Alphard - Creative Nonfiction

It flashed on the screen:

Twenty-one hundred, the Gaza strip,

A historical powder keg,

Burned savage, dazzling

Like the star.

They called the casualties,

The girl with “dreams of going to kindergarten”

A terrorist.

I wondered how they could have possibly known.

It flashed in my mind, in that place. All blistering heat and screaming children running about ankles and that incessant service bell; another order up. It was some tacky Italian pop hits playlist underscored by wine-drunk women in Louboutin heels. Plates which marred my hands ugly and red. The men in that restaurant – your boyfriend, co-worked, your grandfather – liked to wink as they made a crass, yet socially acceptable joke, eyes lingering as I walked away, who liked to ask:

“Where are you from, love?”

I always liked to imagine the look on their faces as I retorted, smugly, “Just up the road.”

Forced them to ask with flushed cheeks or a creased brow “No really. Where are you from?”

Or maybe, just maybe, for once I wouldn’t dignify them with an answer.

But of course, behind my well-practiced smile, my good manners, I would simply suck it up and rationalise that they were just well meaning. Curious even. Perhaps they wondered why my skin wasn’t exactly white or brown, why I didn’t have an accent, how I challenged their cookie cutter perceptions of race?

The answers to their questions were…complicated.

Scaling the flat-topped roofs

Of the resettlement camp,

My father could see right past the tangled electricity lines,

A manmade mess

And out to sea.

The news said clementines were cheap this season.

The farmers were sad.

But on the roof,

Stealing neighbour’s citrus,

He was above it all.

Until he tripped,

And fell back down to the ground.

When I was young, I distinctly remember telling the other gap-toothed children; snacking on celery sticks or fruit roll ups during a round of Truth or Dare; that I was Lebanese. It was the place my father grew up after all, my mother said it was easier for them to comprehend this version of the truth.

Only when I grew older did I come to understand that for most, Lebanon is a country of vibrancy and community, a culture of welcoming and honour. For him, the boarder of the Gaza strip was a home stationed with armed guards at the entrance and a basement turned makeshift bomb shelter to hide away from low flying army planes during the night. In this temporary housing, the government could switch of camp’s water or electricity supply whenever they pleased. Like waves the ocean, these people were forgotten, neglected.

My father was one of the estimated 450 000 Arab Israeli refugees registered to Lebanon since 1948. He was the one in four displaced people, who made up this country’s population.

So, as a child, after a seemingly meaningless lunchtime of playground antics, I asked him the question my people have been asked for many, many years.

“There was a time” he explained, “when our place was ruled by the Ottoman empire and the economy flourished with merchants and trade. In the hilly and mountainous plains of Husseinyeh, our descendants worked off the land as farmers and agriculturalists. In sprawling orchards, we grew clementines and lymun, passionfruit and honeycrisp apples, sweet as simple syrup. In these villages, each home was closely packed together and full of children and laughter spilled out onto the streets.”

I was too young to learn the rest of the story. And yet, as I grew older and steadily brushed off their questions, the complicated histories of my peoples past - most of my knowledge of this mass exodus became reduced to the outdated stories and faded statistics inside the pages of history books. Bound up in Westernised media narratives of a land without people and a people without land. The doubly damned “not only Arab, not only Muslim…but ultimate enemy to Australians.”

If I’m being honest, this place rarely makes the mainstream news. But when it does, they call it the Palestine problem.

On telly the Justice Minister said

The Mother’s gave birth to “little snakes.”

Were their faces round and pointed?

Did their blood run cold?

How do you know which child

Is on the wrong side of history

If they never grow old enough

To find out.

Sifting through the archives of my homeland, the photographs and memories shared by strangers, I came across a familiar face. One that has my Father’s eyes and that distinctly straight, Roman nose. A woman who travelled an innumerable distance by foot to the Gaza strip and then raised ten children, my twenty-seven cousins, now spread across the globe. Surrounded by Google Image’s of Arabic script and black and white rural farmland, I saw my grandmother; Situ’s face. I learnt my family’s story.

To the journalists she explained, it all started seventy-four years ago on one particularly rainy, but perfectly ordinary day. The soldiers came, a blur of khaki and killing rifles, rising above the mountains, like the sun and moon and stars. It caused a rather great deal of commotion, so her mother, with her mouth unbuttoned, and father; a pistol in hand, went to see what all the fuss was about. Inside the barn, they found their three cows, dead.

“Let us stay home and pray that nothing befalls us.” her parents said, like they had a choice in whether they could stay or escape.

“Say your prayers. We’re going to die anyway.”

In the corner of the shared room, a small and sacred light burned brightly, until my Situ blew it out and the house was plagued by darkness. No soldiers could see in, no divine promises of Allah or the Holy Land could light the way. Only a makeshift barricade; their flimsy mattress could block the stream of bullets raining down like God’s tears.

Outside, the soldiers dug deeper and deeper, planting a landmine right by their front doorstep. Planning to blitz Palestine and its people into forgotten relics of the past. They let loose a smoke bomb, clouding the place into an intangible haze, but still, Situ remained awake. Her father had no time to shield the children, with anything other than that mattress before the house collapsed around them.

On my screen she pauses, “we stayed under the rubble till morning, until people from neighbouring villages came to remove the dead and tend to the living.”

At this point, she wasn’t conscious, she hadn’t seen what happened, but her mother was injured, and Father’s hair had burnt from all the bullets. When they pulled her sister out from the ruins her flesh was pulled back so far you could see right down to the bone. Her brother died. Her sister, just eight months old suffocated with a rock in her mouth.

Their names were Ahmed and Samira. But there were many more.

Watching her time worn face recorded in the Bourj el-Semali Camp, I couldn’t help but wonder what my own life would have been like in my Situ’s place? Wrapped in bandages, unable and unmoving for two months after the bomb, blood leaking from my mouth and nose. I couldn’t picture not being able to squeeze my fingers or hold a pencil for years to come. Some things in life are just unimaginable.

The funny thing is, that place - Palestine - is not even really a place at all.

When people asked me “Where are you from?”, I couldn’t point to the country; Palestine on a world map, it couldn’t be listed on my passport. It isn’t even, legally, recognised as a sovereign state by the United Nations.

My homeland is only a few piles of stones and overgrown, tangled thorns, grass whispering of days gone by to the wind. Still, I cannot visit.

Not if I hold any hope of ever seeing my family again. You see, Lebanese law enforcement treats Israel as an “enemy state”. Israeli citizens, or any other person who holds a passport bearing a stamp, visa or even a national seal are strictly prohibited from entry. In recent years, the government stopped stamping passports; instead providing a card with all personal information, but if Lebanese officials discovered this evidence, you may be arrested or subject to indefinite detention for the crime.

So how do you choose between people and a place?

There is an Arabic word; Alphard, it means the solitary one. The brightest star in the Hydra, the world’s largest constellation, Alphard burns a striking orange, all alone. Outside the restaurant, on a clear Autumnal night, I could see myself twinkling in that snake formation in the sky. As the star assembled on the long path between worlds, I saw myself in the darkness between two places, two people:

For stars were named by mortals,

I find it telling, a cruel irony

To know a language I cannot speak,

The words of my Father’s people,

Sit sticky on my tongue,

Lost in history.

Around dining tables

I joked –

I am my Mother’s translator

When I couldn’t find the right words to say,

I suppose these are the excuse

We had to make for ourselves.

My Mother’s own place of origin is equally incongruous; English slash Irish slash Scottish, her family never really took notice of their genealogy, never needed to. She told me that somewhere along the line someone came here during the First Fleet. It’s the kind of inconsequential nonchalance that whiteness can afford.

But her family have their own kind of history. In my Nanna’s kitchen I could trace imprints of cursive sprawl from lists made or recipes curated on the soft timber countertop. In their Federation style spare room, I discovered my great-grandmother’s hand knitted cardigans and old family photographs, perfectly staged. Glamorous, like a scene from a movie. Once, I even found a creased and sun blotched news article from a relative: a train conductor, who died from a freak derailment during a thunderstorm in South Australia. It made me think, in a way, blood can be lost on both sides of history.

And so, back in that restaurant with these emerging places and stories they could not possibly see, the answer to their questions were not, could never be, straightforward. How could I explain the history of my father who escaped in the back of a freezing meat truck to leave that place? Articulate that my grandfather, at just four years old and during another world war, would walk hours to school each day – barefoot and alone – just to receive an education. That he can’t seem to remember these stories anymore.

How could I tell them that I am from Palestine. That place is in the darkness of my eyes, brown like the earth, like the brilliant red of those apple trees and blood lost in Husseinyeh which courses through my veins. That I am Australian. From the sunburnt country with boundless plains to share with all people, places. But I am also so much more.

Instead, they asked their questions, or rather, their statements, heavy with the weight of contempt. I knew what you meant when you asked me that. Because really, you weren’t interested in my reply.

“My Dad’s Palestinian. My Mum’s just white.” I said reflexively, smiling.

They paused for a moment, they laughed, as many have done before.

“How exotic! I bet you don’t like those Israelis, eh?”

I felt the heat from that place, in the restaurant, blood rushing to my cheeks. Boiled down to the same old stereotypes all my life.

Still, I burn hot. Red like the star.

Solitary and alone