Howl

Considering the fact that our literature workshop at Birzeit almost didn’t take place at all, it was a real success. We’d applied for a grant to teach a workshop to Palestinian university students through a fund administered by the US Department of Education and the State Department’s Public Diplomacy program. Despite the contacts that the consul in East Jerusalem had set up with our colleagues at Birzeit, we had a difficult time making arrangements. The department chair was away for the summer and didn’t respond to our emails as we tried to confirm our plan. Fortunately, David knew some people in other departments who connected us to Ahlam, a junior member of the English faculty. It turned out to be a perfect match—she was enthusiastic to have us come and meet with her students. She’d studied English modernism in America on a Fulbright. If she hadn’t drummed up support for us, I doubt it would have happened.

We finally figured out a time that would work for all of us, though when it came, it turned out to be the same day that an American diplomat was visiting Ramallah and the whole place was shut down for a general strike in protest. We told our driver that we wanted to go anyway.

When we arrived, we found two military jeeps parked at the entrance to the university. Students were throwing rocks at the vehicles while soldiers fired rubber bullets back at them. We waited with other cars as the scene unfolded. Then, for no reason, the army sped off with sirens flashing. (Read More)

Lessons in Morphology

It was a strange but mutually beneficial arrangement. I needed to travel north through a number of checkpoints to visit a town that had borne the brunt of the occupation and I needed to get back to Ramallah at a decent hour so as to see friends before I left the next day. They had a service taxi for hire, but little business and few customers. I hired the taxi for a day, and the driver asked if his best friend and his best friend’s son could come along. I said, “The more the merrier.” As we left Ramallah, we passed by the PA’s headquarters, the place where Arafat had been confined for the last three years of his life. They showed me where the prison had been, where the television station was and so on. Much of it was still rubble, even though the Israeli attacks were now years old or more. We left al-Bira and the driver startled me by saying it was good to leave Ramallah. “It belongs to the Tunisians and the Americans who returned to build their villas and play.” He pointed north, offered me a cigarette and said, “Welcome to Palestine.”

This then was to be my “tour” of the occupied territories, and these three, my tour guides. I asked them question after question: What’s that? What’s the name of that village? Where does that dirt road lead to? What kind of trees are those? What kind of grain is that? What’s that building? What’s over there? Why is the asphalt so bad here, why is it better back on the road we were just on? I must have asked hundreds of questions, but my guides did not seem annoyed by them. They got a kick out of my linguistic struggles, I think. For me, it was my first time hearing the dialect of the villages, where, as everyone knows, the letter K disappears to be replaced by a CH sound. Though I came here to tour the landscape of the territories, I was now intrigued their idioms. (Read More)