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HOME-SALMAN-ABU-SITTAS-MEMOIR/
MAPPING MY RETURN
A Palestinian Memoir
by Salman Abu Sitta
352 pp. The American University in Cairo Press. $36.05
To judge by his fellow Palestinian activist associates, the likes of
Edward Said and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Dr. Salman Abu Sitta is among
our living lead intellectuals. He is a low-key but persistent native
contributor to documenting the life, and especially the “living
geography,” of Palestine across the ages, a task to which he has
dedicated his professional knowhow and time.
Amen! I hereby admit that, though not a refugee, I fully subscribe to this
form of resistance.
Abu Sitta’s “regular” professional life seems to have been rich and
challenging enough: It involves the standard technical engineering office
and field work and independent business ventures with the attendant
achievements and reversals, especially in Kuwait with Saddam’s
megalomaniacal invasion and defeat. He participates as well in the
standard Palestinian intellectual and organizational activism worldwide.
Such a career seems typical of many diasporic Palestinians, the genre
known for its high educational and professional achievement. And for its
reliability: “They would go anywhere, any time, and do a terrific job,”
the author tells us.
Yet the loss of home, property and lead position of his family as well as
all the familiar physical and sociocultural surroundings must have been
overwhelming to Salman as a ten-year-old. It stayed with him for life.
Then, half a century later, approaching retirement, the author is seized by
his lifelong urge to discover what lay behind his dispossession:
And that apparently was how his “crusade” to map his return finally
started.
“My life’s mission became to try to put a face to this invisible enemy, in particular,
the Zionist soldiers who attacked and burned down my home.”
Then we are given a quick run of the massive destruction from the air
and ground that the Zionist forces inflicted on Salman’s childhood home,
the school that his father had built for the village’s children, the family’s
flourmill and the other landmarks of the area. There are the elders and
the feeble and the rest of the distraught and fleeing crowd.
The vivid picture of the overwhelming disaster is given full force in the
author’s childhood memories with the site of a ravine that had formerly
served as his agemates’ playground, now used as hideaway by the
village’s women, children and the elderly. “[The] women splashed dirt
on their faces to discourage rape.” The scene seems to have never left
Salman’s active memory. That and viewing his family’s unharvested
wheat fields.
“I had wanted to know, since the moment I had been hiding in the wadi
with the women and children, who had done this to me, to all of us.”
Fast forward for over five decades and Abu Sitta, the itinerant
Palestinian refugee, having escaped his academic life, is a regular at
British libraries in search of historical maps of Palestine from past
Western missions starting with Napoleon’s invasion with all its experts
and cartographers. It is the start of his self-assigned, self-propelled and
unending mapping and documenting of Palestine, the rich field he
continues to lead with academic vigor and which provides the arch that
sustains the book’s narrative.
Unfortunately, the rape the Abu Sitta womenfolk dreaded did take place;
all those rumors were not the figment of someone’s imagination. At this
later stage we are presented with one account that the author discovers
retroactively with all its inhumane and shameful details. He has
entrusted the Palestinian Jewish anthropologist, Uri Davis, with the task
of tracking down his father’s heirloom silver sword. The attempt fails.
Apparently, the sword had been pilfered, along with photos, books and
other valuables, from the family’s residence, the prosperous Ma’in
village’s headman’s home. The investigation leads to a more damning
side issue: A year after the Nakba, a gang rape was committed by a
whole platoon, 17 men soldiers in total, with the victim, a 10 to 15-year-
old Palestinian girl, given a bath and a haircut in full view of the
platoon’s members before they serially raped her, (which, it must be
admitted, was decided democratically by a vote at the mess hall during
that Saturday eve gathering in Kibbutz Nirim, newly established on Abu
Sitta’s private land). Later, they execute the girl and bury her body in a
shallow grave. All of the details are exposed at this later stage by several
of the Participants in an investigative report published in Haaretz.
SALMAN ABU SITTA
Recounting the childhood memory of the Hagana forces destroying his
village, the author formulates the moving conception of his life-long
commitment to the idea of “Mapping My Return,” the title and theme of
his book:
I looked back at the smoldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with
the still-unharvested wheat. I was engulfed by a feeling of both anxiety and serenity:
serenity because we were still alive and an anxiety that was never to leave me. I
wanted to know who this faceless enemy was. What did they look like, why did they
hate us, why did they destroy us, why had they had literally burned our lives to the
ground?
What had we done to them? Who were these Jews anyway? I thought to myself that I
must find out who they were: their names, their faces, where they came from. I must
know their army formations, their officers, what exactly they had done that day, and
where they lived later. I scanned the horizon behind me, recalling the places where I
was born, played, went to school, as they slowly disappeared from view. My
unexpected departure did not feel that it would be such a long separation—it was
simply a sojourn in another place for a while.
If the future was vague for me at that moment, the past that I had just left behind
became frozen in my mind and became my present forever. I never imagined that I
would not see these places again, that I would never be able to return to my
birthplace. The events of those two days catapulted us into the unknown.
I spent the rest of my life on a long, winding journey of return, a journey that has
taken me to dozens of countries over decades of travel, and turned my black hair to
silver. But like a boomerang, I knew the end destination, and that the only way to it
was the road of return I had decided to take.
And that is still the burning fire in Salman’s and other Palestinian
refugees’ hearts. Here Salman shows a detailed map of his home village,
Ma’in Abu Sitta, and the four Israeli Kibbutzim totaling close to one
thousand settlers, established on the village’s land, mainly soldiers who
are later ceremoniously declared civilians. In the meantime, the same
four settlements became the launching grounds for the multiple
massacres of Palestinian refugees in Gaza.
“This river of blood that engulfed the Gaza Strip in 1956 was not deemed sufficient
to earn even a page of coverage in a dozen or so of the western books on the so-
called Suez Campaign.”
Here Abu Sitta shares at length two sets of correspondence from two
fellow Palestinian friends, one killed in one such massacre and the other,
a vagabond, essentially walks his way from Palestine to Kuwait. Just two
intimate examples of what the Palestinian diaspora feels like.