Pay No Heed to the Rockets by Marcello Di Cintio

Author:Marcello Di Cintio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

In Raji Bathish’s ironic short story “Nakba Lite,” five young men decide to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba by collecting their families’ stories for inclusion on a “Nakba Blog.” They become disappointed, though, when they realize their stories lack sufficient tragedy. One man tells of how Israeli soldiers considered using his family’s home as a command center, but never did. Another explains how his family fled the fighting in Haifa and ended up settling comfortably near Nazareth— hardly a desperate fate. A third speaks of his aunt, a spinster “who is expected to die of cancer at any moment because of the trauma she has been suffering for more than sixty years.” She suffered nightmares of being raped by soldiers even though she was never actually raped. Finally, the fourth blogger tells the story of his mother’s uncle, who kept the key to the house he fled in 1948, only to have it stolen during his wife’s funeral. “And so, five years later, my mother’s uncle died from grief over his key.” The blog coordinator loved this story, and asked the man how he knew for sure that the uncle died out of grief for his lost key. The man replied: “Is there anything more tragic to die for?”

Raji is not unlike the men in the story. His personal history also lacks a compelling Nakba tragedy. “All of us Palestinians are melancholic figures. All of us are looking for sadness to write about, because it is not interesting for a Palestinian to write happy things,” Raji told me as we sat at a pricey café in Nazareth near the gaudy Basilica of the Annunciation. “But I am not a refugee,” Raji continued. “My melancholy is related to something different.” Each Palestinian author writes about the occupation somehow, Raji said, but his work challenges collective symbols like lost orange groves or the sanctity of keys for stolen homes. Raji has set stories in Tel Aviv, “the capital of the enemy,” which rarely appears in Palestinian literature. His characters are more vulnerable than heroic. And instead of patriotic clichés, Raji—like Ala Hlehel—would rather write about sex.

When he was a boy, Raji used to steal books and magazines his uncle left behind in his mother’s family home. “It was like a passion for me. I wanted to read all the time. I read everything.” Many of the titles came from Lebanon and Syria, and Raji realized later on how rare these books were. The books were illegal under Israeli law and likely smuggled in. Young Raji most enjoyed reading a Lebanese health magazine called Your Doctor, which always included a sex advice column. “I read about sexual problems and penis size,” Raji said. The magazine taught young Raji the blunt carnal vocabulary he would later use in his work.

The sacred attracted Raji just as much as the sexual. He used to accompany his Catholic mother to church on Sundays. Raji was not particularly religious: even at nine years old he questioned

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