Articles
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2008, page 70
Books
Does the Land Remember Me?: A Memoir of Palestine
By Aziz Shihab, Syracuse University Press, hardcover, 2007, 145 pp. List: $19.95; AET: $15.
Reviewed by Pat McDonnell Twair
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THIS FINAL BOOK by Palestinian-American journalist Aziz Shihab is bittersweet. It is filled with his sweet attachment to his boyhood and family, and bitterness over the shortcomings of his society which he observes have not improved during the previous three decades he lived in the U.S.
Shihab was summoned by relatives to sit at the deathbed of his 106-year-old mother in the West Bank village of Sinjil. What is surprising is that, as a journalist, he does not specify the date—1995—which the reader surmises only when Shihab mentions he was there at the time of the funeral for assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The author cleverly weaves together memories of his family being forced out of West Jerusalem in 1949, his remarkable success as a 19-year-old Reuters News Agency journalist, with his 1995 journeys through Jordan, Israel and the West Bank. Each relative he encounters is poor, and either wants to borrow money or asks for help to move to the U.S.
As Shihab bids farewell to relatives at the Allenby Bridge in 1995, he remembers escaping from his East Jerusalem home in 1949, as armed men from Brooklyn stormed and occupied it, and hugging his family goodbye one year later at Qalandia Airport as he departed for the U.S. with one suitcase and very, very little money.
After he crosses the Allenby Bridge to the Israeli side, an Officer Rafi takes great interest in Shihab when he learns he is a journalist in America.
“What would you write about me?” Officer Rafi asks.
“Where you came from and how you ended up here carrying a gun, taking men to small rooms and asking them to strip naked.”
After hours of waiting to be released, Shihab tells Officer Rafi he would like to see his mother while she is still alive.
“Why? Is she sick?” Rafi asks.
“Very sick. Dying.”
“O my God,” the Israeli exclaims. He calls for an Arab taxi, gives Shihab his luggage and says, “You should have told me before.” He hands Shihab a piece of paper with his phone number on it and remarks, “About that interview, call me.”
The title of the book refers to a plot of land Shihab bought 30 years earlier in Sinjil. Covering a hilltop with fig and olive trees on a little less than two terraced acres, its value now is comparable to property in downtown Dallas.
Shihab’s mother watered the land and tended the trees, hoping her son would return one day and build a stone house on the property. She sang to the land and taught her son to do the same so that it would remember him.
Now everyone was fearful he might sell the land to the Israelis. Never! But he was dismayed to discover that a nephew, Nayef, had returned from the U.S., used Shihab’s building license and erected a home on his uncle’s land.
Shihab confronts Nayef about settling on his property. The problem is not solved, but Shihab tells “anyone willing to listen” that he will not sell his land and someday he will build his home on it.
The author’s impatience with the state of his fellow Palestinians is reflected in his words to an old friend: “Either I have changed or my people did. We no longer think the same way. I truly dislike the exaggerations, the negative attitudes, the lies and the lack of self-examination and taking responsibility.”
Shihab is particularly upset when he is asked to give away a great-niece in marriage, only to discover that she is 15 and about to wed a man twice her age whom she has never seen. Never, in his wildest dreams, could he impose such a fate on his daughter or granddaughter.
One of the most touching scenes in Does the Land Remember Me? occurs when Shihab does look up Officer Rafi, whom he learns is an Iraqi Jew who would like to pay his respects to his bedridden mother. Shihab introduces Officer Rafi as Rafik, his relatives greet him and express their admiration for the Iraqis and the Scud missiles they showered on Israel in 1991.
The author then meets Officer Rafi’s family in Tel Aviv. They greet him warmly and voice their regrets for having been “fooled” by the Mossad into leaving Iraq decades earlier and their lives as second-class citizens in Israel.
Shihab particularly admires his mother’s view of what happens to Palestinians who go to the U.S.:
“Amirka is like a bottle with a big belly and a very thin neck. When you people go there, you are thin and hungry, and you go down that thin neck of the bottle easily. Then you get full of food and money, and you can’t get out of the belly of that bottle.”
This book leaves the reader wondering whether the author’s daughter, poet Naomi Shihab Nye, or son, Adlai, will one day return to Sinjil, reclaim their father’s land and build a stone house on it.
Pat McDonnell Twair is a free-lance writer based in Los Angeles.
