As you read this, the writer Nasser Abu Srour is serving a life sentence at a maximum-security prison in the Negev desert—a fate he was assigned to after being accused of killing a Shin Bet agent during the Intifada of the Stones. During this series of uprisings and demonstrations, Palestinians protested against increasing Israeli state repression, casual harm, and military occupation. For Abu Srour, who had been born in a refugee camp near Bethlehem, the Intifada represented a previously unfathomable opportunity for life that was not delineated by exile, by humiliation, and by a ruling elite that became ever more comfortable with violence, detention, land expropriation, and illegal Jewish settlement. He, and the people who shared this vision of the future, were named the Generation of Stones: an appellation by which the writer builds an ever-growing significance of land, of possession, and of action. What is a stone in the hand, a stone thrown in the air, a stone used to lay a wall?
The Tale of a Wall, forthcoming from Other Press and translated with extraordinary finesse by Luke Leafgren, is Abu Srour’s luminous memoir, written during his incarceration. Within its pages, he conducts a ceremony with the silent structure that binds him, to tell the story of a people that has long been imprisoned by something much more complex and multifarious than a partition. Through miragic poetry, profound conviction, and a never-wavering eye towards a more lucid future, he substantiates the kind of freedom that only the trapped know of—the kind that is forged out of shared belief, the kind that must be achieved through common labour and public declaration. As demonstrated in this surging, fourth-person excerpt, the poet continues, even under isolation, to channel the pulse of a nation under siege.
The cares, interests, and concerns we choose to focus on say much about us. We grow larger as the interests within us expand, just as we grow smaller when they contract. Every interest that makes its home within us shapes us by determining the contours of our activities, our sleeping hours, what we celebrate around the breakfast table, the songs we listen to, the number of minutes we spend interceding with god, and the titles and prices of the books we buy. The things we defend and the things we love: those are what define us. They are the first things that we declare in the first sentence of introduction, during the first meeting with the first person who asks.
Alongside their own concerns, the generation of Stones chose to concentrate on other causes: occupied Arab lands whose rulers shrank from the idea of fighting to reclaim them; Arabs who kept quiet while homegrown thieves enshrined their defeats; nationalistic speeches written in foreign languages; billions of poor people surrounded by the hoarded wealth of the world; millions dying of hunger and reduced to numbers, statistics, and averages tucked into the back pages of newspapers in the important and influential capitals; child laborers and their godless taskmasters; cheap labor and even cheaper working conditions; women whose bodies are harassed by violating hands; a women’s movement that never gives up the fight; speeches to awaken a paralyzed masculinity. . . Between one demonstration and the next, between a martyr’s funeral and the burial ceremony, Palestinians still found time and emotion to weep over the grief of others. Upon our narrow walls, we made space to write the details of others’ suffering until the images and slogans mixed together and became a strange shrine to the existential dignity of suffering. The stones provided by that dignity contained enough hope to compensate for the extra measure of frustration and despair we embraced.
We spoke all the languages of pain. After rejecting prejudice regarding religion, color, or beliefs, our speeches expanded to embrace the entire planet Earth. Our naked, bleeding breasts exposed the lie about a barbarous East that needed the West to refine its primitive savagery. In our lexicon of dignity and worth, the pains of others had no color or smell that distinguished them from our own, for we identified with every speech that rebelled against injustice or supported the not yet triumphant.
Loudly, we rejected tedious panegyrics for kings and sultans. Instead, we read the works of Nâzım Hikmet and Amal Donqol; we read about Võ Nguyên Giáp and Che Guevara. We danced around the fire with the remaining Native Americans. We recited the Fatiha over the souls of a million Algerian martyrs. We ran to cut the noose from around Omar al-Mukhtar’s neck in Libya. We filled our arms with as many Arabic books as we could save from destruction by the descendants of Atatürk. We repeated with de Gaulle after his victory: Paris is burned, Paris is destroyed, but Paris is liberated. We spoke all the languages of pain, but we still had space to smile and laugh at jokes. We preserved a belief in our coming victory and a better life, when our long death would die and we would bury it in the back garden, reciting the poems of victory we had written for the occasion.
Our public squares ran out of room after embracing all those cares, but they still existed. In the cramped space that remained, we played childhood games. We remembered their loss and our need for an innocence that included mistakes alongside the certainty of forgiveness, as well as our need for romanticism, with all its exaggerations. All our women became the beautiful poet al-Khansa, and all our dead went to an assured paradise. We praised our poets, even if they composed just one poem before they died. We recounted their exploits, some details of which were invented, but who rebukes a child for lying when he’s telling a story? We were just exaggerating a little!
What are legends if not dreams that frame a long and arduous task? The romanticism of the rebel taught us to be understanding. Whenever someone wavered or held back, we forgave them. We created excuses for everyone, even those who could never find one for themselves. We believed what we read in the literature of our struggle: that those who do not act commit no fault. And so we were able to forgive ourselves for all the faults we committed. We were close to the people, close to their pains and the hardships of their days. Standing close to their beating hearts, we sped the pace of our actions as much as they could bear, and slowed down whenever they became exhausted. The people believed in our intentions; they believed in us. They flung open their doors to shelter us. We sought refuge with them and protected them in turn.
The intifada gave causes to us all. It made us small gods. We shaped it in our image and gave it our romanticism, our tolerance, and our forgiveness of transgressions, both small and large. We brought it within the vast space of our cares until it joined the very front ranks. It fought, it resisted, and it spun the small miracles that we desperately needed. Causes are like dreams: they are only achieved when we outgrow them in our understanding, our perception, and our faith in our ability to achieve them. Believing in the universality of oppression and the globalization of poverty was all it took to break free of our provincialisms.
We were not yet twenty years old, yet we devoted ourselves to causes that by now had entered their third millennium. We warred against illusions that debased the human self. We shone a light upon legendary heroes who became gods when they fought and died for their causes. We, too, were gods who bled and died. We were gods without a throne, no heaven to call home, and nothing that we had created out of the void. We decreed nothing, sought no worship, and accepted no one’s burnt offerings. We fought with our entire being, we slept when we were able, and we told lies until we were too tired to lie anymore.
We were bigger than our country: our sea, our land, and our sky.
We were holier than our holy places: our mosques, our churches, and our shrines.
We were more delicious than our gardens: our apples, our date palms, and our grapevines.
We were older than our history: Canaan, Adnan, and the Arabic tongue.
We were more eloquent than our poets: Tarafa, Kuthayyir, and King Imru’ al-Qays.
We were, we were, we were. . .
We were lying gods, but we believed our own lies. We believed that Palestine was still possible, that the road was long, and we might not see it in our lifetimes. We believed that freedom was possible, despite all its demands, and that our sacrifices might not be enough. We didn’t stop believing for a single day. We would have died, had we stopped believing. We didn’t stop fighting for a single day. Without the fight, we would have vanished into thin air. We did not abandon our cause for a single day. Doing so would have made us merely human.
Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren
The Tale of a Wall will be published by Other Press on April 30, 2024.
This piece is appearing as a part of the ongoing series, All Eyes on Palestine, in which we present writings and dialogues with insight on Palestinian literature and voices, and their singular value. We hear the Palestinian peoples, and we condemn the violation and deprivation of their human rights.
Nasser Abu Srour was arrested in 1993, accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an Israeli intelligence officer, and sentenced to life in prison. While incarcerated, Abu Srour completed the final semester of a bachelor’s degree in English from Bethlehem University, and obtained a master’s degree in political science from Al-Quds University. The Tale of a Wall is his first book to appear in English. It will be published in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, and translations are forthcoming from Gallimard, Feltrinelli, and Galaxia Gutenberg, among others.
Luke Leafgren is an Assistant Dean of Harvard College. He has translated seven novels from Arabic and has twice received the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, in 2018 for Muhsin Al-Ramli’s The President’s Gardens and in 2023 for Najwa Barakat’s Mister N.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: