1. Mount Olive Road, Jerusalem
The musicians began easily, as though talking to each other; a riff plucked up, passed from one instrument to another, tossed down, lifted into another key. They were not quite performing, not quite serious—literally playing. They picked a little mischief from the oud (the mandolin’s great-bellied grandmother), blew delight from the plastic flute, rumbled up the drums (skin and nylon, hand-held or gripped between blue-jeaned knees). Men’s voices rose and fell in Arabic, a language I do not know except in song, where it feels familiar. Earlier, rolling lamb kefta, I’d learned that Wissam, tall and thin, of the Peter Lorrie eyes, was a singer as well as a composer, but he was too young. When I asked if anyone would sing for us, he shyly turned his head away. I knew that if I kept asking, someone would begin to sing.
It was all too familiar, unexpectedly so: the instruments, the laughter of the men, the music itself. The enormous rosemary bushes in the garden and the rhythms of the oud reminded me of Greece, where I live part of my life. “Palestine” is a Greek word. The original Palestinians—called, in the Bible, Philistines—were purportedly an Ionian people, possibly from Crete. The Arabs as Arabs came much later. Once, talking to the Palestinian ambassador to Algeria, I was surprised to hear of his conviction that there remains a cultural, even a racial, link between the Greeks and the Palestinians. This idea appeals to many Greeks as well, because they like to be found at the origins of things: cultures, technologies, languages, humans.
It’s easy to step further into the water and proclaim the obvious: that many Mediterranean peoples are related not only genetically but also by the shocking blue sky, the richness of the earth, the climate created by that sea, often invisible but always sensed, as though salt-water footprints have dried throughout the landscape.
We were going to the West Bank. I felt like I should be whispering the words, but I also wanted to shout them out the window. I didn’t know why. Not one of us had been there before. I expected glaring poverty, bullet-riddled shacks, women with their heads covered. Brooding men. A shrouded place.
The nonchalance of the company and the warmth of the night air returned me to Greece, the summer gatherings on the island, where men and a very few women used to take up their instruments in order to cast off the world and its furies, or to extend and deepen any conversation without the encumbrance of spoken language.
I asked again, “Will someone sing for us?” Big Charlie, the only non-musician among them, and the most style-conscious in his tailored black shirt, boomed out a few baritone lines and made everyone laugh, including us, the strangers from North America. One of the older men began to hum; the musicians’ fingers danced up and down the frets. They didn’t care too much about our presence, and their ease was a form of welcome. Here we all are, it said. We’ve eaten. Before we sing, we have to play.
___
2. The West Bank
Earlier in the evening, four North American writers and academics had piled into a cab. We were all excited, a little breathless, not only because we were squeezed in, the four of us plus the small cab driver with sea-green eyes, but because we were going to the West Bank. I felt like I should be whispering the words, but I also wanted to shout them out the window.
I didn’t know why. Not one of us had been there before. I expected glaring poverty, bullet-riddled shacks, women with their heads covered. Brooding men. A shrouded place.
We were going to a dance recital. A dance recital? I tried to imagine what this would look like. Muslim men and women doing traditional dances in hand-embroidered peasant garb? Clapping and turning, with drums and ... mandolins? It would folksy and moving, providing it didn’t go on and on and on. Where would this take place? In a field, a schoolyard? Did they have village squares in Ramallah? Afterward, we were to have dinner, a barbecue, with some local musicians. Barbecue. Which made me think of hamburgers, ketchup. This was a translation problem, I thought, like recital.
Evening threw its tattered gold nets through the air; dust puffed and glittered above the road. The sun would set soon. We drove downhill, out of Jerusalem. The great wall rose before us, a statement of fact, a concrete scar of powerful policy. In the backseat, looking into the rearview mirror, I met the cabbie’s feline green eyes and asked, “How far away is Ramallah?”
He was a small, spare, smooth-shaven man, with a slightly pointed chin. A good driver. He returned my gaze with a small spare smile. Mocking? Amused? Bored? I couldn’t tell.
Slow, he replied, “How ... far ... away ... is ... Ramallah?” The r was fantastically rolled. He let the question stand until we, chatterers all, shut up. “No one knows. No one has ever measured. How far away is Ramallah? I cannot say.” The car slowed down, joined the line-up.
The young soldiers let us through the checkpoint without any problem. “That was easy,” one of us said.
The driver smiled again. “They don’t care if you come here, to Ramallah. They only care when you go back there, to Jerusalem.” He deftly sped up and passed another car. “For you it will be fine. You have passports. And I have a travel document. And Jordanian papers.”
“Are you Jordanian?” I asked.
He laughed. “Of course I’m not Jordanian. I’m Palestinian. I have worked, sometimes, in Jordan, and I needed the papers. Many of us have a Jordanian passport, not that it makes much difference here. Palestinians don’t have real passports. We have sometimes a passport from the Palestinian Authority, but that is not a real passport, because Palestine is not considered a real country. So we are not real people.” He smiled into the mirror at me.
The wall does not exist only to curb the heinous crime of terrorism. The wall is not one wall: it is a series of openings and closures, a physical and bureaucratic construction designed to incite hatred, isolation, frustration. The wall does not only separate Israelis from Palestinian Arabs; it separates people from their neighbours, their families, their schools, their mosques, their houses, their land.
This was my introduction to the Kafkaesque reality of Arab life in Israel, the West Bank, the occupied territories. I thought I knew something, from television reports, newspaper articles, magazine pieces. But none of these had ever fully explained the absurdity that law-abiding Israeli and Palestinian Arabs are legally bound to live, day in, day out. Each day, sometimes each hour, this bizarre reality became increasingly pathological. Absurdity in English, though, has come to mean something ridiculous but funny. Better to return to the term Kafkaesque—twisted, damaging yet seemingly impersonal, disconnected, a closed treadmill of stupidity and disgrace. The travel documents, the special passes, the licences, the permits, the identification cards and their varying expiration dates, the arbitrarily changing laws.
I like the wall; it is an honest outrage. Unlike the endless forms of erasure, the wall stands visible and solid. I think of the hundreds of villages and towns that lost their Arab names after their inhabitants were driven away. Moshe Dayan, chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces and the minister of defence during the 1967 war, put it as bluntly as David Ben-Gurion had two decades before, when he acknowledged that naturally Arabs were angry, their land had been stolen from them: “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either ... There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab Population.”11Ha’aretz, April 4, 1969.
Of course he was wrong, like Ben-Gurion, who said that within two generations, people would forget. But people never forgot the names of their homes. Moukhalid. Asqalan. Yajour. Djitt. Djaara. Nazira. Araara. Rounaneh. Al-Quds.
A wall is a wall is a wall, in any language. The Israeli journalist Uri Dromi told me, “Since the wall, there have been no bombings in Tel Aviv. Life before quality of life.” Life before quality of life. I am still thinking about that admonition, trying to understand how it applies to a child, or to thousands of people, or to a teenage boy. We already know where that phrase might take him.
The wall does not exist only to curb the heinous crime of terrorism. The wall is not one wall: it is a series of openings and closures, a physical and bureaucratic construction designed to incite hatred, isolation, frustration. The wall does not only separate Israelis from Palestinian Arabs; it separates people from their neighbours, their families, their schools, their mosques, their houses, their land.
The farmer on the other side of the wall cannot get through to care for his olive trees; the gate is always closed. The next gate is so far away that the trip to take care of the trees would have him sleeping out in his fields; soldiers could shoot him. Eventually he loses legal rights to his ancestral fields because, under a new law, those who neglect their land are relieved of it by the Israeli government.
The wall is not a wall. It is a labyrinth.
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3. Ramallah
Ramallah was not full of bullet-riddled shacks. It was not shrouded. Some women wore headscarves, some did not. The men I saw were not brooding, but talking loudly, with their hands, running to their motorcyles. They walked in the street (even when there was a sidewalk) and waved at our driver, who smiled his sly smile to all. Ramallah was just a stone’s throw away, as we say. We were in Ramallah in a second, driving past fruit and vegetable shops and children on bicycles and women pushing strollers. It was a warm evening in high spring, long before the crushing heat of summer, and even the stray dogs looked jaunty, pleased. This was the West Bank? It looked so normal.
Ramallah is a vibrant city made of concrete, cement like a currency laid down everywhere to pay for the future, rising up in buildings, old apartments, new condos at the bottom of the hills and jutting from the top of them. Think Athens in the ‘80 s or Istanbul’s suburbs or Bangkok or Jakarta. But Ramallah feels much younger than these huge cities; it’s a teenager waking up to the world, kicking the wall, triumphant just due to its own existence. I felt this after five minutes, the big adolescent confidence and awkwardness, streets stretching out all over the place, the aggressive enthusiasm most visible in the new buildings, the rebar still naked sometimes, line after metal line of possibility. Concrete was arguably Rome’s most significant invention, giving Romans (and the modern world) a way to build their empires more quickly.
Concrete is easier, simpler, cheaper than stone.
*
The dance recital did not take place in a field or a dusty village square. The cab driver with sea-green eyes and a Jordanian passport drove us up a hill to an imposing building that overlooked the city. It was a cultural centre. Hundreds of people were outside smoking and talking. The buzz of pleasure and gossip was in the air, leavened with laughter, greetings. And the smell of cologne, the scent of bachelors. Pheremonal teenagers milled gorgeously everywhere. The town’s older people were there, too, well-dressed, sophisticated. It was a big night out. I wished I’d worn a skirt and a pair of heels.
Real dancers have such faith. With consummate grace, they hurl their bodies into the air and the usual disaster of time. They believe in the body so hard, as hard as the righteous believe in God.
An American modern dance troupe performed with young Palestinians. They danced brilliantly, to the enormous crowd in the centre’s auditorium. The dancers amazed me, partly because it was such a surprise—I’d been expecting village garb, clapping—but also because real dancers have such faith. With consummate grace, they hurl their bodies into the air and the usual disaster of time. They believe in the body so hard, as hard as the righteous believe in God. The stories the dances told were complex, grave, sexual, humourous. Sometimes, the black stage floated in the air, ominously empty, waiting to be enlivened by those stories that we were all waiting to see and hear. Two of the Americans, a blonde woman with curly hair and a delicately built man of Asian descent, seemed to have made a private deal with gravity; it gave them special privileges. He could strike the floor with his torso and be airborne in a second. While she was almost angelic, both in her beauty and her leaps, he was extra-human, a little campy; he smiled, laughed with the audience, who loved him for it. Like much of the audience, the dancers were young, striking. But I could hear time running down that blond woman’s spine like a child dragging a stick along an iron fence.
There must have been over a thousand people in the audience. Many of them were there to watch the debut of a particular dance, in which neophyte dancers from Ramallah joined their American colleagues. The professional dance company had been in the city for a couple of weeks, working with aspiring Palestinian choreographers and performers.
The premiering piece was about a wall, shown onstage as many pieces of long dark fabric unrolled from above. The men and women found a way through, around it, beyond it; they tried and eventually succeeded to touch each other, to open the field of the stage so that they could move unencumbered, both in solos and ensemble. This journey from the haunted maze to exuberant freedom called forth a hushed silence from the audience, which was watching its own story, its own adult children articulate both history and possibility with bare legs and arms and labouring chests. The joy, I thought, the joy of the strong, whole human body! We forget that joy every day, busy with the minutiae, the clutter of life, the struggles. The dancers reminded us. And they reminded us, too, that the first history is not a book-thing, not a printed list of the conquered, the conquerors. History is written in and through the human body.
When the performances were over and the lights came up, how strange it was to step outside again, into the purplish dark, the cigarette smoke, so many voices laughing and talking in Arabic. How far away was Israel?
___
4. Music in Al Quds
Later that night, at Saïd Murad’s house on Mount Olive Road, the musicians began to play. Saïd had composed the music for the dance premier.
His friend, the black-outfitted, booming-voiced Charlie, danced first, arms up and out, his steps in time with but also searching out the sound, trying to figure out what he should dance. He was a big, strapping man, with a close-shaven head and a voice more gravelly than Tom Waits’. The drums talked, thumped, thundered a little, the storm far off. Abruptly, they stopped the joking around, demanded that the real music begin. The thumping competed for a while, one round outdoing the next, then suddenly the oud’s deep voice broke in, her rhythms more feminine and complicated. She is double-stringed, two times seven, similar to a mandolin but much bigger, more powerful. A white-haired old man with yellowed smoker’s teeth played her with his eyes closed. Somehow the ash from the rollie cigarette in his mouth never fell on the instrument. I watched. After ten minutes, he stood up, handed the oud to Wissam, and began to dance.
Charlie came over to me. “Yela, will you dance?” Yela, yela, come, come on. They say it in Greek, too, ela, ela. Come and dance, he said.
How could I resist?
I wanted everyone to dance. I called to them, as Charlie had called to me. Yela yela, come, we will dance, move in time, through time. Time, that we cannot resist. The night came on. The cat darted back and forth, looking for leftover kefta; she was too spoiled to eat bread crusts. The air became cool as water, seemed drinkable, swimmable, laced with the smell of flowers.
He was doing a step called sirtaki in Greek, “the dragging dance,“ in which you literally drag your feet. The point of all that rhythm is to pick up the tempo, shift into a faster hasapiko (from the verb “to cut”). You begin slowly, with hesitation, waiting for the music to direct you. Turn by turn, the musicians urge the dancer on, rushing him not to the finish but to the height of their collective abilities. It’s a competition that the dancer and the musicians win together. There is a cautious approach, a fine seduction, sometimes an arrival at ecstasy. Dance is a place, like long memory, where there is no separation. I began dancing with Charlie, but the oud player was more subtle, and smaller; he made a better partner for me.
The other musicians laughed and made jokes about their old oud player and the foreign woman. We smiled along with them for a moment but regally ignored them, too, as befits dancers, circling and turning around each other, our arms parallel to the ground but for the hands and the fingers, which do a small arcing dance of their own. Charlie got down on one knee and swayed and clapped, as enthusiastic onlookers do in Greece. Sometimes we turned back-to-back, aware of each other but not touching, the masculine and feminine heightened by distance. The tension of the dance is to be very close and to never touch. To speak intimately without uttering a single word.
Eventually I had them all up. I wanted everyone to dance. I called to them, as Charlie had called to me. Yela yela, come, we will dance, move in time, through time. Time, that we cannot resist. The night came on. The cat darted back and forth, looking for leftover kefta; she was too spoiled to eat bread crusts. The air became cool as water, seemed drinkable, swimmable, laced with the smell of flowers. I remembered that roses lined the driveway of Said’s house.
Everyone was tired, no one wanted to stop. So we kept going, intent, dazed with pleasure, wishing to prolong it, knowing that it would end when the musicians put down their instruments. But for a while longer, they played and we danced, in the city of Al-Quds, also called Jerusalem, with the night held aloft in our hands.
