BADIL

The prospect of writing My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century filled me with a fairly cavernous sense of dread.

VOICES: PALESTINIAN WOMEN NARRATE DISPLACEMENT

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I had my head on somebody’s lap, and I remember looking at the stars. The world seemed so big – like leaving your home which is small and structured, and going into the big wide world. It was very scary. But at the same time, as a little child, even then, looking at the sky and the stars, I was wondering what was going to happen.

Suad Andraos – exiled as a child from Jaffa

Since high school, writing has been my way of dealing with crises and with the imponderables of the ebb and flow of life. Together with gardening, it has been my psychotherapy. Whenever a major issue weighed heavily on my mind, whenever I wanted to maximize the pleasure from an experience I enjoyed, to savor the aftertaste of an achievement or to lick the wounds of a defeat, I would steal time from my busy schedule to sit in a quiet corner and write. I would read each piece I wrote after I had finished it and then I would put it away never to look at it again.

As Israeli jets began the aerial bombardment of the already besieged Gaza Strip last December, the Israeli film Waltz With Bashir, directed by Ari Folman, opened across North America.

 The film is an animated story of the filmmaker himself who, years after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, is compelled to look into his past when an old friend tells him that he suffers from nightmares about his army service, making Ari realize that he remembers almost nothing about that time in his life. He sets about contacting soldiers from his unit to piece together snippets of memory of their participation in the invasion. The film depicts the invasion of Lebanon in graphic animated detail, culminating in Ari’s belated recollection of his unit’s participation in the Sabra and Shatila massacre. The images of the massacre in the film were all too similar to those we saw on the news of the horrors inflicted on the people of Gaza, and reviews were quick to point out the timely release of the film.

Towards the end of Emile Habiby’s novel The Secret Life of Sa’eed, the pessoptimistic protagonist looks out the window of the police vehicle disappearing him to prison. Sa’eed notices that they are driving through the plain of Ibn Amir, which he tells the Israeli police.

“’No, it’s the Yizrael plain!’” corrects the policeman. This is just one of many scenes in Habiby’s absurdist novel that illustrates the disappearance of people and places in 1948 Palestine. Elia Suleiman’s 1996 film Chronicles of a Disappearance, in a style similar to Habiby’s also makes use of this theme of Palestinian disappearance. It makes sense that one of Palestine’s leading novelists and one of its leading filmmakers would illustrate the absurdity of disappearance as an existential crisis for Palestinians since the Nakba given the reality disappearance plays in daily life.