Reality of displacement

Suad Amiry relives the agony and pain inflicted on Palestinians during and after the 1948 war.

At her Tedx talk, Suad Amiry said, “We become prisoners of some things of which we have not made a choice of in the first place.” This thought resonates throughout  Golda Slept Here , which relives the agony and pain inflicted on Palestinians during and after the 1948 war. Amiry walks the reader through tragic personal histories, focusing on the fact that, when the British left Palestine, the Palestinians felt “frail, dispossessed, dehumanised. They mourned the larger-than-life losses. They mourned the loss of a home, of a garden, an orchard, a field, a homeland.”

The raw emotion of loss makes the prose poetic, yet stark. Amiry does not philosophise on a culture being lost like termite-ridden furniture turning into dust; she simply puts it out there without the histrionics that a writing of loss can easily yield to. There are poignant lines of how each of the protagonists have lived with the reality of their own paradise being lost, as  “a new nation remembered, an old one forgotten,” of how her parents were “grazed by bullets, pierced by direct hits,” as they witnessed this loss and the creation of a new diaspora.

Each protagonist faces life and the Israeli soldiers with an incredible courage, equating the cruelties meted out by both. The story of how her mother Siham barters stuffed vegetables for cosmetics with women in Jerusalem touches upon a delicate reality of displacement of a people as does her father’s rule that each member of the family should tell a joke/story at the dining table.

There is the gut-wrenching story of the famous architect Andoni Baramki and his feelings of being homeless and rootless as he stands in the queue to enter the new Museum that was once his home. Later he is told by an

aghab judge that he is absentee landlord and that his house is an absentee property under the Israeli law.

Huda and Nahil’s story is a commentary of loss and ways of coping with it. The fact that Golda Meir lived in an Arabic home as Prime Minister of Israel is a reflection of the unfairness of the present. At the end of the episode, Huda is imprisoned for visiting her family home. Teta Ayesheh, Farid and Bakiza’s story is a pathetic rendition of how leaving one’s home destroys the core of being alive. They are finally thrown out of their beautiful home in West Jerusalem by an Arabic woman who unleashes her dog on them.

Amiry raises, in all rawness of emotion, a question: “Palestine, will you ever set us free?” The imprisonment continues. A homeland has become a handcuff.

Golda Slept Here;Suad Amiry, Women Unlimited, Rs.300.