Caught in Army Violence at a Palestinian Refugee Camp, Part II
How to stay loyal to the depth of the pain?
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This is the second and final part of an essay by guest writer Gena Corea. To read Part I, please click here. To read my introduction, please visit (Resonant World#81: The Problem of What to Do With our Pain).
Resonant World#82
By Gena Corea
Burhan made light of the events at the army base. He had been through so much worse.
Though I had been worried about the tapes, afraid that they would in some way endanger the family, Akram brushed my concern aside.
“We didn’t tell you anything we would not say to any Israeli soldier, any official, anyone at all.”
They were simply telling the truth of their experience, he said.
Again, they invited me to stay the night, which I did. In the middle of the night, I awoke, aware that there was a man standing at the now opened door to my room. It was Akram.
“Come,” he said to me. “We have curfew.”
I arose and joined all the others in the house who had been awakened by an announcement being broadcast in Arabic repeatedly through a system of loudspeakers placed throughout the camp.
Akram translated the announcement for me: “By order of the military command, this camp is under curfew until further notice. Anyone leaving his house will be shot.”
We stayed up the rest of the night. At one point, Ferdous, Akram and I were in their bedroom peering out the window, on the look-out for soldiers and tending to the baby, Nidal. (“Nidal” means “struggle,” his parents told me.)
‘I Bow to Your Experience’
In the days that followed, our discussions continued. Burhan and I fiercely argued about women’s oppression. Well, I spoke passionately while he, unmoved, batted away my words.
Unable to communicate my reality to him, I finally said to him something like: “You’ve been imprisoned 16 times, even as a child, and you have experienced horrors, day in and day out throughout your life, that my body and mind have never endured. I too have experienced horrors as a woman and you know nothing of them. Can we say to each other: ‘I bow to your experience so deeply felt by you, of which I know nothing at all.”
That gave him pause. He sat with that. Later, he told me he remembered a television movie he had seen, Burning Bed, about an abused American woman who killed her husband. A scene in that movie showed the abusive husband burning his wife’s books when she tried to return to school. Remembering that scene, Burhan said he understood that this was political; that the man was trying to control the woman, demean her, keep her dependent on himself with few avenues of escape.
So he was considering it all.
Akram called me over to a window at one point. Their neighbour, an old woman, was making movements in an elaborate way outside her house, keeping herself as close to the wall as she could. It was body language, Akram explained to me, and she was telling him a soldier was hidden on a roof near their house. He took me to another window and pointed out the roof and described the outline of the soldier so I could discern him. But the soldier was so camouflaged, it took me a long time to recognize his shape. Akram had to take me through it again and again: “Look at that pole of the clothesline. Now look straight down from there to…,” until finally I could clearly identify the soldier.
Akram then moved to another window and passed the old woman’s information on to his neighbour on the other side of the house, using that same body language.
He told me the word would be passed from house to house, from neighbour to neighbour in this way until everyone in camp knew where all the hidden soldiers were.
Amazed at the tight bonds of the community, I thought: “These people will never be defeated.”
‘You Are Welcome Here’
In the living room one day, perusing the family’s photo albums, I glanced up and saw Akram and Burhan both gazing at me while they spoke with each other in Arabic. I cast an inquiring look at them.
Akram responded, telling me what was up: “People in the camp are asking us why we are letting you in here, why we are talking with you. They’re saying you could be a plant by the Israeli army. You could be spying on us. Why were we trusting you, they asked us. I told them, “From the way this woman is, you can tell who she is.”
He paused, still gazing at me, then bowed his head towards me and said, “You are welcome here, Gena Corea.”
In all the decades since, those words still touch me.
The young people lived on the second floor of the house, the parents on the first. At one point, while I was speaking with the parents, Akram came downstairs to tell us that a neighbour, Imad Karaka, whom Ferdous had known well, had been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers while standing on his veranda. Jordanian television had just broadcast the news. Imad, 22, was known as a quiet man, not a stone-thrower. He left a 19-year-old widow and a five-month-old daughter.
Defying the curfew, Ferdous, Burhan and I joined a stream of people going to the home of the dead youth to comfort his family, people so enraged they didn’t care if they too would be shot and killed. I brought with me in my pocket the tiny recorder I used to tape interviews. When we got there, mourners sat in the courtyard and stood on the veranda, many women weeping.
When Imad’s mother heard I was an American, she furiously shouted to me in Arabic— Ferdous translated — that the bullets the soldiers were using were “made in America.”
‘Can You Climb?’
After an hour, shouts erupted from the street outside, gun shots, tear gas. I turned on the tape recorder in my pocket. The Israeli soldiers had arrived. We rushed out to escape them. Ferdous pointed to a thick high wall surrounding the woman’s house.
“Can you climb?” she asked me. “Can you jump?”
“Yes,” I said, determined that I would do whatever she told me to do, that I was not going to get her killed by failing to do what I needed to.
We climbed the wall, its thickness providing sure footing for us at the top. I looked down, terrified at the great height I’d have to jump to the street below. But elapsing time would not make this jump any less frightening. I leapt.
When I landed, crouched down, I felt a moment of elation: I had done it! None of my bones had broken! Then I rose and ran, following Ferdous.
Later, I heard the sounds my tape recorder captured as we ran. Stones skittering under our shoes. Our panting breaths. Neighbours’ hurried instructions as we burst into their homes and they directed us out back doors or windows to make our way across the camp through houses. That way, we would be exposed to the soldiers on the streets as little as possible.
Finally, we climbed through a window in the back of the home of Akram’s parents and I tumbled to the floor, breathless, stunned.
Someone instructed me to come upstairs and eat.
Eat?! Eat?! I could not. I could not even comprehend the order to eat.
I hadn’t had time to be frightened while running. I focused solely on doing whatever Ferdous told me to do. But weeks later, and only once, I listened to my tape from that day. It terrified me. Those stones skittering under shoes as we ran, that panting, those shouts, those gunshots growing fainter as we made distance from the home of the furious, shouting, grieving mother.
Stark Beauty
A couple of days after our escape from the soldiers, I had a crucial interview scheduled with an IVF physician. I did not want to miss it. I asked Ferdous and Akram if there was any way I could leave the camp even though the curfew was still in effect.
This was completely crazy. I am embarrassed at how nuts this request of mine was. But I did ask.
They devised a plan for me to leave out the back of the camp. The plan involved climbing a stony hill dotted with olive trees to reach a back road beyond it where a truck driver would wait for me and take me to a certain spot in Bethlehem. The driver would stay with me in the truck until he could flag down a car, explain the situation to the second driver and ask him to take me on into Jerusalem. Ferdous and Akram arranged everything.
Walking up that stony hill, I could feel the front of my body fill with the stark beauty of the scene in front of me — the stones, the earth, the gnarled trees — a beauty an Israeli bullet could drop me into at any moment, for I could simultaneously feel the back of my body lit up like a target. I was never so alive.
When the second driver left me off at the wall in Jerusalem, I saw a tourist in his fifties wearing Bermuda shorts, a camera slung around his neck.
Flabbergasted, I stood unable to absorb these two juxtaposed realities — sight-seeing and suffering. Did the tourist not know what was happening 30 minutes from here? Did he have no idea there were women, men, children living in camps with barbed wire around them, confined, imprisoned, tear-gassed, unable to move without being shot and killed, grieving their dead children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, aching for their lost homes, lost villages? Did the tourist in Bermuda shorts not know this? It was so close to him! It was so near to him! It was happening right in the moment he lifted his camera, snapped the photo he would show to his friends, explaining “my vacation.”
At the Church of the Nativity, I too had been a tourist before I entered Dheisheh.
Minutes after I left the camp, I later learned, soldiers arrested Burhan. It would be his 17th imprisonment. Three hours later, soldiers killed a 12-year-old girl in Dheisheh. The next day, they killed a 16-year-old boy who was taking part in a demonstration.
A Leader
I returned to the camp once more some days after my interview in Jerusalem. The curfew ended, Ferdous, Akram and I visited the families of the slain children.
At one point, hundreds of us in the neighbourhood were sharing a meal on rooftops, the men sitting round their huge round platters of communal food, the women around ours. To my right sat a little girl who whimpered quietly. Ferdous explained to me that she was the younger sister of the 12-year-old who had been killed. She was inconsolable at the absence of her sister, who had slept beside her every night and looked after her every day, not understanding where her sister had gone.
In a conversation on the rooftop, Akram told me that young boys staged heroic photographs of themselves, a Palestinian flag waving behind them, so that if they were killed, these photos could be made into posters of themselves as martyred heroes. This horrified me.
After the meal, someone suddenly jumped down from a neighbouring rooftop onto ours and began passing out leaflets. He was dressed in women’s attire but, I observed to Akram, it was clearly a youth. Akram responded vaguely, not acknowledging this was a male. I supposed the leaflet was giving instructions from the leaders of the Intifada but Akram remained vague.
Later, at the family’s home, someone referenced Akram’s speech at a rally held a day or so earlier in the camp. When I inquired about this, Akram modestly replied that he had been asked to speak. But people aren’t asked to address a huge rally unless they are leaders. I suppose, though I do not know, that Akram was that, a leader.
Refusing to Turn Away
Coming back to write about my experiences in Israel some 35 years later, I try to make sense of all this suffering, of people who had suffered unimaginable pain, persecution and loss in the Holocaust then, in turn, inflicting pain on others in a cycle that repeats endlessly down through the generations.
Knowing there is much more to it all than this, I am left wondering something about my own life:
How can I be loyal to the suffering I experience in this world? By which I mean: How can I stay with my pain, not abandon it but instead feel it completely, utterly, to its last bitter dregs? Can I find a way to digest my pain so thoroughly that nothing remains to pass on, that the remnants of my pain, like fertilizer, even enrich fields where food can grow for others?
How can I refuse to turn away from my pain? Refuse to retaliate for the pain I receive? Refuse to hurt others? How can I break the cycle of pain-numbed-in-me, pain-replicated, pain-inflicted-on-others?
Our political leaders know nothing about this. Though it is they who stand in the media spotlights, though the microphones are handed over to them, they have nothing to teach us. They cannot guide us in this, the most vital and difficult of tasks.
Meditators, like the monk Shinzen Young, know a lot about digesting pain. May meditators weigh in on this. May spotlights shine on them. May microphones broadcast their words.
Poets, too, and other artists, know a lot about transforming our pain into nourishment for those with whom we share this earth. I think of my friend who, in a family rift where parent and siblings acted horribly, wrote draft after draft of poems that began in anger and then inched their way to love. This took years. It was agonizing. A few friends accompanied him as he drudged through this process, this spiritual healing work being too hard, maybe impossible, to do alone.
“I set a place for her in my heart,” he finally wrote of one who had been cruel to him.
This poet had the courage to feel his pain.
For years, I worked with inmates in a prison who had this same courage to go inward and feel their pain, heeding the words of a great teacher of theirs: “It is this numbness to one’s own pain that is at the core of much of what is considered evil.”1
Like the inmates and my poet friend, I want my pain to end with me. I want my pain and I to go down together, loyally clutching each other, hurting no one in our descent into whatever comes after death.
About Gena Corea
“My skill and my passion is listening empathically to people living in difficult circumstances. Over the years, these people have been female patients in a male-dominated medical system; Blacks fearing imminent massacre in South Africa during apartheid; Catholics and Protestants enduring the violence of the Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland; Palestinians in a camp on the West Bank; convicts in a prison program called Growing Together. I listen to them. Then I carry their words to others in books, articles, speeches.
HarperCollins published my three books: The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Mistreats Women as Patients and Professionals, 1977, updated edition 1985; The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to the Artificial Womb, 1985. (With German, British, and Japanese editions: 1986 and 1988; 1988; 1994, respectively); and The Invisible Epidemic: The Story of Women and AIDS, 1992. The Hidden Malpractice and The Invisible Epidemic were both featured on The New York Times’ Notable Books of the Year lists.
I have also published essays in 31 anthologies. Additionally, I have written op-eds for The New York Times, magazine articles for Ms, Commonweal, Omni, The Progressive, and Mother Jones, and more than 75 columns for The New Republic Feature Syndicate.
My work has confronted me with much suffering. What brings me joy in the midst of this sorrow is African dance. For many years I danced and drummed in Senegal and performed with the director of the Senegalese Black Soofa dance troupe, Caro Diallo. In addition to dancing, swimming in the sea makes me happy to be alive. Now retired, which doesn’t mean much when you’re a writer, I live in Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA.”
Note from the Editor: A labour of love, Resonant World is written in the gaps between work I get paid to do, notably editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!
Casarjian, Robin (1995). Houses of Healing: A Prisoner’s Guide to Inner Power and Freedom. Lionheart Press, Boston.
This story is so incredibly moving...Thank you...