Remembering Childhood in the Middle East: Memoirs from a Century of Change

Salma Khadra Jayyusi (Palestine)

Salma Khadra Jayyusi palestine Palestinian poet, critic, scholar, and anthologist, Salma Jayyusi was born in ‘Akka, then in Palestine, and educated in Beirut and London. In 1980, she founded PROTA (Project of Translation from Arabic Literature) which she continues to direct, a project which has produced some thirty volumes so far. The novels, short stories, and collections of essays published by PROTA include Modern Arabaic Poetry; The Literature of Modern Arabia, and The Legacy of Muslim Spain. She divides her time between the Arab world and Cambridge, Massachusetts. When I think of my childhood, it is ‘Akka, or Acre, that first comes to mind. ‘Akka has indeed taken on the aspect of a paradise in my memory, although I am not sure I was completely happy then, even as a child. I do not recall any sense of complacency or full acceptance in my heart of things as they were. In fact, I did all the things girls were not supposed to do. But ‘Akka’s own original lifestyle, based, in many ways, on a sense of harmony in its people, on a kind of innocent, almost primordial love of merriment and festivity, fascinated me. Beliefs as old as humankind still lived on in that region, side-by-side with newly adopted ones which only people like the “‘Akakweh” could have embraced. For example, they still believed that the first Wednesday in Safar, the second month of the Islamic calendar, should not find them beneath the roofs of their homes but under the open sky. On that day, they went at dawn to the seashore, even on bleak winter days, with food and music, and there they washed themselves in sea water, perhaps cleansing themselves of the devil, or protecting against disease, as Job had done. At the same time, the people of ‘Akka, during the pre1948 decades of the twentieth century, made a habit of picnicking and feasting in al-Bahjeh and al-Shahuta gardens, which were owned by the Baha’is. They were planted with lovely trees, bushes, and flowers and tended by Iranian gardeners . Al-Bahjeh was one of the two Baha’i centers established in Palestine. Here it was, to the outskirts of ‘Akka, that Baha’ Ullah, the father and founder of Baha’ism had come to flee persecution in Iran and to establish his headquarters . (What better place on earth?) His followers built on the elusive chords of memory: remembering ‘akka Salma Khadra Jayyusi ^ him a mansion there on the outskirts of the new ‘Akka, the modern city built outside the massive walls encircling the ancient town. This mansion in alBahjeh where Baha’ Ullah had lived and died was extremely simple, reflecting , in fact, the simplicity advocated by the Baha’is—quite unlike the more sumptuous Baha’i mansion in Haifa, built on the lovely slopes of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean, where Baha’ Ullah’s son, ‘Abbas, is buried and which is the site of the world’s main Baha’i center even until now. Every time we went to al-Bahjeh, I made a point of visiting the holy man’s sunny and spacious room (such is the image I keep from my childhood memory), with its very sparse furnishings, with Baha’ Ullah’s own bed, a simple mattress laid reverently on a small carpet on the floor, with his slippers still set neatly alongside. There it was, we were told, that he had died, on that very same mattress. But to my child’s sensibility, (which otherwise had the tremulous apprehension of the death that took loved ones away), the mattress was surrounded by no aura of death; it rather conveyed, in its utter ascetic simplicity, a kind of vague spiritual message that spoke to my heart. It was there, and in the Zawiya in the old town, the home of the Shadhili sufi sect, that I first knew those strange sensations I could not understand , the sudden surging zest and elevation of the spirit, the incomprehensible yearning for something beyond my reach. Reflecting on this in later years, I could see that what I then experienced was a sense of personal communion with an idealized spiritual world, but what I remember clearly from that time is the total loathing I felt, during those moments of secret flight, for everything that was humdrum and habitual. Just as I was fascinated by the utter simplicity and aloneness of the...