1400032660 (N) by Mourid Barghouti

Author:Mourid Barghouti [Barghouti, Mourid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307486141
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2000-03-26T21:00:00+00:00

I contemplated the guesthouse on whose platform I stood. This is my first place. The faces of its men and their voices come back to me. Or is it my imagination borrowing them from their long death? They appear and disappear in front of me with their real characteristics and those that had been stuck on to them by the tongues and stories that the Barghoutis are supposed to be masters of. The late poet ‘Abd al-Rahim ‘Omar says that in Ramallah there are Muslims, Christians, and Barghoutis! The older folk tell the tales of the guesthouse to their children, generation after generation. Their tales are clothed in exaggerations and additions, depending on the sense of humor of the teller. Some came to me from my father and some from Abu Hazim, but most are stored in their original form in the memories of Abu Kifah and al-Mu'tadel. Abu Kifah's main targets are an uncle of his called Samih and another uncle, Majid. As for al-Mu'tadel, because of his intelligence, he was allowed to sit with the adults from an early age, and later he spent all his vacations from his work in Saudi Arabia at the guesthouse.

Here is Abu Ouda, sitting at the farthest corner of the mat (the distance from the center of the mat depends on the wealth of the sitter). Suddenly one summer evening Abu ‘Ouda says: “Do you know how people distinguish between a stupid man and a clever one?”

“How, Abu Tunub?” (It is said that he was given this name because of his early pressure on his father to let him get married; a ‘tunub’ for them is a long penis.)

“A stupid man has a broad beard.”

Nobody commented, but the headman, sitting in the center of the guesthouse, lifted his right hand slowly to feel his beard, and all the men burst out laughing!

Once he said to them: “Your village, you people of Deir Ghassanah, is a hypocrite's village. If Abu ‘Ouda speaks pearls you say you didn't hear, and if the headman farts you say the scent of musk!”

And here is ‘Bismarck,’ the father of al-Mu'tadel, who manipulates and fixes the affairs of the village in a mysterious way. His nickname reflects not just his machinations but the attitude of the villagers who gave it to him. The nicknames the village gave to people quickly replaced their real names. One of the cleverest similes I heard during this visit concerned two friends who were always together. It was said that they were like Kleenex; if you pulled out one tissue the other appeared immediately. Here is Abu Zuheir, the most cunning man in Deir Ghassanah, who got his son Zuheir married to a girl and then married her sister himself when he was seventy and fathered the martyr ‘Adli.

And here is Abu Seif, awesome and huge, the biggest landowner in this village and its surroundings. The Israelis built a settlement on his land in the village of Mlabbis and named it Btah Tikfa. He is the owner of the olive press in Deir Ghassanah.

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