Tears for Tarshiha Page 3

  Our joy over this ‘improvement’ was profound, but again highlighted how our expectations were being held hostage. At a time when the first McDonald’s was being built in the US and motor cars and trams jostled for position on the city streets of Beirut, we lived as if in another age. Just a few blocks away the conveniences of modern life were plentiful in Beirut, then known as the Paris of the Middle East. But not for us the coffee in the cafes and strolls along the beachside boulevard, instead we had to play the grateful visitor. I can remember when I was little, UNRWA representatives would bring visitors to our house when they wanted to show them how clean the camp was. We were model refugees, well-behaved and spotless but we were stateless, with no passport, no country to go to and no future.

  4

  CAMP LIFE

  M y early childhood was punctuated by critical regional events that impacted greatly on my life as a Palestinian in Lebanon. In the early 1950s, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a popular resistance leader in Egypt and strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, led the fight against the British occupation of Egypt that resulted in Egyptian independence in 1954. Tensions in the Middle East were exacerbated in 1956 when Nasser, now Egyptian President, nationalised the Suez Canal, threatening petroleum shipments from the Persian Gulf to western Europe and sparking an international crisis.9 His ultimate victory in this action led to a growing pan-Arabic movement and in 1958, Egypt and Syria formed the short-lived United Arab Republic (UAR), a move supported by Muslims, including the Palestinians in Lebanon. The success of this movement helped politicise our people and in response, a Palestinian leadership-in-exile emerged, supported by Syria and Egypt.

  By contrast, the Lebanese Christian President Camille Chamoun was strengthening the country’s ties with the British, French, US and Israel. Conflict over these regional events, the role of former colonisers, as well as fighting between Lebanon’s influential political families—based largely along religious lines—contributed to the civil war that started in May 1958. Unable to contain the warring factions, Chamoun called in the US Marines. It was the first, but not the last time, the US Marines were in Lebanon.

  There was no organised Palestinian resistance at this time and Palestinians in general stood apart from Lebanese politics during the 1950s and early 1960s. Nonetheless, the Lebanese police and internal security—the Maktab Thani, or Duexieme Bureau—kept a close eye on us. As a child, I was scared of the Lebanese police and security officers. They had an office at the entrance to the camp and were always in the camp strutting around. Just walking past them would set my heart racing; I was always afraid they would stop and question me. My family, like all Palestinians in Lebanon, was heavily constrained and we knew to keep our opinions on matters in Lebanon to ourselves.

  The Maktab controlled the minutiae of our lives and seemed to revel in making life difficult and humiliating us. We needed permission for everything. If we wanted to visit relatives in another camp, or to travel in Lebanon, we needed to get a special pass. If we wanted to hold a celebration, we needed special permission. I vividly remember my father hammering a nail into the wall of our house as he tried to hang a picture. Suddenly, the police were there, demanding to know what he was doing—despite it being self-evident. My father calmly replied he was just hanging a picture. They asked to see his permission note for the ‘improvement to the house’. He was then taken away. And although the police held him away for just half an hour, for all of us it was 30 minutes of real fear that he would never return.

  One of the cruellest restrictions imposed on us in these times, however, related to the use of water. When my parents lived in tents, UNRWA used to bring water in tanks for the camp residents. After people became more settled, UNRWA connected the camp to the main city water lines but installed only a few communal watering points in the camp. People then had to fetch water by hand from these points. When I was a child there was no proper system of wastewater disposal. We had to throw all wastewater into the drains that ran through the narrow lanes of the camp. The Maktab banned any water to be thrown in the streets during the day so we had to collect wastewater in large bowls and to wait until nighttime to dispose of it. By then, of course, the bowls were full and heavy. This meant the women in the camp had to wash their children, their clothes and clean their houses after dark. As we did not have electricity, all of this had to be done by gasoline light.

  This meant I had an uneasy relationship with water as a child. My mother scolded me if I played with water and would say, with total justification, ‘They [the police] will put me or your father in jail and they will beat us’. This terrified me. One day my mother went to visit a sick neighbour. My older brothers were playing with some water in a bowl in the dar and did not realise the water was splashing and draining away into the lane outside the house. There was a bang on the door and then the Maktab officers were calling for my mother, who came running from the neighbour’s.

  ‘Don’t you know that it is forbidden to have water spilling into the camp in the daytime!’ the officer yelled.

  ‘I am sorry. I wasn’t at home,’ she replied. ‘I was visiting my neighbour who is sick. And, look, they’re only little children.’

  My mother was lucky that day, as she was only threatened, but it added to the feeling of insecurity and intimidation she always felt. Often women were taken to the police station for spilling water during the early hours of the morning, when it was light, because they could not finish their housework during the night. They were not arrested, but at the station police officers would beat them on the feet and threaten them with worse. So, my mother was right to be afraid.

  Burj Barajneh camp was built on a hill in an undeveloped, sparsely inhabited, agricultural area south of Beirut. Long before the airport was built nearby, the area was a vacant wasteland dotted with pine groves that have long since disappeared. On one side of the camp there was a sand hill where children would go and play, but it was crowded so my siblings and I rarely went there. Instead, I used to play at home with my brothers, Ihab and Nader, and my sister Mervat, who was two years younger than me. My mother made us dolls and we would play make-believe games such as doctors and nurses, like children anywhere in the world.

  Compared with many children in the camp at that time, we were relatively well off. Some people could not afford food and relied on neighbours to feed them. My father had a good job throughout most of my childhood and occasionally bought us toys in addition to those my mother made. But we were also very creative in the way we invented games and we made our own toys from bits of wood and things that we could find around the camp. Because we had little space in the house or the dar, we had to make our games fit into this small area. Playing hide and seek was not much fun as we had few places to hide. Instead we would play other games with our fingers and toes, sitting around in a small circle. One game my aunts taught us involved sitting in a circle with our feet pointing to the middle. We would pass a small parcel around and sing:

  My grandmother sent me to get a pomegranate. I brought it, it fell down and broke. Oh, oh, oh, bride, hide your foot in the box.

  In Palestine, when girls get married, they prepare a big wooden chest with clothes and other things needed for the marriage, a bridal ‘chest’. This song was about that tradition. When we stopped singing, the person who ended up with the parcel would be number one in the circle and from there we would count to 10. The person who got the number 10 had to tuck one leg under their body or hide it under their clothes. When both legs were hidden you were out of the game.

  I spent most of the time with my brothers and sisters playing these types of games. We never fought, although naturally we had different personalities. Nader was very quiet and obedient, but Ihab was stubborn and somewhat wilful. As a young girl, I was quiet but strong and used to follow my mother, carrying the mop and broom, wanting to help her. Because I was my father’s oldest daughter, I held a special place in his heart and was a little spoiled by him
. He gave me the rare Arabic name, Olfat, which means to care and love or cherish.

  So, my childhood memories are filled with this sense of security within my family, but they are also filled with memories of the daily insecurity of our lives in the camp. My family’s talk was often filled with grief and longing. Trapped in the misery and deprivation of the camp, they longed for the sight and smell of their fields: the olive groves, the trees and the fresh air of their home in Tarshiha. And that longing was passed on to me.

  As much as the older people in the camp wanted to return home, life went on and there were many joyous times. When I was around six years, my aunt Amne was married. Weddings were a time of great celebration in the camp and I can still remember her party in great detail. Two chairs, one for the bride and one for the groom, were placed on a large table behind which there was a beautiful carpet, for decoration. There was a lot of drumming and traditional singing and Amne, dressed in a gorgeous red gown, sat while the women sang, and men and women danced the traditional Dabkeh.

  After some time, my mother and her other sisters helped Amne down from the table and took her away. She soon reappeared dressed in a beautiful blue dress. This happened seven times, each time Amne came dressed in a gown of vibrant colours, until at the last she appeared in a white bridal gown. The tradition of changing dresses enabled the bride to take to the marriage seven gowns that she would use for other public celebrations and other people’s weddings. As a new bride, Amne was expected to dress well, and her husband would have paid for these dresses as part of the marriage dowry. The more the bride changed her clothes, the more people would talk all summer, ‘Oh yes, she changed dresses five or eight times’. Or they might say, ‘What a generous husband she has as he had to pay for all these dresses’.

  Before this public marriage party, the couple had exchanged a marriage contract in the presence of a Muslim Sheik and two witnesses. This religious ceremony constituted the official marriage. This official marriage was followed by the marriage party, which signified the time from when the couple lived together as husband and wife. At this public wedding party, when Amne came at last dressed in her exquisite white wedding gown, her groom joined her. He took her wedding ring, which she had worn on her right hand following the formal religious marriage several months earlier, and placed it on her left hand, and she repeated the same ritual with him, placing his ring on his left hand. This movement of the wedding rings to each other’s left hands meant that they were officially married, and the public wedding party continued with much dancing and singing for many hours, with everyone joining in, children included.

  The special wedding food all the women had prepared was brought out after the service and my eyes boggled at the feast before me. Large trays of rice and meat, and rice and chicken, both covered with nuts were laid out. Later mlebbes, sugared almonds, were offered as people danced and enjoyed the celebration. For the wedding, we wore our best clothes which we had received at the end of Ramadan, a key Islamic feast. It was such a treat for us to have new clothes, that we would sleep with them beside us, and put our new shoes under our pillows so they wouldn’t run away. My mother made all our clothes and was expert at re-purposing things. If something was worn or too small, she would cut it and remake it as curtains or cushion covers. Everything was recycled.

  Until I was six, my life was contained within the camp boundaries, and I was only dimly aware of the city that lay at our doorstep. All that changed when I started school as the UNRWA-run schools for Palestinians were outside the camp. It was then that I saw shops and cars and ‘normal’ houses; and began to ask why we didn’t live in these nice places. My mother would patiently remind me that Lebanon was not our country. I wondered how we could live in Lebanon but not be from that country; after all I was born there. I would ask, ‘Why am I here if this is not my country?’ My mother would say, ‘Because we had to leave our country; we were forced to leave Palestine’. Even when this was explained, I found it hard to understand.

  Happily for me, my mother refused to let me do housework because she wanted her children to focus on their education—a legacy I think of her missing out on schooling. Our neighbours criticised her, but she would say to them, ‘Olfat will learn these things when she marries’. But I also sensed it was her contribution to the fight for Palestine as she truly believed through education we would regain our country.

  Every day when we arrived home from school just after 2 o’clock, my mother would have lunch ready. Then, and after everything was cleared away, we would all sit together on the floor around a small round table and, holding my baby brother Amer, she would check our homework, correct it and quiz us on what we had learnt. Early the next morning she would go over this material again and then we had to repeat our homework with her. I often believe the foundation for my later academic success was laid in those days, and I copied her approach when I had my own children.

  Thanks to my father’s job, we were one of the first families in the camp to get a gas cooker and we were the first also to get a radio. People would come and congratulate us on these new purchases, and were happy for us, but we always made sure we shared these luxuries. My mother told me that in the late 1950s, whenever Egyptian President Nasser was giving a speech on radio our house became a gathering place and would be crowded with camp residents who came to listen. Our people lauded Nasser as a hero for defeating the British and for his support of our struggle: we were convinced that he would help us to return home. It was via this radio that the world came into our camp and, as long as it was not too loud, the Lebanese police kept an eye on us from a distance and did not confiscate it.

  Huddled around this technology, the family could hear first-hand of the global events impacting on our lives. Internationally, the Cold War between the US and the USSR was in full swing, each superpower vying for influence in the Middle East. By 1964, the Arab League had belatedly started to support the Palestinians with the establishment of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). For the first time we had a formal, regional political voice; and in the camps, students’, women’s and other representative groups were formed, and began to agitate politically. Yasser Arafat, living with his Palestinian parents in Cairo, established a more radical group, Al-Fatah, (‘The Opening’) which was outside the Arab-sponsored PLO. Arafat’s group was committed to armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine, but in time he took over the PLO and became its chairman.

  As these groups began to bring our situation to international attention, our hopes of returning home were once more cruelly shattered. The 1967 war between Israel and the Arab nations led to the decimation and humiliation of the Arab armies. Israel now occupied the Palestinian territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including all of Jerusalem, as well as the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Thousands of lives were lost, and another 100,000 Palestinians were displaced, with most crossing from the West Bank into Jordan. Many were forcibly evicted from their homes and their villages bulldozed to prevent their return. In November 1967, UN Security Council Resolution 242 reaffirmed the right of return of all Palestinians to their homeland. But once again Israel ignored the decree and the world assented through its silence.

  In Lebanon these regional events split the country. Arabs, the progressive Orthodox Christians and the Communist Party supported Nasser’s pan-Arabism and the Palestinians. On the other side were the pro-western Christians of East Beirut. Nationally, there was also serious conflict amongst Lebanese over the growing economic disparity between country and city. The decades-long political and religious tensions inside Lebanon needed little fuelling while inside Burj Barajneh camp, Palestinian resistance, and support for that resistance, were growing.

  I was in my second year of school that year and on a chore to buy tomato paste made in the camp by local women. I was in the tiny lane outside our house when two men in the black and white keffiyyeh, the traditional Arab scarf worn by males, appro
ached. I could only see their eyes and I screamed in terror. My mother rushed outside. The poor men wanted to calm me but my mother, aware of the danger they were in, told them to run. She turned to me and bent down looking directly into my eyes, whispering urgently, ‘You are allowed to lie now. Tell anyone who comes that you saw a dog and were afraid.’

  I did not understand. My mother had always told me not to lie. In what seemed just seconds later, two Lebanese Army officers came running down the lane towards us. I was in tears. They asked me why I was crying.

  ‘I was frightened by a dog,’ I hastily replied.

  That seemed to satisfy them because they moved away, but I was worried by the incident and later asked my mother why she had told me to lie. She sought to ease my concerns and said, ‘It is forbidden to lie, but in this situation what you said was a white lie. Those soldiers were chasing those two young men you saw because they are fighting to liberate Palestine.’ She added, ‘If the Lebanese capture them they will torture them and put them in prison, so we want to protect them, not harm them’.

  She told me to tell no one outside our family. Young though I was, I realised what she was asking me to do was important, and I obeyed.

  My parents were not political within the PLO but they supported anyone who could help them return home. I asked my parents many questions about these young men and why they had covered their faces. My father explained they needed to remain anonymous because they were soldiers fighting to take us back to our homeland in Palestine.