Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture Page | Extract from Out of Place

After the fall of Palestine my father set about in earnest -- right until the end of his life -- to get my mother a US document of some kind, but failed to do so. As his widow, she tried and also failed until the end of hers. Stuck with a Palestine passport that was soon replaced with a laissez-passer, my mother travelled with us as a gently comic embarrassment. My father would routinely tell the story (echoed by her) of how her document would be placed underneath our sack of smart green US passports in the futile hope that the official would allow her through as one of us. That never happened. There was always a summoning of a higher-ranked official, who with grave looks and cautious accents drew my parents aside for explanations, short sermons, even warnings, while my sisters and I stood around, uncomprehending and bored. When we did finally pass through, the meaning of her anomalous existence as represented by an embarrassing document was never explained to me as being a consequence of a shattering collective experience of dispossession. and in a matter of hours, once inside Lebanon, or Greece, or the United States itself, the question of my mother's nationality would be forgotten, and everyday life resumed.

After 1948, my aunt Nabiha, who had established herself in Zamalek about three blocks from where we lived, began her lonely, exasperating charity work on behalf of the Palestinian refugees in Egypt. She started by approaching the English-speaking charities and missions connected to the Protestant churches, which included the church Mission Society (CMS) and the Anglican and Presbyterian missions. Children and medical problems were the most urgent issues for her; later, she tried to get the men, and in some cases the women, jobs in the homes or businesses of friends. My strongest memory of Aunt Nabiha is of her weary face and complainingly pathetic voice recounting the miseries of "her" refugees (as we all used to call them) and the even greater miseries of prying concessions out of the Egyptian government, which refused to grant residence permits for more than one month. This calculated harassment of defenseless, dispossessed, and usually very poor Palestinians became my aunt's obsession. [...]

It was through Aunt Nabiha that I first experienced Palestine as history and cause in the anger and consternation I felt over the suffering of the refugees, those Others, whom she brought into my life. It was also she who communicated to me, the desolations of being without a country or a place to return to, of being unprotected by any national authority or institutions, of no longer being able to make sense of the past except as bitter, helpless regret nor of the present with its daily queuing, anxiety-filled searches for jobs, and poverty, hunger, and humiliations. I got a very vivid sense of all this from her conversation, and by observing her frenetic daily schedule. She was well-off enough to have a car and an exceptionally forbearing driver -- osta Ibrahim, smartly dressed in a dark suit, white shirt and somber tie, plus a red fez, the tarbush worn by respectable middle-class Egyptian men until the revolution of 1952 discouraged the practice -- who began the day with her at eight, brought her home for lunch at two, picked her up again at four and stayed with her until eight or nine. Homes, clinics, schools, government offices were her quotidian destinations.

On Fridays she would stay at home and receive people who had only heard about her as a source of help and sustenance. It was a powerful shock to me, when I visited her one Friday, that I could barely make it to the door. She lived on the second floor of an apartment house on Fuad Al-Awwal Street at one of its most congested, noise-filled intersections; on one corner was a Shell station, and beneath her flat a well-known Greek grocer, Vasilakis, who occupied the whole ground floor. He was always crowded with customers whose waiting cars blocked traffic and produced an almost constant din of angry, cacophonous honking, overlaid with the sounds of raucous yelling and expostulation. For some reason my aunt was not bothered by this unholy din, and she conducted herself during rare free moments at home as if she were at a resort. "Like a casino," she would say of the evening racket; for her a "casino" was not a gambling casino but, inexplicably, a hilltop café of the imagination where it was always calm and cool. Added to the deafening street noise as I tried to enter her building were the cries, even the wails, of dozens and dozens of Palestinians crowded onto the staircase all the way to her flat's door, the elevator having been angrily switched off by her sulky, scandalised Sudanese doorman. There was the barest semblance of order in this pitching, heaving sea of people: she refused to let in more than one petitioner at a time, with the result that the crowd scarcely diminished in size or impatience in the course of a very long day.

When I finally entered her drawing room I found her calmly siting on a straight-backed chair without a table or any sort of paper in evidence, listening to a middle-aged woman whose tear-streaked face told a miserable story of poverty and sickness which seemed to spur my aunt to greater efficiency and purpose. "I told you to stop taking those pills," she said testily; "all they do is to make you drowsy. Do what I say, and I'll get you another five pounds from the church, if you promise to keep off the pills and start to take in washing on a regular basis." The woman began to remonstrate, but she was cut off imperiously. "That's it. Go home and don't forget to tell your husband to go see Dr Haddad again this week. I'll take care of what he prescribes. But tell him to do it." The woman was waved out, and another one, with two children in tow, entered. [...]

Her medical partners were Dr Wadie Baz Haddad, our family doctor, a short, powerfully built, silver-haired man who was originally from Jerusalem but had lived in Shubra, one of Cairo's poorest sections, ever since he got his medical degree in Beirut. Following his death in August 1948, his place was immediately taken by his son Farid. She also relied on Wadie's younger brother, Kamil, who owned a pharmacy across the street and seemed to be able to supply Aunt Nabiha's Palestinian wards with a considerable amount of free or almost free medicine. Dr Wadie has never been mentioned in any history of the period, but he played a remarkable role among Cairo's poor for his astoundingly profound but unsung charitable mission and, according to my mother and Aunt Nabiha, his genius as a diagnostician. [...]

We were on our first visit to the United States in the late summer of 1948 when my father received a cable informing him of the kind doctor's death, and asking for money to have him buried. He had left his family totally penniless, Ida [his wife] was ravingly incompetent, and Farid, the eldest son, was in jail at the time for being a Communist. He had just completed medical school when he was picked up, although he was released a few months later. The moment he was able to, he became my aunt's medical adjutant, living in the same unselfconsciously committed way as his father, caring not a whit for money or advancement -- except that, unlike his father, he was, and remained till his death in prison in late 1959, a profoundly political man. His affinity with my aunt was perfect. She referred Palestinians to him, he treated them without charge, and seemed unshaken and indeed strengthened by the daily sorrow he confronted. Forty years later I discovered that even his Communist party friends considered him to be a saint, as much for his extraordinary service as for his unfailingly even, kind temperament.

		Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 September 1999 Issue No. 446
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