun alththani, which means January. “My father tried to teach me all the months, but I got stuck on January. Kanun alththani has a kind of melody,” khulud said, betraying her writer’s sensibility.

  “It is a beautiful word,” I agreed. We were sitting in her living room in Vardia, a neighborhood far from Wadi Nisnas on Haifa’s Mount Carmel. “How do you say February?”

  “Shbat.” Khulud laughed. “You see? You can’t go from kanun alththani to shbat.”

  When she moved from Czechoslovakia to Haifa as a child, khulud endured the uniquely Palestinian anxiety of immigrating to a place she didn’t know but was compelled to call home. The move was hard for her. Haifa’s culture did not resemble what she knew in Slovakia, and she didn’t speak the language. “I remember the experience of trying to fit in, and always failing somehow.” Khulud sat quietly on the fringes of life in Haifa—not bullied, but left out. “I was always an outsider. Always, always, always.”

  Like many of the Palestinians I spoke to in Israel, khulud’s family was not displaced by the Nakba. She has no refugee story. Khulud’s grandfather even served as a member of the Israeli Knesset. (“We are not going to talk about him,” khulud said.) But while khulud’s youth did not bear the typically Palestinian scars of post-Nakba dislocation, khulud endured her own personal brand of self-imposed exile. When she was eighteen years old, an American ship bound for Russia broke down in the Mediterranean and docked in Haifa for repairs. Khulud met and promptly fell in love with the ship’s chef, an American man twice her age. When he returned to the United States, khulud followed. They married in Las Vegas and lived for a while in an RV, driving through Mississippi and New Mexico before settling in a dingy basement apartment near Atlanta. Her husband had a fondness for Jack Daniel’s that he didn’t have for work, and khulud’s parents sent money every few months to help support her. Khulud and her husband eventually had a daughter, Michelle.

  Khulud’s parents flew to America three times—each separately once, then together—to try to coax their daughter back home. Khulud was stubborn. Finally, in the middle of the night and at the end of a long conversation, khulud’s mother made her realize the sadness of her basement-dwelling American life. A few months later, after khulud organized Michelle’s travel documents, the two packed up their few possessions and returned to Haifa. The husband stayed behind. They never divorced, but she and Michelle rarely hear from him.

  After earning a master’s degree in English literature at the University of Haifa, khulud wanted to be a writer, but her own fragmented identity intimidated her. She wasn’t sure whom she represented in her work and wondered what a writer with her unique heritage was permitted to express. Would she be seen as speaking for all Palestinians or the Palestinian minority living in Israel? Or was she an immigrant writer from Slovakia? The fact that she writes in English rather than Arabic or Hebrew raised further questions about for whom she was writing.

  Khulud finally found her voice as a writer in 2008 when she started to work for Isha L’Isha, a radical feminist organization in Israel. Feminism connected the various strands of khulud’s splintered self and gave her the “legitimization” to write about individual lives without worrying about representing the collective Palestinian experience. On the page, khulud was a woman first, before all else.

  She remains a perennial outsider, though, and has spent her life trying to figure out where she fits in. “The feeling of wanting to belong is a primal instinct,” she said. “We need to belong to something. Whatever it is. I think this is something that always drove me: to find the group or the place I belong to. And I could never find that. The Palestinians, the people I want to belong to, don’t really accept me fully. Not in the total sense. Because, at the end of the day, I am a foreigner.” Khulud spent years of “moving between the spaces of belonging and not belonging” in search of an emotional home before realizing that such a place did not exist—at least not for her.

  But khulud discovered that her fluid identity possesses its own sort of power. “Its strength lies in its movement: sometimes being positioned at the very center, at other times on the margins.” Khulud feels this mutability offers her a broad view. She views the complicated social-political structures of her world from various perspectives and can “make intricate connections between phenomena that otherwise would seem unrelated.” Khulud may not belong anywhere, but from where she stands she can see everything.

  Her outsider identity also offers khulud certain permissions not granted to other women she knows. The regular cultural taboos—against living with a partner outside of marriage, say, or marrying someone from a different religion—do not apply to her. A few years ago, khulud cofounded a Facebook page where Palestinian victims of sexual harassment and assault could share their experiences. “This is something that is not talked about even in intimate circles,” she said. “Even between sisters.” Many women posted their stories on the page, but only khulud used her full name. Her colleagues praised khulud for her bravery and for being a “revolutionary,” but khulud knows she only got away with doing this because she was a foreigner and not “wholly Palestinian.”

  Khulud wrote her first novel, Haifa Fragments, while working two jobs, raising a daughter, caring for two dogs, and tending to her mother, who’d suffered a stroke. The novel follows Mayysoon, a Palestinian jewelry designer living in Haifa, and her relationships with her Muslim boyfriend, Ziyad, her secretive Christian father, and a young woman, Shahd, who lives in a village on the other side of the wall. All of these characters are Palestinian, but their individual histories, experiences, and values are diverse. Each character’s life represents a fragment of what it means to be a contemporary Palestinian and challenges the Western perception of Palestinians as either stock victims or militants.

  Comparing Mayysoon’s urban existence in Haifa to Shahd’s rural village in the West Bank raises the question of which woman enjoys the better life, and reminded me of Ala, Raji, and the other Palestinians I met living in Israel. Is there an advantage to living as an a
dmittedly second-class Palestinian citizen of Israel compared to being the subject of Israeli occupation in the West Bank? Khulud used to think so. “And this kept me silent for many years. Who am I to write about Palestine when I am living in a luxury of sorts? During active military operations, they are suffering. Being killed. Murdered. Who am I to say that I am being discriminated against here in Haifa?” But khulud started to accept the fact that Palestinians on her side of the wall also feel pain. “We don’t need to compare whose suffering is worse.”

  This real-life anguish inspires many of khulud’s short stories. Or “fictionalized realities,” as she calls them. Her story “Conflict Zone Date” draws on the attempted lynching of a Palestinian man in 2012. Ibrahim Abu-Taah was escorting a female Jewish colleague home from a staff party in Jerusalem when a group of Jewish teenagers heard the woman refer to Ibrahim by name, thus outing him as an Arab. They pummeled him with an iron rod. Ibrahim ended up in hospital with a broken leg. In the days following the incident, Jerusalem police officials said that their investigators were still trying to find the motive behind the attack.

  The police didn’t have to look far. Three weeks earlier, dozens of Jewish youth ambushed a group of Palestinians in Jerusalem’s Zion Square and beat one seventeen-year-old nearly to death. A week after that attack, Lehava, an extremist group that opposes relationships between Jews and non-Jews, and whose leader advocates the burning of churches and mosques, circulated an online poster reading: