Musings of a Lowly Scribe

Usually I only leaf through Al-Ittihad, the only Arabic daily in Israel, glancing rather fleetingly at its headlines. This morning, however, I read the text of the speech delivered by the chair of the Arab (meaning us, the Palestinian citizens of Israel) High Monitoring Committee at the meeting of our political spokesmen (including one single woman!) with the Libyan Leader in his capacity as the head of the recent Arab summit. It struck me as a significant document for more reasons than one: It apparently spoke for the consensus opinion of all attendants of this meeting, a rare display of unity worthy of celebrating; it covered our most significant issues; it was relatively brief, frank and to the point, or so I thought at first; and the occasion was unique, for, with the exception of the late Arafat, no Arab leader has ever condescended to this level of collective discourse and interaction with all factions of our community. This was an unprecedented breakthrough in another way, the first official recognition by a standing head figure of the Arab world of our community, we the Palestinians within, as a potential player in the field of inter-Arab politics, murky as this field usually is. We have been excluded from consideration by all concerned since ever we were separated by the events of Nakba as a suspect, maligned, and neglected, or intentionally side-stepped, group.

Both Israel and the Arab world have preferred to deal with us as individuals, or at best, as a collection of separate faith-based groupings lacking a unified voice, identity, or influence. Conveniently, we have adapted to this unnatural mold and adopted daily ‘struggle’ (I almost shudder at the mendacity of this overused term when others use it) for individual survival as our modus vivendi. As Toufiq Zayyad, the late poet Mayor of Nazareth, had put it, we will always be a thorn in Israel’s [Zionist] throat. To the Arab world, we are a less significant but more nagging disturbance to their figurative anatomy, not unlike a hemorrhoidal affliction: a constant bother and embarrassment. And here, out of the clear blue sky, comes a unifying and significance-laden gesture of recognition. It comes not from the prince of Arab liberation dreams, the Saladin plotting his hour of glory just north of the border, not from the obstinate ophthalmologist to the north-east, who had inherited his father’s long breath and extended vision, not from our tame and impoverished son-in-law to the east, nor from the latter-day pharaoh to the south, but from the original and inventive high-wire trapeze artist. Much can be said about the man but one thing is sure: he has gained his kosher certificate from the Americans, and though he is no Zionist, of late, contact with him has gained legitimacy. The whole thing sounded right. I made up my mind that this was a historical document worthy of the widest possible distribution in the international media.

Out of the group of two dozen invitees two were barred from attending by Israel: The first was Ameer Makhoul, the Director General of Ittijah (The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, an umbrella organization that I had initiated while still active in the civil society sphere) who was informed at the border crossing to Jordan that the Minister of the Interior considered him a security threat to the state of Israel and hence he could not leave the country for two months. The second was Omar Said, a political activist and a pharmaceutical scientist and entrepreneur who had cut his professional teeth at the Galilee Society for Health Research and Services, the civil society home-base that I had established in 1981. He was arrested at the border and barred from seeing his lawyer and family. Though I was pleased I wasn’t the subject of Israel’s civic terrorism, I still felt good about being so closely associated with the two that were. Indirectly and perhaps subconsciously, this must have added to my initial enthusiasm about the piece that I read: I decided to translate it and place it on my blog. I called Ameer, jokingly congratulated him on having reached the level of being acclaimed as a peril to Israel’s security and enquired who exactly wrote the piece and if it had the approval of all participants. His answer confirmed my suspicions, a fact that, somehow, fed into my cumulatively escalating self-esteem this morning.

I sat down and started the task of translating. I had just finished reading Tariq Ali’s “The Book of Saladin” which is narrated by the fictitious scribe, the Jewish Ibn Yakub. As I commenced my mechanical function, a sense of rapid deflation came over me: Like Ibn Yakub, I felt lowly and subservient: If this is such a worthy document how come I had nothing to do with its drafting? Mohammad Zidan, the community leader who delivered it orally in the presence of Colonel Gadhafi, is a good friend of mine from the good old days of the Galilee Society when we ran a Ford Foundation-funded project in his village while he served as its mayor. I know my mastery of high classic Arabic is no less than his. So how come I am relegated to the role of his scribe, offering my uninvited services and on voluntary basis at that?

With considerably devalued sense of duty I continued the thankless task of translating. This meant that I had to ponder the exact meaning of every word in the one newsprint page-long speech and to select the best English word that carries the hidden meaning and exact flavor and nuance of so many highfalutin pronouncements. My God! Why couldn’t my friend cut through the fog of flowery and pretentious wording and say what was on his mind directly? Perhaps I should do that for him in translation. But that would be inaccurate if not dishonest. In the sociopolitical context in which the speech was given, the ostentatious language and the hyperbole serve a definite purpose; they are an integral part of the message being delivered; you can’t skip the flowery verbiage and say what actually is on your mind. The inner meaning is conveyed to a great extent by the style itself; I am reminded of the famous axiom: “The medium is the message.” But this still doesn’t say exactly the sense of obligatory grandiose mantle in which an idea has to be cloaked to be befitting when one is making a formal presentation in high places. To hell with exactitude; I am going to skimp on some of my friend’s superhumanly pompous idioms and let the English reader suffer!

I still am less than comfortable with my rendition of the content of the speech I found so impressive only an hour ago. Something else is nagging at my subconscious and I am having trouble dragging it up to the surface where it would stop belonging to the “sub” category so I can confront it; I want to deal with it frontally. I am uncomfortable with what I am writing in English though I had just read the piece in Arabic and thought so highly of it. I look at the paragraph I have reached and read it in Arabic. It is an accurate statement of what the great majority of Palestinians, and possibly most Arabs, would consider factual; the discourse is sensible and civilized. I turn to my English translation of the same and it reeks of sloganism and of anti-Israel language that verges on rejectionism and would surely qualify in average Israeli thought as anti-Semitic. Americans would dismiss much of it as Israel-bashing rhetoric. Now I think I understand the source of my insecurity as a scribe: When I read the Arabic version I was an Arab who had internalized all the cultural and psychological residues of the historical Islamic-Christian clashes from the conquest of Constantinople, the battles of the Crusaders (in nearby Hittin and Acre, and extending, as per George W. Bush, across a millennium to Iraq and Afghanistan) and the rape of Andalusia (who was raped by whom depends on who you are.) I took for granted the Arab/Palestinian discourse with all its sense of injured pride and suffered injustices at the hands of the West and their Zionist colonial project. As I switched over to my English version I was unconsciously transformed into my ‘American’ alter-ego; I read the piece through the Israeli-inspired American spin-doctored miasma of prejudices and ill-assumptions; I was instantaneously transformed to an American reader, mindful of the accepted American ‘civility’ based on decades of the internalized sense of ‘our’ special relationship with ‘the only democracy in the middle East’ and on centuries of wary orientalist alarm at the subterfuge designs of Mohammadans (after all, the spokesman of the group in Libya is named Mohammad and several other members carry other names of the Islamic Prophet) inimical to ‘our’ Judeo-Christian traditions.

I have to stop this confusing pursuit of self-interpretation. The subject of my admiration in the original Arabic turns out to be a piece of trash when rendered literally in English. It simply sounds different in English. I shouldn’t have translated it. I can sleep better with it in the original. Here it is:

Speech delivered by Mr. Mohammad Zidan, Chair of the Monitoring Committee, at the Meeting with Colonel Muammar Gadhafi on 25 April, 2010
(Unauthorized Translation)

The leader of the Libyan revolution, brother Muammar al-Gadhafi;
Brothers in dear Libya,
Peace and Gods Blessings upon you.

Let us open by thanking brother and leader Colonel Muammar al-Gadhafi and our brethren, the people of Libya for this kind gesture of inviting a delegation from the 1948 Palestinians for a meeting with you. This invitation reveals many a meaning in its name and content, especially with you heading the current Arab Summit of Serit in which capacity you have been conducting a series of Arab meetings. Even before we landed on Libyan soil, we felt proud in anticipation of this meeting and brotherly embrace.

We highly value, dear Colonel and brother, your initiating this brotherly meeting. We hope that it will be a good start for more meetings and communications so that, with your rich experience and insightful vision, the meeting of the branch with its mother-tree and of the child with its family and people is complete. This meeting empowers us with a moral energy that we need greatly in our strategic position so as to continue our steadfast and existential trip in confronting the challenges that has faced us repeatedly as we stayed in our ancestral lands,

At about this time sixty-two years ago, the Nakba earthquake leveled some 530 Palestinian villages and cities. The Zionist movement, backed by colonial powers, drove out the majority of our people leaving only some 150 thousand whose persistence in their homes was not unlike ‘grasping embers’ for decades. We have remained on our lands, maintaining a grip on our identity, our language, our traditions and our convictions despite all Jewishizing and falsification attempts, till we have become today about one million and three-hundred thousand, the equivalent of one-fifth of the country’s population.

The dust of the Nakba’s volcanic eruption continued settling till we realized that we have experienced two heavy nightmares, the first the handiwork of the racist practices of Israel’s governments, and the second shown by the Arab world’s estrangement from us.

Six decades have passed while the suffering and threats have mounted, covering all walks of life: land, residence, education, labor, unemployment, poverty, budgets, and all civic and national rights. Six decades have elapsed with the citizenship imposed on us still conditional and constrained due to racist policies and practices against us.

Despite the nightmares and the variety of subjugation and suffering, the ‘internal Palestinians’ have achieved the near impossible, thanks to their struggle, their belief in the truth and justice of their claims, their attachment to their culture and history which infused us with tremendous ability to crystallize our national identity and to maintain the solid basis of our national struggle. In the past, racism against Arab citizens was practiced secretly. Currently its slogans have become a basic part of the establishment and the mainstream. Tens of unprecedented racist laws for Jewishizing space and the populous are now passed openly and affect Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, while the world continues to deal with pampered Israel with silk gloves.

In parallel, with talk of negotiations and the peace process, land theft in the West Bank continues while Jerusalem faces nonstop Jewishizing and cleansing of its Arab population as the recent decision of evicting seventy thousand of its residents and of the residents of the rest of the West Bank using various excuses.

In the Jewishizing and falsification campaign, the al-Aqsa Mosque, as a religious, a cultural and a national symbol, faces continued assault: tunnels are dug under it, synagogues surround it above, calls for breaking and entering it are rife, and plans for tearing it down and for constructing the presumed temple are drawn by settler groups under the protection of occupation authorities. They do not shy away from soiling Islamic and Christian holy sites: Mosques and churches have become cowsheds and wine cellars while others have been converted to synagogues with little attention to the laws of heaven or of this world.

Despite the policies of control and oppression and despite persecution of their political leaders and the subjugation and domestication attempts, the Palestinians within did not change their skins but rather persisted in accumulating gains, struggling collectively with ant-like diligence to extract our basic and national rights with blood and tears as the native people of the land who put down their permanent deep roots in the face of threats, impositions and danger.

In keeping what is left of their land, and in maintaining their identity and ties to their people and humanity, the Palestinians within paid a heavy price: tens were martyred and hundreds were injured in Kufr-Qasim in 1956, on the first Land Day in 1976, and in the uprising of Jerusalem and al-Aqsa in 2000, all in defense of rights, land, holy sites and belonging, while tens were killed between these blood-drenched landmarks. Every day, the Palestinians within, whether in Galililee, in the triangle and costal cities, or, especially, in the Negev, face up to expulsion and ethnic cleansing operations with their bare bodies, full hearts and conviction as solidly founded as the mountains of Galilee that, if it must be, then death is better than departure.

Under the weight of confinement, oppression and persecution we continue in our struggle to solidify our presence in our homeland for which we have no alternative and to secure a decent living with nothing less than our full national and civil rights. We are part of this land and didn’t immigrate to it. Born and rooted in it as the hyssop and the olive, we find “on this land much that deserves living” [as our poet Mahmoud Darwish said.] It is truly the mother of all beginnings and, despite the pain, we will not abandon the path of justice and belonging.

Brother leader,
We come to you from our land to our land, so that Nazareth, Haifa, Acre and the rest of our cities and towns will embrace their sisters Tripoli, Benghazi and Serit. We come to seek your moral support, to connect, to consult, and to complement one another while still nurturing a sense of blame toward the Arab world, the blame between brothers. After our people’s Nakba, and for long decades, we suffered doubly: the bitter taste of oppression, Jewishizing, dispossession and expulsion at the hand of Israel, and, in parallel, the injustices from our brethren who blamed us, we who remained on our land, falsely and cruelly. We were viewed with suspicion and doubt as if we had sold our souls and abandoned our roots and religion, all because we preferred staying over departure and were forced to carry blue [Israeli] identity cards and accepted a citizenship we inherited and practiced against our will.

Within sight of the oppressors, the wheat grains grew to fill the precious land with wheat spikes and the fields of Jezreel Valley swayed with joy in welcoming those who remained to reap it and to grind it into flour from which they made historic monuments and proof of the Arab nature of the place. Those who were abandoned as orphans at the feast of the wicked grew and filled the land and its prisons with their freedom songs, awaiting the dawn of that long night. The land sang with them like a mother, happy for her growing children morphing literary figures, poets and freedom lovers. They have become a symbol of resistance literature and human creativity. Indeed, our giant poet, Mahmoud Darwish, has expressed our love and priorities well:

We love the rose
But we love wheat more
And we love the perfume of roses
But the wheat spikes are purer.

We did not shirk our responsibilities in our homeland. We stood high in the face of our oppressors even as barefoot and naked orphans. Today, recognition by the Arab world, most of which is ignorant of our achievements, is still lacking.

Despite all of that we repeat the song of hope by our famous poet Samih al-Qasim:

Despite doubt and despite sadness
I hear, yes, I hear the footsteps of dawn
Despite doubt and despite sadness
I will not lose my conviction
That the sun will rise
Spreading victory flags
Spreading all that it carries of longing and hope
My red pronouncements
My green pronouncements

Therefore, we value highly this visit to Libya. We view it as a form of return, as support for us and for our issues, and as recognition of the need for parts of the same nation to connect and for the lie of normalization to be eliminated. Nothing is more natural than for brothers to meet, even if after a long absence.

Before this august gathering we offer our thanks to the descendents, the followers and the emulators of the martyr Omar al-Mukhtar and his school of struggle and sacrifice, for hosting us. We call on our Libyan brothers led by brother Muammar el-Gadhafi to move toward ending the historic injustice that has blocked our way by promoting, supporting and institutionalizing this natural reconnecting between people of the same nation.

Brother Gadhafi,
We need the moral support of the Arabs and for them to stand with us in the continuing struggle for our survival and our rights. Likewise we look to your help in extracting our brethren in occupied Gaza and the West Bank from their plight of internal conflict and to lift the oppressive external isolation of Gaza.

We take this opportunity to emphasize that all Palestinian blood is one, all their pain is one, and the road to the realization of our nation’s dreams is one: and that is through unity and agreement. Without that we will continue to be lost in the darkness of the unknown.

With you heading the Arab Summit, we hope that your good efforts will aid in ending the Palestinian internal conflict and in stopping the dangerous hemorrhage so as to reunite the Palestinian people. Unity is the only guarantee for guarding the national project of freedom and independence in a Palestinian State with holy Jerusalem as its capital.

We hope that your presidency of the Arab Summit will be the start of Arab unity, of speaking in one voice regarding all issues in our area. That will aid in resolving obstinate problems and promote stability and progress in the area.

Last but not least, based on what we have said and to correct the mistakes of the past and protect future ambitions, we hope that Libya, as the current head of the Arab Summit, will seek to extend to us the moral support of the Arab world against the campaigns and plans of evacuation and Jewishization. Again, we thank you for this festive reception and generous hosting hoping that God will preserve you and that the Libyan people will advance under you

The Winds in Nosara

The winds at Nosara blow warm and furious for three days at a stretch, we were told. Our informants failed to inform us that the three-day cycle could repeat three consecutive times as it did shortly after our arrival. They call it ‘The Christmas Winds’ and it is reported to be always strong enough to tear down the town’s infrastructure, maintained artificially primitive by choice: Electricity and telephone lines regularly get torn and roads blocked by falling trees, water supply is interrupted and internet connections go silent for few days at a time, all repeatedly repaired year after year with dogged resistance to the obvious alternative of a sturdier underground routing of such vital public utilities. This is part of the community’s conscious resistance to official modernity, the sane and calculated risk Nosara’s Civic Association (NCA) has chosen thus far in an effort to keep rampant development at an arm’s length. The most torrid local controversy to have raged over the past ten years in Nosara is reported to have been that of whether to approve the construction of a gas station on the edge of the American Project or not. It seems that the NCA, mainly well-established expat Americans, controls new development through the exclusive right it has to the water supply in the area. Anyone considering building a house or opening a business within its vicinity has to weigh his or her options in light of this reality, despite the fact that the law of the land guarantees everyone the right to water supply. But here as elsewhere the wheels of justice grind slow and one may be doomed to failure awaiting its final resolve if the NCA considers the project detrimental to the ecology.

With the same tenacity, the NCA, anxious to keep the area free of the onslaught of ecotourism and the insatiable greed of so many ambitious new businesses has stiffly resisted paving the town’s streets or the main roads leading to it. Better employment and easier living conditions for the locals in the original village of Nosara who don’t all own SUVs has to be sacrificed in the process. With the seasonally dry weather the dirt roads generate such a cloud of dust every time a motorcyclist or an ATV driver ventures by, usually sparingly clad and with a bandito-like facemask in an effort to avert the threat of pneumoconiosis, that visibility is cut down to near zero. In their fight against this combined curse of the primitively-inclined NCA and the unforgiving winds, the locals have come up with another ingenious solution: sprinkling the dirt roads with the liquid refuse from sugarcane processing plants. It holds the dust down till the next rain soaks away the sugary glue and turns the roads to a messy mud stream awaiting the next cycle of dry weather to return it to dust blowing with the fierce winds. The temporary relief from the dust clouds is further enriched by the heavenly stench of putrefied sugar molasses for the few days after it has been first sprinkled. When I first experienced it, it brought to my senses the same nostalgic pleasant scent of Arrabeh’s streets in late autumn with the liquid refuse from the four olive presses of the village, the same raw olive aroma that helped endear Crete to my heart when I first toured its rural environs. Something about the scent of the two fermenting residues is nostalgically similar. The rainy season here starts in April and lasts for some six months. It rains hard enough, I am told, to flush army ants out of their subterranean labyrinths in search of a dry refuge, the ants in turn breaking and entering human residences and driving people to abandon their homes; it rains that hard!

Now, in mid-February, as most treetops have recovered from their shameless deciduous nakedness, another forceful wind is blowing fierce enough to masquerade and envelope the morning’s howling of the howler monkeys. Nosara is in the dry forest of Costa Rica as distinguished from the rain forest and the cloud forest ecosystems such as Monte Verde further up the mountains. I step out on the deck with my coffee and laptop to add a few lines to something I had started about my Palestinian identity and how my state defines that to conflict with its very being. I straighten out the rocking chairs that the wind has toppled overnight and proceed to tackle my assignment for the morning. But the fresh green canopy of the forest, just recovered from the height of the dry season, beguiles my eyes with the extreme swinging back and forth in the warm gusty wind. The relentless wavelike motion of treetops on all sides of my perch claims my full attention. The coquettish swaying of so many flowering mangos, veritable brunettes adorned with their holiday best attire, overwhelms me. I focus momentarily on one magic beauty then the other and a third. It brings to mind the most erotic TV shows from the Arabian Gulf stations, fully clad babes except for their bare heads swinging violently side-to-side or back and forth and flinging their loose hair in tune to catchy love songs. Sharif, my anthropologist brother, thinks the conception of this flinging of hair, totally innocent by Western standards, as pornographic eroticism underlies the consensus by its target audiences regarding the need to cover the sexually explicit baring of hair and hence the requirement for hijab or head cover. A fellow villager of little education who gained a passable skill as a TV technician after a work accident in his original employment as a bricklayer, showed up one day to calibrate my TV dish and selected two such ‘pornographic’ stations, assigned them to the last two slots on my remote control and sought to convince me of the usefulness of the arrangement, declaring in a muted voice and in local Arabic code to keep the information secret from my foreign wife:
“I have the English Al-Jazeera and the BBC as numbers one and two as you requested. But should you get bored and need to spend an hour or two viewing lewd material for your manly entertainment all you do is to press downward from your favorite news channels and you have the best erotic stations I can recommend.” I checked the two stations and let the arrangement stand. Not long afterward I heard from friends and neighbors that the gentleman had started offering this recommendation as “Dr. Hatim’s choice for male entertainment.”

******

I am home alone in this rented ideal vacation spot atop a steep hill in the natural forest along the Costa-Rican Pacific coast, part of what locals call “the American Project.” The house is part of a development that was pioneered by an American businessman in the mid-twentieth century and now populated mainly by retired well-off Americans or younger fellow expats, my son-in-law and his family amongst them, fleeing the nosedive of the American economy and taking temporary refuge in this warm, friendly and relatively inexpensive tropical Paradise with its unthreatening business climate. Yet I find the prices unreasonably high in comparison to labor wages: Anything beyond rice and beans is half again as expensive as it costs in Manhattan, our last stop. If a laborer were to eat out at the cheapest café here he would have to spend above his daily wages at $3 an hour.

That is as far as my business acumen allows me to speculate on the motives of the over one hundred ruddy and tanned American surfer couples and their young children that I see daily on sultry Guiones beach, the five-mile stretch of fine sand welcoming the gently rolling waves across the shallow half moon of water expanse that fans out to the infinite crimson evening horizon that has just swallowed a huge sun. I survey the waters from my position clear above the downhill canopy and can make out dozens of surfers on their boards and more sun worshippers ambling on the shore. I am able to judge the tide to be low by the distance from the tree line where the rolling white breakers succumb to the calming embrace of the shore and by the relative prominence of the rocks battered by the surf at the bay’s right tip.

Walking the full arch of the half moon beach at the early hours of the morning is a visual delight beyond my artistic comprehension. The mixed constituent of its sand, from black grains of volcanic lava to glistening white quartz, with all the varying hues in between, fine gray silt from the rush of the waters from the many inlets in the rainy season, brownish crushed bits of coral reef, and all sort of components whose origins I fail to ascertain, add up to an unimpressive overall gray mix. But the sifting effect of the receding tide, each wave crashing and rolling gently back just short of the last, patiently sorts out the various ingredients of the sandy shore, each according to its origin and specific gravity. With the endless minute interferences and physical interruptions by the beach’s community of live forms, from ever-dredging tiny mollusks and busy hermit crabs to the pesky sandpipers forever racing to comb the shallow waters of the beach, it all adds up to magnificent line patterns that would take me a lifetime of admiring, interpreting and imagining as postmodern visual creations of muted hues on recycled paper, bark sheeting and native cloth. I am enchanted enough to box several line combinations out of the many hectares of magic drawings in photo frames that I snap to my later disappointment and chagrin at my instrument’s failure to capture the magnificent play of morning light on nature’s random doodling.

For now, I am lounging on the deck of the MB (Monkey Business) compound: A garage and parking lot at the top level, a two-bedroom, a large living room and kitchen combination with an equal-size wooden deck facing the sea to the west at the second level, and a guests’ quarters, the casita –little house- with a kidney-shaped swimming pool and concrete lounging area at the lowest rung. Each of the three entities occupies a distinct and separate plane on the steeply sloping hillside. None of them juts out above the forest canopy to betray our presence in the hideout. Mango trees, coconut palms and frangipanis are the only tree species familiar to me from my days in Hawaii. They also happen to be the tamest and least expansive out of the over two dozen tree varieties enveloping the house on all sides. Members of the largest variety are currently blooming and seem to attract an over-a-dozen-member brood of howler monkeys on their twice daily journey up and down the forest at dawn and near sunset. The youngish male leader surprises me by its sudden shameless flashing of his scrotum at me in a most unexpected manner, a bright milky white bag contrasting sharply with his gray-black thighs and reddish chest and torso hair. Lulu, my three-year-old granddaughter has learned to imitate their howling as they forage for tender leaves and the stem and base of flowers. Their tremendous roar, possibly the loudest in the animal kingdom, is loud enough to be heard up to five kilometers away. It belies the friendly animal’s small size and benign nature, its worst offence that any naturalist has ever documented in a book is its tendency to surprise curious eco-tourists by sneaking secretly up to a branch directly above them and releasing some liquid or solid excrement at them. Alas, Lulu lacks the prehensile tail to swing across treetops for they do encroach on the perimeter of the balconies of our residence and she would be able to join them by extending her arm over the railing. It is easier for her to play the role of the iguana, the Pyzote, or, best of all, a baby sloth.

Everyone has gone to swim with the turtles today. Considering my proclivity to seasickness and my stage of recuperation from my recent surgery, I have decided to abscond and, instead, to take in the full brunt of another sunset from the deck all alone. Last night was another turtle watching adventure and I took part fully. Playa Ostional, the beach half an hour’s dirt-road drive crossing four rivers on the way from here, is the world’s premier nesting grounds for the Olive Ridley Sea Turtle. A huge nature protection area, the Ostional Nature Reserve, has been established by the environmentally aware Costa Rican government and we paid our fees and went with a teenage guide, Malaika, our fourth-grade granddaughter serving as our translator on this bit of ecotourism. The young man led us to the beach and easily located the huge turtles busy digging their nests or on their way out of the water to start the fateful task. The time that the turtles come for their egg-laying fest, known locally as arribada -the arrival- is not entirely predictable though it is somehow tied to the phase of the moon and to the season of the year. Major arribadas have already taken place this year. On those phenomenal occasions the beach gets entirely covered by the invading turtles, driven berserk by their maternal instincts and competing aggressively to the point of climbing atop one another in their mad race.

None of that for us though, our guide having to use his red-tinged flash light (regular light distracts and confuses the mother turtles and drives them back to the ocean, mission unaccomplished) to locate the dozen Olive Ridley Turtles we saw. We chose one that had already progressed well on her sand-digging task and stood around patiently to watch the magic process. In about half an hour she had finished digging a foot-and-a-half-deep hole by flinging the sand with her hind legs to the side. Now she finally balanced her egg-laden rear abdomen over the hole and proceeded to exude volleys of golf-ball-size reddish white eggs glistening with the protective copious antibacterial mucous that oozed in intervals. In about another half hour the arduous patient procreation process was completed with a total of several dozen eggs, perhaps near one hundred. The majestic creature then proceeded to cover the nest with the repetitive inward flipping of her hind legs in equal knowing consistency to the earlier outward directed flipping away of the sand. Soon the hole was filled and a small mound accumulated over it. Our queen then swiveled around, first in one direction then in the other, with forceful up-and-down patting motion of those powerful hind flippers, pouncing her whole bodyweight repeatedly in a sort of jumping aerobic dance exercise to pack the sand over her hidden treasure into as solid a state as sand on a beach can possibly be packed. The sand was then smoothed over to obfuscate any remnants sign of her nesting accomplishment and the clever thing moved this way then that way and back and forth well away from the actual site of the nest to leave evidence of her having visited the area at a distance from the actual treasure site, a clever and convincing camouflage to mislead the cleverest of predators. It was impossible for me as I watched this fellow creature not to read intelligent strategy, willful planning and comprehension of cause and effect in this presumed instinctive grand performance. In another few days the same mothering instinct will bring her back to lay another batch of eggs and thus redouble the chances of survival for some of her progeny. Perhaps one in a hundred of those buried embryos will survive to where, in another twenty more years, it will swim back to Ostional Beach in another procreational fest. As we followed our exhausted heroine shuffling her tremulous hind legs to push off back into the Pacific I could hardly contain my own sense of satisfaction and achievement for having shared the miraculous act of creation that I have witnessed. Not since I walked out of the hospital’s maternity ward on the eve of the 1973 war swaddling my hours-old child in my arms after having participated in his delivery have I sensed such a rich personal fulfillment and exuberance admixed with the vague sense of eminent danger.
******
‘Scholars also calculate happiness by determining “happy life years.” This figure results from merging average self-reported happiness … with life expectancy. Using this system, Costa Rica again easily tops the list. The United States is 19th, and Zimbabwe comes in last,’ wrote Nicholas Kristof in a NY Times op-ed piece about the same time we arrived here, few days into 2010. It brought back to mind a story from my village lore about a hapless man named Jebir. (That had to be his name so it rhymes with the Arabic word for ‘grave’ –Qebir- to facilitate the creation of a catchy phrase that makes a well-known local saying.) Poor Jebir led such a miserable existence, not a single bright day or a happy occasion, he decided to seek a new life in a different location. Any man worth his salt should be able to have a new start in some other corner of God’s wide lands. He packed some wheat bread dipped in olive oil and sprinkled with sea salt and an onion and hit the road in search of a better fortune with no specific location in mind. He went for seven days and seven nights till he came to a small town on the banks of a lovely river in a lush valley, a paradise on earth if there ever was one. He decided to seek his fortune in this locale. To start things right he did his ablution on the riverside and spread his white headdress on a green batch on the side of his new town’s cemetery. As he finished his religious duty of the morning he looked around and found that the headstones of the graves had a strange peculiarity: They all recorded the lifespan of the dead in extremely short periods: One of the dead was reported to have lived a year, another two and a third four or five years. No one had lived over the number of the fingers of your two hands of years. Jaber’s amazement was even greater when he saw the people of the town on their way to their farms or to the market. He judged their ages to vary, like members of any other community, from the newborn to the middle-aged and the few elderly. Failing to comprehend the mysterious contradiction he greeted the next man he saw with “Peace unto you” and asked directly for the explanation of what he had read on all those headstones. “Of course, that is correct. It is our tradition in this town to count only the years a person had lived happily.” “I see!” Jebir said. “I am new here. Should I die in your beautiful town, please let it be recorded on my grave: ‘Jebir, min batn immu lal-qebir’ –from his mother’s womb to the grave.”
No matter how you cut it, Ticos, as native Costa Ricans call themselves, are the happiest people on earth. It could well be constitutional, cultural or the warm weather, plentiful rain, fertile soil and beautiful beaches spanning the country on two sides, its Pacific and Atlantic coasts. More likely and quite in tune with my personal logic, it is the fact that the country had abolished its army and invested the savings in education. I haven’t met a nasty Tico so far, or a physically threatening type despite the abundant machismo demeanor among men; it seems to be expressed more in line with the virile natural abundance of the place than against other humans. The first contact ever that I had with a Tica, at the airport as it happened, she was extra friendly, apparently in an effort to make up for the immigration system’s technical shortcomings; the Christmas winds had blown the electric wires down and we had to wait patiently till they were fixed before we could be processed through. And it had to happen exactly as the lady inspector held my passport and was trying to ascertain that the youngish photo in it did belong to the aged specimen standing before her. I took the opportunity to rush to the bathroom and take off the thermal underwear I had donned earlier in the day in freezing New York. I came back and waited patiently, occasionally breaking the boring wait with tickling my little granddaughter and then glancing at the lady inspector with a friendly smile, proud of my happy relationship with the child. As the electricity came back to the excited applause of staff and travelers alike, my first Tico friend swept the electronic edge of my passport through her desktop computer and beamed a ‘Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience we caused you.” Then she leaned over with her rather hefty chest and whispered half secretly to me: “You have such a beautiful smile! It is good to welcome you to our country.” Then she got more personal: “And I like your thick moustache.” I wanted to tell her the explanation that my friend Toufiq gives for growing a thick moustache, but people behind me in the arrival line were pushing impatiently and I had to move on, incidentally negating the very statement I was about to make on behalf of my friend: “People nowadays have lost all sense of shame and propriety,” he thinks. “The only way you can get anyone to respect you is to instill fear in their hearts with the ferocious first impression you make on them, and a mean-looking moustache is part of that.”
The second Tica was no less friendly, a young receptionist at the Nosara Reef Hotel where we spent our first night. She enquired about my rather unfamiliar last name. I said it was the Arabic form for Canaanite and that I come from that part of the world. “My mother is originally from Lebanon. She speaks the language but I never learned it. Here is our home phone. Should you ever need a couple of dancer to liven up your birthday part, we would be happy to be your guests. My mom has taught me raqs balady –Arabic folkdance. And it never seems to end: Since I returned from my surgery in the capital, San Jose, everyone in this small community seems to have heard about my ordeal with a misdiagnosed (I am to blame partially) ruptured appendix that necessitated emergency air evacuation. The cleaning woman, the gardener, the clerk at the car rental office, the waiter at the internet café, the parking lot attendant at he Guiones Beach and the partner of my physician, all seem to know what has happened and to really care about my health. They greet me with a big smile, the men thrusting their clenched fist high in the air with their motto for all that is cool and worthy in Costa Rica: “Pura vida –pure life!” There is something endearing and quite telling as well in the physical statement one sees in every town, village and hamlet in the country: At the center of the communal life of each is the traditional sacred triad of a church, a school and a football field, always adjacent to one another. It beats the defining landmarks of the smallest communities I remember noticing in rural Wyoming in my two summers of rough-necking there as a college student: a gas station and a bar.
There is a certain softness about these people; the most muscular Tico, bare-chested and with muscle masses rippling underneath nasty-looking tattoos on his shoulders, and the most aggressive-looking Tica hussy, in short shorts and Bikini tops, turn out to be absolute softies the moment you ask for directions to the beach. “Latin countries generally do well in happiness surveys,” Kristof opines. “…Perhaps one reason is a cultural emphasis on family and friends, on social capital over financial capital.” I must admit to a twinge of jealousy at arriving in late afternoon at a neighboring location, Pelada Beach, to find a group of native seaside squatters, a half dozen young adults with few older people, lulling on the edge of the soft surf with children of various ages running in circles around them and an infant or two at their mother’s breasts. The idyllic setting and relaxed social atmosphere said it all for me. The only question that I had was what in the world were they all so intently chattering about? Surely not Obama’s recent state of the Union! Like folks back in Arrabeh, 80% of Ticos are construction workers, mostly unemployed currently. That helps focus topics of discussion closer to home.
The super-macho image society here maintains of itself didn’t prevent it from electing a woman president, the fifth female president so far. Contradictions seem to be the rule: In this most democratic and least corrupt of Latin American states, two ex-presidents are serving jail terms and a third has fled to Switzerland. The countries efficient railroad link between the interior and the Atlantic coast, hauling coffee and other merchandise from the countryside was simply abandoned and left to rust in favor of another president’s cousin’s trucking business. Or so another mild mannered Tico tells me. A Mexican politician reportedly explained it all in one wisecrack: “A politician who is poor is a poor politician.” When those Christmas winds caused another light airplane to turn around and leave after few failed attempts at landing, I joined my son-in-law on a drive to San Jose. The road to the capital, which houses half of the countries total population, and back was so over-choked by that president’s cousin’s fleet of trucks that it took us over twice the estimated time of travel.
In the capital I asked a Tico colleague who doubled as our guide to take me to see one of its many sprawling slum neighborhoods. He explained with dismissive and disturbing body language that those slums residents were all Nicaraguan refugees from the years of war there or current economic refugees. “They take advantage of our socialized educational and health care system. The moment they enter the country, legally or otherwise, they have automatic coverage. And look how they are dragging our entire welfare state down with them.” He proceeded to warn us against the danger of entering one of the slums because of the resident’s habitual criminality. Three times he promised to drive us through one and three times he reneged on his promise. It all confirmed the stereotype Ticos have of their less fortunate northern neighbors, a smaller and darker version of themselves. Nicaraguans are Costa Rica’s Jordanians in Israel, Egyptians in Jordan, or Sudanese in Egypt, a lesser and cheaper version of oneself. You can observe the same cascade of social worth and labor prices in South East Asia: Thai-Burmese-Chinese and the chain is probably longer for the knowledgeable.
******
A different issue now comes to mind: what difficult patients doctors themselves make. In my case it was actually out of my control. I did follow orders and paid adequate attention and fully trusted my physicians. It was more the attending staff’s own self-consciousness about their performance after they were told that I was a physician and that I wanted to know about every step and every medication in advance. It put a slight damper on their performance and led to some of it being a little clumsy. Laiali, my little granddaughter awaiting her third birthday in another week, was a little alarmed by her visit to me in the hospital where she couldn’t quite overlook all the tubes and catheters leading in and out of my body. Now, after the abdominal surgical wound has healed well, she seeks to overcome her fears by playing doctor and tending to my presumed abdominal problem as I lay in the hammock on the deck. She feels my stomach and proceeds to apply imaginary cold compresses all over it reassuring me that I am the best howler monkey patient she has. She then wants me to know that her cold compresses work wonders in helping to cure me. “These will stop farting too,” she assures me.
The perforation of my appendix apparently had taken place unannounced several days before I became fully aware of anything really wrong with me. Whatever it was, I managed to keep my panic threshold rather high: First, the afternoon before the night I became alarmed, we went to the local physician in Nosara where he (and I) had to rely on clinical signs only; in the present case those led us astray. I was subjected to an injection of a massive dose of a long-acting broad-spectrum antibiotic for a presumed kidney infection. My symptoms persisted and late that night I became certain I had an inflamed appendix, though I didn’t know it was already perforated. I made the diagnosis based mainly on my interpretation of the right lower abdominal pain associated with a certain movement of my right leg, the classic Psoas sign that surgeons look for, spontaneously elicited from within. It had woken me from sleep that night. Next Seth, my son-in-law, drove me ever-so-carefully in his small SUV over the 20km of dirt road to reach the paved road to Nicoya, the region’s capital. A perforated appendix tends to accentuate the gut-jarring bumps a passenger in an old standard-shift car speeding in a race against time experiences. Seth was anxious that a major bouncing on a rut in the road may well rupture my appendix, a development that could end in sudden shock and possible death. At the same time, any extended delay could well yield the same calamitous result. Weighing the odds of one disastrous development against the other, he tried to adjust his speed to match the condition of the road a few yards at a time. We finally made it just before dawn to the hospital at Nicoya where the sleepy staff made the right diagnosis. Surveying the seen at the hospital while awaiting the arrival of the surgeon, I was intrigued and charmed by the quaint and casual atmosphere of the dozen inpatients sharing the same open space at the end of the open corridor. I started considering which corner of the corridor would be the airiest in the heat of the day.
Only one factor made me finally opt for an emergency medical evacuation to CIMA hospital, a modern private hospital in San Jose: I couldn’t communicate with any of the bed occupants. And a slight doubt still lurked in my mind: I had undergone a hernia repair elective procedure some ten years earlier and I recall the surgeon speaking to me about the option of taking out my appendix while at it. I was convinced they had done that. My nephew, a senior surgeon in Germany was involved in the decision and I finally reached him on the phone. Though he had opted not to participate in my hernia operation, he recalled clearly that his colleague chose a surgical approach that didn’t allow for the optional appendectomy. This finally clinched the diagnosis for me. Seth accompanied me throughout the debilitating saga. He tried to keep a step ahead of the medical game by acting on his instinctive early panic leanings and by reverting to his I-phone internet connection and running simultaneous consultations with his infectious disease specialist uncle in NY and with my surgeon nephew in Germany. The surgeon chose first to perform the procedure through the less invasive endoscopy. When she realized the complexity of the situation, a well walled-off perforation of the appendix, she converted to an open abdominal surgery. Despite all of that I had no real early warning of what was happening in my gut. Toufiq, my friend back in Arrabeh, later explained it on the phone with a chuckle: “In some old clunkers the motor may well go kaput without any red light ever flashing on the dashboard; your fuses are all shot to hell already.”
Now, in retrospect, I am aware of another strange aspect of this potential brush with mortality, another ‘shot fuse’ phenomenon: I chat on the phone with a colleague back home and he expresses his longing and interest in hearing my ‘new outlook on life after the scary experience.’ Except that throughout the ordeal it never crossed my mind that there was a threat to my life: I knew what was happening and had full trust in the competence of those in charge of the system to which I succumbed. It never occurred to me to consider the alternative of a possible failure of the system, rare as that is statistically. It could have been happening to a total stranger and I wouldn’t be less concerned or uncertain of the outcome: A burst appendix that had to be cleaned up and covered with massive doses of intravenous antibiotics, a procedure not so unfamiliar or complicated once the underlying problem was discovered; it was the same if it were happening to me or to any other human. And it went well with no untoward delays or unexpected complications. Why would this necessarily inspire a new outlook at life still escapes me.

An Open Letter to Reviewers

Note: This is a letter I drafted but never sent out. It was addressed to all the reviewers who had commented so positively about my book, A Doctor in Galilee, to seek their advice in how to reach the mainstream reader in the West. H.K.

May 27, 2009
Dear friends,

This is a message of acknowledgment, thanks and celebration.

I woke up this morning feeling all renewed and invigorated. Out of the clear blue sky came this realization that in recent weeks I have crossed another landmark in my personal development, that I have metamorphosed into a new species, a new genre of the human race, no less caring, though not formally recognized as one of the caring professions, than my formerly well-fitting professional identity as a physician, and a publicly charged one as per the definition and moral code of public health.

Like a new garment, it still feels less than comfortable, this new identity. Its fiber still feels a little scratchy to the skin. I have dealt with the international community before, so that I can't blame the make-up of my new audience, the cyberspace-mediated circle of international friends and contacts, for the slight sensation of formication that keeps me up nights. And this is not the first time I have experienced the pleasant prurience of a transformed identity, nor is this the most drastic leap of faith I have taken. The list is long indeed: from peasant boy to a city slicker, from a third-world setting to life on an American college campus, from a college student to a care giver, from that to a civil society activist, and from a husband to a father and onward to a clan elder, to mention only the most drastic ones.

All along I willfully sought out intimate and transforming liaison with members of each new group to help me mold into the new role. When I first saw Woody Allen's film 'Chameleon' it spoke to me movingly. I was still adapting to a civil society role while still fulfilling my duties as a physician to my tribe, a layer of new garments atop of my white gown. Seeking a way out I took to a mix-and-match style mining new and inclusive public health concepts to meet my needs and new outlook. And this was how I emerged to grapple with the nascent NGO/civil society sector as a promotional agent of health and community development on behalf of the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

True, my past contacts have been limited to the international health and development NGO crowd with a smattering of aspirants to sainthood at its edges, those associated with the church-centered or church-funded charities. Over the years I managed to gain sufficient comfort with this latter kindly bunch as we played at reaching a compromise between their basic grounding in self-congratulatory charitable work and my self-serving development-based experimentations.

Eventually this tug-of-war ground to a routine and I took to clawing at the hems of the real holy personages, by their own internally consistent appraisals, such as the Holy Land Latin Patriarch and the head of the Catholic Dioces of New York, real people I met. Though I never gave it much thought at the time, I must now admit, with the insight gained through the powerful focus of that marvelous old invention, the retrospectoscope, to a degree of fascination with the real holy men of my days, those bigger than life figures like Mahatma Gandhi, Marten Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama. Transgressing against my monotheistic upbringing while still abiding by the Islamic tradition of limiting worship to a private affair between two parties, I did make supplications to these private multiple gods of mine. In the 1960s I even joined a Civil Rights march in Washington, DC, at the peril of being deported as an alien. More recently I knocked at President Mandela’s door but could only befriend his late fellow freedom fighter and Minister of Justice, Dulla Omar. On the second attempt I wound up making contact with Archbishop Tutu, no less godly a figure were it not for his narrowed denominational identity. That was also a major problem with Marten Luther King: his specific church affiliation brought him down one notch from full godliness. In my college days in Hawaii I served as the resident custodian for the Unitarian Church in lush Nuuanu Valley and attended their rather secular Sunday meetings. And while at Harvard on occasion on Sundays I would drift to the Cambridge Quakers’ meeting house. I found both a bit too theologically confining. And for a while I even dabbled in Zen Buddhism.

The Dalai Lama fails the test on a different count. I met him in person twice, albeit not in private. His American idol status blemishes his godliness for me; he is too trendy. You cannot have it both ways; no one can be a celebrity in Hollywood and in heaven.

That leaves only Mandela and the Mahatma. Here is a piece from my first trip to India:

Ranakpur
November 30, 2003
Gandhi, to my thinking, is the man who deserves the greatest respect of all the historical figures I know. He embodies all the values that I subscribe to: nonviolence, compassion, activism, and humility. As I stood at the simple memorial edifice at the site of his cremation I cried copious silent tears not for his loss to humanity, but for the defeat of his aspirations and for my own inability to hold on to my own internal equilibrium and self-respect in facing the human calamity that is India’s poor and disabled beggars. I cry very rarely and usually when physically exhausted and emotionally defeated. This time I was well rested despite some nightmares and wakeful early mornings. I found myself overwhelmed with the sense of my own defeat and loss of purpose. I lost all sense of self-respect and outward defenses that could afford me some equanimity. I could no longer face the world. How could I lay claim to sanity in the midst of the irrationality of India or maintain my dignity in the midst of the squalor and the degradation of its masses. How can I ever enjoy a meal in the plush surroundings of another hotel without severing all moral links to the majority of humanity that India personifies. A time was when I felt I could discharge my inborn and acquired debts to humanity through professional service as a caregiver to my own narrow slice of the human race. And when the time came I acted on this obligation in Arrabeh and the Galilee. Coming up against India at this late stage in the game (age and career-wise) the myth of the significance of my contribution to the alleviation of human suffering is suddenly and starkly exposed. In the past I have seen poverty and deprivation in Palestinian refugee camps and in the slums of Cairo and it impinged on my conscience and innermost feelings. Yet, before India, I managed to maintain my inner balance and to regard such situations as controllable if not curable. India is of another magnitude, both in depth and extent. In India my entire world of morality collapsed on me. It stunned me into regression and defeat. India missed the chance of benefiting from the cruelty of a Marxist dictatorship and Gandhi and Nehru are to blame!”

So we are back to monotheism: It is Mandela by a neck. And now you know my real spiritual standing: I belong to the UC group. No, not the Unitarian Church but the Utterly Confused or the Ultimately Condemned if you wish.

But I digress.
We started with a message of thanks. And I wanted to explain my sense of renewal and self reinvention. I am now starting to accept, though rather tentatively and with much trepidation, my new identity as a writer, or perhaps we can just say 'a person who writes'. I seem to be vaguely aware of having entered the literary world, albeit through its backdoor. And it all is your fault and that of my editor at Pluto Press, Dr. Roger van Swanenberg. You all managed to pry that back door open just enough for me to sneak in. Or was it that you cracked a window open for some fresh air and I snuck in? Be that as it may, you have already permitted me to crash your party and, now with cocktail in hand I hope to mingle with the crowd and to circulate among the regulars.

Damn! Even that is not going to work. I do suffer from GERD (I will explain if you will allow me to step back for a moment into my original medical stomping grounds: Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disorder, a form of severe heart burn if you wish.) and I cannot handle liquor especially evenings. Perhaps you will allow me just this once to fake it and go around with water in my glass. You won't divulge our little secret, would you! I will even pretend to be getting a little tipsy if you promise not to tell. I will share a secret with you: I can fake comfort in awkward situations. Here is another piece from my past:

“Tape-recorded on 19 June 1983:
This was a challenge not easy to live up to. The visible level of affluence as I entered the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York, for example, threw me for a loop. The classy garden entrance, the posh carpets in the hallways, the modern furniture, and the top of the line high-tech equipment were beyond my wildest dreams. Any one entering that office realizes full well that its occupants have money. I kept looking at the lining of the elevator and saying to myself how nice it would be to own a winter coat made out of that material.

Traveling abroad like this to knock at doors and to meet with officials of NGOs I feel remorseful about the time and energy I waste on people sitting in their air-conditioned offices and making a living by discussing the misery and dying of others. It brings back to mind the sudden fits of anger I often experience in the midst of bureaucratic Ministry of Health discussions of health policy; I get the urge to throw all their papers at those hypocritical soothsayers and rush out to treat the Bedouin kids I know are dying of neglect or boiling in the throws of a fever that very moment.

While waiting in the hallway of The Ford Foundation I feared an inevitable confrontation between my sense of urgency and the deliberate calculations and prying questions of the young woman I was waiting to meet. Suddenly I felt panicky; I broke in a run to escape the impending disaster. I hurried to the men’s room and splashed some cold water on my face, recalling swimming as a child in the cool spring at the western edge of Arrabeh.

To pretend that I was comfortable in those surroundings was one thing. But to step outside and see the destitution of the homeless man warming himself over the building’s hot air vent was simply incomprehensible. It knocked me off balance. Fortunately no one accompanied me out to hear me scream my foulest curses.

The field officer I had hosted in the Galilee had scheduled a luncheon appointment for me with Oscar (Bud) Harkevy, the head of the population and health department. No need here to go into the details of the luncheon itself, though it still makes my mouth water to think of it. I was put through the grind. I had to justify our project proposal and to give a description of what life is like in Galilee and of the health problems of the Palestinian community in Israel while treading lightly on the subject of Israel’s discriminatory policies. Then the gentleman wanted to know where I was heading to from New York. Proudly I said:
“To Washington, DC; I am invited to the International Conference on Polio Eradication.”
“Oh yes!” he responded, “The other day I was talking to my friends Jonas Salk and Robert McNamara, the head of the World Bank, and we were trying to figure out what it would cost to deliver polio immunization to every child in the world. What is striking is the difference in estimates. Salk thinks it will average three dollars per child while McNamara quotes twenty-two dollars. I said: ‘listen fellows, you have to make up your minds. After all, even at twenty two dollars apiece, if you estimate eighty million new babies a year, we are still talking peanuts, you know.’”
That was when I choked on the fruit salad I was trying to down at an acceptable speed. Like the man I was, I managed to swallow my food, to grin and bear the slap I felt across my face. I mumbled something appropriate about few billion dollars and feigned the body language to indicate that it didn’t raise a pimple on my ass. Right now as I do this recording a braying donkey in the background is trying to remind me of what a fake I can be when pressed against the wall.”

So now you know me a little more intimately. Having divulged so much personal details to you, I now feel more comfortable in your company. I will now tell you where I am heading, ‘inshallah!’ And I mean the term in its original literal meaning -if God wills it- invoking God’s permission and blessing on my plans. (And you thought I was an atheist!) Of recent years Middle East bureaucrats in their dealings with run-of-the-mill customers have imbued ‘inshallah’ with a new dismissive and more cynical meaning: ‘If God feels like helping you let Him do it!’ Which is why a commentator with Latin American experience interpreted ‘inshallah’ as ‘manyana but without the sense of urgency’.

Now to my future plan, the original reason for this longish stream-of-consciousness outpouring: I would like to take the next plunge, to ask for your help in reaching out to the wider circle of nonpartisan general public in the West. Of course, reaching that crowd is the dream of every writer on his way to the best-seller list. But hang on a second! That is not what I have in mind. Selling my book is for Pluto Press to handle. What I have in mind is conveying my narrative, the particularity of which you seem to have appreciated, to the widest possible public through print or any other possible way.

You are a select group of readers, a group that makes a habit, if not a profession, of critical reading. I judge by what you wrote about ‘A Doctor in Galilee’ that you found it worth your time and not only because of your pro-Palestinian convictions. I want to believe that you judge the book to be readable on its literary merits alone. Am I correct in assuming that? That is the part I want now to hang my hat on. How can I persuade the uninvolved masses in the West to sample my narrative? How can I reach out with this different Palestinian narrative as casual reading and not as targeted political discourse in the first instance? Can I afford the deceit of imagining my humanity and struggle against injustice seeping through to the apolitical reader’s mind without addressing the subject frontally? At the risk of boring you with overstating my case, here is what I wrote a Quaker friend recently:

"Dear ...,
I presume you may have noticed the alerts I have been sending out about the positive reviews my book of memoirs has been receiving, though mainly in sympathetic pro-Palestinian media.

I am writing you personally now to seek your input in a complex matter that is currently on my mind: I know well the efforts of the AFSC to call the world's attention to issues of the powerless, to empower the weak and the marginalized, and to give a voice to the voiceless. So far, with my book, I feel that I have gotten my foot in the door, so to speak, with the Palestinian and activist media. Yet that is not the main target readership I imagined reaching when I decided on publishing my memoirs. It is the less informed and seemingly less involved western and especially American public that I had in mind and the book was fashioned accordingly. It is aimed at the average churchgoing American housewife who couldn't care less about the lives of Palestinians and Israelis but who ultimately decides their fate. I have now reached the point where I want to knock at the door of that crowd. What tricks of the trade can I use? What channels can I try to utilize? How does one manage to grab the attention of the Western/American mainstream? Can you help me work out a strategy? Or does that require a brainstorming session? And if so can that be done on the phone?

Also recently one of you guys wrote me after reading my memoirs:
“I just wish I could grab Carter, or Oprah, or Zogby by the necks and tell them ‘This is your assignment, bearing on the humanity of all of us, and you may not read anything else or become involved in any other distraction until you finish it!’”.
Now, that would really help! But there must be other less aggressive ways of enticing people to sample my reality. And you people are the experts on the matter. I am at your party to learn first hand what you and your ilk excel in - promoting positive thoughts to the world. Technically I presume we are talking media, all sorts of media, and it may only need what we doctors often prescribe – tincture of time. I consider myself the patiently enduring type. But I am also the intrusive type, not the type to sit completely still and wait. As I linger I stay involved. That is why I crashed your party in the first place. Good Muslims are expected to carry their struggle, ‘jihad’, against the wrongs of the world physically with their sword, and if that is impractical then with their tongue and barring that, then in their hearts. “And that is the feeblest of commitments,” the good prophet decreed.
See you at the next party.
Hatim

What Is in a Name

I look at the seventeen young women in the picture on the internet, the group photo of Palestinian women prisoners just released in exchange for a video of an Israeli prisoner in Gaza named Shalit, all in hijab with uniformly dark-colors. I cannot but wander in imagination and wonder what they would look like in western sports uniforms as a soccer team, the maximum I allow my mind to stray from their austere outer appearance. Then I consider their first names, chosen for them by joyous fathers and mothers, no doubt, some 15 to 25 years ago at the most, though the news item in Enrique Ferro’s daily bulletin states: “one … came back to find that all of her children were now grown up.” I try to imagine what those parents dreamed for their newborn girls at the moment they decided on their choices and how they imagined their infant girls as brides: Shirin, Nevine and Regina probably were not imagined by their mothers as anything but pretty Barbie doll types that will grow to marry and be pampered by Western-trained professionals serving in the appropriate Palestinian governmental department, the real thing and not the virtual ones of today’s constricted reality whether in Gaza or Ramallah. Twenty years ago we were riding the tsunami wave of the first Intifada with its promise of success of its peaceful resistance. Then the horizon looked wider and brighter.

Perhaps the same was true for the parents of the seven girls with the fragrant and buoyant, romantic first names: Sana (Glow), Hiam (Infatuation), Laila (That of the night), Najwa (Flirtatious), Baraa’ (Innocence), Nahid (Bosomy), and Zohoor (Flowers). Three more, Maymuneh (Lucky), Hiba (Gift), and Manal (Gain), have the inspired flamboyance of wishful thinking. Arabic is a rich and discriminating language with subtle nuances that may have escaped me in translating some of the names. Yet they all share an upbeat and hopeful feel that surely does not come unintentionally to a parent sizing up the sound and flavor of a name for his/her baby. Perhaps some parents had simply named their baby after an aunt, a grandmother or a dear friend. That is possible but more likely with the two traditional names in the list, Rima and Fatima. Perhaps Lebnan (Lebanon) could be added to the two or it could well be an expression of solidarity with the people of that country in their decades of struggle. Or the girl may have been born on her mother’s trip to visit a relative in a refugee camp in Lebanon when camp-hopping across the Arab world was still possible for a Palestinian.

And there are the straight forward ones deriving directly from Palestine’s Jihad (Struggle) Somood (Perseverance), and Kifah (Resistence). Only Ayat (Koranic Verses) can imply the religiosity that jumps at you out of the picture. To the best of my knowledge never before was Islam in Palestine associated with such prohibition of casual behavior and dress before. With the advent of the Ottomans the hijab of their harem was emulated only in the city. In rural areas their dress code for women, like their influence, never took hold. Elderly village women, including my mother and aunts, who ventured to the city felt obliged to cover up in deference to their more influenced urban hosts but only for the duration of their trip, usually one day. Upon return the black outside covers would be flung aside for the casually modest village attire, not different from what traditional women wear, say in Crete.

I had just returned from a celebration in honor of Samih el-Qassim, probably the best-known Palestinian poet alive today and my former schoolmate, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The man has an astounding record of published poems from which to read and he has a superb mastery of the Arabic language and a delivery style and touch of showmanship to match. I was happy I decided to attend the event held at the Mahmoud Darwish Cultural Center and sponsored by the Toufiq Zayyad Institute for Creativity and National Culture. The implication of the choice of venue and sponsor, both named after dead colleagues and former close friends of Samih, was not lost on him. He chose to read a new poem remembering and eulogizing all of his departed fellow Palestinian poets. Only one contemporary and friend remained, Taha Muhammad Ali, and Samih acknowledged his presence in the front row of the hall repeatedly. The refrain and central message in the poem was to confirm the ever-lasting presence of all these departed men (and one woman, Fadwa Touqan) in our midst in spirit and in the word. Somehow, the message between the lines sounded very much like a goodbye. And I felt sad for this giant of a literary figure with his ever-youthful looks admitting to aging; he admitted it in words and in the ever-so-slight fading of the youthful glimmer in his eyes.
I am only two years his senior!

One of the celebrants was a man I knew from previous reincarnations, Rafiq (Arabic for gentle) Hussainy, formerly the head of the Jerusalem office of the international charity, Medical Aid for Palestine. This was in the days of the First Intifada when Jerusalem was still at the physical and emotional center of Palestinian nationalism. Later I reconnected to Rafiq as the head of a major private medical center in Ramallah, capitalized by rich Palestinian shareholders in the Diaspora. Now he has secured a more lucrative job, the Head of the Palestinian Presidential Staff. As such he was delegated for the honoring function by President Abbas of the PNA himself. After all, Samih is a national treasure shared by all Palestinians, nay, by all Arabs. When his turn at the podium came Rafiq spewed forth all the expected platitudes and added a sentence or two about the need for all Palestinians to unite in the face of the Zionist enemy. At the mention he made of the Palestinian President a timid flutter of applause came from the audience, for the title no doubt. I admired Rafiq’s command of the Arabic language, his extemporaneous speech abilities, his well-bred youthful looks and his blank baby face. On the way home I heard the news on the radio that the PNA had withdrawn its request to the UN Human Rights Council to adopt the Goldstone Committee report accusing Israel (and Hamas) of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. The price the PNA collected for this retraction? Israel’s permission to be granted for a second mobile telephone network in Palestine (read 12% thereof). Who owns how many shares in the Watanya (nationalist, no less!) wireless network, I wondered!

Suddenly an image from my childhood flashed across my inner screen, that of another Abbas. He was the perennial ‘circumcision man’ of those days, trudging the streets of the village with his hard-leather briefcase hanging from his black-jacketed shoulder and shouting out his trade: “Mtahhir! Mtahhir!” As he would reach our neighborhood we would scuttle away and the older boys would run after us and pretend they wanted to catch us for Abbas to cut away our male genitalia. About the only safe place there was for us to run to was the mosque where we were sure to find some adult family relative to protect us. The man’s name alone which we interpreted literally, ‘the ever-frowning one’, evoked thoughts of bitter suffering at his hand. It was never the pain that we feared but rather the resultant aftereffect of impotence. And now here it comes again, the mental anguish of impending total impotence. Has Abbas just cut off our collective penis? Where can we run away from this man? Into the lap of Zionizm? Wouldn’t a single state bring with it a semblance of potency?

Not a single Zionist attended our celebration of Samih, ‘the ever-forgiving one’, and his poetry.

The day before was the 9th memorial day of the start in 2000 of the second Palestinian Intifada and the loss on this side of the Green Line of 13 of our youth killed by Israeli police, mainly by sharpshooters. The venue for commemoration was Arrabeh’s farmers’ market and a crowd estimated at some 30-40 thousand converged from all over Israel to protest the state’s discrimination and violence against its Palestinian minority. I decided to delegate the duty of visiting the graves of the two martyred teens from Arrabeh to the younger generation and took a roundabout route to the meeting place arriving an hour late according to the widely published schedule but just in time for the speeches. Arrabeh’s newly-elected young mayor, another man with a decent command of the Arabic language, tried to match the size of the crowd with the sheer pitch of his voice. Then came abu-Asil on behalf of the bereaved 13 families. He ranged all the way from Arrabeh to Iran and the USA and back; and so did the Head of the High Arab Monitoring Committee after him. Sheikh Ikrima of Jerusalem then opened and closed his mercifully brief speech by joining the youth in the crowd in chanting “With our souls, with our blood we redeem the Aqsa mosque!” And there was my friend Ilan Pappe who was brief and to the point: The racist Zionist system, especially the current Israeli ultra-rightist government, is dangerous and unjust to all of us and has to be defeated. And The Palestinian right of return is just and we all should hold it sacred.

Some may have interpreted his role at the meeting as that of a token Jewish speaker in this mostly Arab crowd. I even heard few racist rumblings from a group of youth objecting to having a Jew speak at this Aqsa-related occasion. I did see a few dozen other Jewish participants with their leftist political identity clearly splashed across their T-shirts. Especially among the youth, partisan political identity -Jabha, Tajammu’, Abnaa’ el-Balad, Islamic Movement, etc.- was worn as an item of dress or held up boldly on a banner. Yet the most striking symbols of identity I noticed were expressed in fashionable color combination and style of attire and not in a written statement: Two thin, tall, doe-eyed, young women with a proud, haughty and angry expression on their pretty faces combined the colors of the Palestinian flag in various items of outer dress with a touch of the symbolic Palestinian kafyieh to say unambiguously: “I am Palestinian and proud of it!” I recognized one of the two as the daughter of a former student of mine from Sakhnin and she confirmed my guess and posed for a picture with her friend. Not far from them stood the two medics who man our local authority’s ambulance. I snapped a photo of the two standing at the ready with a large Star of David on their backs. The message was clear: You can shout all the slogans you want. When it comes to life and death issues it is the Star of David that speaks. In Arrabeh there is one licensed ambulance; a Jewish community of an equal size may have a dozen. In the ever-mounting struggle for survival the odds are rigged. In Gaza it was hundred to one.

Perhaps there were no Zionists here as well. Except for the pilots of those helicopters encircling above for the duration of the event.

Yet, the day before, I hobnobbed with Zionists for the better part of the afternoon. I had arrived at the Galilee Society for the ceremonial opening of the new headquarters of its research facility. This is a new wing, the third floor added to the home I had built for my NGO and which wound up costing me my lead position in it. The Research and Development Center had started in a caravan placed at a scenic hilltop in Eilaboun some fifteen years earlier and received partial government funding thanks to the decision of Shulamit Aloni, the Minister of Science and Technology at the time. Now she was among the honorees on this special occasion and the hosts needed another old-timer to assist and keep her company. Aloni’s impeccable personal integrity and stand on issues of justice and equality does not stack well with her reluctance to renounce the Zionist movement so far. Her fight is with the tightening hold the Jewish fundamentalists are having on Israel. Still, I found myself joining her and the current minister and his entourage seated in the first row. As the religious minister, an avowed political enemy of hers by definition, rose to speak she kept a running commentary of jabs and one-liners whispering in my ear. Unfortunately I had forgotten my hearing aid and had to chuckle appreciatively on cue.

The praise of the minister and his chief scientist, and the impressive list of researchers and their research projects aside, there was a clear disconnect, if not full opposition, between the basic percept on which I and my colleagues had built the mother organization, the advancement of the health and wellbeing of the Palestinian community in Israel, and the vision the minister advanced as his rationale for supporting the daughter research facility, the advancement of Israel’s position in the world of science and technology. This may sound inane, for what else would a state support its scientific institutions for if not to advance its standing in the world of science? The contradiction I was unable to overlook sprang from the definition of Israel of itself as exclusive of its Palestinian citizens. The fundamental contradiction this exclusionary definition casts upon all of the state’s dealings with 20% of its citizens limits the zone of comfort of any amongst them receiving governmental research grants to personal gain and ulterior motives to the exclusion of any altruism. Ultimately, such recessive motivation undercuts, if not undermines, a researcher’s ambition and dreams. That is why in my days I never put much trust in governmental funding of our projects and reached out to the international community. I took the relationship with Shulamit (peaceful!) Aloni, then as now, to be an innocent ‘flirtation’ between two secular peace seekers.

Was Aloni conscious of the pulling of the rug from under the feet of our researchers when she committed her ministry to supporting them, I wonder! I doubt it, for she must have thought that she would succeed in redefining the state from her liberal perspective. I now asked her one question:
“Will we, the likes of you and me, survive the current racism?”
“I doubt it,” answered the frail but clear-minded woman.

An old friend of my wife’s with a pretty Hawaiian name (I studied at the University of Hawaii and married a Hawaiian wife and we still connect to all things Hawaiian) and her American Jewish husband have kept in touch with us for all the years since our Boston days in the 1960’s. The man has even read my book and apparently checks my blog on occasion. He wrote chiding me for my “riling against Zionism” and wanted me to let off the topic. He sites two models for me: himself as the enlightened “good Zionist” (“I voted for Livni” he explains) and a young Palestinian who co-directs an Israeli Arab-Jewish NGO I had co-founded and then left in consternation. This week the young man had a chance to express himself to the Israeli public in an op-ed in Haaretz, a lead national newspaper. I read his piece and found it less than inspiring. It raises the right issues but in the form of pleading that liberal Zionists find palatable coming from an Arab citizen of Israel as long as he doesn’t cross the line and start calling himself ‘Palestinian’.

I was about to email my liberal Zionist contact. We had kept in touch over the years for the sake of the god old daysand for the sake of the wife's lovely name. I reviewed our correspondence. He finds voting for Livni, no less racist a politician than her competitor Netanyahu, noble enough to offer as an enticement for me to continue contact with him. How come he votes in Israeli elections in the first place? He never lived here. I don’t have the time to spend on correspondence with people who think that they have the right to decide my fate just because of their race, I decided.

An Open Letter to President Carter

September 10, 2009
Dear President Carter,

In Arrabeh, my Palestinian hometown in Galilee I also am considered an elder. Hardly a day passes by that I don’t receive gifts of food and when I speak a good number of people take what I say seriously. Like you and Rosalyn I have dedicated my life to improving people’s health and advocating for peace. Except that I had decided to act locally starting with my own people. This was not out of any lack of choices. I had finished my studies of Medicine and Public Health at Harvard and put aside my American dream of material comforts to return to my village and serve nonstop for close to four decades. I say all of this to gain some credibility with you, hopefully enough to encourage you to read the rest of what I have to say.

Let me start at a personal level by thanking you and Rosalyn for fasting with the people of Gaza and for praying for their deliverance from their merciless imprisonment. I am extremely moved by this sincere gesture; it nearly brings tears to my eyes because spending a day of prayer and fasting was what my late mother, a simple illiterate Palestinian peasant woman, did whenever she lost a child. I am tempted to call on all decent people in the world to fast for one day every time a child dies unnecessarily in Palestine or in Israel. But that may mean spending a lifetime of prayer and fasting.

Seeing your piece on behalf of The Elders in Sunday’s Washington Post resurrected in me the faint hope that the world will finally come to understand that the two-state solution for Israel/Palestine is actually dead and gone. Despite your diplomatic hesitance to announce its final demise your assertion that “a more likely alternative to the present debacle is one state …” should now shift the goal of all peace-loving people of the world to the struggle for equality and to end the apartheid practiced in all of historical Palestine west of the Jordan River. Let me right away share with you a personal secret: I have never felt superior to any other human being and have always successfully overcome any sense of inferiority even when in the presence of such bullies as the top echelon of the current Israeli government. And mind you, I have nothing to face their consistent threats of ethnic cleansing against me except for my reliance on the goodwill of people like you and your fellow Elders and, for a fleeting moment there, of President Obama. So, you understand, I am secure in the knowledge that the exclusionary claims of one race to my home will not stand the scrutiny of the world, elemental justice, or the common sense that will ultimately overcome all else. You see, Mr. President, I can make a more valid claim to ancient roots in this land, whither Canaanite or Jewish, than all those bullies combined. And all I am asking for is to be their equal as a citizen.

And let me thank you, Mr. President, on behalf of all Palestinians for your courage in ‘opening Pandora’s box’ a while back as well by recognizing in your book what is happening in the Palestinian Occupied Territories as apartheid. As a result now only few diehard Zionists deny it. I realize, of course, that for diplomatic and pragmatic considerations you chose to limit that accurate characterization to Israel’s practices beyond the Green Line. As one who has experienced it on my own skin for six out of my seven decades of life, I can testify to the accuracy of the characterization as applied within that imaginary line, whatever hue it has since taken, as well. For reasons of space limitation and so as not to overstay my welcome in this attempt to hold your attention I will refrain from venturing into any details to support my claim. Suffice it to say that a fellow Jewish activist, Uri Davis, and I have talked about it nearly two decades ago and he went on to document it in some detail.

Should this arouse your curiosity I would be delighted to invite you to hear the full details of what befell the Palestinian near 20% minority in ‘Israel proper’ at the time of al-Nakba and ever since. A small group of Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel is struggling with the task of holding a session of the International Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine here in Nazareth. Our chosen topic is the war crimes committed in 1948 with a sharp focus on one single community, possibly the ancient village of Saffuriyya. We envision this as the first step toward our “Truth and Reconciliation” process. I am sure my colleagues on the BRTP National Committee would be honored to invite you and/or Rosalyn to sit as judges in this peoples’ court. Should you accept this invitation, and apropos of Saffuriyya, I would be happy to arrange an alternative tour of Galilee for you which I guarantee will be no less interesting and enlightening than The Elders day in Bil’in. Perhaps it will be guided by the ‘present absentee’ Suffouriyyan Poet, my friend Taha Muhammad Ali. He has been acclaimed as “perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today”. To give you just a taste of his stuff, here is how he describes his community’s experience of violent expulsion from their homes(as translated from Arabic by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, and Gabriel Levin in “So What: New & Selected Poems”):

We did not weep
when we were leaving –
for we had neither time nor tears,
and there was no farewell.
We did not know
at the moment of parting
that it was a parting, so where would our weeping
have come from?

And if such a tour pans out, then I will insist on hosting you in my home in the best tradition of Palestinian hospitality as depicted in another of Taha’s poems:

In his life
he…
didn’t raise his voice to a soul
except in his saying:
“Come in, please,
by God, you can’t refuse.”

…

And I can assure you,
were he to encounter
the entire crew
of the aircraft carrier Enterprise,
he’d serve them eggs
sunny-side up,
and Labneh
fresh from the bag.

And yet I do have a special offer to make. On your visit to my home I will treat you to a magic moment in the shade of the multi-millennia olive tree in my front yard. But I will stop here. If you are really interested you can check the link to another unsolicited letter I just wrote to another contemporary human rights fighter of mine, Jane Fonda:
http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/2009/09/open-letter-of-welcome-to-jane-fonda.html Or you can read about my tree and my roots in the last chapter of my book, “A Doctor in Galilee”.

Till we meet and with highest regards,
Humbly,

Hatim Kanaaneh, MD, MPH
Author of 'A Doctor in Galilee: the Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel', Pluto Press, 2008
Active Blog: http://a-doctor-in-galilee.blogspot.com/

Another Man From Nazareth

A Review of “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness” By Adina Hoffman, Yale University Press, New Haven &London, 454 pages.


Adina Hoffman writes in a gripping rich language and with a charming poetic flare. Her avid documentary precision makes her obvious love for the subject of her biographical account and for his family, his surroundings and his people almost suspect, were such evil thoughts not rendered meaningless by her fidelity to the deeper nuances of Taha Muhammad Ali’s deceptively simple and un-classical poetry. Her penchant for linking his every word to the traumatic events of his life and the lives of his fellow internally displaced Saffuriyyans, stay-put Nazarenes and ethnically-cleansed Galileans gives special meaning to the book’s subtitle: “A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century.” Her insistent delving into his private thoughts, and more significantly into his private life, makes his poetry almost as delectably meaningful read on the book’s English language page as it is when heard in Arabic from Taha’s own mouth and with his special delivery style and intonation in his now hesitant raspy voice.

The cover of “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness” gives the essence of the story inside: A dozen mug shots of Taha’s strong-featured post-mature face, two of which presumably overshadowed by the book’s title, all of which in various contemplative and silent pensive poses, the deeply furrowed face cupped and framed by his massive hand except for the very last in which the poet finally opens his mouth and speaks with an accusatory pointing of the finger. The autodidact Taha had spent a lifetime silently absorbing what went on around him and peacefully resisting by earning a living for his family, resisting by educating himself, resisting by occasionally expressing himself in the less enthusiastically popular local literary media, and resisting, above all, by honing his uniquely original poetic skill as the voice of the Palestinian Fellah from Saffuriyya whom we, his Palestinian contemporaries, all know and identify with as our next-door neighbor expelled from his home for no guilt of his own, and who the world at large can appreciate for his lack of frills and pretentions: a struggling refugee with a large heart and a measure of guile and universality.

All of that and more I learned from Hoffman’s book, though I have known Taha from as long ago as my teenage years. In the mid-1950s, the years I attended high school, Taha was a permanent fixture of the Nazareth landscape as one walked up from Sahit El-Karajat –Square of the Garages- to the Church of the Annunciation and the adjacent White Mosque or to the ancient souk. Later when I returned to Nazareth as Deputy District Physician for the Galilee I would always notice and greet him on my way to chat with a friend, no other than his brother Faisal across the way. Instead of being out hawking his souvenirs to the tourists, he sat in the shade of the corrugated-iron canopy in front of his small store or just inside it behind the glass vetrina. His impressive Abe Lincoln-minus-the-beard facial features and his total absorption in the books he constantly pored over added to the impression that one was looking at a part of the shop’s display for the benefit of the tourists. Until one asked about the price of an item and Taha’s thick lips parted with a broad smile and his deep raspy voice issued from his throat like a doomsday warning from a prophet let loose in the hills of Palestine of old.

My own close relationship then was with his younger brother, Faisal Essaffuri, the name we, his friends, called him, combining his proper first name meaning ‘sword of justice’ and a reference to Saffuryya, the formerly prosperous town north-west of Nazareth from which his family was violently driven out during the Nakba, in place of a family name. (The irony of this combination in light of the powerlessness of my friend and his fellow uprooted Saffuriyyans to remedy by force the injustice that befell them never dawned on me before.) Faisal always looked rather pensive, quoted often from the old masters of romantic Arabic poetry, and convoluted whatever topic any of us brought up into an issue of existential philosophical significance revolving around his Saffuriyya childhood. Faisal had dropped out of school because of the family’s limited means and opened another souvenir shop right across from his older brother, Taha.

I allow myself the luxury of this piece of reminiscence to make a point: There is little in it that is not covered in full by Adina Hoffman’s account with the added advantage of a selection of dated photographs. The Nazareth scene around Taha is further fleshed out with a full accoutrement of family, friends, literary contemporaries, those who frequented his literary salon of a souvenir shop and others who did not, and the social and political milieu of Nazareth, and that further afield encompassing people and events all the way to his refugee childhood fiancé, Amira of Saffuriyya and Ein el-Hiloui refugee camp. Yet Hoffman never loses sight of her focus on her protagonist, Taha, obsessively arranging all else around him in concentric and ever-widening circles of love and understanding that shine through the pages of her book.

And yet it is all documented through orally recounted history buttressed by ample archival references starting with Taha’s childhood in Saffuriyya, through his community’s forced expulsion to Lebanon, his families adventuresome return to Galilee, first to Reineh at the edge of their former fields and within sight of their destroyed village and then to Nazareth, his lifelong entrepreneurial spirit and acceptance of responsibility as the breadwinner of his family as the first surviving son and considering his father’s physical disability, his lifelong love of literature and striving to learn through self instruction bordering on self flagellation, his marriage to another loving Saffuriyya refugee, building a home and raising a family and suffering the death of a teenage grandchild, all the way to crystallizing a private and unique poetic style and being discovered, translated and celebrated at the far end of his rainbow of a life.

I feel particularly enriched by the author’s forays into the literary lives of not only Taha Muhammad Ali but also his fellow Palestinian contemporary poets. Those were also my contemporaries, give or take a decade or two, and I knew several among them on a first-name basis. In a manner of speaking, this book gave me, an outsider to the field of literature, a welcome reintroduction to those friends as literary luminaries, from Michel Haddad, a close friend of my late teacher and writer brother, to Samih el-Qasim, a fellow member of the Boy Scout troop that received Danny Kaye in Nazareth, to Nazareth’s forceful mayor and splendid poet, Tawfiq Zayyad. Of course, I had read some of their works with varying degrees of comprehension, appreciation and enthusiasm. But I never really knew any of them closely as literary figures. Now I feel I know all of them better, thanks to Adina Hoffman.

For example, I could never imagine anyone who didn't live in Nazareth in the 1950s being able to grasp the intricacies of the personality and mental anguish of such a character as Michel Haddad till I read Hoffman’s account of his literary dabbling (for he dabbled in many things as she mentions and more people probably remember him for his radio program for amateur singers than for his poetry.) I find it simply astounding that a person who didn't see or hear him daily could grasp his character so precisely.

Taha, as expected, is covered even more thoroughly and sensitively. What is more he emerges not only as a Palestinian poet but also as ‘another Palestinian’ from an era and a place that the author manages to un-camouflage for the uninformed, and, more importantly, for the misinformed reader. And for that we all, Palestinians, Israelis, Palestinian Israelis, and all uninvolved others, owe her a tremendous debt.

Hoffman’s recounting and acceptance of Taha’s remembered version of events and her insistence on aligning such accounts with recorded documents is far from an easy task given the highly oral Palestinian narrative and the most incessant documentarian yet no less skewed Israeli parallel narrative. Taha’s account of the events of Saffuriyya’s Nakba, for example, supported by other Saffuriyyan who lived through the horrific events brings her up against the contrary version accepted in the Israeli narrative. The contradiction is finally, and for the first time ever, resolved in favor of Taha’s truth by Hoffman delving in the Israeli military archives and discovering the previously unknown records of the air raid that actually did take place despite the denial of no less a trusted source than Dov Yarimya, the Hagana commander who entered the abandoned village and who has since converted to pacifism and renounced Zionism altogether. He himself had never known of the air attack.

Hoffman’s tome is written as a contribution to the study of Palestinian poetry and addresses the life of the poet as it shapes his art. Her account is rich with bits and pieces of Taha’s poems as illustrations, though at the end one is left with the feeling that the account of the poet’s life is no more than an explanatory note about the connived ‘simplicity’, directness, authenticity , splendor and infectious magic of his village-based universal poetry. That much becomes clear as she signs off with his last poem entitled ‘Revenge’ (translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi and Gabriel Levin) in which he imagines rising above taking revenge in a dual with his enemy,

the man who killed my father,
and razed our home,
expelling me
into
a narrow country

because Taha discovers that his enemy is another human being with family and friends. But even if this vile enemy were

without a mother or father
with neither a brother nor sister,
wifeless, without a child,
and without kin or neighbors or friends,
colleagues or companions…

he would choose as his revenge only

to ignore him as I passed him by
on the street—as I
convinced myself
that paying him no attention
in itself was a kind of revenge.

That done Adina and Taha go on a car ride to the fertile fields of Saffuriyya to buy fruits and vegetables for a feast celebrating the publication of his translated poems in the volume “So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005.”