Tears nearly sprang from my eyes. I hugged her, and she asked, laughing, “Is this a sentimental Arab film? What happened?”
Maybe I shouldn’t be so afraid for Maryam. She surprises me. One day Abed called her “Surprising Maryam,” but he hadn’t seen her for two years, so even he was surprised by that same spring inside her. It’s different from the young men’s spring; they call it “the girls’ lathe.” Abed found his sister a teen, a small woman. She was no taller than he was or than her two other brothers, but she had grown suddenly from a child with two braids into a teenager with all the curves of a young woman. She had been shaped on the girls’ lathe. I smiled. But the spring was working on her mind also. It takes me by surprise.
She was sixteen, in the second year of high school, when she came back from school and announced proudly: “I received full marks for my composition! The teacher told us in class: ‘I’ve been working in teaching for twenty years and I’ve never given a student full marks. But I liked what Maryam wrote so much that I even thought of giving her full marks, plus five marks.’ The girls laughed at the idea. When class was over they gathered around me, wanting me to read what I wrote. I said, ‘Tomorrow. I’ll give it to my mother to read first.”
I asked her, “What was the subject the teacher set for you?”
She said, “‘The memory of a man you love.’ Most of the girls wrote about their grandfather, but I’ve never seen my grandfather Abu Amin.”
Sadiq laughed, and said, “You wrote about your grandmother?”
She said, “No,” so I knew she had written about her father. I changed the subject: “Turn on the television, Sadiq, we’ll miss the news.”
Sadiq smiled, “Mama watches the news seven times a day!”
Maryam laughed. “In Beirut it was the newspapers and the radio, now it’s the television!”
“In Beirut you were little and you wanted attention. You were even jealous of the newspaper!”
“Mama, admit it: did you read the newspaper or did you stop at every paragraph and every line and every word, as if you were going to be tested on it the next day? Maybe all you needed was a red pen, to underline the important paragraphs so you could learn them by heart! And the scissors, they were always near you so you could clip a news item here or an article there, along with Naji al-Ali’s daily drawings. Abed insisted that you were working secretly for some archive, which we didn’t know anything about!”
I laughed and so did Sadiq. He said, “It’s strange.”
“What’s strange?”
“In an earlier time Mama would go out early to buy the papers.
She would go out before having her coffee. Then she would throw them in the trash without reading them. ‘Where are the papers, Mama?’ She would say, ‘I don’t know,’ and then admit that she had gotten rid of them!”
Randa said, “I don’t believe it.”
Maryam said, giving me a pat and putting her arms around my shoulders, “Believe it. That’s Mama. Every time period has its own set system.”
I said, “Raise the volume, Sadiq, the news is starting.”
The children are right, I’ve become addicted to the news. Sometimes we turn on the television to watch the news and Sadiq or Maryam or Randa says, changing the channel, “There’s nothing new.” But I ask them to go back to the same channel; I follow the pictures of the young men throwing stones at the soldiers of the occupation. A woman facing an enlisted man, her hands in his face, shouting. Enlisted men wearing armor firing their rifles or pursuing kids down the side streets. Army cars, ambulances, police raids, arrests, demonstrations, the refrigerators of the autopsy room, the funerals. Yes, I had a desire to watch what I had watched in the previous newscast and maybe the one before it. Why? I don’t know.
I watch, and I wait.
42
The Son of al-Shajara
Maryam wrote:
On July 22, 1987, someone shot the Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-Ali, using a pistol equipped with a silencer. The shooting occurred in London and resulted in the death of Naji al-Ali five weeks later. The fifth anniversary of the event fell during the vacation this last summer, and some newspapers called attention to it. I did not learn the date of the anniversary from the newspaper, however, because I remembered it, and I don’t believe that I could ever forget it in the future.
In July of 1987, which was the first summer after we moved from Lebanon to live in Abu Dhabi, my older brother and guardian took me and my mother and his family to spend some of the vacation in Greece. I was eleven years old, and I loved playing, I loved the sea, I loved the sand, I loved eating fish, and I loved listening to the Greek music that resounded in the restaurants and cafés to which my brother took us. I even loved the line dances they would dance in the restaurants; I would jump up and join in, giving my right hand to the person standing on my right and my left hand to the person on my left, and dancing. These were among the happiest days of my life. When we returned to Abu Dhabi I learned by chance, from some words that passed between my mother and my brother, that Naji had been assassinated in London. I cried out, “Naji of Ain al-Helwa? The cartoonist?” Afterward, for a week or more, I was very distressed. I was sad over the passing of Naji al-Ali, but my distress and my anger with myself were greater than my sadness. My father was a doctor in Acre Hospital and was martyred in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila; would it be possible, for example, for Acre Hospital to be mentioned, or for the anniversary of the massacres to pass, when I was immersed in the pleasure of a beautiful summer resort, and that I would not stop for a moment, if only in my imagination, to mourn and to salute his memory? I had not known of the martyrdom of Naji al-Ali at the time, and I hated myself as if I had committed a crime.
Naji al-Ali was a native of the village of al-Shajara in upper Galilee, in Palestine. His family went to south Lebanon as refugees at the time of the Nakba — Catastrophe — in 1948, when he was a boy of eleven. He lived with his family in the Ain al-Helwa camp, and he remained connected to the camp even after he grew up and moved to the Gulf to work as a cartoonist. He never forgot that his land was stolen from him and that he was unjustly turned out of his country, so that he was forced to live as a refugee in a camp in Lebanon. He did not forget that he was a son of the camp, and that his mother made his underwear from leftover sacks that had contained flour distributed by the aid agency, and that she also used them to make a cloth bag in which he could put his notebooks when he went to school. He did not forget that when he was a boy he worked selling vegetables and picking oranges to contribute to the family income. He did not forget that his family lived in Ain al-Helwa and that Israeli planes shelled the camp regularly, as if killing people were a daily duty assigned to them.
I love Naji al-Ali’s cartoons; there are many of them, and they are rich in meaning, teaching us a great deal. I love Hanzala, because he has become familiar due to his reappearance in the drawings, and because he makes me think that I am like him, for some reason I don’t understand. This happens even though Hanzala is barefoot and his patched clothes show that he is poor, while I have not just one but several pairs of shoes, and my father was a doctor and my brother works here in Abu Dhabi, where he provides us with an easy, even luxurious life. I love Hanzala’s mother Zeinab; even though she wears a peasant dress, she still carries the key to her house in Palestine suspended on a cord around her neck, like my mother. Hanzala’s father is a peasant with big feet, barefoot and defeated; he always makes me think of my father and brothers, because I know that they feel defeated. Even the fedayeen fighter whom Naji draws swimming, returning to Beirut after the departure of the fedayeen in 1982, reminds me of my brother Abed, who was a fedayeen fighter and who was about to get on the ship when it was decided that the fedayeen would evacuate Beirut, but who turned around and came back to us in the house. Finally, Naji drew the children of the stones and named them before the Intifada arose and before they were known by this name; he drew the children as they were throwing stones at the occupiers, and from the little stones he formed an oncoming tank. He even drew our Lord Jesus on his cross, lifting his hand to throw a stone at the oppressors.