Soul in Exile Lives of a Palestinian Revolutionary

208 Pages·2016·9.92 MB·English

by  Fawaz Turki

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SOUL IN EXILE
LIVES OF A PALESTINIAN
REVOLUTIONARY
To Camilla Spain,
with gratitude for all the rebel songs
from the liberated zones of Ireland
Copyright © 1988 by Fawaz Turki
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Turki, Fawaz, 1940-
Soul in exile.
1. Turki, Fawaz, 1940- . 2. Refugees, Arab
Biography. 3. Palestinian Arabs—Biography.
4. Jewish-Arab relations—1949- . I. Title.
HV640.5.A6T87 1988 956'.04 88-1455
ISBN 0-85345-746-8
ISBN 0-85345-747-6 (pbk.)
Monthly Review Press
122 West 27th Street
New York, N.Y. 10001
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 987654321
PROLOGUE
Most people, not least of all Arabs, consider the capital cities of the
Maghreb countries of North Africa to be steeped in French culture.
That may be true of Tunis and Rabat. Not so Algiers. Here people
have thoroughly scrubbed all the grime of the colonial past off their
national body. Streets, squares, parks, marketplaces, and other city
landmarks are named after heroes of the war of independence.
People read El Mojahed, not Le Monde. Road signs are in Arabic.
Cafes have terraces, as in Paris, but they are filled with a generation
of young Algerians who have grown up with little recollection of the
Pieds Noirs nightmare. This is a blue-collar city, not without its share
of drabness. But its inhabitants, unlike those of other cities in North
Africa and the rest of the Arab world, are not so helpless economically
that they have to import their matches, their soap, and their pencils.
Algerians forever remind you, and each other, how costly it was for
them to gain their independence. True, this independence has not
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produced economic miracles. Life here is still lived close to the bone.
It does not allow, as in Western society, or monied society in some
Arab countries, for afternoons of brie and beaujolais nouveau, for
annual vacations by the seashore and shopping sprees at department
stores. Thousands of Algerians still emigrate each year to Western
Europe in search of a place as “guest workers.”
In the Middle East, however, Algerians are seen as the Germans of
the Arab world, hard working and persistent, though at times stolid
and humorless, respected for their accomplishments in national
reconstruction. Respected, but not, unfortunately, emulated.
At the Algiers airport, the clean and spacious VIP lounge is located
in a separate building. Its officials speak in soft, polite tones. Atten¬
dants attired in national dress serve coffee.
The main terminal, however, resembles all main terminals in the
Arab world, crowded with passengers and their relatives and veiled
women and children and peddlers and lottery-ticket sellers and taxi
drivers and pickpockets and porters and policemen. And soldiers
everywhere with submachine guns. You choke in the heat. You are
overpowered by the pungent smells and the dust. And you wonder if
you are going to be arrested or questioned or delayed. You worry
about that even if you are a citizen of Algeria. Rut if you are a
Palestinian, you worry more. You know that you have no recourse to
justice. You have no state, no embassy, no institution of any kind to
protect you in a moment of crisis. That’s how it has always been for
Palestinians; but you don’t mind or care.
You have worn your sense of otherness all these years as a
consciousness more intimately enfolding than your own skin.
Statelessness is your only state, and you have long since developed
an aboriginal sense of how to live there. You have grown up thinldng
that only in hell is there likely to be a halcyon statehood without the
implosive stresses of national struggle. Perhaps a state is only a
fantasy in the crazed dreams of your people, devised to contain the
terrors of their history.
No matter though. The five thousand Palestinians who have been
arriving in Algiers around the first week of February 1983 know they
need not worry. They are received at the VIP lounge. As celebrities.
As revolutionaries. They are, after all, arbiters of the destiny of the
Palestinian people and are in the Algerian capital to attend the
sixteenth session of the Palestine National Council (PNC), their
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parliament-in-exile. Among them are the 355 council members, all
manner of council officials and functionaries, observers, journalists,
and activists, as well as foreign dignitaries and solidarity group
representatives.
X too stand there clutching my passport. There is something
formidably, unendurably pitiful about the way a person, stateless all
his life, clutches a passport once he gets one. I look at all the other
Palestinians around me, coming from a bewildering multiplicity of
countries, and experience a kind of emotional vertigo. We have all
grown up and lived not only in diverse locales in the Arab world, but
also in Western and Eastern Europe, in North and South America, in
Africa and the Far East. Yet we have managed to keep our communal
sense of national reference bounding and rebounding among us, like
jugglers’ weights, from year to year, from place to place, from
generation to generation, so that we now understand each other, as if
through a common trick of feeling.
As I sit in the lounge, memories of more flamboyant times cross my
mind. A mere eight months before, what had taken a whole gen¬
eration to build had been at its magical height. There was not
a Palestinian alive then on whose life the Movement, the Revolu¬
tion, the Resistance (as it was alternately called) had not etched
a deeper national sensibility and inner excitement. There was not
a Palestinian alive between the battle of Karameh in 1968 and
the siege of Beirut in 1982 who was not radically transformed at
the core. Our society had experienced a dynamic awakening at
its vital centers of query and apprehension. Our national folk troop
had found in music and dance a liberating function of culture
and was recreating dabki dances and the use of our musical in¬
struments, the yarghoul and the oud. The Palestine Film Institute
was projecting lucid imagery on the screen and showing how a
society, once held inert by its sense of refugeeism, could, through
national struggle, impose coherence on the botched landscape of its
everyday reality. The Palestine Research Center had amassed the
world’s largest library on Palestinian history, along with a large
number of artifacts, artworks, and old manuscripts dealing with our
culture. A whole institute employing hundreds was established to
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resurrect the ancient art of embroidery. Our poetry, fiction, belles
lettres, science, and system of education were enriched at their core
of meaning.
A new tense, a tense of reality brought to a higher pitch of subtlety,
was being added to the grammar of our cultural life, flourishing even
under the occupation. To elude the censorship and restrictions while
remaining responsive to the native sensibility, our writers were
compelled to sharpen and restructure their metaphors and allusions,
their use of image and style.
For two decades our Movement continued to release intense
energies of spirit, and exploit possibilities of perception that would
otherwise have remained fallow. We were growing up to see our¬
selves as inseparable from the national struggle, or separable from it
only by abstraction. Our struggle for statehood, for freedom, for self¬
definition was, in effect, our window on life. We knew that if the
Palestinian Revolution lost any of this energy, every Palestinian
would, in a vital and central way, become less Palestinian.
This process of renewal seemed active wherever we chose to pitch
our metaphorical tents, not only in Lebanon, but elsewhere.
Then, a walk through the Arab University district, where the
Movement’s offices and institutions were located, quickly proved—
to a native son who had grown up in the streets of Beirut—that
beyond the outward circumstance of anarchy lay a greater reality of
revolutionary dreams. And the streets teemed with Iranian revolu¬
tionaries out to topple the Shah, Turkish leftists training to form a
native underground, Egyptian Communists organizing to overthrow
Sadat, Sudanese poets hiding from Numeiri’s repressive regime,
Nicaraguan Sandinistas out to liberate their society from Somoza,
Arab Marxists who believed that armed struggle was the only instru¬
ment of liberation in the Arab world, Tunisian intellectuals coming to
grips with their inability to write a coherent theory of the “Arab
nation,” plus European Trotskyists, U.S. pacifists, English ideologues,
East German labor unionists—they were all there, not to mention all
manner of Arab-American hucksters who had a readymade formula
to “turn American public opinion” in our favor in return for this
amount of money, or to put out a publication or open a “lobbying
office”for that amount.
Though at times shrill and naive, our political values and the
subversive energy of our outsidedness as a nation-in-exile had
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thrown their shadow across the entire Arab world, the third world,
the Islamic world, and the socialist world.
Here in Algiers today, however, no one knows that our objective
reality, along with these same political values, has already turned on
its hinges.
To these Palestinians, and others like them around the world who
follow the ten-day proceedings from afar, this is just another
Palestine National Council session. A very important one to be sure,
since it has been called to reassemble our political ethos and redefine
our tactical direction in the wake of war, but nevertheless just
another gathering of our parliament-in-exile. With a long catalog of
ruin stretching behind us, all the way from the dismemberment of
our homeland in 1948 to the siege of Beirut just eight months before,
and with death sweeping over our history with such cruel frequency,
we have thought that the 1982 war was just another firestorm, from
which we will emerge intact, even purified. None suspect that each
one of us (for in national struggle history is Everyman’s affair) is
destined to suffer, however uniquely, some part of the tragedy and
dislocation that followed the siege of Beirut. None suspect that the
fall of movements, or causes, from grace could be accompanied by a
festive mood such as the one characterizing this sixteenth session of
the PNC. None suspect that the arrow of revolt we had shot twenty
years before has started its downward flight. And none understand
that, whether we like it or not, whether under duress or in agree¬
ment, we will have to hand over the leadership of this national
struggle—a struggle that has become so ingrained in our daily
lives—to another generation of Palestinians.
No. Made haughty by our grief over Sabra/Shatila and arrogant by
our ritual of resistance in Beirut, we remain unchanged, unyielding,
unmoved in our repose of illusion. A generation of Palestinians that,
in its impudence, expected, as we have become accustomed to
expecting, that the Arab world, and maybe the world beyond, owes us
a living. And support. And respect. And here we are, five thousand of
us, to reenact our private anguish on a public stage, unaware that the
last authority of reason in everything we had built and struggled for is
shattered. We strut about as if we still occupy center stage in the
international arena as heroes of a national struggle supported by a
consensus of humanity at all its international forums.
At the airport, I sit in the VIP lounge—for where else would men
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