The Childhood of a Palestinian

Author: زياد خدّاش

Why does the Palestinian writer rush to write about his childhood in its simple details? Why does he seem so eager to do so? Whenever I read a piece of literature by a Palestinian, my first question is always: I enjoyed what I read from you, but when will you write about your childhood? He immediately responds, I am actually writing it, I am almost done. This was done by Mahmoud Shuqair, Khalil Sakakini, Ibrahim Jawhar, Ibrahim Nasrallah, Emile Habibi, Mourid Barghouti, Ismail and Tammam Shmout, Fadwa Tuqan, Muhammad Ali Tahah, Faisal Hourani, and many others.

The book in my hands is by the Jerusalemite writer and intellectual, Jamil Salhout, titled (Thorns of the Wilderness), published by the Everything Library in Haifa, in a medium format with approximately 200 pages. On the back cover, Salhout writes: (I can say that I and the majority of my generation lived despite the laws of nature, as the mortality rate among children was very high, yet we lived to be witnesses to a reality in which we had no choices). Faisal Hourani wrote about why he wrote his childhood memoirs: (I realized that what I lived was not just personal memories; it was part of the history of a nation trying to remember itself in the face of erasure). As for the poet Mourid Barghouti, he wrote: (I did not write my childhood memoirs to talk about myself, but to tell the reader this is how we lived and this is how the land was torn from our souls before it was taken from our hands).

In the writings of European writers and thinkers, the reason for writing memoirs seems completely different from that of the Palestinian. The American novelist Henry Miller wrote his memoirs in the form of famous novels in the 1920s, not to fend off an attempt at erasure by a foreign invader, but in search of the essence of the idea of time. The existential question was often the reason for this interest among Western writers. A clearer example is the experience of the French novelist Marcel Proust as he wrote (In Search of Lost Time), not to preserve a memory threatened with death and cancellation, but to reflect on the idea of time and enjoy digging into a lost treasure called childhood.

In his book (Thorns of the Wilderness), Jamil Salhout returns to the beginning of childhood in the village of Sawahra, in the Jerusalem district, born in 1949, and the context of this childhood is very well known. It was just a year after the occupation of Palestine, and the war was still ongoing. How can we imagine this context? Salhout writes: (There was nothing in our childhood that delighted the heart, for our fathers who witnessed the end of the Ottoman era and the accompanying ignorance and injustices suffered greatly in their childhood, at the end of the global war, until they fell under British occupation, which tried to beautify its name as a mandate instead of an occupation. Thus, our fathers were victims of a reality imposed on them; they did not live their childhood, youth, or even their old age).

There is, therefore, an other-centered narrative that Salhout writes in his book, a narrative of the childhood of his parents and grandparents, a narrative that is certainly not as detailed as his own, but it reveals the extent of the tragedy of his people shared across generations, as if it is the fate of the Palestinian to live a devastated childhood.