The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, December 8, 2013
The Hindu
Palestinian author Suad Amiry. Photo: Meeta Ahlawat
We have also watched the game of competitive politics muddying an issue
that should have remained firmly focused on issues of gender. Instead,
helped largely by some sections of the media, it has deteriorated into a
slanging match, of a kind that is all too familiar in this election
season.
Amid all the heat and noise generated, what did we forget? Plenty. For
one, we forgot that the issue was violence against women. We forgot,
that it is not just these two women but thousands like them who can
never speak up because the predators are in their homes, in their
neighbourhoods, men they know and even trust. And we in the media forgot
that going for the overkill on one case will do nothing to educate our
readers and viewers about the reality of sexual violence that women
confront.
In the midst of all this madness, it was a relief and inspiring to
listen to a voice of sanity. To a woman who can tell you something about
the insanity of living daily under the cloud of violence. About the
ability of women to work around this state of madness. And about how,
despite life’s grimness, you can have a sense of humour.
The woman I refer to is the remarkable Palestinian writer and architect,
Suad Amiry. She was in India at the end of last month to release her
new book, Golda slept here (published by Women Unlimited).
Amiry is an architect. Her organisation, Riwaq, has done amazing work in
restoring and conserving heritage buildings in Palestine. These
structures have been restored to create spaces for the local community
who live in a perpetual state of siege. Riwaq has created over one
hundred such “spaces for change”, as she calls them.
When you listen to Amiry, you get a new perspective on survival, on how
to deal with adversity, on how to make people laugh even though what you
narrate is heart-wrenchingly tragic.
Born in Damascus to a Syrian mother and Palestinian father, Amiry chose
to make her home in Ramallah, on the West Bank. And in addition to her
work as a restoration architect, she began to write about living in
Palestine where, as she says, you have to forget about logic because
“nothing makes sense”. Amiry says she also realised that Palestinians
speak about their collective loss but hardly ever about personal loss.
Her latest book records the stories of Palestinians who had owned and
lived in beautiful homes in Jerusalem but who, like other Palestinians,
were turned into refugees overnight in 1948 when Jerusalem was divided.
Some of them moved to East Jerusalem, others further, to other cities,
other countries.
In 1967, when the Israelis occupied East Jerusalem and made it, once
again, one city, many of these Palestinians thought they would be
entitled to recover their properties. Instead, they found their homes
occupied by Israeli families. What hurt the most was that these families
had no idea of the past, of the people who had designed and built these
beautiful homes, who had lived in them for generations, and who had to
abandon them not out of choice but because of the force of
circumstances. As if that was not enough, under Israeli law, these
Palestinian home owners were considered “absentee” landlords and
therefore had no rights over their own property.
Of course, these stories are familiar from the Partition between India
and Pakistan and in other parts of the world where forceful
displacements of people have taken place. But the poignancy of the
stories that Amiry recounts in her book are special because these are
people who now live in the same city, they are not “absent” and yet the
law will not acknowledge their presence. As architect Andoni Baramki,
who built many beautiful buildings in Jerusalem tells the judge hearing
his case for repossession of his home, “Sir, the Palestinians are
‘absentees’ only because you do not allow them to be present. And those
of us who are present are considered absent. We can never win.”
Indeed, nothing makes sense in Palestine. Except the lives of those who
survive, who “lost the pillars for a sane life, a profound foundation
called HOME,” as Amiry puts it. Yet who continue to fight and to hope.
They have much to teach us.
(To read the original, click here.)
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