“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
““What are your requests?” – “We want to see the sun.””
There are so many things we would like to say – it is so difficult to allow ourselves to talk about such great, so unjustified suffering. However we try, because that’s what we can do.
“Mulberry Leaves” comes out in 2020. We are in 2024. We would like to say that the situation has worsened but reading these pages we immediately know that it is just a step forward into the abyss. We were lucky enough to speak with Aysar al-Saifi, to hear from his voice what and how much senselessness the stories in this book arise from. These are 38 very short stories, a few pages each, of rare intensity and poetry. We would like to point this out straight away: within and beyond all the pain, it is a beautiful book. Because yes, in short, here we are talking about books; every now and then, as in this case, the role of window onto our present becomes more evident, the light that enters is blinding. In an almost paradoxical way it is never repetitive: the stories of life in prison, the threats of life in the Dheìsheh camp, near Bethlehem, (where the author was born and raised), the escapes, the resistance, are all unique.
What this book does is precisely bring back to us the uniqueness of every single experience, torn from the shapeless mass of the death and injured counts. Many images recur, yes, from mulberry leaves to the alleys of memory, and they all take us back to the shared dimension of struggle, of awareness of the past but also and always of looking towards the future. “The first thing they teach us is to resist,” says Aysar; “My grandmother made us hide the books in the ground, not the money.”; and again, the only question that he resounds at the end of his speech and of every story: “Why?”. And it’s a devastating question.
On every page, the only obvious guilt that emerges is that of being born in the wrong part of the globe, the indelible guilt of being Palestinian. What the Israeli narrative does most of all is essentially the assimilation of Palestinian consciousness.
“The Occupation aims to destroy their culture and heritage with the aim of creating empty bodies, without content, to be manipulated at will.” This is what they resist, much more than bombs and torture, they try not to forget who they are and they do so by cultivating dreams and memories that can fill that space suspended between “the words of History and distances”. One might think that there cannot be sufficient political or historical reason to justify even one of these abuses and instead there are thousands. In less than 150 pages, the stories of separation nail us to the wall: husbands from their wives, mothers and fathers from their children, brothers, friends, from places, from the sun, from the sea. “The Occupation […] transformed these children who understand nothing about politics, economics and history into new militants for freedom. He planted the seeds of hatred, contempt and rebellion in them: they will never forget the day they were deprived of the possibility of seeing the sea.”
Aysar says it well when, talking about his father’s “administrative detentions” (a sort of completely arbitrary preventive arrest), he explains: you can’t even imagine it. Yet what he does with his words and his stories is precisely this: to make us imagine. Not only the horror but also the hope and the inhuman – or very human – strength with which the desire for freedom takes root where it is most denied and betrayed.
There is a dialogue that perhaps concentrates more than others the spirit of this cruel and wicked war, the dialogue between a young incarcerated artist and an officer on the profound meaning of a drawing that the latter wants to purchase.
Officer: “Well, even though he is a lion, he still remains behind bars.”
Abd al-Quader: “Although you are behind bars, you are still a lion.”
Read these stories: they are full of poetry and love and hope. They have the millenary resistance of the roots and the superb strength of the wind that whips the branches. Read them to be closer to those who are fighting, to those who are dying, to those who are fleeing. Read them to be witnesses, so as not to believe other imposed narratives, so as not to be able to say that you didn’t know. They are our fathers, our sisters, our friends, there is no other way to think about war. If we have a freedom, not a duty, it is to consider ourselves brothers and to resist with them.
Thanks Aysar.
Written by Delis
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Aysar Al-Saifi, Foglie di gelso, Prospero , Novate Milanese, 2020