On a rainy day in 1955, four-year-old Raja Shehadeh left school without putting his coat on. ‘I will soon be home, I thought, trailing the coat as it became heavy with rain.’ The walk was longer than he expected, or the rain heavier. He arrived back soaked through and fell ill with pneumonia. The journey home, without protection from the weather, could have killed him.
Throughout his life in Palestine, Shehadeh has been buffeted by events that have seemed as uncontrollable as the weather. He was a very young child when his family were forced out of Jaffa by Israeli soldiers and moved to Ramallah, and 16 during the Israeli invasion of the city.
For nearly 30 years, Shehadeh — a lawyer, activist and writer — has taken a walk every year on the anniversary of the 1967 war and occupation of Palestine by Israel. The year of this book is 2017 —the 50th anniversary — and Shehadeh is 66, plagued by a recurring dream in which he is lost and can’t find his home.
The hills are now out of bounds, so Shehadeh takes a walk through the city instead. Along the way, he seeks out his old homes, those of his family and friends as well as sites of significance to his life and to the Palestinian resistance. The buildings he passes are occupied by ghosts of his former selves: the 16-year-old Shehadeh waits with his anxious mother inside the old house they lived in during the invasion of Ramallah, his grandmother’s white underwear ‘billowing on the clothes line of her kitchen balcony’ as though a flag of surrender. Shehadeh’s father, a lawyer and one of the earliest supporters of the two-state solution, pulls up on the road outside another house with a gift of baraziq (thin, crisp, salty sesame cakes), not long before his murder.
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