De Britse fotograaf Rich Wiles stuurde me deze email:
'Behind the Wall – ‘Family’
Jameela looked radiant in orange and blue, a beautiful denim dress with a sewn in orange shirt finished off with a huge bow at the front. Her brown leather shoes also carried a bow which stood out from the fold-down lace of her tiny white socks. At one side of her head a red and yellow bobble secured a bunch firmly in place. Raghda had chosen leopard print trousers and matching long sleeved shirt on top of which she wore a black t-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘High Rock Girl’. Over her shoulder hung a small matching leopard print handbag and as always her huge sparkling brown eyes and glistening smile lit up any room in which she stood like a beacon of light. Jameela’s smile was equally heartwarming as we all walked down the street hand in hand. It was clear from the throngs of smartly dressed people out in the streets that everyone had made a similar effort to don their finest wares. But it was a special day, it was Eid Al-fiter, the festival that marked the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Jameela is three years old. Raghda is one of Jameela’s four older sisters and about eight. As we walked through the narrow streets of Balata camp together in the sun, slowly so as to account for Jameela’s little strides, Raghda told me proudly that she had shekels in her bag today. Adults give children gifts of money, often a shekel, to children for the festival and Raghda was excited that she had her own little supply today. She asked me where I wanted to go but I didn’t really mind, I was just happy spending time with them. She wanted to show me the little park that was open with four swings and a miniature and ancient looking creaky Ferris wheel of sorts that went little more than two metres high at its uppermost point. The girls went on the swings together and posed for some photographs, smiling as always. Raghda wanted to go on the wheel, she wanted me to see her at the top. I tried to pay the shekel for the ride but she refused immediately. As the wheel turned two young faces beamed down at me and then disappeared again as it rotated, before bouncing back as full of life and hope as ever. Raghda waved and clapped every time she saw me, whilst Jameela just grinned and gripped the rusty metal bar of their little carriage as though she was riding a Disneyland rollercoaster… but then maybe that’s what so many lives have become now.
We left the tiny fenced-in sandpit that was providing so much fun for the camp’s children and walked down to the lower end of the camp which backs onto fields before running away towards Nablus’ hills. Jameela chattered away to anyone who was listening, and Raghda and I communicated as best we could with my broken Arabic. Children looked quizzically at us as we walked, some knew Raghda and asked about her family, others looked at me, and then at the girls, before nodding at me:
“Ajnebi?” (“Foreigner?”)
Before I could answer Raghda would always interject:
“La hoo falasteeny, hoo ahoy!” (No he’s Palestinian, he’s my brother!”)
As she said it she looked up at me proudly, squeezed my hand, and smiled. Every time we neared one of the many small grocery stores around the streets of Balata Camp Raghda would stop and turn to face me:
“Rich Shu bidak? Shu bidak Rich? Chocolata, cola…?” (“Rich what do you want? What do you want Rich? Chocolate, cola...?”)
I would politely refuse and offer to buy the girls a drink but my little guide would not allow it. Every time I did this she seemed disappointed and, frustrated, would put her little collection of shekels back in her miniature cat-print handbag. After this was repeated two or three times my stupid stubbornness, or pride, or whatever was telling me to refuse, crumbled. Raghda’s face lit up as I accepted her offer of a cold drink and then she meticulously picked through a cool box full of soft drinks in a cramped little grocery store looking for the coldest. I bought a couple of small chocolate cakes and we stood together in the shade of alleyways no more than a metre wide enjoying our treats. Jameela ended up wearing more of the chocolate cake than she ate, but she was happy nevertheless. Raghda was even happier once I had accepted her offer of a drink. It was a rare day for her to walk around the camp dressed-up with a couple of shekels in her pocket, much as it was for any child in Balata, and all she wanted was to share her treat with me.
Balata has become like a second home to me in Palestine over the last few years and much of that is down to the family with whom I have had the honour of staying in the camp over this time. The girls are two of seven siblings in the family, all of whom have become like brothers and sisters to me. Jameela was very young when I first stayed with them and it took us a while to get to know each other, now she happily runs me in circles playing hide-and-seek, I love to spend time with her as I do with all the family. There were only six of Abu Abud’s sons and daughters in the house when I first began staying there as one of the two sons, Abud, was in prison like so many others from Balata. He was 15 when he was imprisoned. So when Jameela was born she didn’t know her brother, she couldn’t see him. She never saw him in person until he was released from prison a year or so later. When I first met Abud he had been released only a month or two earlier, I had seen many photos of him and it was good to see the family back together, but I could also see how confusing it was for Jameela, she just didn’t know him. Things are different now, and their relationship is just as loving and affectionate as all the others in this tightly-knit family unit as Jameela has grown to know her brother.
A few days before the Eid Festival we were all sat together in the family living room. We had just finished watching ‘Bab Al Hara’ – the Syrian TV series that captivated people across Palestine with its nightly tales of resistance to occupation, albeit Syrian resistance to French occupation rather than that modern day colonialist enterprise which dominates life in Palestine. The family have been no different to most others in Palestine in their nightly choice of viewing this year. Raghda and I had been playing ‘noughts-and-crosses’. The phone rang, it was the girls’ uncle. Abu Abud chatted away eagerly as he does on many nights to his brother. Then Jameela came to speak to her uncle on the phone. Her father held the phone so she could talk but instead she began to sing ‘Shater, Shater’, Nancy Ajram’s pop song which has been the hit of the summer in Palestine. She clapped and sang away down the phone, smiling as ever as we all laughed. As she sang it struck me that here was another family relationship she was trying to build with a relative that she had never met. She knows her uncle’s face from the huge prison portrait that hangs behind the television in the living room, but she has never met him though she talks and sings to him regularly down the phone. Jameela will be a few years older yet before she finally gets to meet her uncle, if he is released from prison on time. This is how children are forced to grow-up in Palestine, building relationships with family members through photographs and, if they are ‘lucky’, telephones. Thousands and thousands of children are living like this, separated from their relatives because of prisons or bullets, and soon Jameela would have a new little brother or sister as her mother was heavily pregnant, another child who would be forced to grow-up separated from her nearest and dearest.
I share a room with Abud when I stay in Balata. Many nights we have sat up until all hours in his room, sometimes because of the deafening barrage of IOF automatic gunfire and explosions bouncing off the walls in the camp, other times just talking, more often than not a disturbing combination of the two. We have often talked about his arrest and time in prison. He has shown me his old photograph albums of the friends he grew up with. As he flicks through the pages he comments on the young boys in the photographs, his childhood friends:
“Fi sission, fi sission, mayiet, fi sission, mayiet…” (“In prison, in prison, dead, in prison, dead…”)
Other nights he has shown me his collection of prison letters and drawings. He still keeps his little notepads in which he drew whilst locked-up. Most of the images are in ink, sketches of hands wrapped in barbed wire, a map of Palestine bleeding, Che Guevara, a Palestinian flag. Occasionally odd pieces of text, usually just single words, float somewhere on the page. One reoccurring word is ‘hop’ (‘love’), another is ‘huriya’ (‘freedom’). Abud would often laugh when he saw ‘hop’:
“Ay hop? Wein el hop? Wein mumkin inlaqi el hop fi sission?” (“What love? Where is the love? Where do we find love in prison???”
One night he gave me a small bracelet that he made in prison in the colours of the national flag, and a ring to go with it. I didn’t want to accept something that I thought would be so personal, but he insisted, and often checked that I wore it. He would also ask me about life in Europe, about how it felt to travel, to live without Occupation, checkpoints, and martyrs. Abud can only dream about living with such basic rights, he cannot leave Nablus, he is not allowed through the IOF checkpoints which surround the city.
By mid-November, Abud, Jamela, Raghda, and all the rest of the family were eagerly awaiting the birth of their new family member. The time finally came and Abu and Um Abud left Balata in the direction of the hospital. Everybody was very excited. The birth went well and around 8pm the two proud parents returned to the camp cradling a new baby daughter called Tasbeeh, which means ‘always thank God’. She was a beautiful ray of hope for everyone. But Tasbeeh would come to learn in the first few hours of her life about the world that she had been born into…
Around six hours after mother and baby had arrived back in Balata Camp their house was surrounded by dozens of IOF soldiers. Tasbeeh had not even enjoyed one nights sleep with her family when her peace was shattered as sound bombs exploded and the butts of M-16’s pounded on their metal front door. As Abu Abud opened the front door just after 2am more sound bombs were thrown in to the house. Tasbeeh was crying amongst all the explosions as the IOF barged in and began questioning Abu Abud. Then, amongst the explosions somebody went quiet. Tasbeeh stopped crying:
“…my wife ran to her. Her mouth was filled with blood. My wife turned her over and tried to help her to breath, she was massaging her back and chest and trying to get the blood from her mouth…”
After a few seconds Tasbeeh’s little chest began to move again. She was still in the first few hours of her life when she had this, her first encounter with the IOF, and it nearly killed her.
Abud and his brother were forced outside into the dark night. There, they were made to stand against the front walls of the house whilst the IOF smashed their way through their property. When the IOF left Abu Abud’s house they left behind destruction and devastation, and they left an imprint on a child’s mind in the first day of her life that will stay with her until the last. But in their actions the IOF also guaranteed that another little member of this family must now grow-up separated from her brother, much as Jameela had to in her earliest years. When the IOF smashed their way into the house they were carrying their usual array of lethal munitions, when they left they took with them part of the family. They arrested Abud again, he is now 18 years old.
Abud had been eagerly awaiting the birth of his new sister much like all the family, but now he is gone, and she will have to grow-up without her big brother. Abu and Um Abud were still very worried about Tasbeeh. Later when Um Abud went to check on her new daughter she found blood coming from one of Tasbeeh’s ears, they immediately rushed back to the hospital fearing some kind of injury from the explosions. Tasbeeh had blood cleaned from inside her lungs by dedicated doctors in a Nablus hospital. The doctors also fear that Tasbeeh has lost one of her eardrums because of the explosions, but said they would prefer to wait until she is a few months older before beginning to run further tests.
When I heard the news about Abud and Tasbeeh I felt sick, it was a day that had started with so much family anticipation and excitement. I thought about how less than a month earlier we had all enjoyed Ramadan and Eid together. How we had talked about the birth of a new child. I remembered how when I was hospitalised after being involved in a car crash in October Abud was the first person that I rang, and how his family came to collect me from the hospital and took me home to care for me. I remembered Jameela’s phone call to her uncle in prison, and her first years without Abud, and thought about how the whole cycle was now being repeated. I thought about one dark night in Balata Camp that began with a beautiful new arrival and ended with a sickening departure. About a new life that began and almost ended amongst the explosions, bleeding, and separation, of its first night in this world. About a new baby who may or may not have had the chance to lay eyes on her big brother before he was dragged away for a length of time dictated by no law other than that of his occupiers. I thought about guns and sound bombs, about telephones and photographs.
And I thought about family…'
Jameela looked radiant in orange and blue, a beautiful denim dress with a sewn in orange shirt finished off with a huge bow at the front. Her brown leather shoes also carried a bow which stood out from the fold-down lace of her tiny white socks. At one side of her head a red and yellow bobble secured a bunch firmly in place. Raghda had chosen leopard print trousers and matching long sleeved shirt on top of which she wore a black t-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘High Rock Girl’. Over her shoulder hung a small matching leopard print handbag and as always her huge sparkling brown eyes and glistening smile lit up any room in which she stood like a beacon of light. Jameela’s smile was equally heartwarming as we all walked down the street hand in hand. It was clear from the throngs of smartly dressed people out in the streets that everyone had made a similar effort to don their finest wares. But it was a special day, it was Eid Al-fiter, the festival that marked the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
Jameela is three years old. Raghda is one of Jameela’s four older sisters and about eight. As we walked through the narrow streets of Balata camp together in the sun, slowly so as to account for Jameela’s little strides, Raghda told me proudly that she had shekels in her bag today. Adults give children gifts of money, often a shekel, to children for the festival and Raghda was excited that she had her own little supply today. She asked me where I wanted to go but I didn’t really mind, I was just happy spending time with them. She wanted to show me the little park that was open with four swings and a miniature and ancient looking creaky Ferris wheel of sorts that went little more than two metres high at its uppermost point. The girls went on the swings together and posed for some photographs, smiling as always. Raghda wanted to go on the wheel, she wanted me to see her at the top. I tried to pay the shekel for the ride but she refused immediately. As the wheel turned two young faces beamed down at me and then disappeared again as it rotated, before bouncing back as full of life and hope as ever. Raghda waved and clapped every time she saw me, whilst Jameela just grinned and gripped the rusty metal bar of their little carriage as though she was riding a Disneyland rollercoaster… but then maybe that’s what so many lives have become now.
We left the tiny fenced-in sandpit that was providing so much fun for the camp’s children and walked down to the lower end of the camp which backs onto fields before running away towards Nablus’ hills. Jameela chattered away to anyone who was listening, and Raghda and I communicated as best we could with my broken Arabic. Children looked quizzically at us as we walked, some knew Raghda and asked about her family, others looked at me, and then at the girls, before nodding at me:
“Ajnebi?” (“Foreigner?”)
Before I could answer Raghda would always interject:
“La hoo falasteeny, hoo ahoy!” (No he’s Palestinian, he’s my brother!”)
As she said it she looked up at me proudly, squeezed my hand, and smiled. Every time we neared one of the many small grocery stores around the streets of Balata Camp Raghda would stop and turn to face me:
“Rich Shu bidak? Shu bidak Rich? Chocolata, cola…?” (“Rich what do you want? What do you want Rich? Chocolate, cola...?”)
I would politely refuse and offer to buy the girls a drink but my little guide would not allow it. Every time I did this she seemed disappointed and, frustrated, would put her little collection of shekels back in her miniature cat-print handbag. After this was repeated two or three times my stupid stubbornness, or pride, or whatever was telling me to refuse, crumbled. Raghda’s face lit up as I accepted her offer of a cold drink and then she meticulously picked through a cool box full of soft drinks in a cramped little grocery store looking for the coldest. I bought a couple of small chocolate cakes and we stood together in the shade of alleyways no more than a metre wide enjoying our treats. Jameela ended up wearing more of the chocolate cake than she ate, but she was happy nevertheless. Raghda was even happier once I had accepted her offer of a drink. It was a rare day for her to walk around the camp dressed-up with a couple of shekels in her pocket, much as it was for any child in Balata, and all she wanted was to share her treat with me.
Balata has become like a second home to me in Palestine over the last few years and much of that is down to the family with whom I have had the honour of staying in the camp over this time. The girls are two of seven siblings in the family, all of whom have become like brothers and sisters to me. Jameela was very young when I first stayed with them and it took us a while to get to know each other, now she happily runs me in circles playing hide-and-seek, I love to spend time with her as I do with all the family. There were only six of Abu Abud’s sons and daughters in the house when I first began staying there as one of the two sons, Abud, was in prison like so many others from Balata. He was 15 when he was imprisoned. So when Jameela was born she didn’t know her brother, she couldn’t see him. She never saw him in person until he was released from prison a year or so later. When I first met Abud he had been released only a month or two earlier, I had seen many photos of him and it was good to see the family back together, but I could also see how confusing it was for Jameela, she just didn’t know him. Things are different now, and their relationship is just as loving and affectionate as all the others in this tightly-knit family unit as Jameela has grown to know her brother.
A few days before the Eid Festival we were all sat together in the family living room. We had just finished watching ‘Bab Al Hara’ – the Syrian TV series that captivated people across Palestine with its nightly tales of resistance to occupation, albeit Syrian resistance to French occupation rather than that modern day colonialist enterprise which dominates life in Palestine. The family have been no different to most others in Palestine in their nightly choice of viewing this year. Raghda and I had been playing ‘noughts-and-crosses’. The phone rang, it was the girls’ uncle. Abu Abud chatted away eagerly as he does on many nights to his brother. Then Jameela came to speak to her uncle on the phone. Her father held the phone so she could talk but instead she began to sing ‘Shater, Shater’, Nancy Ajram’s pop song which has been the hit of the summer in Palestine. She clapped and sang away down the phone, smiling as ever as we all laughed. As she sang it struck me that here was another family relationship she was trying to build with a relative that she had never met. She knows her uncle’s face from the huge prison portrait that hangs behind the television in the living room, but she has never met him though she talks and sings to him regularly down the phone. Jameela will be a few years older yet before she finally gets to meet her uncle, if he is released from prison on time. This is how children are forced to grow-up in Palestine, building relationships with family members through photographs and, if they are ‘lucky’, telephones. Thousands and thousands of children are living like this, separated from their relatives because of prisons or bullets, and soon Jameela would have a new little brother or sister as her mother was heavily pregnant, another child who would be forced to grow-up separated from her nearest and dearest.
I share a room with Abud when I stay in Balata. Many nights we have sat up until all hours in his room, sometimes because of the deafening barrage of IOF automatic gunfire and explosions bouncing off the walls in the camp, other times just talking, more often than not a disturbing combination of the two. We have often talked about his arrest and time in prison. He has shown me his old photograph albums of the friends he grew up with. As he flicks through the pages he comments on the young boys in the photographs, his childhood friends:
“Fi sission, fi sission, mayiet, fi sission, mayiet…” (“In prison, in prison, dead, in prison, dead…”)
Other nights he has shown me his collection of prison letters and drawings. He still keeps his little notepads in which he drew whilst locked-up. Most of the images are in ink, sketches of hands wrapped in barbed wire, a map of Palestine bleeding, Che Guevara, a Palestinian flag. Occasionally odd pieces of text, usually just single words, float somewhere on the page. One reoccurring word is ‘hop’ (‘love’), another is ‘huriya’ (‘freedom’). Abud would often laugh when he saw ‘hop’:
“Ay hop? Wein el hop? Wein mumkin inlaqi el hop fi sission?” (“What love? Where is the love? Where do we find love in prison???”
One night he gave me a small bracelet that he made in prison in the colours of the national flag, and a ring to go with it. I didn’t want to accept something that I thought would be so personal, but he insisted, and often checked that I wore it. He would also ask me about life in Europe, about how it felt to travel, to live without Occupation, checkpoints, and martyrs. Abud can only dream about living with such basic rights, he cannot leave Nablus, he is not allowed through the IOF checkpoints which surround the city.
By mid-November, Abud, Jamela, Raghda, and all the rest of the family were eagerly awaiting the birth of their new family member. The time finally came and Abu and Um Abud left Balata in the direction of the hospital. Everybody was very excited. The birth went well and around 8pm the two proud parents returned to the camp cradling a new baby daughter called Tasbeeh, which means ‘always thank God’. She was a beautiful ray of hope for everyone. But Tasbeeh would come to learn in the first few hours of her life about the world that she had been born into…
Around six hours after mother and baby had arrived back in Balata Camp their house was surrounded by dozens of IOF soldiers. Tasbeeh had not even enjoyed one nights sleep with her family when her peace was shattered as sound bombs exploded and the butts of M-16’s pounded on their metal front door. As Abu Abud opened the front door just after 2am more sound bombs were thrown in to the house. Tasbeeh was crying amongst all the explosions as the IOF barged in and began questioning Abu Abud. Then, amongst the explosions somebody went quiet. Tasbeeh stopped crying:
“…my wife ran to her. Her mouth was filled with blood. My wife turned her over and tried to help her to breath, she was massaging her back and chest and trying to get the blood from her mouth…”
After a few seconds Tasbeeh’s little chest began to move again. She was still in the first few hours of her life when she had this, her first encounter with the IOF, and it nearly killed her.
Abud and his brother were forced outside into the dark night. There, they were made to stand against the front walls of the house whilst the IOF smashed their way through their property. When the IOF left Abu Abud’s house they left behind destruction and devastation, and they left an imprint on a child’s mind in the first day of her life that will stay with her until the last. But in their actions the IOF also guaranteed that another little member of this family must now grow-up separated from her brother, much as Jameela had to in her earliest years. When the IOF smashed their way into the house they were carrying their usual array of lethal munitions, when they left they took with them part of the family. They arrested Abud again, he is now 18 years old.
Abud had been eagerly awaiting the birth of his new sister much like all the family, but now he is gone, and she will have to grow-up without her big brother. Abu and Um Abud were still very worried about Tasbeeh. Later when Um Abud went to check on her new daughter she found blood coming from one of Tasbeeh’s ears, they immediately rushed back to the hospital fearing some kind of injury from the explosions. Tasbeeh had blood cleaned from inside her lungs by dedicated doctors in a Nablus hospital. The doctors also fear that Tasbeeh has lost one of her eardrums because of the explosions, but said they would prefer to wait until she is a few months older before beginning to run further tests.
When I heard the news about Abud and Tasbeeh I felt sick, it was a day that had started with so much family anticipation and excitement. I thought about how less than a month earlier we had all enjoyed Ramadan and Eid together. How we had talked about the birth of a new child. I remembered how when I was hospitalised after being involved in a car crash in October Abud was the first person that I rang, and how his family came to collect me from the hospital and took me home to care for me. I remembered Jameela’s phone call to her uncle in prison, and her first years without Abud, and thought about how the whole cycle was now being repeated. I thought about one dark night in Balata Camp that began with a beautiful new arrival and ended with a sickening departure. About a new life that began and almost ended amongst the explosions, bleeding, and separation, of its first night in this world. About a new baby who may or may not have had the chance to lay eyes on her big brother before he was dragged away for a length of time dictated by no law other than that of his occupiers. I thought about guns and sound bombs, about telephones and photographs.
And I thought about family…'
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