Under the Gaze of Angels: Stories by Said Habib

Author:Said Habib
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Interlink Publishing Group Inc
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Under the Gaze of Angels

I was born in Haifa, during the British Mandate for Palestine, on August 21, 1945. My British birth certificate and baptismal document states a name that is different from the one I use today. My parents named me Maurice for reasons I can only speculate. They never explained their choice. Today, I suspect that it was done to appease the new British rulers, who unseated the Ottomans who ruled Palestine. They hoped that my name would make my life easier when dealing with them. I lived with that name for the first few years of my life.

According to my mother, I was reluctant to embrace life and struggled with every breath. My acute asthma required constant care and, lacking funds, my parents abandoned the treatments offered by modern medicine, deciding to explore the traditional remedies practiced in our community. Their search took them to a sage, who sensed, upon seeing me, that something was terribly wrong. Hearing my name, he cursed the devil. To rid me of bad blood, he took his sharp knife and bled me by making small incisions all over my back, then proceeded with a name-changing ceremony and gave me my Arabic name. He called me Said, restoring me to what he viewed to be a normal state.

My new name, however, didn’t cure my asthma. In fact, my condition worsened when my family was driven out of Haifa by the increased violence between the local inhabitants and the Jewish groups who began to come from Europe in greater numbers, wanting to claim Palestine as their own. We left behind our home and my father’s bombed-out carpentry workshop. Abandoning all of their large possessions for the sake of our safety, my parents collected whatever they could carry and fled to Nazareth. There, we took shelter in the basement of the Sisters of Nazareth Convent and waited for the conflict to end. Many vacant homes had been left in trust to various religious institutions by the frightened people who had decided to escape the violence in Palestine. They moved to neighboring Arab countries, thinking that they could reclaim their homes when the conflict was sorted out. With the establishment of Israel in 1948, the borders were permanently sealed. Realizing that no one was coming back to their homes, the religious institutions made a decision. They allowed people living in their corridors and basements to move into the vacant homes that had been left in their care. In a dramatic twist of fate, we ended up in one of the most beautiful vacant houses in Nazareth.

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