I am writing the following several months later based on notes I took when I was in Jenin. Everything was so emotionally intense when I was there that I was not always in the mood to sit down at a computer and write. I also didn't always have access to the internet, and I wrote in my notebook instead. So this is not strictly a blog at all, but the immediacy comes back when I now review what I wrote then.
from Tuesday 05/07/11 ...
It is noisy in the camp. The camp consists of narrow streets concrete houses and shops, not a camp as people might imagine it with tents, although in the early years people would have lived like that, literally in tents before small concrete structures were put up. And then when Jenin camp was attacked in 2002 and partly destroyed, the camp was rebuilt with newer buildings. some of the houses are quite large. Mustafa's house looks narrow from the street. The street, the size of a small lane is one of the main roads ofte camp is called Shariah Ouda - Return Street. Everything here reminds you of the original trauma, the Nakba - catastrophe - that occurred in 1948 when the Palestinians fled or were emptied from cities like Haifa and the surrounding villages and countryside when Israel was established. The people who live in the camp now are the third generation of refugees from that event.
Mustafa's house although narrow from the street, is quite large inside. You come off the street through a metal gate down a little path and go in through a side door. There is a large sitting room on the left and next to it the bedroom of his young five year old daughter Mais and her bathroom. All these Mustafa has given over to me. In the sitting room there is a flat screen television from which I can watch satellite television, many middle eastern channels, stations from Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, Al Jazira in Arabic and English, Palestinian stations, nationalists channels.
There is another sitting room to the right as you come in through the side door, covered with mats and mattresses. This is where we eat. Mais runs in and out and up and down the path all day and with her friends, neighbouring kids from the other close by houses, late into the night. Mustafa's wife I only see occasionally. She brings cooks, we talk a bit, and then she goes to another part of the house. It is customary in Palestine for men and women to socialise separately. Mustafa's mother lives in a flat at the top of the house. I never see her. I am in Mais's bedroom, which is filled with children's toys like any room anywhere for a child of her age. I don't know what she thinks about me taking over her room for a month. At the far end of the room Mais has a bathroom and shower which I use. Sometimes the shower is not working and I have to wash from a bucket of water, it is extremely hot and dry here in the summer, not a hint of rain for the whole of the summer, really until late autumn, and there are often water shortages.
It is peaceful in the house. I spend a lot of time talking to Mustafa in Arabic and English. The contrast between the atmosphere of the house and what happens outside, even at a time of relative peace - incursions of soldiers, arrests, the still unresolved murder of Juliano Mer-Khamis at the Freedom Theatre.
Mustafa once told me how anxious he was for the future, for the life that his daughter would have to live later on. He has noticed my habit of talking to myself when I think I am alone. 'My father used to do that', he said, 'He was a nervous man'. I try to imagine what it was like, living year after year with the uncertainty, the receding hopes of return, the periods of danger and bloodshed, but above all the monotonous waiting year after year for a resolution that never comes. At the time of the fighting in 2002, Mustafa was away with his family in a nearby village. The soldiers took over his house and used it as a sniping post. There is a crack along the lenght of the ceiling in the living room, which was where the house was hit by a mortar shell. The soldiers threw most of the furniture out on to the street.
Friday 08/07/11 ...
Mustafa and I go out from the camp into the town. The town is about twenty minutes walk away. Out of his house along Shariah Ouda, past the metal horse sculpture, down a side road and we come out at the cinema. Mustafa has an electrically powered wheelchair, given to him by the Palestinian authority. He is very confident navigating the roads, far more confident than I am.
Mustafa has a brother who has a small stall selling hats, belts, and other tourist things. Every Saturday, Palestinians from Israel are allowed to cross the checkpoint into Jenin, which they do in quite large numbers, because most of the shops in Israel are closed on that day. Today is Friday which is the Muslim day of prayer. Most of the shops and businesses in Jenin are closed but Mustafa's brother is working on building a metal shutter for his stall. He is using an oxy-acetylene welder. I sit on a plastic crate, drink coffee and talk to him and his teenage son, Mustafa's nephew. I have already met his son. He came to Mustafa's house soon after I arrived. I had shown him my Arabic English dictionary. 'What is Zahyunia [Zionism] in English?', he asked me.
Later we go back to the camp and visit Mustafa's sister. Then we go to the Freedom Theatre which is nearby. Outside, at the place where the director Juliano Mer-Khamis was shot dead in April, there is a large photograph of him on a black cloth background hanging down from a wall. He is holding out his hand, pointing with two fingers, prophetically. There is a sign next to the picture that says, 'Martyr to Freedom, Culture and Original Thought'. The theatre is going to continue despite the proximity of unseen enemies. Juliano founded it after 2002 so that young people could express their lives, traumas, fears, anger, rather than become a new generation of martyrs. They are going to tour in Europe in the autumn with a show called Shu Kman - What Else?
