Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: Ramallah diaries
Suad Amiry Granta Books, 194pp, £12.99
ISBN 1862077215
We have lived so long with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis that the destruction has begun to be dehumanised into a series of tired cliches. Suad Amiry's marvellous little book knocks those cliches aside. The nasty things inflicted every day on ordinary Palestinians - the humiliations and vindictiveness of Israel's military occupation - are the nub of her tale. However, they are recounted with the light touch of a spirited, witty woman who can see the funny side of almost everything but who, every now and then, feels she has had enough and tells her tormentors so. One laughs with her, and sometimes wants to cry.
Amiry's Palestinian father lived in Jaffa (which was taken over by Israel in 1948) and her mother is Syrian: she herself was conceived in Jerusalem, born in Damascus, brought up in Amman and educated mainly in Beirut - a mixture that caused her nightmarish difficulties in obtaining ID papers from the Israeli authorities. An architect, she moved in 1981 to Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, to teach at Birzeit University. Because the university was closed by military order for seven of the nine months of that academic year, she was left with lots of time to fall in love. A little time later, she married Salim and settled in Ramallah.
The first part of her book is a mixture of anecdotes and sketches covering the 1980s and early 1990s. The second part is the diary she kept in 2002 when the Israelis reoccupied Ramallah and she was shut up in her house with her gutsy 91-year-old mother-in-law, who drove her almost as crazy as the Israelis did.
She vividly describes living under curfew, when
houses gradually metamorphosed into nothing but kitchens and bedrooms. Excessive eating, screaming at one another and producing babies were the only three possible activities. No wonder the Israelis are totally obsessed with demographics.
Then there is the wild dash, when the curfew is lifted for a couple of hours, to do the shopping and visit friends and relatives: food flies through the air at the supermarkets; one needs streetwise ingenuity to bypass the roadblocks and checkpoints.
Entertainment comes from gossip, the enjoyable soap opera of her neighbours' lives. One energetic set of neighbours indulged in the double complexities of infidelity and collaboration with the Israeli occupiers. When the collaborating son gave Amiry an amazing electric tableau of Mecca that twinkled and glittered green and red, she enjoyed it as something wonderfully kitsch, and happily passed it on to like-minded friends, until she was struck by the chilling and embarrassing thought that it was almost certainly bugged.
"There is nothing," Amiry writes, "more frustrating and humiliating than arguing with an Israeli soldier." Maybe, but under provocation the lady gives as good as she gets. She flummoxes one young soldier at a checkpoint simply by staring at him, with her enormous eyes, out of the window of her car. And she demoralises the tedious security apparatus at Tel Aviv airport - which is demanding, at ever higher levels, to know what she did during her visit to London - by insisting that she has been "dancing". On a good day, she is anybody's match.
Except, perhaps, for her mother-in-law. Living opposite Yasser Arafat's battered and besieged headquarters in Ramallah, the old lady is in grave danger. Amiry goes to rescue her during a short break in the curfew, clambering over walls and fences and rubble to do so. But as precious time runs out, Um Salim (Arab women are traditionally known as the mother of their eldest son) fusses, as she reasonably might, about which dress to take and who will water her plants. In the end she goes as she is, and they make it, just.
And that is the start of a new sort of trouble. Regardless of the bangs and booms outside, Um Salim likes her meals punctually at 8am and 1pm and 7pm, and she tells her daughter-in-law that, now there is a curfew and she is not working, she ought to be able to organise herself a bit better. Except that one day, at one o'clock, Salim is in deadly danger from trigger-happy Israeli soldiers as he tries to make his way home, Amiry is struggling to work out a way to rescue him, and his mother is driving her up the wall by demanding a different sort of plate for her lunch.
The grumbling is heartfelt, but so is the affection. When Amiry is trying to hurry her mother-in-law out of her endan- gered house, the old lady cannot find her money and jewellery. "Never mind," says her desperate daughter-in-law, "just leave it. We'll come back soon and get it." Um Salim's reply stops her in her tracks: "That's what we said in 1948 when we left our house in Jaffa." Amiry, struck dumb, stands still and cries.
And that is the point. Amiry's snapshots of how an intelligent, impatient woman survives the mortifications of refugee status and occupation illuminates the long, sad tale that started in 1948 when the Palestinians were cast out of a land they believed was theirs. We can identify with her humour, stamina and frustration. But there is no happy ending in sight, as yet.
Barbara Smith is a former Middle East correspondent of the Economist
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