MODERN PALESTINE
Author explores the literature
It’s not the advice you want to hear when excitedly setting off to write an ambitious new book.
But years ago, when Marcello Di Cintio shared his plans to write a book about Palestine, he was not met with enthusiasm in all quarters. Take Vancouver writer Deborah Campbell, author of 2002’s This Heated Place: Encounters in the Promised Land. She advised him against it outright.
“Her advice was, ‘Don’t!’” says Di Cintio, in an interview from his Calgary home. “She said: ‘You’ll get yelled at. Everyone is going to be mad.’ I ignored her advice, to my peril.”
The irony is that Di Cintio’s new book, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in Present Tense, was an attempt to take a wider view of the troubled region by looking at the modern Palestinian experience through its literature. By interviewing authors, intellectuals, librarians, booksellers and poets in the towns and villages of West Bank, Jerusalem, Israel and Gaza and exploring the forces that have shaped modern Palestinian literature, Di Cintio was able to offer a more nuanced look at day-to-day life that goes beyond the anger and turmoil that most people associate with Palestinian life.
“I’ve been wanting to find a way to write about Palestine for years in a way that doesn’t start with the conflict,” Di Cintio says. “So writing about the writers and writing about literary culture was kind of my way in.
“That was my lens, my back door into the culture instead of starting every conversation with, ‘Tell me about the checkpoints. Tell me about the village your grandfather lost,’ I could say, ‘What’s the first poem you wrote?’ There was a way in that had a little more humanity.”
Di Cintio’s work has always revolved around travel and immersing himself in various cultures. His 2000 book, Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa, chronicles a 10-month backpacking journey, while 2006’s Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran explored the poet-wrestler subculture in Iran. Walls: Travels Along the Barricades was the author’s globe-trotting look at various cultures and nations divided by walls around the world. It won Di Cintio the 2013 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing.
Early inspiration for Pay No Heed came in 2012; Di Cintio was writer-in-residence for the Palestine Writing Workshop in Birzeit, north of Ramallah in central West Bank. It was an eye-opening experience for a number of reasons, but an early moment of clarity came after he assigned the nine writers in his workshop to write about their own life.
“When only one of them was even slightly political, that surprised me a lot,” he says. “When I carried on over the course of that month, I got maybe two that were political out of 27 submissions over the course of that workshop. That really surprised me.”
Instead, they wrote about a daily life that, while certainly not unaffected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wasn’t necessarily defined by it, either. One woman wrote about scandalizing her classmates by eating ice cream in the winter. One wrote about her mother’s vanity. One wrote about the time her father threatened to kill her with a knife.
Two years later, Di Cintio saw photographs of the aftermath of Operation Protective Edge, which Israel launched against militants in the Gaza Strip. Four of them were of a girl in a green dress who smiled as she salvaged tattered books from the wreckage.
“That was a super striking image,” says Di Cintio. “I had been following that 2014 war in Gaza, as I’m sure a lot of people were, and looking at horrible photographs. And there’s this girl with books. It had encompassed all I had been thinking about in this girl in the green dress. That was a startling moment, too.”
So Di Cintio made more trips to the Middle East to interview writers, poets and booksellers. He studied the work of Mahmoud Darwish, who was considered the Palestinian national poet before he died in 2008. A line from one of his 1982 poems, which was written when the poet was living in Beirut during the Lebanon War and offers a lengthy meditation on brewing coffee, provided the title of Di Cintio’s book.
He also looked at the work of other well-known Palestinian writers such as Rajeh Shehadeh and Moheeb Barghouti, but also tracked down more obscure and modern writers.
That included everyone from Salha Hamdeen, a young Bedouin girl who won international attention in 2012 for writing fairy tales in a makeshift camp in the Israelicontrolled Wadi Abu Hindi, west of Jerusalem, to Mohammed elKurd, a teenage poet challenging Palestinian societal norms and traditions by writing about feminism and women’s rights.
“Just like every other culture has a literature, Palestinians have their own and it has changed over time,” says Di Cintio. “It started off very political and flag-waving. After (the 1948 Arab-Israeli War), every writer was a soldier. Every writer was there to advance the cause of this national project. When the (1993 Oslo Accords) came in and the whole national project fell apart, most Palestinians felt they had been betrayed by the leaders.
“The artists, but the writers first, decided ‘F-ck this: All our flagwaving led to this.’ So they started to turn their attention inward. Instead of writing about politics, they wrote about their daily lives. We’ve seen that continue with the next generation of writers, who will talk about the conflict but only as it relates to their characters. It used to be every woman in every poem represented modern Palestine. Now a mother is just a mother. They have this tendency to write much more nuanced, domestic work.”
I’ve been wanting to … write about Palestine … in a way that doesn’t start with the conflict. … Writing about the writers … was kind of my way in.