Meet Me in Gaza Page 4

  An evening or two later, I am in my apartment finishing my dinner, wishing I had listened to Saida and gone easier on the fil-fil. My mouth is on fire and I’m gulping bottled water like a thirsty crow, letting it trickle straight down my chin and neck. Wiping my mouth, I go into the kitchen, turn on the tap and let the water run, to see if it might be OK for boiling. But it smells slightly dank, as usual, so I use more bottled water to make a brew, then settle down in front of the television. We have electricity right now, so I can watch the news on Al Jazeera International.

  The news fascinates me because Gaza is always in it, and for the first time I can judge for myself how it reflects day-to-day realities inside a ‘war zone’. So far it reminds me, more than anything, of a trailer for the kind of action movies that Muhammad the driver watches – brief clips of drama, violence and tragedy, all strung together by a narrator with a deep, grave voice.

  ‘The only power plant in the Gaza Strip is scheduled to shut down in one hour.’

  As the TV camera slowly pans across the brightly lit news studio and settles on the Al Jazeera newsreader – he’s dapper as a game show host – I remember my colleague Shadi warning me that Israel has now stopped all deliveries of industrial fuel to Gaza, and the power plant is spent. The newsreader opens his mouth, but just as he’s about to speak to camera, there is a soft pop and the screen blinks shut like an eye.

  I am in a dark apartment on a dark street in a city with no power. The blackness is thick as sauce. The small knot of anxiety pebbles in my guts. Why the fuck did I choose to come and live here? But there’s nothing to do right now, except reach for my matches.

  Someone knocks at my door.

  ‘It’s open.’

  I am four floors up and don’t bother locking my front door, except at night, and even then I sometimes forget. It’s bombs that worry me here, not burglars.

  ‘They shut the power station and I want to see if you are OK.’

  It’s my landlord’s son, Ali, who lives with his wife just across the landing. Sometimes he and I sit and smoke a cigarette or two together.

  ‘I’m fine. Come on in.’

  Ali is carrying a candle. The tip of his cigarette glows red.

  ‘Come – look out of your kitchen window at our city,’ he says.

  I follow him into my kitchen, touching the walls to make sure they’re still there. We stand at the window together, gazing across the city, where a sea of tiny candles are flickering, as though we are in a ship slowly sinking beneath the waves.

  sun and moon letters

  At work the next morning I am asked to draft an appeal to the ‘international community’, urging them to pressurise Israel into immediately resuming fuel supplies to Gaza. Seven hundred thousand people are now without mains electricity. Gaza City’s biggest hospital – al-Shifa – has patients on kidney dialysis, and premature babies in incubators, whose lives depend on generators for which the hospital has no spare parts and barely any fuel. Bakeries have shut down because there’s no fuel for the ovens. The Gaza Ministry of Religious Affairs is appealing for emergency supplies of concrete for a new cemetery, saying it is running short of space to bury the dead.

  I spend an hour at my desk, drafting the appeal. Whoever this amorphous international community actually is – and I’m really not sure – it has boycotted Gaza and the Gazans ever since Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006. So I don’t feel too hopeful. It’s a bit like writing an appeal to God.

  When I look up from my screen, Shadi is standing in the doorway, smoking.

  ‘I came to see if you are OK,’ he says.

  ‘Thanks – but I’m fine. You OK too?’

  ‘We are used to this in Gaza.’ He offers me his grey, mocking-the-situation smile.

  Shadi is always looking out for me, always inviting me for coffee with him and his friends at the al-Deira Hotel, and giving me a lift home in his ‘best-in-the-West’ old banger afterwards. I’ve been to his home too, and shared supper with his wife and three children. His eldest son is a teenage rapper, his wife is a therapist. Among his family, Shadi seems somewhat mellower; he sprawls on the couch and slows down for a little while – until his phone rings and he immediately fumbles for his car keys. Wherever I see him, he’s always deliberately and defiantly cheerful. But this morning his face is drained.

  We publish the appeal that afternoon. Then we all go home. Twenty-four hours later Israel allows limited shipments of fuel to enter Gaza and the power plant partially reopens. But the acute sense of uncertainty still grips the city. I can almost feel Gaza holding its breath, like a bolshy teenager with a broken face, hoping his father’s mood will be better tonight.

  When the electricity has come back on, I decide to make more use of my time off work and take Arabic lessons. Joumana, the secretary at the Centre, offered me Arabic lessons when I first arrived, but I didn’t take her up on it. But now my lack of Arabic is really starting to cramp my style. I want to hold my own with my new friends and their families – like Saida’s mother, Hind – and to meet Gazans who don’t speak English. So I ask Joumana if I can arrange these lessons and she gives me the number for Mounir, the ustaz, or teacher, that the Centre employs to tutor its foreign staff. I’m the only foreigner at the Centre right now, but there have been a string of others before me. I call Ustaz Mounir and we arrange a lesson at my apartment after work on Sunday.

  Mounir arrives bang on time. I buzz him through the gate, but it’s a good few minutes before he knocks at my fourth-floor front door. When I open the door, he’s outside, breathing heavily.

  ‘Eighty-eight stairs. You live at the top of your building.’

  He doesn’t look, or sound, very happy to be here. I invite him inside, offer him an armchair and ask if he’d like some tea. ‘Yes, please,’ he replies without smiling.

  His blue suit is slightly too big for him, his eyes are very dark and his gaze hard. I serve us both tea infused with sage and watch him spoon three heaped sugars into his glass mug. Resting the mug on the coffee table, Mounir unpacks sheets of exercise papers and a large notebook from his briefcase.

  ‘I have been teaching Arabic to foreigners for more than fifteen years.’ He sounds righteous as a judge. ‘Have you studied our language at all?’

  ‘I had some lessons while I was living in Ramallah.’

  ‘So what can you say?’

  Clearing my throat, I start speaking. But I’m immediately self-conscious, stumbling over words and phrases that I’m familiar with, because this feels like an exam. I pause, lose my train of thought, then pick up the thread again. I feel myself blushing. Oh, shit.

  Mounir holds his pen poised but writes nothing, merely watches and listens intently, asking me to repeat some words. Then he is silent. I look down at the carpet, which is red and brown and swirly, total 1970s kitsch. I’m not sure I really want these lessons.

  ‘Your problem is that your first Arabic teacher was an amateur,’ he states. ‘So we are going to have to start right back at the beginning.’

  My first Arabic teacher – Sharif – was from Gaza. He is Saida’s cousin, but I met him while I was in Ramallah. He was studying journalism at Beir Zeit University, just outside Ramallah, and teaching Arabic to foreigners like me to support himself. Sharif left Gaza in 2005, after securing a permit from the Israeli authorities to travel to Ramallah for just twenty-four hours. By the time I met him, he had been in the West Bank for two years without a permit. This left him in the surreal, and lousy, predicament of effectively being an illegal immigrant in his own country; at constant risk of being stopped at an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank and sent straight back to Gaza.12 He travelled the few miles between Ramallah and Beir Zeit University every day, but never any further.

  ‘I escaped from one prison, and here I am inside another!’ he laughed bitterly during one of our lessons.13 He was 22 years old – though he looked about 16 – and missed his family badly, but couldn’t risk visiting them because he was afraid Israel
would not allow him to leave Gaza again, and then the education his parents had saved for would be ruined. Sharif didn’t want me to go to Gaza. He said it was a prison filled with broken people and shattered dreams.

  Mounir is pulling no punches about his opinion of my first teacher. But he’s right. Sharif was an amateur. Glancing at his wristwatch, Mounir puts down his pen.

  ‘Excuse me, I have to pray now,’ he says.

  I nod and sit back on the couch as he unlaces his shoes, places them neatly beside the chair, kneels, then prostrates himself on the carpet, softly praying aloud. He appears completely at ease, worshipping in front of me as the muezzins’ call echoes through the streets. There is literally a mosque on every corner of Gaza and I often see men unfurling prayer mats and kneeling to pray on street corners.

  A few minutes later, his prayers finished and shoes re-laced, Mounir sits back down and for the first time he smiles at me.

  ‘Your colleagues at the Centre tell me they call you Louisa Laziza,’ he says. ‘Do you know what it means?’

  I do. My nickname at work is a gentle play on words. Laziza means sweet in Arabic and rhymes with my name, so it’s stuck. I like it. Compared with most of my previous nicknames, it’s a gem.

  Now we are both smiling and the atmosphere between us feels easier. Mounir asks me again, more gently this time, to speak in Arabic. At first I still stumble, searching for the correct words in the right order, but with him prompting me I slowly describe a recent evening in a nearby café with some friends, and walking home afterwards just as the power went off for the night. With no light pollution and no moon, the stars shimmered like a mirror shattered across the black sky.

  He is a good listener, my new teacher. I relax, and then of course the words begin to flow a little. But soon, glancing at his wristwatch again, he says he has to go. Gathering his things, he pauses by the door for a moment and offers me his hand – a formal but friendly gesture. We shake briefly, standing well apart. But we have scheduled our next lesson. I’ve even asked for homework.

  ‘I think you are interested in learning something about our life here,’ he says, looking me in the eye for the first time. ‘If you study well, I will open the doors of our beautiful language to you. And you will hear stories that will amaze you.’

  Palestinians speak Levantine Arabic, a dialect of modern standard Arabic. The Levant, ‘country of the sunrise’, is a wide strip of the eastern Mediterranean coast, now divided between Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

  In Ramallah, local West Bank Palestinians crack jokes about Gazan peasants with rough accents (and about men from Nablus in the northern West Bank being closet gays and those half-wits from Hebron [in Arabic, al-Khalil] down in the southern West Bank). Gaza lies just 25 miles from the southern West Bank as the crow flies, but the local accent here is tinged with inflections from neighbouring Egypt.

  Ustaz Mounir tells me what he thinks. ‘We Gazans do have a slight accent from our Egyptian neighbour,’ he says during one of our lessons. ‘But our Arabic is softer than the Egyptians’, more like the language of the Lebanese and the Syrians.’

  Arabs are Semitic people, originally from the Arabian peninsula and its surrounding area. In some ancient Semitic languages, ‘Arab’ can mean the desert, a raven, a nomad or the verb to mingle. Arabic, the language of the Arabs, is the most widely spoken living Semitic language, its history predating Islam by centuries. Inscriptions of Arabic texts from at least 200 BC have been unearthed in Saudi Arabia. The earliest known Arabic literature was poetry, and the pre-Islamic poets included the Su‘luk – rebellious, ragged vagabonds who wandered the deserts of northern Arabia reciting verses in praise of solitude and railing against the conservative confines of tribal life. Some Su‘luk began their recitals with a mournful ‘standing at the ruins’ prelude, evoking a beloved’s scorched desert home. Many of the ancient Semitic languages eventually died out or became merely ceremonial. But from the mid-seventh century AD onwards, Arabic flourished alongside the dramatic rise of Islam.

  The different histories of Gaza have been laid one over the other, like layers of rich sediment. It’s easily forgotten, but before the Muslims swept in, most Gazans were actually Christian. And before Christianity they were pagans, with domed temples across the city dedicated to deities like Dagon, whom they worshipped first as a symbol of fertility, later as the god of rain, grain and fishing. Christianity arrived in Gaza in the first century AD – after all, Jerusalem was just up the road, so to speak. But it wasn’t until the end of the fourth century that Gazans began taking the religion seriously, following the arrival of a zealous, middle-aged Orthodox Greek bishop called Porphyry,14 who obtained an imperial decree to destroy Gaza’s eight major pagan sites.

  When the Christians torched the main Pagan temple with pitch, sulphur and fat, it blazed for days. Afterwards, beating back the pagans with clubs and staves, they used the blackened temple stones to pave the city streets and built a church over the heathen ruins – where, to this day, Gaza’s small Eastern Orthodox community congregates every Sunday. Though some Gazans were converted by these violent tactics (or faked it to save their own skins), many Gazans despised this pious new religion being forced down their throats. Pagans rioted inside the city, slaughtered groups of priests and nuns and fed parts of the bloated, stinking corpses to the local pigs. The surviving Christians were undeterred; persecution was part of their mission. How do you defeat men for whom death is an act of faith?

  Mark the Deacon, a thin-lipped monk who arrived in Gaza with the Greek bishop, came upon local pagans who doggedly refused to accept Christianity. He described them boldly worshipping a life-size marble idol in one of the city squares. It was, he said, the ‘image of a nude woman, with her pudenda exposed – [and] held in high esteem by all the citizens, especially the women who kindled lights and burned incense in its honour.’15 This voluptuous beauty, with her rope of golden hair, was Venus Anadyomene, ‘Venus Rising from the Sea’, the pagan goddess of love and sexuality, who shared her devotees’ dreams and inspired women to find good men as husbands. Mark the deacon was having none of it. He stoutly declared that when a holy crucifix was held in front of the naked idol, she shattered to smithereens.

  Back in the present, Mounir has suggested two Arabic lessons a week. And he does indeed take me right back to the beginning, guiding me through the three vowels and twenty-eight consonants of the modern standard Arabic alphabet. The consonants are divided into two groups of fourteen, known as sun and moon letters. Basically, sun letters assimilate with the preceding article and moon letters do not. Mounir is a grammar fanatic. When I groan, he shakes his head.

  ‘If you do not understand the grammar, Louisa, you will never grasp this language. You think it is hard but it is not. Arabic is pure logic. Learn the logic.’

  But he sometimes smiles now during our lessons. And I do my homework because I like the challenge and am determined, damn it, to crack the grammar. I enjoy Arabic because I love the way it sounds and the way that Arabs feast on words the same way they feast on their food. Arabic is poetry; how else do you describe a language which has a word – m’nowrah – to describe a woman who is shining; and a name like Bassem, meaning ‘he who is so often smiling’?

  But Gazan Arabic is salty too; tinged, like every aspect of life here, by the Mediterranean. Mounir surprises me one lesson by asking whether I know any local insults.

  ‘If you ever have trouble on the streets with shabab, you might need a few strong words,’ he says with the merest spark of a twinkle in his hard eyes. Shabab are youths, and in Gaza, like everywhere else in the world, they loiter, spit and curse on street corners. There are a lot of Gazan shabab (the median age here is just 17 and three-quarters of the population are aged under 25), but they rarely bother me. I know some filthy Arabic words by now, but censure myself, telling Mounir I’m familiar with just one or two of the classic insults, such as ‘Ishrab min al-bahr’ – Go drink from the sea – which basically means, ‘G
o to hell!’16

  He nods. ‘Yes, we’ve been saying this in Gaza for so many years. But my advice, if any of the shabab are bothering you, is to tell them “Igliboh” and I’m sure then they will leave you alone.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Capsize!’

  My twice-weekly lessons with Mounir are a mixture of grammar and conversation. Despite being almost the same age, we are in many ways polar opposites. He is a conservative, religious, married Muslim in his early forties, and father to five children. I’m in my late thirties, unmarried and nomadic, with no children and no orthodox religion. But we are both curious people who ask a lot of questions and we always find lots to talk about.

  Mounir is proud of the differences between Arab and Western culture.

  ‘We Arabs are not Westerners and I don’t think we should imitate Western culture or be expected to imitate it,’ he says. He is passionate about the communality of Arab culture, and traditional male respect for modesty among women, and believes all Muslim women should cover their hair. His wife is a muhajaba (a Muslim woman who covers her head and most of her body) and he says she sometimes chooses to wear the niqab, or face veil, too.

  ‘Before I was engaged to my wife, I told her parents that I could not marry a woman who didn’t cover her head in public,’ he tells me during one of our lessons. ‘Her parents told me they could not allow their daughter to marry a man who doesn’t go to the mosque regularly to pray. We were all in agreement, including my wife. I attend the mosque and she never goes outside without her head covered, out of respect for herself and her religion.

  ‘You know, I have visited your country, Louisa. I was in London about five years ago – and I was not impressed with the way that men treat women in Great Britain. I think many of the British men do not respect women. The freedoms that you have in England and Europe are the freedoms that men want you to have for their own benefit – and what kind of freedom is that, really?’