Taha, Dalia. “Writing the Truth.” Global Performance Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2024, https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv7n1a222
Dalia Taha
What Palestinians are enduring now is the continuation of a story, that of the Nakba. The destruction of Palestine, after 1948, and the exile of Palestinians.
For a century we watched our houses being demolished with the same look of regret, pain, and despair.
Over time we have learned to never trust ceilings and walls, knowing these can be torn down, knowing that one night we will be forced to snatch our kids and flee, before our home becomes our coffin.
For the same reason, however, we have also turned our homes into books.
If you look at the videos from Gaza, you see in the ruins of homes, the ruins of a city, also everywhere shards of text, slogans, graffiti.
Walking back home from school during the days of the first Intifada, which erupted in 1987, I read the political slogans written on the façade of houses in the village of Birzeit where I grew up. The writing was everywhere.
Our main work then was to smuggle words, sentences.
My father used to lament all the books in his library that his mother had to burn when the soldiers raided his village, searching our houses.
Political pamphlets were circulated in secrecy. You had to burn them or bury them in construction sites.
Imprisoned activists and leaders smuggled letters out of prison, written in small fonts, on small paper, small enough to roll them into small capsules. These capsules had to pass through so many hands before reaching us.
Graffiti writers used to take to the streets at night, under curfew and paint the walls with these utterances: political messages, statements, dates of strikes, actions to be undertaken.
The Israeli army would erase these writing, and arrest people caught doing it. Even carrying a bottle of paint spray would get you arrested.
This kind of writing makes a place unlike any other. It reminds you that we live in writing, no less than in homes. But it also tells you that writing is something dangerous.
Something dangerous precisely in so far as it wasn’t allowed to be said. In so far as it wasn’t supposed to reach us. It is this prohibition that makes of the encounter with a text a revelation, or disclosure.
I have always thought I’m fortunate that I live in a place where I can be the reader of such revelations. A reader of forbidden, dangerous texts.
We can’t find the truth on the front pages of our newspapers. We will not find it in what is taught in our classrooms. Nor in what is discussed in celebrated literary events.
The truth is what originates from the mouths of those who live in the margins. Those who ask us to suspect the innocence of the centre, The truth that for which you are imprisoned, tortured, and killed, or saying it.
These voices are the voices of people who did not cringe before the powerful. Did not betray the weak. The voices of people who have seen reality’s darkest face and were not terrified by it.
The voices of people who are trying to figure out what is right and resist what is wrong, who live by that knowledge. And who thereby demand that we respond. That we do something.
In that demand is their truth. Truth does not explain the world. It makes worlds. Perhaps we could say that it worlds, in the active sense.
This worlding is a defiance of the order of things, in so many ways. It is that which gives us the feeling that both past and future is always in the present. That over there is here. That big is small.
It is the feeling that I get when I see in the images from Gaza tenderness and love. Small children speaking to bundles wrapped in white gauze. “Habibi my brother! He’s my heart! Habibi my sweet brother!”
Doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, street vendors, journalists, cradling small children covered in blood, becoming for a moment mothers and fathers, repeating the same words. “Habibi,” “Don’t be afraid,” “I am here”.
Even if done in a dark room, in a lonely corner of the world, we are never alone when reading and writing.
As Palestinians our greatest writing project happened collectively.
*
Following the Nakba, Palestinians collected testimonies from Palestinians from residents from every Palestinian city, village, or Bedouin community.
I like to think of this project as Palestine’s greatest writing project. It was written collectively, by so many voices. Voices that should have never reached us.
The people interviewed were from all walks of life: peasants, city dwellers, theater goers, shepherds, teachers, mothers, tailors, fishermen, factory owners, workers, writers.
No testimony was more important than another. The testimony of a woman living in the smallest and most remote village was as important as the testimony of a political leader in Haifa.
Missing any story, was missing an irreplaceable part of life in Palestine before the Nakba
Personas from all over the world featured in these testimonies. A Lebanese teacher, a Serbian worker, a Yemeni unionist.
In attempting to write their story, Palestinians wrote the stories of everyone, the story of the world, the story of people who lived and travelled and immigrated.
The Muslims, the Armenian, the Syrian, the Serbians, the Lebanese, the Jordanians, the Germans, the Jews, the Iraqis, the Yemenis.
From the small rooms of dreary camps where Palestinians were expected to die along with their story and fall into oblivion they wrote something that is more than a novel. It is more than a novel because it is still written.
While Israel was dictating a story of a land for one people, thereby erasing all the other stories Palestine had to tell, Palestinians were writing a story for everyone.
What happened in this writing project is what distinguishes great writing. It’s writing that pulls to pieces the imagination of colonial order: a world of immutable identities. A writing that imagines a world of multitudes.
Its truth is that there are many truths, its story that of many lives. It’s the story of a world in which no life is more sacred than another.
This is what we fight for. This is what Palestinian writing is. It is that which we have instead of a home. It is that which we have instead of a world that is not ours. It is that with which we make a world. A world for everyone.
*
Poems translated from the Arabic by Mariam Hijjawi
You’re not on the list of most-spoken languages,
yet most of humanity speaks you:
those who jumped off roofs, women in mental asylums,
entire nations kidnapped/stolen from their continent into ships’ hulls,
adolescent girls in correctional institutions,
sullen passengers on a bus leaving Iraq Al-Manshieh towards the unknown.
You are all we have to converse with the hills,
with the passing clouds.
Without you, plays would never say
enough, and we’d never stand before
paintings, waiting for them to open their
doors to us, to enter us through our wounds.
Without you we’d never have known
we could talk to ourselves.
You are there with our friends in their photographs,
with you they finally appear, as they truly are,
strangers. You are the very last of what remains of a
protest, closing in on the scene for ever,
hiding in the trees, leaving us breathless.
You are what we’d hear if we really listened to history.
You are what we’d find at the heart of crowded cities,
on faces buried in their phones,
in their hesitant glances at others.
Silence, we don’t build graves,
these are your stony tongues,
reaching out from the window of nothingness,
Mumbling the years of birth and death,
as if they were your favourite songs.
The book you were reading,
is now on your bedside table.
In it are the lines you drew
under the phrases that moved you,
those you probably read and reread,
taken by them,
those which upon reading,
you put the book down,
and paced the room.
You were, for a week,
submerged in this book,
taking it with you wherever you went,
reading alone on your bed,
splayed out on the sofa,
voices of family members
coming in from the other room,
and every time you raised your head
you found yourself facing the world
at your window, staring at the sky,
ready, at last, to converse with the hills.
Each book gives you a language with which
you can speak to a thing in this world,
things you hadn’t yet known were there:
the pores of the trees,
foxes’ snouts,
sadness on human faces.
Look how beautiful you are when you read,
how gentle you seem as you let
a continent conquer you
when you put your book down
on the bedside table,
like you’re giving the world back
a thing of the world.
Standing in awe, facing the hills,
like the book has also just returned to the world,
something belonging to the world.
The last poem you read on your phone – while it lit your face –
on the bus coming from Jerusalem,
standing, leaning on the doors,
your bag between your feet,
your phone in your hand.
The poem you are thinking of now,
while you cross Al-Manara Square,
your hands in your pockets,
your scarf covering half your face.
The poem you read first thing in the morning,
as soon as you woke up,
before the world accosted you.
The poem you read in your bed,
during the second Intifada,
while tanks besieged the Muqata’a*,
before you knew anything of the world.
The poem you read one hot summer,
in a strange city in which you met no one.
The poem you read while reading another book.
The poem you read on your bed one night,
after your cellmates had fallen asleep.
The poem that knows something about you you don’t.
The poem you don’t quite remember,
but remember how you walked through Nablus afterwards,
and the world was shrouded in mystery.
The poem you read during the war,
it didn’t assuage you
but it did, for some moments,
distract you.
The poem you found while leafing, bored,
through a book at your friends’ house
for a lack of anything to say.
The poem your grandfather continued to recite
even after he’d lost his mind.
The poem you read thousands of times.
The poem you wanted to share with everyone you knew.
The poem you’re thinking of now,
while crossing Al-Manara Square,
your hands in your pockets,
your scarf covering half your face,
the trees captivating you,
not knowing where you were going,
like the frost,
drifting and alone,
walking,
drinking in the fog.
* PA Headquarters in Ramallah
There’s a truck loaded with books standing at the border, waiting for Israeli border officials to let it through. They will go through each book. A book containing the words “Lebanon”, “Beirut”, or “Syria” will be torn up. This, the owner of the book store tells me. I know that it happens but am still enjoying him telling me. I ask him to tell me more. Always more, enjoying that we can always make conversation about the ways in which the Israelis are trying to kill us. So, listen to me now;
It is true that we all look defeated in this stricken, crushed and battered city. It is true that we don’t look as if we’re about to set the world on fire.
It is true you do not see anger on our faces.
But each time we meet, in tiny rooms, in cafés, when we run into someone by chance on the street and during a taxi ride that does not take more than five minutes, we curse everything. Look how innocent we seem from afar. Fill your eyes with our innocence. You might never suspect anything of two people standing in a small bookstore, reached by a staircase that leads down from the street, engaged in what appears to be a passing conversation. But believe me, this is what it looks like when a revolution is being planned.
We recruit each other every day
We don’t collect names
We don’t make lists
We exchange quick glances and keep moving
Do you remember your first night in this world?
It was not your first night in Kinshasa, or Buenos Aires,
in Cairo or Jerusalem.
You may have been born near a skyscraper
or in a quiet village by the river
but it was your first night in the world.
Neither villages nor cities bordered your birthplace,
neither countries nor continents
but planets and galaxies.
Your name was chosen months ago
and people are already describing you:
angry, calm, pensive, wise …
But you are a strange creature,
closer to outer space than you are to us.
We cannot overcome
the awkwardness of those first minutes
of a guest’s arrival
by asking about the journey.
Whether we waited for you in a delivery room
or found you in the street,
we don’t know, exactly
how you got here.
And even though we’ve laid out for you
clean towels and sheets,
we’re unable to say, make yourself at home.
We still do not feel so ourselves.
We behave like we own it
but we are, like you,
guests in this world.
This is a good moment to remember that.
And this is your first night
on the face of the earth.
And you weren’t here yet
when it rained this morning,
yet the grass is still wet.
Everything will later repeat itself;
your fist will open and close, open and close.
You will begin to tell night from day,
then you will start to stare
at people’s faces.
Somehow,
even science does not understand how,
you will say your first words,
and adults will ask you to say them again.
And for some reason,
it will be wonderful.
Later, the river and the skyscrapers will have names,
and the fast underground train.
You will think, then, that you own this world,
own things in it
like your sister
or your children.
and you will be able to wage wars
and to uproot forests.
But still,
no matter how hard-hearted you will become,
there will be moments in your life,
when something will move you
and remind you of your first home;
the sight of hills, for example.
But that will come in its own time.
Now you are fragile and wonderful
and everyone studies your face.
This is your first night on the face of the earth
and it feels like Christmas,
so they treat you like a gift.
But if we say it enough times:
This is your first night on the face of the earth,
This is your first night on the face of the earth,
we will understand
that you are a traveler
from a faraway place
just arrived at an inn.
It’s true that there is a storm outside
but the door of the inn is always open
and you and the storm
together will enter
Together –
you and the storm
They stand among us like ticking bombs,
the trees in our city.
Too quiet, as if they had sworn not to speak.
So quiet, they might just be acting.
Nevertheless, on Library Street,
I walk beneath them unconcerned,
deep in my thoughts,
while their roots slowly extend underground,
quietly setting a trap.
The trees are uncanny,
not because they are saying
something we don’t understand
but because we don’t know who
they are communicating with.
Look how they seem to be smuggling weapons,
their branches barely touching.
Always suspicious looking
as if they had just stopped speaking;
like two people who go quiet
the moment you enter a room.
An army with its own secret codes,
advancing without even appearing to move.
So frightening these trees,
look at them, friend
with your heart, not your eyes.
The trees are a warning sign,
standing before us
like a messenger who has just delivered news
and is waiting for our response.
And as we have done before with all messengers,
we cut off their heads
There are people we will never know.
They may walk ahead us in the street for some minutes.
That will also be brief.
In the end the man with the trousers too big for him
will take a different path.
And the girl in red shoes will
turn right,
and open the iron gate
leading to her house.
They will disappear in the riddle that is their life.
And even though our eyes did not meet,
there is something missing now,
as if a character in a film had vanished mid scene.
Maybe at this moment,
while we are without a future, without a past,
I can point my question at you like a pistol:
What if your life was mine?
Your cropped hair,
your oversized trousers,
that jacket flapping in the wind.
I stare at people
when walking behind them.
Mere minutes,
but time enough for me to notice this
miracle we call a living being.
And trivial things,
like the weight of a school bag on the back of an adolescent girl
suddenly become a mystery,
and a reason for me to follow her,
trying to understand what it means to be alive,
and walk on two feet,
to forgive others,
and be forgiven by them,
to be you and not me.
Look at you.
The way you have turned up your trouser legs.
The medallion hanging from your school bag.
Your running shoes.
Things that do not necessarily make you more beautiful
but they are what people will notice
if they look at the last photograph taken of you.
You are absolutely unknown to me
but I know what it is like
to have an entire world within you
that no one knows anything about.
The pleasure of that,
to be alive
and to wonder about the others around you.
To be alive,
and to not understand what that means exactly.
An adolescent in a short, crumpled school dress
turns towards her house,
and opens the iron gate
leading to her house.
No one knows what she is thinking
but someone has just put
her washed shirts in a drawer.