Kusuus Daghril (Hidden Stories)

It's easy to make generalizations about a people when you live beside them, as any foreigner in Jordan, but when you live among them, as we do with our home stay families, the huge variety of lifestyles, beliefs, and narratives becomes readily apparent. In one family I know, the 23-year old daughter comes home from the mall with excessively provocative clothing, camisoles with mere flaps of fabric covering the stomach, in which she parades around the house, spending hours talking to her clandestine boyfriend on the phone until the wee hours of the morning. Until a few weeks ago, she had never prayed in her life; in the middle of her first time, she started laughing, as she had no idea how to properly prostrate herself. In another family, the women are not allowed out of the hosue without the father's permission, and the window shades must be closed at all times so other men--perhapse those in the adjacent apartment building--will have no opportunity to see the women in their unveiled state.

While this variance in religious practice is fairly common, at dinner tonight with friends, I began to hear the personal histories of everyone's host families, a subject we are all only beginning to understand, since something of so sensitive a nature is a story that must be earned, and is not easily or often discussed in a society like this. Thoug hall these families function on what I would call a normal level today, almost all of them, in one way or another, previously went through what I can only identify as unmistakable tragedy, though perhaps to them, it is merely what was put on their plate.

One girl, who lives with three, elderly sisters, finally found the answer to the question she had been wondering about all semester, yet had been too polite to ask. We all live with Palestinian families, so of course we want to know, when? How? Why Jordan?

The stories, of course, vary quite a bit, and are often coupled with anger, reinterpretation, misinterpretation, and resentment. Palestinians who came after '67 are somewhat more straight forward, but for those who came in '48, their stories intrigue me to no end, as there is such a huge collection of literature on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides explaining, in mostly opposing views, what exactly happened at the moment when an Israeli state was created in the place of the Palestinian community. Were they expelled, or did they leave? Whose fault was it? How was it possible that in a mere period of days, weeks, an entirely new political entity could arise where another was, and had been, for centuries prior, in the same place?

The oldest sister, now in her eighties, was a teenager when it all happened; she remembers it as clear as a bell. There was no violence, not any that she saw, rather, the British troops in their community began spreading lies, telling them they had to leave for ten days, just temporarily, and that they would return to their homes shortly. Eager to comply, her family moved into a tent for two weeks an hour east of Jaffa, each member only taking a small backpack of clothes, leaving their houses, bank accounts, and family heirlooms behind. She remembers the tent being "like summer camp", an adventure, until two weeks passed by, and her family didn't return home--they kept moving east. Someone--she wasn't sure who--had come and told her parents that they could never return, and her parents had no choice but to resettle the family in the small town that, with the coming influx of Palestinians, would rise to become the capital of Jordan, Amman. Neighbors who hadn't heeded the warnings of the British and had stayed soon reported to her parents that a Jewish family had moved into the family's house in Jaffa the next day, taking over all their possessions, as if an entirely different family hadn't lived there for years just a few weeks ago.

Utterly incomprehensible. I cannot even begin to understand how either family--the uprooted Palestinians, or the Jewish family in their former home--could merely continue on as normal after that. The sister mentioned that now, great animosity exists between families like hers--who left at the heeding of the British, and were unable to return, those like her former neighbors, who stayed through the creation of Israel, and now resent those who left, saying they were too scared, too eager to do the bidding of the British, and if more had stayed, Palestine would not have been lost. My host father's family was from Jaffa as well, yet he is young enough to have been born in Jordan. Depsite not having any sort of painful uprooting like the one the elderly sister had, he is completely irrational about the conflict, constantly insisting that at some point in the near future, the Arabs will eliminate all the Jews, Israel will cease to exist, and that this is the obvious solution "that everyone knows will happen". He is so lost in this fantasy that it is not even worth discussing with him. The sister, however, who wasn't allowed to return to her home, whose family lost everything, doesn't blame the Jews--only the British. In her view, the British had grown tried or trying to placate the two sides, had promised the creation of a Jewish state, and therefore had to get rid of the Palestinians, by whatever means possible. I don't think the transition was as creepily smooth across the board by any means--as many historians have documented, violence did occur. In a way, it would make more sense to me if violence had occured; it is much more distrubing to me that so great a transition--the uprooting of a family, never again to return, the erasure of a community, and an identity, transplanted to a largely uninhabited area, could happen in a mere span of weeks. What a feeling of instability the must have felt, everything that meant home to them, minus their relatives, gone in the blink of an eye. What a great amount of things I take for granted, my fixed nationality and identity being one of them.

Everyone here has their hidden stories, and no one has been left unaffected by the upheavals that have plagued this area ever since the gradual release of the grip of colonialism. My host mother spent most of her childhood in Kuwait; sometimes she shows me pictures of her and her siblings playing dress up in a plush living room, gleefully running on beautiful white sandy beaches without a care in the world. Then Arafat supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, and all the Palestinians were thrown out of Kuwait, again...everything was lost, and they had to start over from scratch in Amman. In the process, her father suffered three strokes and died when she was merely fourteen. Now, years later, her oldest brother, just one year older than her, tries to provide for the six-person family on his salary as an administrator at the local university. It is not easy to get a job in Jordan--the economy, though growing, is meager at best, and in so small a country where wasta--the social ties in between families--weighs heavily in the professional realm, your smarts or skills often have very little to do with the job you may or may not get.

Everyday, I think to myself....I am so, so lucky to have had the life that I have.