Samir
El-Youssef, raised in a refugee camp, grew up into a writer who challenges
the myths of Palestinian politics. Matthew J. Reisz meets a trouncer
of taboos.
Samir El-youssef's living room is full of books - Arabic on one side,
English on the other. Asked how he defines himself, he hesitates, tries
out ideas and then suggests that "It's a question of loyalty in two
dimensions - I'm a citizen-exile or citizen-refugee." He was born a
refugee, in a Palestinian camp in Lebanon, moved to London in 1990,
acquired British citizenship in 2000 and has now made a successful life as
writer and peace activist. His first English novel, The Illusion of Return
(Halban, £12.99), explores many of the resulting issues of identity.
El-youssef has a Sunni father, but his mother comes from the only Shi'ite
Palestinian family. This, he believes, "has contributed to the
diversity of my understanding of things - from the beginning you are aware
of yourself as someone different". Although he has contributed many
articles to the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, his criticisms of
the second intifada and the Arab policy of "non-normalisation"
in relation to Israel have sometimes proved too controversial to be
published.
"We have to meet up with the Israelis and have a dialogue with
them," he explains. "The idea of not meeting is simply childish
and stupid. But it is not easy to express your views. You can be branded a
'Zionist' or a 'traitor' simply for not parroting the same old
slogans."
His own social circle consists largely of liberal British Jews and
Israelis. Asked about his outspoken opposition to the academic boycott of
Israel, he responds cheerfully: "What hope do we have if we as
writers don't speak to each other? Do we really think our idiotic leaders
are going to sort things out?"
El-youssef is effusive and hospitable; we laugh a lot over cakes and
Turkish coffee. But the story of his early life is bleak. The family left
the camp for a Shi'ite village when they had scraped together enough money
to buy property. They lived through the Israeli occupation, but the
so-called "war of the camps" in 1986 saw the Shi'ite militia,
Amal, targeting Palestinians. They soon had little choice but to move on
to the Sunni city of Sidon.
Life was comparatively safe, but the whole country was collapsing and
Palestinians were usually at the bottom of the heap: "Lebanon in the
Eighties was awful, a state of nature with everybody at the throats of
everybody else. To be a Palestinian at the end of the decade was hopeless,
absolutely hopeless... There was a terrible anti-Palestinian attitude in
the country. The PLO was shattered, there was a lot of corruption."
For those in the camps, there was an additional malaise. They had long
been at the forefront of the Palestinian national "revolution",
but the first intifada (1987-90) in the West Bank and Gaza shifted the
centre of gravity. Despite the posturing and violence, "there had
been a sense of doing something, of facing up to a challenge, but now
things were happening somewhere else. Suddenly we were left with militias,
armed factions and political organisations with ridiculous or bankrupt
agendas in addition to poverty, lack of services, lack of
everything."
It was at this ghastly moment that El-youssef got out and went to Cyprus.
He then moved to England for possible work on a Kuwaiti-backed magazine -
a project which fell through when Saddam Hussein carried out "an
invasion against my interests". It is this moment he revisits in
"The Day the Beast Got Thirsty", a novella published in Gaza
Blues (David Paul) alongside 15 enigmatic stories by his friend, the
Israeli writer Etgar Keret.
"The Beast" takes place in a refugee camp where the young
narrator lives amid fighters, racketeers, sloganeers and "fixers who
sold you visas that took you nowhere". Exhausted, numb, frequently
stoned and bored with all the talk of "our just cause", he ends
up wondering about life with Dalal, a woman he doesn't even like: "We
will get married and have 10 children, but then they will die, and have
their photos glued to the walls of the Camp, declaring them as heroic
martyrs who have died while fighting the Zionist enemy... After that
Israel could invade Lebanon again, destroy the Camp and fuck us all up, so
we die and get the hell out of this fucking life."
Such ferocious black humour gives a picture of life far more real - and
hence more moving - than any images of noble suffering. "I wanted to
write about the Palestinian community in Lebanon as a real community with
problems and tensions and contradictions," El-youssef explains,
"and not just as a heap of people waiting for the problem to be
solved. What you read in 'The Beast' is what people said in the street all
the time, the jokes about Arafat, the PLO and 'the revolution', the
selfishness, the cynicism accompanied by frankness - but all this has
failed to be reflected in literature."
The Illusion of Return continues this examination. The central section
looks back to a Lebanese city under Israeli occupation in 1982 or 1983, on
the last evening the listless narrator spent hanging out with his friends
Ali, George and Maher. One takes refuge in philosophy, another boasts
about his resistance work. It is a world full of hypocrisy, homophobia and
despair, where moral compromise is unavoidable. It is also a world shot
through with class divisions. The main characters may be legally refugees,
but they come from families with enough money to have moved out of the
camps and become "middle class". When an impoverished young man
stuck in a camp takes Maher's Marxist posturing literally, the result soon
proves tragic.
In 1948, El-youssef's parents were expelled from a village in Palestine
which no longer exists - he visited the site last year. He has some sharp
words about Palestinians' continuing refugee status within Lebanon, Jordan
and Syria: "How can you be a refugee if you've been a teacher for 25
years earning a good salary? When they'd just arrived and were living in
tents, they were obviously real refugees. But after 30 or 40 years, the
term is ridiculous. Some of them had more money than many Lebanese...
There again, why are we still refugees in Lebanon? What kind of country
leaves people as refugees for 60 years, even people who were born
there?"
If the issue of "refugees" is complex, even more intractable is
the "right of return". The opening section of the novel treats
this farcically. Around the year 2000, the narrator is half-heartedly
working on a dissertation about Palestinian refugees when he is verbally
and then physically assailed by hard-line students from a group called the
Campaign for the Right of Return. El-youssef extracts a good deal of
comedy from a narrator who seems inordinately proud of his phrase "We
must look at the notion of return as a symbolic value". Yet the issue
is utterly serious.
He is deeply pessimistic about the current Middle East, sceptical of
two-state solutions which would create a weak Palestine alongside a
powerful Israel, and seems to place his long-term hopes in a one-state
solution, although he is well aware this sounds utopian - and has few
takers among even the most liberal Jewish Israelis. As for now, he is
committed to greater honesty, dialogue and willingness to address
"the human issue of those living in refugee camps" without
overlooking the question of why they are still refugees. He also thinks
that we also need to look far more carefully at the whole notion of
return: "To what can we return? A piece of land? To places we have
never been or which have changed beyond recognition? Is 'return' just
about escaping the inhospitality of the world?
"The idea that every single person whose parents came from Palestine
should have an automatic right of return is ridiculous. People who make
that claim don't give a toss about the refugees, whether Palestinians live
or die, they just want to continue the war with Israel.
"I don't believe in the right of return," he says,
"and don't want to return, but I do want an acknowledgement from the
Israelis that I don't come from nowhere... It is a question of honour and
dignity. For Palestinians leading relatively secure lives, I'm sure that
is the consensus. Why would they want to 'return' to the Palestine their
families left? It's not there any more. It doesn't exist."
Matthew J Reisz is editor of the 'Jewish Quarterly'
