Adaf: a Palestinian in Lebanon, Caroline Moorehead

Mon, 16 Dec 2002 00:00:00 +0000

When Adaf was very young, her mother used to sing to the children about her life in Palestine, before the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe), when the Palestinians fled their lands and villages. She would sing about the village, and her father’s fields of olives and orange trees, and the weddings of the villagers, when there would be dancing. This was forty years ago, when Adaf was growing up in Shatila, the camp outside Beirut to which came many of the refugees from Safsaf, her mother and father’s village.

By then the family had moved out of the tent in which they had spent their first eight years in Shatila, and were living in a very small house built on the same site. Adaf does not remember her childhood as unhappy. There was very little water, and the children took it in turns to carry the buckets from the central deposit, where the lorries belonging to the United Nations (UN) brought in supplies, and there were very few comforts, but neither Adaf nor her brothers and sisters were ever hungry, and she remembers playing along the edges of the camp with the other children in perfect contentment.

Adaf is now 43, and the mother of two small children. She is still in Shatila, living with them in another room built over the first one belonging to her parents, on the same small plot of land. Her mother has barely left the confines of the camp in over half a century. Now, as then, the camp occupies just over one square kilometre, but the original population of a few hundred people has grown to over 12,000. All around them, as their families have grown and multiplied, others have also built up in the space above their former tents, one breezeblock room above another, like precarious houses made of cards.

Towards the centre of the camp, it is almost completely dark, the buildings all but touching at the top while between them hangs a canopy of dangling electric wires and cables. The smell – sewage, rotting food and the accumulated dirt of years – is terrible, particularly (says Adaf), when it has been raining, and the water collects in puddles along the alleys, some of which are no wider than a man’s shoulders. Shatila is one of twelve Palestinian refugee camps in the Lebanon, home now to well over 200,000 people.

‘I have never left Shatila for longer than a holiday,’ says Adaf, who is one of the few camp inhabitants fortunate enough to have a job. She works in a vocational training centre, a series of small and crowded rooms near the edge of the camp, funded by a foreign organisation to teach some of the women the kind of skills – hairdressing, book-keeping, embroidery – that might find them work. Like her parents and her children, Adaf has no papers beyond an identity card.

The Lebanon, in the early days welcoming to the Palestinian refugees who arrived over its borders, believing that its visitors would not stay long, has long since turned against its now unwelcome settlers. Year by year, tighter restrictions have been placed on the Palestinians. Some 73 occupations are closed to them, so that today the Palestinians may not work either as doctors or lawyers, teachers or dentists, architects or taxi drivers.

Nor may they either own property or hand any they already hold on to their children. Adaf, an energetic, capable woman, worries most about her daughter and her mother. ‘My mother,’ she says, ‘is now elderly and, like most of the older refugees, often ill. She has very high blood pressure and diabetes. With the diminishing of UN funds, there is now no free medical care for people over 60 for any serious illness. We worry all the time about how we will pay for her if she becomes really ill.’

‘My daughter is now seven. There is now nowhere for the children to play. When I was young we were quieter, less agitated. The children now are always nervous; they have a lot of energy they can’t burn off. In the playground, there is a lot of fighting. When I was a child, we didn’t have television. My daughter keeps seeing things on television, toys, cars, clothes, holidays and asking: “Why can’t I have those things? Why can’t we go somewhere? Why do we live in a camp?” I can’t answer her questions. I don’t know the answer myself.’

Like all Palestinians, Adaf’s family is scattered. ‘Stability of geography and the continuity of land,’ as Edward Said once wrote, do not exist for them. Her eldest brother lives in Utah. He got a scholarship to study in the United States and then managed to stay on; he sells and buys second-hand cars. Another brother is in Germany; he was smuggled out of Shatila after the ‘war of the camps’ in 1985 and was granted asylum.

She has one sister in Denmark and another in Canada. Three other married sisters live in Shatila with their families, and one in ain el-Helweh, a camp just outside Sidon. She has relatives throughout much of the United States, in Jordan, Syria and the UK. ‘Like all Palestinians, we are a close and loving family,’ she says. ‘But we never see each other. How can we? There are too many of us and we have neither the money nor the papers to travel.’ Transience and vulnerability mark all their lives.

Adaf has never been to what was once called Safsaf and is now known by the Israelis who occupied it in 1948 as Bar Yochay, though it lies not far over the border between Lebanon and Israel. Not long ago, a former neighbour from the village, now living in Sweden, visited his childhood home and, passing through Lebanon on his way back, stopped to see Adaf and her family. He brought with him a video, showing the original Safsaf, grown over with grass and piles of stones where the houses once stood. The olive groves and orchards have largely been abandoned. There are new strips of forest. After the neighbour had left, Adaf’s mother began to talk about the past, and at night she dreamt again of her childhood. She has told Adaf that her one hope now is that someone will take her home before she dies.

Not long ago, a researcher questioned the Palestinians living in Lebanon about the right of return, the much-debated clause in all peace settlements about allowing the Palestinians driven abroad in 1948 to return to their homeland. Over three-quarters said that going home was what they had waited for all their lives. For the young too, children who have never known a life other than the camp in Lebanon, Palestine is home.

‘But where is home?’ asks Adaf. ‘We have no home. Palestine was home. But our Palestine no longer exists. The trouble with living in exile, dreaming as my mother dreams, is that we have somehow moved into limbo. If we actually lived there, then we might be free. As it is, we are consumed with the idea of being refugees – with no home, no state, no place. It is what defines us.’ In the end, wrote Said in a long essay about displacement, ‘the past owns us.’

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Adaf: a Palestinian in Lebanon, Caroline Moorehead