Pay No Heed to the Rockets Read online

  ALSO BY MARCELLO DI CINTIO

  Walls: Travels Along the Barricades

  Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran

  Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa

  Pay No Heed to the Rockets

  Copyright © 2018 by Marcello Di Cintio

  First published in 2018 in Canada by Goose Lane Editions

  First Counterpoint hardcover edition: 2018

  Map by Jim Todd, Todd Graphic. www.toddgraphic.ns.ca

  Reprinted by permission of Goose Lane Editions from the Canadian edition of Pay No Heed to the Rockets.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Di Cintio, Marcello, 1973– author

  Title: Pay no heed to the rockets : Palestine in the present tense / Marcello Di Cintio.

  Description: First Counterpoint hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018007702 | ISBN 9781640090811 | eISBN 9781640090828

  Subjects: LCSH: Arabic literature—Palestine—History and criticism. | Literature and society—West Bank. | Literature and society—Gaza. | Palestinian Arabs— West Bank—Intellectual life. | Palestinian Arabs—Gaza—Intellectual life. | Palestinian Arabs in literature. | Arab-Israeli conflict—Literature and the conflict. | Di Cintio, Marcello, 1973– —Travel. | West Bank—Social conditions. | Gaza— Social conditions.

  Classification: LCC PJ8190 .D53 2018 | DDC 956.9405/5—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018007702

  Jacket designed by Nicole Caputo

  Book designed by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the people of Gaza

  CONTENTS

  Introduction The Girl in the Green Dress

  1 The Homeland Is Where None of This Can Happen

  2 Whenever My Sore Heart Gets Hungry

  3 To Breathe Life into a Name

  4 I Do Not Have an Account in the Bank of Wars

  5 If You Can Hear the Rockets, Then You Are Alive

  6 She Is Oranges That Explode

  Conclusion Her Name Is Maram

  Reading List

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  The Girl in the Green Dress

  In 1996, Mourid Barghouti sat in a waiting room on the Jordanian side of the Allenby Bridge. He passed the time leafing through the manuscript pages of what would become his ninth book of poetry. But anxiety about the quality of his poems—a typical writer’s doubt—compelled him to return the manuscript to his bag. Instead, he reflected on the first poem he ever published, “Apology to a Faraway Soldier,” which came out on the first day of 1967’s Six-Day War. The Arab armies fell to the Israelis by the sixth day, and the river Barghouti now waited to cross became a border. Barghouti once joked, “I wonder if the Arabs were defeated and Palestine was lost because I wrote a poem.”

  In his memoir I Saw Ramallah, Barghouti described stepping out of the waiting room and glancing west across the bridge at the land of Palestine after three decades of exile:

  Who would dare make it into an abstraction now that it has declared its physical self to the senses?

  It is no longer “the beloved” in the poetry of resistance, or an item on a political party program, it is not an argument or a metaphor. It stretches before me, as touchable as a scorpion, a bird, a well; visible as a field of chalk, as the prints of shoes.

  I asked myself, what is so special about it except that we have lost it?

  Eventually, a Jordanian soldier told Barghouti he could cross the bridge. He walked with a small bag on his left shoulder and the bridge’s “prohibited wooden planks” creaking beneath his feet. “Behind me the world,” he wrote, “ahead of me my world.”

  Nineteen years later, I sat in the same waiting room as Barghouti, or one just like it, and waited for my chance to cross the same bridge. I’d traveled to Israel and Palestine many times since millennial madness first drew me to Jerusalem in the final days of 1999, but I’d only ever arrived at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. The last time was in 2012. I’d signed on as the writer-in-residence at the Palestine Writing Workshop and ran a creative nonfiction course in a beautiful old stone house in Birzeit. Over the course of a month, I instructed nine writers to craft stories from their own lives. Before the residency began, I wondered how many would write about their experience of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How many would recount memories of their grandfather’s lost olive trees or pen narratives of humiliations at the hands of checkpoint soldiers? I was curious to see if they would write the sort of stories I’d grown accustomed to hearing from Palestine.

  They didn’t. One woman wrote about the day her little brother wandered off during Friday prayers at Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. Another wrote a charming piece about eating ice cream in the winter as a child, a mild rebellion that shocked her classmates. “Very few things fail to surprise Catholic schoolgirls,” she wrote. There were many family stories. Some made me laugh aloud, like one writer’s teasing of her mother’s vanity or another’s recollection of her parents’ bizarre indecision around naming their children. Others were disturbing. One young woman wrote a chilling account of the night she quarreled with her domineering father who, enraged, commanded his wife to fetch a knife so he could kill their daughter.

  Each of the nearly thirty stories the women wrote in the workshop was uniquely Palestinian, but almost none addressed the conflict—at least not directly. My students’ assignments provided my first glimpses of a complete Palestinian life. Until then, I’d only viewed Palestinians through the lens of the struggle: through journalism, activism, and political discourse. After reading my students’ stories, I started to see the regular humanity of the Palestinian experience. The conflict complicated their lives, surely, but so did strict schoolteachers, threatening fathers, lost brothers, and mothers who needed help coloring the gray out of their hair. My students’ stories revealed individual Palestinian lives that existed alongside the greater collective struggle.

  My departure from Palestine after the residency abruptly disconnected me from these human narratives. My diet of Palestinian stories came instead from newspaper reports, press releases, the rambling of politicians, and the coverage of war. Five months after I left Palestine, the Israeli military exchanged rockets with militants in Gaza in a weeklong war that killed at least a hundred Gazan civilians, dozens of them children, and four Israeli civilians. The following year brought the relatively banal news of failed peace talks, demolished homes, and detained children. Israeli soldiers shot to death fifteen Palestinian civilians in 2013, and the occasional rocket fizzled out of Gaza. Numbed by all of this, I almost forgot what I learned from my writing students in Birzeit: there is more to Palestine than the cruel accounting of death and despair.

  Then, in the hot summer of 2014, I saw the girl in the green dress. Israel had launched Operation Protective Edge against militants in the Gaza Strip. During a brief lull in the bombing, a series of four photos emerged of a young Gazan girl sifting through the wreckage of a destroyed building. The girl—around ten years old—wore a green dress and pink
leggings, and her long hair was tied back in a neat ponytail. She pulled books from beneath shattered concrete and cinder blocks and stacked them in her arms. The books were tattered and filthy, their covers dangling from their bindings. But in the last photograph, the girl walked away smiling.

  I’d seen countless photos from the war. Images of wailing women. Bloodied men on stretchers. Funeral processions. Gray and yellow corpses. Few, though, had as profound an effect on me as these four photos of the girl and her broken books. I was tempted to reduce her to an abstraction. In Barghouti’s “poetry of resistance,” this girl could represent all of “beloved” Palestine. Her thin frame might embody the more than five hundred Gazan children who were killed during the fifty days of Protective Edge. She could have been one of them, for all I knew. The shattered building around her might be a convenient symbol of loss, her smile a symbol of Palestinian resilience, her youth a symbol of hope.

  But just like the land Barghouti saw from across the bridge in 1996, this girl is neither an argument nor a metaphor. She, too, has a physical self to declare. She is loved not as a line of verse but as a daughter. A sister. A schoolmate. I wanted to see her like I wanted to see Palestine: not as an enduring and unsolvable political problem but as something physical that exists in the present tense. And I wanted to see Palestinians as a people unto themselves, not merely as one half of a warring binary. Not in opposition but in situ.

  Most of all, though, the girl in the photos made me long for beauty. All we think we know of Palestine is its ugliness. Palestine is a place of despairing gray broken only by the red of blood and flame. But the girl in Gaza was beautiful in the way all children are beautiful, and more beautiful still for the unexpected flash of her green dress against the gray rubble. So I traveled to Palestine to find beauty. I wanted to touch the bird and the well, not just the scorpion.

  Nothing is more beautiful than a story. And nothing is more human. To weave the snarled strands of a life, either real or imagined, into literature is a form of blessed alchemy. Twists of plot and turns of phrase mirror the messy details of human existence. We are nothing more or less than the stories we tell. But the only story most outsiders ever hear about Palestine is a thin volume of enduring conflict. The character of the Palestinian is either a furious militant throwing stones with a keffiyeh wrapped around his face or an old woman in a hijab wailing in front of her destroyed home. This single Sisyphean narrative of anger and deprivation holds the Palestinians hostage, and little beauty is to be found in such a plot.

  Inspired by the girl and the books she rescued from the detritus of war, and by my students’ stories, I decided to seek out the brokers of grace itself: the poets and writers of Palestine. They gather the fragments of their existence onto their pages, verse by verse and line by line, and bare the beauty of a place known mostly for its opposite. Certainly, the writers, and those who keep and sell their books, would have different stories to tell than the one I’d grown weary and despondent of hearing. Surely, they could reveal what made Palestine special, other than the fact that it has been lost.

  I never got the chance to meet Barghouti himself. The best I could do was to follow his footsteps across the border. And so, after I’d waited in the Jordanian departure salon for an hour with a group of Arab families, a border soldier returned our passports and led us outside. The wooden bridge Barghouti walked across was no longer in use. This disappointed me. I wanted to retrace Barghouti’s footfalls on Allenby’s “prohibited wooden planks.” The new paved crossing robbed the journey of its pedestrian poetry. Instead, we boarded a bus already nearly full of travelers from other waiting rooms. We drove for a few meters before stopping behind a line of identical buses stretching from the Jordanian border to the customs post on the other side. When our driver realized the buses were not moving, he pulled ours out of the line and roared past the unmoving vehicles to the front, where he talked his way past the official at the checkpoint. Then he edged the bus into a space in front of the Israeli border post. Some of the passengers applauded. Half of them passed Jordanian banknotes to the driver as a tip. Uncertain of the protocol, I did neither.

  We waited inside the bus for another quarter hour before being allowed to exit into the chaos of the checkpoint. Hundreds of people, mostly Palestinian families, fought to navigate the gauntlet of Israeli security. Mustached men wrestled heavy suitcases through the crowd while their headscarved wives clutched crying children. Many of the Arabs were returning from umrah pilgrimages to Mecca and carried large plastic vessels of water with them, a sacred liquid souvenir from the holy Zamzam well in the Great Mosque.

  Each arrival pressed through the mob under the disinterested gaze of young Israel Defense Forces soldiers. The border soldiers always looked bored to me, whether here on the bridge, on the smooth tiles of Ben Gurion Airport, or at the West Bank checkpoints. I never knew whether their indifferent calm was somehow part of their uniform—a way to mask a trained alertness, say—or if the borders simply bored them. Barghouti noticed this, too. When he passed through here, he looked at the face of one of these soldiers. “For a moment he seemed a mere employee,” Barghouti wrote. “At least his gun is very shiny. His gun is my personal history. It is the history of my estrangement. His gun took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land.”

  I merged into the current of bodies as best I could and followed the lead of those in front of me. I pushed my way to a counter where I showed my passport to an Israeli soldier in exchange for tags for my backpack. Then I squeezed out of the queue and toward a conveyor belt that swept my bag somewhere inside the building. Finally, I joined three successive lines in front of three different glass booths to show my documents to three different officials. The last, a woman of about twenty years, asked me where I planned on staying and what I planned on doing. She interrupted me when I started to list the Palestinian writers I wanted to meet. “Don’t say Palestine,” she said. “This is Israel. Stop saying Palestine.”

  1

  The Homeland Is Where None of This Can Happen

  I once read a story about a time when the late poet Mahmoud Darwish crossed the Allenby Bridge into Palestine. His Israeli interrogator recognized him and, starstruck, asked Darwish to recite some of his poetry. Darwish refused. “A prisoner does not sing to his prison warden,” he said.

  I can understand the border soldier’s admiration for Darwish. Of all the writers of Palestine, he is the most beloved. Darwish’s poetry is recited, remembered, and loved by readers around the world. His portrait hangs in Palestine’s cafés and is spray-painted on its walls. My intention was to seek out living literary culture, not the august figures of Palestine’s past, but Darwish hovered over nearly every conversation. Following his ghost meant beginning to know this place.

  Mahmoud Darwish was seven years old in May 1948. He was living in al-Birwa, a hilltop village overlooking the junction where the highway to the Mediterranean coast at Acre met the road from Nazareth, when a group of weary refugees arrived on foot seeking a night’s respite. They were Palestinians from Haifa, they said, and were on their way to Lebanon. When the village mukhtar asked the refugees why they’d left Haifa, they said that Jewish soldiers were shooting the men and raping the women who stayed behind.

  The previous year, the war-weary British declared an end to their quarter-century mandate over the land of Palestine. The newly formed United Nations drew up and voted for a partition plan that divided the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states. Most of the region’s Jews accepted the partition. Palestine’s Arabs, who made up two-thirds of the population but were granted less than half of the territory, rejected it outright. A civil war began immediately after the UN passed the partition resolution in November 1947. This escalated into all-out war between Israeli forces and a coalition of Arab militaries on May 15, 1948—the day after British soldiers left the region and Israel declared itself an independent state, and a few days before the refugees reached al-Birwa.
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br />   More and more refugees passed through al-Birwa in the days that followed as they fled the fighting along the coast. All told stories of chaos and violence. No one in al-Birwa could be sure what was true, what was exaggeration, and what was propaganda. Still, the news rattled the villagers. They’d heard rumors of a massacre in the coastal village of Tantura where unarmed men were lined up and shot by Israeli soldiers. Farmers harvesting corn began to spot Israeli tanks and armored vehicles on the far edges of their farmland. Once news broke that the Israelis had occupied Acre, some of al-Birwa’s families, fearing a night raid on the village, decided it was safer to sleep in their fields than in their houses.

  At the time, and for centuries beforehand, almost everyone in al-Birwa was a farmer. Water from freshwater springs irrigated melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, and eggplants. Cows and goats wandered among the olive and mulberry trees. Neighbors shared whatever they had with those who were lacking. “We were very happy with the life we had at the time,” Abu Ahmed Sa’ad told me. “All of us were connected together.”

  I’d reached out to Abu Ahmed because I wanted to learn about the fate of the village he shared with Mahmoud Darwish. He invited me to his home in Jadeidi-Makr, an Arab town near Acre. Abu Ahmed was enviably robust for a man of eighty years. Only his snowy hair and the slight curve of his back betrayed his age. It was a warm April morning, and we sat on a table in front of his home while a younger woman—perhaps a granddaughter—brought out sweetened Arabic coffee in a blue pot. Abu Ahmed insisted on pouring my cup himself.

  No two families in al-Birwa were connected as closely as the Darwishes and the Sa’ads. The Sa’ad family home stood across the road from the Darwish family’s. “We were always at their house,” Abu Ahmed said. His mother and Mahmoud’s mother were cousins, and both came from the nearby village of Dimoon. Abu Ahmed would eventually marry the daughter of Hassan Darwish, the village mukhtar and Mahmoud’s great-uncle. Abu Ahmed’s sister married Mahmoud Darwish’s brother. The two families even shared a private cemetery in al-Birwa. “We were more or less the same family,” Abu Ahmed said. “Two names, one family.”