Gamal Abdel-Nasser died … and they all suffered a kind of paralysis – a stupefaction. Was he really dead? No one believed that he could die. They knew that he was human and therefore mortal, yet … he wouldn’t actually die. But die he did, and with him died many dreams and hopes. He died carrying the cares of the nation; the nation that he loved had killed him. He died after bidding farewell to Sheikh Sabah al-Salim al-Sabah, the Emir of Kuwait, the last of his fellow Arabs to see him. He died after stopping the bloodshed in Jordan, but he killed himself to do it. The nation killed him. They had all killed him. Everyone grieved with the poet Nizar Qabbani:
We killed you, last of the Prophets,
We killed you.
It is nothing new for us
To murder the Companions and the Saints.
How many Prophets have we killed?
How many imams have we slaughtered as they said the
evening prayer?
All our history is suffering;
All our days are Karbala.*
Hisham’s cousin Ahmad brought him the news on a morning Hisham would never forget as long as he lived. He was getting ready to go to college, when suddenly, to Hisham’s surprise, Ahmad burst into his room. He poured himself a glass of tea, took a large gulp, then said calmly, ‘Have you heard the news? Your friend has died. Gamal has died, and may God never bring him back.’ Hisham was combing his hair. His hands started to tremble, the comb fell from his grip and he stared in horror at Ahmad.
‘What … what did you say?’
‘Gamal has died … or did you think he was immortal?’ Ahmad sniggered. Hisham felt an enormous hatred for his cousin, and at the same time a dagger plunged itself deep inside him. He wanted to cry, but a lump in his throat prevented him. His eyes stung with tears, but he couldn’t weep. Ahmad walked out, oblivious to the pain he had caused, and Hisham did not go to college that day.
Gamal Abdel-Nasser was a symbol; a universal father-figure. They hated him, they loathed him, they argued with him, they fought with him, but they could not live without him or bear the thought of losing him. You may hate your father intensely, deep down you may wish he would vanish so that you can be free, but as soon as he dies you are confronted by the void he has left. Pain tears you apart, and your conscience tortures you, because you once wished him dead. When your father dies, you feel that something of yourself has also died; that the wall you leaned upon has collapsed. Until its collapse you hadn’t even noticed you were leaning on it, now you long for it with all your heart. But can what is past return? Nasser meant all this to Hisham.
He was in a state of confusion and considerable distress. Had Nasser really died, or was it just a rumour? He set off for his friends’ house in a daze. The door was open, so he walked straight in and found everyone sitting around the radio in the hall, grief-stricken. Muhanna and Muhammad were weeping, hunched over with their heads in their arms. So it was true. Hisham sat beside Muhaysin, feeling an almost unbearably painful swelling in his throat. He was overwhelmed by the need to cry, like the day long past when he heard of his aunt Hila’s death. Since then, he had rarely cried: once when he had said goodbye to his mother as he left for Beirut; and on another occasion when he heard that his aunt Sharifa had died. Now he rested his head on his knees and began to cry quietly.
As he wept, he felt that he was not grieving for someone else, but for himself. He had been born the year Nasser launched his revolution. He was not yet three months old when the 23rd of July Movement came into being. Nasser’s heroics in Port Said and Suez were the backdrop against which he lived his early childhood. Like a dream, he still remembered the day his mother had picked him up and danced him around the room following the withdrawal of the Tripartite Forces. He could remember perfectly his mother’s subsequent accounts of courageous deeds in Port Said and Suez, and his father’s tales of heroes like Gawal Gamal – his father never stopped telling him how Gawal Gamal filled his aeroplane with explosives and plunged it, and himself, into the heart of an enemy destroyer, thereby putting an end to the supposedly indestructible ship.
As he grew up Hisham became increasingly conscious of Abdel-Nasser’s achievements. Nasser was implementing the union with Syria as Hisham was beginning to take in the world around him, and to this day he could remember his father and father’s friends’ cheers when the union was announced. They were sitting in a circle around the big radio in the sitting room. His father had bought a massive aerial for the occasion so that he could tune into stations all over the world. An image of Nasser standing amidst the crowds in Damascus still stuck in Hisham’s memory. That was also the year he went to primary school. For all the years of primary school Arab life rang with one name: Gamal Abdel-Nasser. For Arabs, every political event was linked to Nasser: the union, its dissolution, the revolution and war in Yemen, the Socialist Union, Socialist laws, Algerian independence, the revolution in Iraq, the resistance to the Baghdad Pact and the Arab Union … Nasser was in the very air they breathed.
By the time Hisham left primary school, Nasser was the Arabs’ only leader, still unrivalled, despite the disaster of the breakup of the union. By the time he left middle school Nasser’s star had fallen, but as a symbol he endured in people’s hearts. Can symbols fall? June 1967 came, and with it the transforming moment of simultaneous death and awakening. Politically, Gamal Abdel-Nasser died that June, three years before his body died, and with the death of Nasser many other dreams died.
Hisham clearly remembered the day he awoke to the disaster. For many, the previous day held the promise of a stroll on the shores of Haifa, Jaffa and Tel Aviv; now, suddenly, Zionists were promenading on the banks of the Suez Canal and praying in the ancient city of Jerusalem, drinking beer in al-Bireh and the golden arak of Ramallah in Tulkarm, bathing in olive oil in Nablus and filling their lungs with the air of the Golan and Jabal al-Sheikh. Their souls died within them as their eyes opened to the huge illusion they had been living – but no one blamed Nasser; they blamed everything and everyone except Nasser. The father could do no wrong, even when he was mistaken. When he resigned they wept; when he revoked his resignation, they rejoiced and said that perhaps it was a new dawn. Deep inside themselves they feared that it might be a new illusion, but they trusted Nasser in spite of everything; they wanted to trust him.
Hisham remembered those gloomy days well. Everything about them was tasteless, colourless, without smell. The songs of Abd al-Wahhab, Abd al-Halim, Farid and Umm Kulthumm were whetted blades and burning whips, and there was nothing but sorrow and dejection. The songs in our mouths are salty, the women’s locks are salty … our skins are dead to feeling, and our souls complain of their ruin. That’s how Nizar Qabbani put it, transformed by the disaster from a poet of love and melancholy into a poet who ‘writes with a knife’.
Nasser was dying while Hisham was at university – and with Nasser, a part of Hisham was also dying; a phase of his life was over, and a new phase was beginning. How couldn’t he be deeply affected by Nasser’s death, when his life had been linked with the great man’s since birth? In the organisation, they’d tried to teach him to hate Nasser. Even at a time when he had been dazzled by the scientific methodology of Marxism, when Nasser was anyway unpopular in his own country after the revolution and civil war in Yemen, Hisham had still tried to defend him. He was incapable of hating him … and his soul blamed him for hating him a single moment.
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* Karbala, a city in Iraq, is where Hussein ibn Ali was martyred in ad 680. The place subsequently became a sacred rallying point for Shi‘ite Muslims.