I’m always at a loss . . .

. . . when I think about the incredible things people say. Some of them are elderly, uneducated folks who haven’t had a day of schooling in their lives. Then out of the blue, they come out with some gem of wisdom so profound that no educated person could have said anything half as earthshaking, and I wonder how it can happen. But as amazing as it is, I wouldn’t believe it if somebody told me these people had heard these things somewhere, memorized them, and saved them up for this or that situation. I mean, sayings like these would be hard to memorize. Besides, it’s pretty unlikely that people would talk about things like these unless they’d experienced them firsthand. In other words, they aren’t the sort of thing you could just dictate to somebody and have him regurgitate it an hour later, much less years later.

People who talk this way make me think of characters in a novel. A novelist doesn’t put down everything a character thinks about all day long. Instead, he has his characters say the best, most important things. So maybe we come to love a character in a novel the way we come to love a poet. We know, for example, that a poet does ordinary things like eat and drink and watch television, and that he dreams, gets happy and sad and angry, listens to music, and even pees. But we push this knowledge to the back of our heads so that all we see of the poet is his poetry. That’s how he becomes “a poet” in our eyes, just the way a person becomes a character in a novel.

When I read Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Umm Saad, I kept thinking: where on earth would a woman like this have picked up so much wisdom? Yeah—Umm Saad is the perfect example. Then I started wondering too: what happens with Umm Saad outside Kanafani’s novel? Does she get sick? Does she get sad? Does she have mood swings? What all did she do in her lifetime, outside that novel’s ninety pages?

I mean, I know a woman like Umm Saad has to be wonderful. But she might not have been as wonderful twenty, thirty, or forty years earlier. She might have been like me, like us. Even if she was, the question remains: why did Kanafani put only the best parts of her in the novel? Was it because when he met her, she took a liking to him because he made her think of her son Saad and, as a result, she poured out her emotions and thoughts as though she were talking to herself? Or is it just that novels are only novels if they’re like this, and their characters can only be proper characters if they’re this way—saying exactly what’s supposed to be said, and nothing else, at just the time when it should be said, then disappearing and reappearing, only to say what’s supposed to be said in some other situation?

How many pages would Kanafani have had to write if he’d wanted to describe Umm Saad’s life down to the last little detail? Would we have loved her as much if we’d read the thousand- or two-thousand-page version of her story? Or maybe the reason she’s so perfect is just that she’s completely present in the moment, whereas the rest of us spend our lives outside the moment.

I swear I’m going to go crazy. I write one article after another and send them off to newspapers, but to this day not a single one of them has gotten published.

A few months ago a journalist said to me, “Children would never think this way, whether they’re martyred or not.”

“But they do think this way!” I told him. “In fact, they think even more deeply than this. Your problem is that when you read what I’ve written about other kids and what they’ve said, you discover that they think better than you do, and that grieving mothers think better than you do. That’s because, instead of getting your hands dirty with real life, you go around with your head stuck in a dictionary. Since you own the key to a publishing house, you think you know more than everybody else. What you’ve forgotten is that the doormat we hide our house key under is the same mat we use to wipe the dirt and mud from the street off our shoes before we come inside.”

I figured I’d never be able to publish anything in that newspaper as long as people like him worked there. But as I left the place, I felt strong. In fact, I felt like Superwoman. It was as if I’d had the kind of epiphany that comes to some of the people I talk to, or to characters in novels. Otherwise, where would I have gotten the idea of the key under the doormat? I’d really put him in his place! I mean, who does he think he is? He thinks he holds the keys to our mouths and our hearts, to what we should and shouldn’t say. Who gave him the right to decide how things are supposed to be said and written, anyway? Is he some kind of computerized spelling and grammar checker?

Actually, I’m not sure the spellchecker analogy works as well as the doormat one, and if I were writing a novel, I’d probably chuck it.

But what was I supposed to do now? I’d been collecting little stories. Some I’d heard from other people, some were based on things I’d been through myself, and some I’d clipped out of newspapers. And I kept wondering: what are our authors doing today? Why aren’t they writing about all these things?

After my argument with that journalist, I decided to scribble down whatever I saw with the idea that some day I might hand my scribblings over to a ‘real’ writer. I thought: maybe I’ll go find Ghassan Kanafani’s grave and tell him, “Get up now and write down these poor orphaned stories that nobody pays any attention to! Because if we don’t write down our story, you know what’s going to happen to it? (Sorry for going on like this, Ghassan, but I know I can talk to you from the heart. I can rant and rave to you without feeling embarrassed, since you’re one of us.) Do you know what happens to the stories we don’t write down?”

. . .

“I’ll tell you what happens to them: they become enemy property.”

Whenever a door closed in my face, I’d go knock on Ghassan’s, since his was always open.

Last night I saw him in a dream. It made me so happy. He was walking down a street that I recognized, but didn’t. It was broad and clean, and it had the sea on both sides of it. At first I followed him from a distance. I didn’t dare come right up to him. I realized I was dreaming, and that I was going to wake up. Everything overlapped with everything else, and I heard a voice—it might have been my own—saying, “Where’s your nerve, girl? You talk about him night and day, but when he shows up, you run away like a scared
little mouse!”

“Me, a scared little mouse?” That made me mad. If I were ‘a scared little mouse,’ I wouldn’t have said what I said to that nasty old journalist.

But then I started to think about how, if I went on this way, I was going to miss out on the chance to meet him.

I looked in his direction. By this time he was way ahead of me. But then I heard him calling me by name. I wondered how he could be sure who I was, since even my mother couldn’t tell me and my sister apart.

I took off running toward him, but every time one of my feet touched the ground, the sea on either side of the street rose a little higher.

I heard him calling me again and telling me to hurry. So I sped up, and just when I started to think I’d never catch up with him, I saw him smile and reach out to me. But when our fingertips touched, it turned out that the hand belonged to my sister.

Then I woke up in a fright.